Another
Nature
‘Only the
poet, disdaining to be tied to any such subjection,
lifted up with the vigour of his own
invention,
doth grow in effect another nature….’
Philip
Sidney: The Defence Of Poesy
A. S. Kline © 2014 All Rights Reserved
This work may be freely reproduced, stored, and
transmitted, electronically or otherwise, for any non-commercial purpose.
Contents
The Beauty The Camera Does
Not Capture
A Villanelle for
Wittgenstein – Made While Walking
The Inevitability Of
Involvement
through the tender
declivities of the spirit,
as though bathing and
healing,
though what pales the stones
are lichens,
growths out of weathering,
the excrescences of time made
beauty.
Here are the wide skies, the
green fields,
the gleam and glitter of
grass
that flows in the wind
denoting richness,
as though a signifier to what
hides
shy in the spirit, anxious of
hurt,
needful of what bathes and
transmutes.
Here are the run of trees, the
line of wall,
the shadows on the field,
the long slopes gently
curving, the caves
of cold, the mined-out rakes,
their sound
which is a delicate soughing
of the air moving soft over
dissolved lives.
The quicklime of time moves
mysteriously here,
nothing demonstrative,
discrete as its wildflowers,
its fields mute in winter,
its misted lights and darks,
its underground soothing
waters,
its ease of trees, its ash
and hawthorn musings.
The rounded hills spring to a
godless sky
fierce in blue intensity, a
winter stillness
inescapable, then resolve
themselves into
paler quiets, gripping the
heart,
in a crystalline and
heartless universe.
Here the stone spires hover
pointing nowhere except
back into the human spirit.
These are human hills,
they open out, immense, under
the stars,
their collision of moistures,
long sediment of tides
their risen beds of creature
and un-creation.
This is not a landscape that
shifts the mind sideways:
the comers stay, thought
dives deep into the ground
to rise a mile distant,
bubbling, covering the grass
and spreading its net of
light, ready at any instant
to sink away, elusive as life
itself, undirected.
It is more like star-music,
collisions of galaxies
without sound, but whose
colours we almost hear,
hiding the other life surely
existent
somewhere in the billion-fold
light of the vast bonfire;
more like a secret music on
the edge of the ear,
beyond its coils, music that
somehow echoes us
without assuming our
presence, resonating though
with what we create from the
invisible, in every space
and none, our mind-creations,
marks of the fortunate,
emblems of humility, or love,
since these are the great
spaces, landscapes and voids,
in whose inner cores lie the
flowing chambers,
whirls of gaseous light or
deep veils
that will never blaze for us,
yet are our birth-right,
notes of our clef on the
stave of a familiar being.
At night the hills and
mounds, the peaks and shallows
seem no shelter, rather the
gates at the field sides
that lead into seas of grass
not caves of the heart but
veins and sinews of light
that stretch, bright
tendrils, into a universe
we never fully comprehend,
only suffer. If our hearts
were stronger might we forget
ourselves
and leave time behind,
embracing only space,
a drifting through a flow
un-destined, calling
out cries like these cries of
the limestone night,
strange harsh cries of the
creatures, then their sighs,
groans, piercing shrieks,
murmurs and snuffling,
which blossom like stars and
fall, descend and fade
like stars, in the inner
vision of the listener
and the watcher?
The limestone is a milkiness
of the breath, a pallid
rough-smooth arc of the
moving voice,
a shimmering of light where
there should be none,
a careless shuffle of stone
over endless seams of hills,
shrouding the sanctums of
water:
what fluids we are, what
fluidity of being,
shapeless and shaped, carving
and still uncarved,
finding out narrow ways in
the cliff-shadowed depths
of the limestone dale, no
more nor less than the galactic
coiling, no stranger: no less
no more conceivable!
draws me in.
Is it collision, or by-pass,
juxtaposition,
a trick of the eye, a slight
of distance,
a subtle movement of
parallax,
a simple conjunction without meaning,
though it creates the rose,
like that rose in the garden
where we walked
to the courtyard, cistern,
fountain,
through the arbours,
beside the channels of stone
those spouting gushers
above the tinted air of the
plain.
