Luminous Great Mass

By Peter O’Leary Peter O’Leary

Holy Trinity Airship

billows a

chrys-

elephantine

cave Louis Sullivan, Arch-

itect, lord master,

conceived of

in the hollow of power.

He swells.

I am his balloonist

balancing an azimuth

as earth-apse I

orbit, robed in

hot gas & leather

fastened by a yolk-stalk

of gravity to gold-

end onions nozzling heavens

whose suns are stomachs

with churches in their navels.

Each we are priests

as aeronauts at the vestibules,

& enter the cavity:

space, self, organ; celest-

ial nave

bellies

stars sailors name saints

and adore—

their egress is bitter

weeping, their praise pure

Russian form:

a cathedral,

my inner orrery.

Peter O’Leary, “Luminous Great Mass” from Watchfulness. Spuyten Duyvil, 2001.

Source: Watchfulness (Spuyten Duyvil, 2001)

Biography

Peter O’Leary was born in 1968 in Detroit, Michigan, and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago Divinity School. His recent books of poetry include The Phosphorescence of Thought (2012), Luminous Epinoia (2010), Depth Theology (2006), and Watchfulness (2001). He is the author of the critical study Gnostic Contagion: Robert Duncan & the Poetry of Illness (2002). As Ronald Johnson’s literary executor, he has edited several . . .

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