T HE C ENACLE / A PRIL - The ElectroLounge

After many months absence, a new issue of The Cenacle, #39-40, Winter
2000. Two Vessels (for Samantha) is dedicated to a girl known too briefly online
& following through the
conceit of two vessels, I & thou, person to person, person to people,
person to nature, person to cosmos, endless combinations, two vessels
pouring simultaneously into each other. The choices we make, the actions
we take, the world we speak, the world as we confront it as it confronts
us. I pour into you. You pour into me. Ever & always.
Cenacle 39-40’s Two Vessels is like Cenacle 4-5’s Stranger America some
five years earlier: a poetic travelogue of geography, event, & soul. The
difference lay in design, the latter issue bumped up lovely by Brannon—her
note refers to it as the “first all-digital Cenacle”—& in poetic maturity or, more
sharply, ambition. Two Vessels is a summoning, language as music as magick,
muse as prayer:
Your name is Eurydice, your mother & I
have never yet danced together, drunk
together, fought for & against our
transforming love. I will promise
her the best of me. She will accept the burden
too. Your birth-day will become our
anniversary. Our anniversary will
become your torch in the world’s woods.
Brannon employs many photographic portraits to decorate the issue: my ruddylovely
friend Mio, us both virgins unto Burning Man; bowling allies; boulders;
long western vistas. The front cover Brannon’s visual rendering of the
impossible-yet-alluring title. The back cover poet Amante grasping a tamarack
fraternally in the Bell Rock Cemetery. What binds all is the slip & climb from
beauty to beauty by girl, by leaf, by magick molecule, by pen’s hurried leap on &
at & over—
25
“Two Vessels” & sometimes called symbiosis as shown on the cover of
Cenacle 41 April 2000, a chase with souls’ twined among desire, nature, music, &
mystery. This fifth anniversary issue, thirty-first in all, was further along the
path, deeper into cyberspatial spheres.
From several years’ backward glance, this issue bears a rending poignancy
in how it marks a time come & gone. Cenacle: group of artists. My friends. Gerry
Dillon’s “And Fechtner, she played her fiddle barefoot” with its sci-fi trappings
shot through with working-class sensibilities: “The first time I saw her, I was
The Cenacle / 51-52 / Winter 2004