The white and perfect rose,
the rose of stars,
that I imagine here
in the green darkness
of a pure December
years away,
the out-flung light
from those flat and edge-on
spirals,
one its stem, the other the
true calyx,
pointillism of a billion
worlds,
our rose,
the rose of time, the rose
of the ever-flowering
universe
in which we melt and vanish,
rain on leaves
of eternal light,
on hills under the stars.
Its image joins us, mind on
mind,
as it welded us body on body,
the two are one.
An image reclaimed, no image
of unsound gods, deceptive
angels
in some blind heaven,
or battles or veils,
or secret unintelligible
joys,
but image of delicate earth,
an impossible echo,
in which you, all of earth to
me, linger;
rose
etched of galaxies:
world
is form, its perception,
but
mind is symbol:
lives
are like galaxies,
love
is their bright collision.
at
the stars, naked in winter
crest
the shaft veil the abandoned mine
on
its distant hill
and
encircle its deep quiet.
The mine went under the earth
the miners under the earth,
the minds, went down
into the chill,
into damp silence
to split the stone,
pick, hammer and wedge,
drag the sledge
wind the windlass:
now all is quiet again.
Ash inherits.
its black flame-tips burn,
black matter, black energy
move above.
We feel their gravity
their lost gatherings
their silent murmur
their lightless presence
dark as lead and heavy
though they too walked
through green fields
studying wild flowers.
in
the stone walls, mines, farms,
back
to the first peoples
who
moved over this land
with
thoughts we grasp for,
trying
to conceive in shadows
the
shapes of familiar ghosts.
Stone
on stone, or stone from stone,
back
to the rings and lows,
not
of this quietened landscape
but
the sounding industry
echoing
on curving hills
the
noise of its creature-being
over
a living surface.
Hand-axe
and sled, barn
and
standing stone,
ditch
and field,
and
then the trickle of water,
into
the grey-white vale,
then
the silent flowers
in
the gate of grass.
towards
the rising sun.
Minds
on fire with light
follow
the world in flight.
Flame
of the brilliant eye
sings
in the morning sky.
We
run towards the light
out
of the quiet of night.
the maze of being in which
worlds conflict,
and yet in his gentleness
refuses conflict.
That is paradox. To be moral he
must engage
with a world that only
renders him immoral,
presents the choices granted
beyond choice.
Beyond good and evil lies the
real, that place
where we navigate by
unreliable beacons,
or by the markers that they
place on slopes
to find a direct path by in
the snowfields.
Look, there they climb the
hill, on either side
the dangerous shafts, the
deceptive hollows.
The moral man in his
gentleness, pursues
the lightest things, the
dance of shadows,
grateful for music, taciturn
as to meanings,
which evolve from lines of
light as notes evolve
spirals of stars in the
attentive listener,
not to be voiced too loudly,
subtle as love
which is not measured by
happiness or time,
but by the depths that fall
away from us
and open the void of multi-coloured
veils
in which strange objects
lurk, some that destroy,
collapsed beings that suck in
all matter, life;
some that give back their
light, send a planet
silver and blue turning alive
through silence.
Such planets the moral man in
his gentleness
observes, they climb above
his courtyard
pinpricks of faultless
diamond, glittering
towards the distant tree, or
a sombre hill,
with a measure that is more
than human,
more than the moral man in
his gentleness.
which save us by their
quietness
and absence of demand, the
things that serve;
the stone guide-post that
completes a gate,
the rutted track that somehow
always heals
again its mud grown firm, the
creature’s gaze
placid or vital, the wall,
the line of trees,
that make a boundary to our
hidden path
visible only by its stiles,
those works of hands,
the craft of artistry, that
punctuate horizons,
an up-flung post their
signal, or a crest
of stone that says ascend
descend,
register your being here
(feel gravity
drag you down, and bring you
back
from its summit, mountaineer)
or the humbler still, the
blue flower by the way,
the pool of water, the
trickle like the memory
of a brook, the tremor of a
half-remembered line,
the moment part-recovered
teasing thought
that lies buried deep in an
afternoon
of your self that tried but
failed to survive you.
