the iconoclast's descending

    Afterward   (Postlude as Prologue) from the forthcoming anthology, The Inexhaustible in the Exhausted Always Speaks Douglas Blake Olds, May 2025   This essay is not   intended  as  a  map to a  sequence of lyric meditations but a progressive poetic theology—a metaphysical journey into vectors (more meteorology than cartography) of witness, reckoning, and regenerative craft. From conception to an era’s death cradle, instruction to disillusionment, to retraining in the kinesthetic poiesis of Christ, each part is meant to deepen, fracture, or counterpose the last. The poiesis of spiritual aware ness spirals from inward to outward, from lament to re-imagining, from historicism to poetic telos : from erosion of natural person hood of grasping to the sparked human essence called down from transcendental heights of conceit and ratiocination instead to serve immanence of the whole. Catches, Between Fret and Ga...