A poetry of 'gnosis' (inspired by my reading of the Nag Hammadi)

"Follow the clue patiently and you will understand nothing" (Basil Bunting)

Seth says,

she's the unimpressionable ever diffused wildly in wrong light, and brightly as the worm who worms into the wrong-wheeled soul, sewing the leprous

song of men's hearts; and surfeited, as worms in the wrong unimaginable light go and the empty and forlorn flower gardens, too is Sophia,

who's never one to tell the inconstant & wrong-headed souls they've been trampled in the unwise night of earth, and entwined at its airy ends,

nor that star-airy night can rile the wise; and who says "The heart's a niche for nettles that the aeons recoil from (unimaginable how!), & that it lisps

til it's dark and queens the uninquisitive who like to ease into the cattail mud, lazy and proud, and whose shield is more of the same insensate night"—

Sophia who says all this, never one to rise nor start too lightly or rather blame the scent of day for the abyssal Night, not liking to rise

dunged in all this abyssal heart of night, emptied and out-emptying like all the poor flowerless, the poor starless who coil out of dark inscrutable mud

Aeons! Aeons! boring into the sky's derisory mouth & maddening all the rest, quick-eyed are and just til Sophia riles them, without pity, hair of gristly snow

Hymns sure of this owl-vinctrix, limbs agile and congruous, claw deep into mud And her pitiless falling unkings the dark and scatters all its seed,

gelid-eyed vinctrix, & she disembowels deep to make the archons shriek and
the angels sleep, Barbelo, Adamas, & scatters tansy over their bones;

or stands twenty-four hours round them, the gelid bones and windpipes, and
archons lying in twitch grass, & twenty-four more, shrieking

or is double stars high, in cahoots with the swelling All or high over the grasses, a dying  half-voiced song from the wrong light, unlinked by the All

and chorusing moodily over the windpipes