Or the eye grows humbler
still,
and quieter,
follows the softened swerve
of the horizon
unbroken by artefacts, almost
free of trees
the line of blue or grey or
occasional gold
that deepens in the heart,
the colour
of our child-being, the
pinprick self
dwarfed by each cloud, leaf,
pebble,
until we are nothing more
than the transience
that is the condition of our
passing through,
elusive ourselves as what we
contemplate,
found in a right perspective,
whittled down
like the fastening of the
latch,
to something usable, a form
of the mind that can employ
the mind
for making and creating,
as sober minds
made these wide farms and
walls,
followed the slopes, made
trails
and quarried through
to ancient bedrock,
itself dove-coloured stone,
shade of the earth.
The land engenders love,
careless of its own beauty
which exists perhaps only in
living minds,
a perception of what cradles
the human heart
and soothes its pain and
restlessness,
invokes the dark, the purl
of secret waters in discrete
abyss
the hidden channels of our
promises.
Nothing here proclaims in
pearl-grey winter
a summer dominance,
its speech is the speech of
mortal dialect
its form the conciseness of a
ridge
multiplied to a long backbone
of edges,
or an unpretentious wood on a
slope,
mysterious by being laid full
open,
as the loved is always
mysterious,
less known when eye to eye
or mind to mind,
but always astonishing.
Nothing here states other
than obvious
shapes and hues and tones
or is less obvious,
or why would we return
in heart, ear, eye
and the marrow of thought
to whatever it may mean
to lose oneself in landscape?
There is a complexity
the mind still reads
as it did long ago
in a text too subtle
for its understanding,
but from which
some hidden redolence,
like a forgotten scent
rises, essential
inescapable, and yet
unreachable,
a fragrance like the rose
but not the rose,
further there, stranger,
alien to us, yet humbler,
essence of time, but what;
faint as the far field
we will never know,
but whose distance calls to
us,
dark travellers.
a thousand
in a flight, rhythm of birds, the ghosts of light flocking over the fields of
light,
like
the gone generations,
each
complicated life a universe, lost universes, into which
we
dare travel less than into the great universe
whose
planets will only return us to ourselves
selves
into which we can no longer travel.
Great
flights of birds,
dark
flickerings of the dale,
what
birds are these
nothing
here tells,
no
field-glass, no bird-book defines
the
unknown, the unspecific glimmering
darkness,
like the dark matter
congregating
among stars,
that
energy that grips the galaxies
tighter
than light,
defying
our detailed naming,
defeating
ownership.
A
wild migration. Reading the legend
where
Buddha says the self
like
the world does not exist as one
abiding
thing, but as shifting forms,
and
in saying so
almost
touched on process,
the
life non-linear, the fractal depths
where
even choice
hangs
by an ash-tree thread
over
a dew-pond’s glow.
Migration.
Not transmigration.
Not
gone beyond. Just this,
the
poems of time on stone,
the
groves of time crowning tiny hills
from
which birds wheel,
where
birds rise and join
that
greater flight of birds,
the
major ghost.
conceals
the heart, conceals the mind
behind
the flesh, inside the eye,
which
every moment, every place
inside
the space of walls and hills,
creates
another universe
though
less immediate, and part
not
of the other, but the self,
more
of the irreal than the real,
though
entangled here in both.
So
you, unseen, move on green hills,
stand
beside me as I gaze
over
the stone stile into the shorn field,
the
glow, then walk between lines
of
silver stubble, the gold, the grey,
to
reach the mere’s dark solitude,
though
my solitudes are deeper,
since
in them no creatures winter
except
heart’s creatures,
intangible,
unseen.
Invisible,
is it visibility mind longs for?
Some
repetition of water, fixity of stone?
Or
do we value too much our private silence
of
which no one can know, not even
the
near companion, not even self often,
what
it is that dreams in this hive
of
dark, this flow behind the visage?
A
fair exchange, an inner making
everywhere
invisible, for the clear discretion
of
limestone uplands?
They
would be music, the voice in me
others
can never hear,
unable
to critique me for revealing
too
much, only for delving too deep
unable
to communicate
the
meaning of the stillness,
except
by gesturing vaguely at forms,
by
muttering incantations,
wrenched
from the unspeakable,
this
viewless taciturn.
