Worlds Interpenetrating and Apart

In this volume of poems written over thirty-five years, William Irwin Thompson presents a remarkable range of work--from the personal and lyrical, through the narrative and mythological, to the scientific and cosmological--that traces many of the major themes that have affected contemporary culture for the past half century. His book opens with a mythological sequence on Quetzalcoatl, "Blue Jade from the Morning Star," which john Bierhorst has called "a fresh reading."

In the words of Kathleen Raine: "There is a great difference between merely academic translation and the imaginative participation which Dr. Thompson has brought to these 'versions' and verse commentaries on the great vision of Quetzalcoatl."

Books Two and Three contain mostly lyrical work, while Book Four concludes with a vision of the evolution of life that extends the lyrical into the cosmological in a sequence built on and addressed to the work of his four scientific friends: Ralph Abraham, James Lovelock, Lynn Margulis, and Francisco Varela.

Worlds Interpenetrating and Apart
(For Francisco Varela)

The inexplicable beginning of worlds
Required gods in the air, germs in the sea,
Or else there was nothing held to explain,
Alone among causes, the greatest of old.
Albrecht Dürer and Hieronymus Bosch,
I think I am beginning to understand.
Worlds interpenetratingly apart
I remark, and mark here again in ink.
Angels I observe Greek and Hebraic
Were messengers of old, unseen by all
Save the most artistic, imaginative
Women and men whose souls wore out holes
In their shod bodies until they were eyes.
Tied to the stake with martyr's eyes buried
Alive in their darkening flesh, they could see
Infinitesimal crystalline forms,
Now thought to be viruses, better known
As plagues, marks of the apocalypse, aids
To understanding the deadly sifting
Of sudden unbecoming worlds torn apart
Like Dürer's paper sky of martyrdom.
I confess to angels as viruses,
Elementals and gnomes, bacteria,
And plagues the final judgment for ending
The adaptive habits of the settled world.
But angels are not viruses only,
These the merest tip of penetration
In our world of bodies that know others
And while remaining a part of each,
Equally, elsewhere also take their life.