Read The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly for Free Online Page A

kiss your mouth,
    where nothing bad has happened.
    I’m not anyone but I wish I could be told
    when you will come to save us. I have written
    several poems and several hymns, and one
    has been performed on the religious
    ultrahigh frequency station. And it goes like this.

The Skewbald Horse
    I wish to tell about a time
    That’s gone,
    When I looked at the wheat and thought it was the sea.
    I rode to town. The light was gold. I heard them
    Speak of the future—around them the dogs dreamed.
    It was Sunday, and in our town
    The church bells then were so arranged
    As to play “Amazing Grace” upon the drugged
    Air and clenched hearts of August. And all the time
    The wheat in its inlets of honey
    Perished and replaced itself imperceptibly
    And the horses swam slowly through the fields.
    I breathed something thick and terrible
    Riding home toward the falling sun, a wild
    Musical heat of sorrow and youth that made
    A great strength up and down me. I
    Was desire—what lived in the sad, slow
    Thighs of young girls the dull breeze
    Pressed their aprons to embrace? The same
    Pitchblende dying between mine? Whatever
    It was, I believed it whirled the Earth,
    In faith and troth, whatever it was—
    Mingling of phosphor and lodestone
    Drawn through our hearts—caught fire,
    And didn’t it ride the horse and me, but we
    Rode through it also? All
    Were in town: I stood in the house of my birth,
    In the silence of its sun-struck rooms,
    The only house to have known my cries,
    The only house to have witnessed these beginnings,
    And thought, How far from home!
    Whatever it was, I took to sea
    To drown it—but it was only
    The downslope of eighteen hundred forty-seven,
    The dead-flowery twilight of my nineteenth summer—
    And it set me adrift. The sea
    Was not the sea. It was a gray, austere dumb land
    Of messages without a word,
    Tumbling its seed, holding out its hands
    Around our senseless faiths, the faiths that placed us
    In this chasm between the torn hopes
    Behind us and the hopes, fragile as cobwebs, on the other shore.
    Watch on and watch off, in the green illumination
    Froth cast unreasonably out of dark water, I sighted
    Our lesser selves ever attending our passage,
    The demons, the criminals, the fools
    We demonically, criminally, foolishly believed
    Lay back of us: it wasn’t to ferry cargo but to create
    Jetsam that we’d put ourselves in danger.
    And when we’d arrived, whatever it was—
    The time, it was the time—
    Drove me to cheat my brothers, to search
    The purses of my mates while the merchant
    S.S. John Adams slept in St. George’s Channel,
    To forge my name to the bill of lading,
    To steal my captain’s skewbald quarter stallion
    And strike across the Irish countryside.
    Our fourth day in that country
    Brought us to the thick of Kildare County,
    A Yankee sailor on a stolen quarter horse,
    The sailor in rags and waving a bill of lading
    For a hold of goods, the horse consumed
    And starved and marked such as no Irishman
    Could remember—skewbald, he’d be named
    In Boston, where our captain
    Had traded for him before I stole him—
    And the several tribes
    Gathered for a festive day of races laughed
    Inside their whiskers at this creature and scraped bare
    Their birthrights to wager against him.
    Their eyes like sapphires strewn in the sun,
    Their purses sighing and crying along their bellies,
    The spittle doing a jig along the strands
    Of their old beards: the men
    Of the large-boned clans had black hair
    That came up out of the throats
    Of their shirts and ate their faces,
    While the little fellows like me were of a blonder
    More shall we say humanified strain of farmer,
    But all were truly horsemen—never having to touch
    Their animals but always smelling just like them,
    Telling a horse’s life and death in a hoof,
    Everyone wagering with a loud word
    On some half-extinguished, half-Highlands nag
    Raised by the spoon-to-mouth from