They
would be sound: did you not say
in
words that startled me,
those
casual brilliant words,
that
the miracle would be for the human
to
end in music, escape
the
poor words which we set in lines,
unable
to speak our longing
for
that sweet place we get to
when
they are so placed
and
a strange unlooked-for music plays.
The
weathered heights, the steep stone ways
rise
to travel the tops, where bright
in
December light the mind waits
for
vision, strength, realisation,
something
real from the real distance,
of
light rays slanting under sombre cloud,
of
green undulating ridges with tiny trees
riding
their backs like windblown children,
something
more maybe from the flight of birds
than
their dark whirling and far cries.
Marble
and quicklime are the modifications
of
this rock, form and return to formlessness,
and
we, like its fossils, dissolved and petrified,
change
light each hour and yet are here
silent,
unseen within the setting day
in
our weird permanence, brief as
the
flash of sun,
there,
then behind the cloud, cascading
in
a secret glory:
oh,
guess what I am from my rays.
Down
by the ginnels of abraded stone,
down
by the runnels of invisible water
that
flow under the ground,
I
find my track,
long
shadows take me,
a grove
of trees groans and sighs
to
this cold north-westerly;
its
dry leaves shake,
in
places no thought goes
still
mysterious in loveliness,
since
no map shows the beauty of the landscape,
nor
landscape shows the movements of the mind.
that
needs something of the human eye,
that
sweep of continuous movement over a landscape,
under
its arc of extended sky,
the
vision the creature’s denied: though birds maybe
penetrate,
as Blake said, another space
between
the beech, the oak wood, and the ash.
What
does the camera feel on its face
of
this world that rises clear in the living eye,
this
excitement of the senses it cannot capture,
of
this country which has to be walked through
to
be known, of this abstract: Nature?
A
beauty the image creates by mutilation,
to
render it in its medium, to make the new,
is
not this beauty the heart cannot explain
except
by speaking of love; unreal, untrue,
not
this pure juxtaposition of mind and sense,
like
stone to the touch, a cold flame in the air,
grass-green
light to the eye; not this that always
takes
the heart by surprise, and holds it there.
between
high walls, a trail of earth and grass,
but
the day is flame and ice, the low sun sings
to
the long silences, the thrash of branches.
I
watch my shadow move along the wall
in
a patch of sunlight; no winter shade
it
is a shadow of the summer freed here
to
slide from seasons, and abandon time.
Plunge
down dale, into the secret narrows,
the
thick grasses between sculpted outcrops,
the
sudden shelter: here the salt-way ran,
here
packed mules followed the long slope
towards
the green depths, here time congeals,
and
like the shadow on the wall repeats
the
centuries in miniature, rewinds the human,
or
fashions the one bird, replicates its flight,
and
secretes it still among ash and hawthorn,
makes
stream and river sound the same music
out
of the same molecules of water, abrades
the
stone but not in the forms of civilisation,
whose
marble shapes made to soothe, impress,
or
simply echo visibly in space, here lose
their
resonance – we move beyond artifice,
this
is the windblown world in our faces,
and
the primal shadow, with its primal dance
over
surface, though here is the modern eye
to
catch both past and present in awareness
knowing
these spaces too have always opened
into
infinite space, and the night of galaxies,
that
the primal shape also involved affections,
that
the senses stirred here, among soluble stone,
rock
softer to the hand, incised regions,
cut
by sweet water, sculpted by the storm,
strange
under snow, or glittering with grass,
(simple
to raise a stone circle or a barn roof,
to
make safe against the shiver of the stars)
conformable
but rugged, with small fields
hedged
in stone where the stubble lingers,
high
on the slope, hidden among green tracts
in
its slight rectangle of undulating ground,
harsh
with a northern hardness, open though
and
gentler than the south in the inner spirit,
so
that the grass hides small flowers in spring,
the
mere hides tiny amphibians, insects, stems,
minds
hold warmth. If civilisation is truth,
acknowledged
beauty, love of deep places,
here
is the civilised landscape. Its shadows
are
my shadow travelling across its space
of
whitened wall in the gale-bright sun,
its
imperfect perfection the distant detail,
its
past my present, its creatures my kin,
its
limestone sieve still winnowing my light.
or
fail to walk over it in a lifetime.
