Gulley Jimson's Visionary Wall, a poem

Gulley Jimson's Visionary Wall by Walter Rufus Eagles

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Dream analysts, ladies of occult-darkened rooms

And teachers and long-dead writers of ancient apocrypha

All foredoom the value, stuff and insanity

Packing that squared-off universe of light and form

You knew to be (if still within the mind)

Arranged by no geometer

But by What is better left unnamed and void

Until seen in seraphic crouch and glow

Upon the shoulders of an otherwise anonymous child

Somewhere in England or Jerusalem.

Once that blaze of light had seared your ordinary brain

No hand, foot nor eye could claim the less allegiance

From your captive heart

For being drudge and scullion,

Soldier, thief, hangman or whore.

Crushed to craze

Beneath the vaunting foot of unshod Son of God

You saw from subjugation several planes

Of Being's bliss.

And your eyes are not your eyes:

Those colors out there stark upon the world

Were really never red or green

And seldom violent. And here

Upon this muralled wall

The burning Tyger of another's mystic days

Peers in rage and impotence

From out a forest of night-flesh legs that,

Clipped beneath the knee at ceiling height,

Thrust up to sky within the mind

Their thigh and groin, breast and brain:

A vision meant to seize the heart

And grip it through the ceiling,

To be hauled into the sky,

Breaking blacksmith's chain.

Walter Rufus Eagles

Natchitoches, Louisiana, 1959

Recorded 12/30/1999