I love the answer

I love not poetry, but music,
And not music, but the Answer!
Answer of sounds between the letters.
And God is sweeter - than any answer.

We wake up with you yin and yang.
I see a circle, and not a sphere.
We touch flowing up and down,
And by the words you return kissing.

Thus people communicate in words.
They are pitiable! Can't calm down.
Continuous yapping, in rough prose
never coming to understanding.

Only in death they will come to learning
multiplicity of their visions,
acute hearing, clairvoyance,
And Light-mindedness of their speeches!

****

Dear Liza, I wrote you such a long, detailed response to to your comments on ORPHEUS. It was all so academic, intellectual, impersonal; but that's me as you well know: I live in my head with thoughts, arguments, subtle reasoning. Then you write a poem which is pure light and all my philosophizing collapses and I surrender to your faith and "understanding" - that's your word in line 12 of I LOVE THE ANSWER. Forgive me  my intellectual longeurs, they come naturally to me. But in this email, I want to express as clearly as I can the spiritual message of immediate understanding you present in this poem.

Everything that needs to be said about a redeemed life is said in stanza one. The other three  stanzas describe the secular reality that precedes this redeemed life, and suggests possibilities
for shifting from the secular to the sacred life. This first stanza compresses your entire life as an Orthodox believer, and you use the image of stages that you climb to close the gap between you
and holiness. But you have not written a narrative poem; it doesn't tell a story but instead presents a vivid image of climbing a ladder or staircase, each step upward is available to every human being but s/he must be motivated by a sheer desire to be with God. This can't be faked. Such an ascent depends on an act of unshakeable faith, it is really the highest form of prayer, which carries
a soul upward better than angel wings.

You highlight four steps or stages of ascent: 1) poetry, 2) music, 3) The Answer, and 4) God's Presence. The first step involves a key element of our humanity - LANGUAGE - in the form of poetry, which is language polished and perfected and made to be impressive. Much of the Bible is poetry, or poetic prose, and the traditions of religious poetry in both of our languages is impressive. Both of us, dear Liza, dearly love poetry, but your poem is wise about its own identity.
No human language can express the Mystery of Faith, much less the mysterious identity of God.
So poetry takes across the threshold of the first step, but then it must give way to the non-verbal art of music in the second stage. Music is intuitive, immediate, pure; it creates an atmosphere
which makes us completely receptive to the divine will. (Both of us grew up with a tradition of religious music that was totally separate from "pops" music: the music of the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church, choruses and the organs filled those immense cathedral spaces.)
The third stage is the poem's title stage and is clearly the culmination of your religious experience.
This so-called answer is not really a verbal answer, although it may well include language. You describe it as "sounds between the letters" which suggests a dimension of meaning far more profound than a dictionary can trace. This is a direct and immediate encounter with God, no doubt shaped by God so that you are not overwhelmed. Even Moses had to protect himself from the full radiance of God's appearance, and at the end of his COMEDY Dante falls silent, because even a great poet is rendered speechless.  This moment in your poem is very important to me: you have led me gently, without any hype or false drama, to the very heart of reality. And the word you chose to describe the moment is a simple but eloquent one: S-W-E-E-T. "Taste and see how sweet the Lord is," sings the psalmist. // This quatrain could stand alone as an account of a mystical experience. You add a second quatrain which begins with an awakening and a return to the secular world, but the imagery and vocabulary suggest a sustained mystic awareness. I won't offer a paraphrase, because the purpose of the words seems to push us past rational understanding. // The last two quatrains focus on the failure of worldly people to achieve such mystic awareness. As you say, their attempts are "pitiable," and the "rough prose" they speak
lacks the spiritual lift of your poetry. Mystics experience the presence of God in the flesh, in their
material lives, in the here-and-now. But most people will not "see" until after death. So be it: there's nothing wrong with living a decent moral and religious life with the hope of salvation after death. At the end of his MESSIAH, Handel wrote a beautiful aria for the soprano, with words taken from JOB: "I know that my Redeemer liveth, and that I will see Him in the latter day." I WILL SEE HIM - that is the faith that runs like an underground stream in your poem, it is like the waters of a second Baptism that will purify you so that your present self - a woman living in modern St. Petersburg, living in fruitful contact with family, friends and colleagues, experiencing all the ups-and-downs of everyday life, work, play, sleep, dreams, etc. - can also be that latter-day
woman of faith who is already living a parallel life blessed by the presence of God. // I am just an ordinary man, not blessed with your degree of faith; I'm neither a saint nor an "ubermensch," but a descendant of that very ancient seeker Gilgamesh, the first purely human HERO in world literature. Your poem has shined a light over me, and it is a beacon-light that will glow for time to come.
 
Dear Liza I have spent the past six hours reading your poem over and over and writing my commentary on it. I have six pages of rough drafts, but I'm not satisfied with my writing yet: It's either too intellectual like my comments on Orpheus yesterday (!) or it doesn't express the depth of your poem. I have to find the MIDDLE ZONE of perfect balance so my commentary does justice to your poem - which is nothing less than a Poem of Redemption Achieved. // I really wanted to send it to you tonight do you could read it on Sunday - the Lord's Day. But it has to be worthy, and I need more time to make it so. But I want you to know it is coming, it is imminent,. There is an angel hovering over my apartment building who will take the finished writing and rush through arc of space and deliver it to you in St. Petersburg. I can hear him singing hymns as he waits patiently:

God's presence is sweet, it is the threshold
of happiness. It is a circle that encloses us
in peace, it is a vision that heightens
our existence and releases it into flight.
Heaven is so close, already tendrils
of divine light connect is to the Source
of all illumination. And we will be so bright
we will shine over the world, and we will be
so light we will float above the web of life.

The angel has been singing for six hours, and shows no fatigue or need for sleep. But my six hours of writing make me both tired and sleepy. I'm just an ordinary man in a sphere of heavenly
hope. Be blessed by the angels, Liza.