It
is the wide tract filled with detail,
that
like a fractal boundary dissolves
into
deeper layers, on further scales.
You
could cross it, driving, in an hour,
from
all directions, or miss it going by
in
a moment. It yields its secrets easily,
but
holds them endlessly in its stillness,
is
no challenge, offers no temptation,
is
not some place of power, some jewel
of
ages, a storehouse of acquisition,
or
the sacred space of any rite,
but
will draw the heart and root it deeper
in
its simplicity, the complex real,
its
unpretentious being, of itself,
in
the subtle region that it occupies.
It
is like the path you cross,
not
the path you follow. The latter
predicates
a destination, an idea,
the
former an embrace of freedom,
an
implicit acceptance of the
fall
of a purer water in the ear,
which
anticipates no answer
even
though it echoes inside.
It
is like the light you feel, not
the
light you see, a warmth
of
the spirit that disregards
the
superficialities of ritual:
it
is the sun itself and not
the
reflected or refracted ray
mirrored
or absorbed in the pool
which
indicate a depth or surface to be lit
rather
than a substance under your hand
that
almost seems to support the globe in space
unsuspended,
present in the void.
You
can follow the lines of its ancient lanes:
they
all have names, who named them?
Or
be anonymous in its anonymity,
(bird
unidentified, or flower, or stream,
the
corner of a hill, the barn, the wall,
though
its trees insist on recognition),
unrecognised
yourself, free of the net,
circling
between villages, caught
in
the boundless boundary of a single day,
the
mileage of a quiet walk,
the
whisper of its hedgerows, fences, ditches,
the
shade of ruined, broken-backed, solid walls
that
apportion vale-sides, cover distances,
like
threads of stone in lakes of emerald,
or
textured chains on a bright fabric;
or
you can sit in stillness
on
a layered ledge,
fingering
the crumbling rock,
tasting
its stony strangeness,
watching
the kestrel pass,
the
rabbit in the grass,
the
insect on the stem,
the
breath of air
that
stirs the mind,
its
latent memories.
back
towards walls in their angles,
back
towards stones,
names
are a flex of older shifts of meaning
tongued
and elided time,
their
words are words for streams, barns, possession,
not
flowers or trees
not
stars or birds,
nothing
for beauty all for being
for
endurance,
for
carving out and holding on,
for
rooting in the silence
sounding
a note
however
brief or faint
of
the familiar music.
The
tracks were their tracks, we are passers-by:
to
spend a life here is still to be a stranger,
whom
light delights, who hears
under
the ground in darkness clearer water
or
at the corner of the field
might
see the brown hare dance on snow,
and
so be more than guest
sinking
deeper
towards
the hearts of words
their
writhing tendrils
their
nodes where meaning hangs
their
soil that falls
into
your open hand
and
discloses
what
time will never tell of its own accord.
Stand
quiet here between the ash and alder,
between
the upland summit and the valley,
wildflowers
in the eye,
grass
underfoot,
draw
that deep breath
that
joins both body and mind,
in
the further space
where
this place is,
where
ideas move
through
the labyrinth of thought
its
sculpted channels,
ideas
like dark words flickering in the sun,
with
their black light
that
flows from centuries
of
words, of names
now
silent.
where
place is all of light, and of the night
what
noises now
so
secretly
is
what cannot, though time deceive,
be
lost entirely and must leave
the
meaning of the inner vow
a
message of the mystery,
take
thought, among the valleys slow
the
sifting water shimmering there
in
clearer air
persistently,
is
what cannot, though time deceive,
be
changed entirely, nor must grieve
the
passing or the failed response
as
you must know.
Now,
beloved, in this evening light
where
limestone wall and hawthorn brake
foam
on the ledges of the night,
believe
in me, for my sake,
or
if not, in the deep intention here
that
takes the mind beyond our fear
towards
the purity of star
where
mind is sated by the far.
Though
words are a public tune we all agree,
self
is the private music in the head.
Despite
the bright speech of the familiar dead,
despite
the rapport between yourself and me,
mind
is the meaning that cannot be said.
Oh,
he was right, all language can be read,
but
words we speak are not the mystery;
self
is the private music in the head.
