Ekstasis MagazineComment

St. Brant’s Quietism

Ekstasis MagazineComment
St. Brant’s Quietism

St. Brant’s Quietism

S.T. Brant

To Hart Crane “They are no trophies of the sun.”
— Hart Crane, “Praise for an Urn”

There are no trophies of the sun
When you let what you love retain your love
While you saunter to the grave
Less great, restrained by the love you restrained
From retiring to dusk. All things
Run their course. We cannot keep forever in a jar
The things that overfill the jar
Or things that in the jar dry out. All things run
Their course, and return
Beyond us to their source.

Now is not the time for turning back,
Or for turning.
Now is not the time for moving.
That time is never; will not be.

Journey into truth, hunt for the king element.
The element that to nature gives Nature.
If what you’ve found is not the bottom of the bottom,
The fire that burns fire, water that drowns water,
The Life that’s Life to life,
You’ve stopped where you began,
No matter the damage, time, and cost you’ve walked.
The truth stops. The Way ends.
Once you meet the truth of you
you find yourself bitten by the Ending Spider,
The fiction of the soul that we pursue,
The continuity of the road we wander, never knowing
We tread a consuming fire,
the real Soul, the self,
A lonely fire we come upon the midst of nothing,
In the desert burning the dark around it,
a fire unlit by hand, but willed to fire;
The god in the desert we pursue we are.

The wind blew through the doors;
Shadows stride across the floors.
Burning, the heat, returns me to the shore
My prayers cast me from without the oars.

I will accept what god says I must accept in the attitude
Which god accepts bad news: in whirlwinds, rains
And thunder, lightning, fire;
Death.
Siege, I would, angels that would deliver me god’s word,
The end; and sign the epistle I return in those angels’ ash:
Xoxo.
Another legionnaire, a nightmare cavalier, I return god’s gifts.
This, the lesson of a saint most particular to him.


S.T. Brant
Poet & Teacher

S. T. Brant is a teacher from Las Vegas. Pubs in/coming from EcoTheo, Timber, Door is a Jar, Santa Clara Review, Rain Taxi, New South, Green Mountains Review, Another Chicago Magazine, Ekstasis, 8 Poems, a few others. You can find him on Twitter @terriblebinth or Instagram @shanelemagne.

Photography by Anders Jildén