Leo Yankevich

BEFORE HIS MAJESTY

A little vague, so very touched, he sits
    with mouth agape, and he regards the men
       in white as they unknot his mind with straps,
  as they unsicken—free his soul with pins.

The pins feel bad, unlike the flames that fly
    in pastures, suns atop a crimson barn,
       the straw inside a bed for dreams, the dumb
  at prayer, at prayer. Amid the solemn dust,

the horses neighing, childhoods gone amuck,
    the wheel of torture turns like heresy.
       The Law redeems no-one. The courts exist
  for glory, glory... mid so much mercy.

ESSE

"And if he should have to compete with those who had been always prisoners, by laying down the law about those shadows while he was blinking before his eyes were settled down—and it would take a good long time to get used to things—wouldn't they all laugh at him and say he had spoiled his eyesight by going up there, and it was not worth-while so much as to try to go up? And would they not kill anyone who would try to release them and take them up, if they could somehow lay hands on him and kill him?"
"That they would!" said he. (Socrates)

—from Book VII (the allegory of the cave) of Plato's The Republic

To be a little touched, the sacred way:
  in slants of light that glorify windows.
    To be a tad estranged, unlike all those
        who smile as guiltless gods against the grey

twilight, bursting to flame, bursting to flame.
  To be, to be, beyond the cage of be-
    ing, court, arbiter, jury, holy see—
        nor here nor there, imbecilically lame

in that august mystery and graven mood.
  To be, a moment, still as stone, bright stone
    that's grasped like truth, alone amid the lone,
        though hoisted high upon a crimsoned rood.

PHILOSOPHER

        for Czeslaw Milosz

For a moment as brief and long as eternity
he sees what the blind man sees in the blink of an eye:
a sun that never sets, forms wrought from gold, purity
before it falls or is restored to grace, the grey sky

beheld from the far side of dawn. As if in a dream,
he walks amid universals, essences of names,
and marvels at the beauty of birds, the snowflakes teem-
ing through the ethereal windows of souls, and the flames

of dear dead Heraclitus—now at last understood.
For as long as a moment is he sees the Father
embrace the Son—forever since the onset of time.

He has climbed out of the phantasmical cave for good,
martyred by what rills in the blood, no longer bothered
by those in fetters—yet part of the natural crime.

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