There
are those things that in the nerves are bred,
open
to all, yet here’s the sole circuitry;
mind
is the meaning that cannot be said.
Though
you on I and I on you have fed,
though
love is communion, we still are free.
Self
is the private music in the head.
If
not might you suppose that we instead
could
stand for each, the other each must be?
Mind
is the meaning that cannot be said.
Self
is the private music in the head.
that
dark figure that climbs the landscape
slope
by slope, from the quiet village
to
the upland field, it may seem
his
silent self-containment is the outcome
of
hand and mind accustomed to their work,
or
that his stride neither too short nor long
used
to steep valleys or grassy pastures,
evokes
the steadiness of light on limestone,
the
unspectacular under a winter sky,
light
on a rock that shapes to the hand
as
you climb the stile, shapes to the wind,
the
seasons, and the sun.
It
might be you think you know this century
is
the century he climbs, though how you know
which
century you travel, at this moment,
between
the glittering field and the sky
is
hard to say, a rational supposition maybe,
but
then how much of us is reason,
how
much a sheer persistence, like the ground,
which
looked much the same in other centuries,
though
lift your eyes to the skyline
and
mine stacks, then carriages on rutted roads,
then
horse and plough, then low appear,
the
burial mound, the smoke
from
ancient fires,
and
that same climber, moving to your eye
like
a familiar ghost – see him clear,
in
that eye of imagination,
truer
often than the seeing eye,
vision
not veiling habit.
As
if the track he treads, the muddy lane,
is
the one track trodden, that he
is
only a little ahead of us maybe,
planning
his labour, rising purposefully
out
of the valley, to heal, or conserve,
to
mend a wall or shift a stone,
or
like us here to gaze, look down and out
over
the landscape, knowing that this
in
some clear form will sweetly outlast us,
that
we are a simple shadow on the brightness,
(a
flicker no more than the evening moth,
than
the brown hare’s passing down
a
furrow through the cold air)
a
shadow seized on transience a little more
in
mind, though less in flesh;
who
knows how long the kestrel’s minute
lasts,
or that of the field-mouse,
or
the horse-fly?
In
the end he is only ourselves in passing,
the
one dark figure that always strides
from
that field gate to the further stile,
his
mind glimmers in ours, ours in his,
and
we breathe the one mortal being,
swifter
than Lathkill’s winter stream,
or
the gyring flight of birds (what birds
are
they) over the gleaming grass.
And
we are in both places, in all places,
what
Donne meant by the main, the continent
where
all are separate but all are one,
and
the island an illusion. The twisted spiral,
the
subtle code that is the bond of life,
and
its message, twines through this landscape,
to
coil about the sun,
where
Dante saw the human form (as
Leonardo
drew, and Blake supposed)
for
us the only One.
where
no one needs to conceal the lie of the land,
or
the shafts sunk in error where nothing lay.
Conflict
evaded it, though it saw violence,
caught
between non-strategic viewpoints,
aligned
solely with the earth as it was,
and
the smoke and fumes of our savage
seizure
of the planet shrank here on green
slopes
of abandoned silence.
Its
life was rebellious and mercurial,
brief
lightning of a local nature,
a
robust mockery of Achilles and Apollo:
rather
Mercury with his cattle, and the flute
of
the shepherd rather than the lyre:
there
are too many lyres.
Change
and oppression might threaten,
was
the message,
but
unchanged we will be still and persevere,
knowing
a deeper truth, that the random order
of
the universe has seen far worse
but
not invented better.
Which
is no claim for sainthood for minds
that
chose the hidden ways, old crossroads,
ancient
fields, now thoroughly modern:
there
are no saints, only beneficent purposes
and
internal solutions to what erodes
our
brevity devoid of all intention,
this
cosmos, strangely free, expanding nowhere,
silently,
and sprung from nowhere,
which
few now find strange.
No
saints, only images erected, statues
to
sainthood. Whether we choose
to
scatter ourselves or concentrate our love
is
not the point, though they think so
who
seek to engineer societies or faiths,
the
truth is subtler, deeper.
Self
is no mass movement. Valid lives
also
turned away from intervention,
seeking
no harm to everything on earth.
The
interventionists of mind have much
to
answer for, extolled as they are
by
the public voice.
Apollo
never masters Mercury,
thank
goodness, the fields are free
to
wild creatures too,
those
who move under bright constellations
to
other and more intense
destinations
not
on our maps, and never
to
be explained, or compromised,
by
an overt communication.
To
learn is to unfold what we know,
more
than a rush from place to place:
seeking
beauty, revealing beauty
is
harder, the argument against progress,
destabilisation
of old ways of life,
a
too swift change that sharpens the mind
and
may belittle it. The human race
is
not a movement towards set place,
its
purposes in the end all purposeless.
Where
no great names die, where there is
scant
history, the real continues,
every
value a judgement still.
the
night grows deeper,
the
mind grows smaller,
my
dear sleeper.
As
the stars en masse,
our
bright impasse,
stretch
further back
in
time’s dark crack;
as
the tide of light
in
the dead of night
from
the moon at full
exerts
its pull,
stirs
your dark hair,
remember
there;
time
is the keeper,
my
dear sleeper.
What
waits for us is the habit that will pass.
You
must overtake your shadow in the grass.
Daylight
begins before the ends of night.
What
waits for us is a shadow in the grass,
You
will have end before the world’s delight.
Thought
has a mind to take the world in flight,
body
mind’s semblance that in time will pass.
Oh
you must learn the meaning of delight.
What
the mind loves defeats the counter-pass,
the
swallow exceeds its shadow in the grass,
starlight
and air, we meet, at ends of night.
All
that has mind for shadows in the grass,
all
that will overtake this world in flight,
comes
of the deepest habits that must pass,
forms
the sun’s semblance in the dark of night.
Thought
must take pains to forge the world’s delight.
Oh
you must learn the subtlest counter-pass,
what
the mind loves is our sole means of flight,
sharper
than swallow’s shadow on the grass.
whose
progress is un-sensational,
formed
of the simplest kinds of weather,
the
grey, the umber, or the blue.
Its
shape is the shape of cumulo-nimbus,
curves
and bays, towers and curtain walls.
You
can never imagine it as marble,
hard
to see Michelangelo’s captive slave
buried
there, though it will gloss with wear.
Its
scent is wild grassland air combined
with
an almost imperceptible drift of flowers,
a
fragrance that tugs the heart, beyond the sense.
Its
mastery is the conquest of dark hollows,
the
traverse of gently co-operative hills,
the
rise beside clumps of trees without dissent,
the
embrace of water beneath its knees.
Its
sound is breeze, delicate wood-anemone,
or
a hiss of wind where a gust has died,
or
the vague mutter of a marginal stream
waiting
to dive, unexpectedly emerging.
Its
light is a curious blend of pale and dark,
a
story written by lichen on slabs of stiles,
calling
to distant roadways on green hills
shattering
all your assumed imaginations.
Its
seriousness is the depth of its own poetic,
despising
the facile, weightless, ephemeral
music
of what only lasts after a fashion.
Its
core’s the fossil meaning of lost erosions,
the
coils and fronds and pens of other seas
than
these grass oceans in an upland silence,
which
a buzzard cry may break, or the croak
of
a crow mocking impermanence, ever crow.
It
has been always other than what we have been,
always
stone, always the implacable non-reason
corresponding
to those trails of galactic stars,
from
whose whirls we stare at the central darkness.
contemplating
the State, the confusion of their affairs.
Sacred
to deities of trade, movement, loitering, the night,
a
place where stray dogs attack, or sleep sound in the sun,
crossroads
are permanent impermanence, something
always
passes, but like a horizontal sign they point
the
directions of other-where, out of what is;
to
a dip and the trees, or a sloping hill and the skyline.
Surviving
here they embody history, tracks
and
routes that followed lines of landscape,
and
crossed each other as lines of life will cross
precipitating
re-appraisal of what was and might be.
A
crossroad opens, never drives you on, but tempts
to
rest and be at peace an instant, which is hard
for
creatures born to restlessness, and re-invention.
One-track
places have single pasts and futures,
you
come you go, but crossroads offer options,
not
the least of which is to cease from travel,
and
hold still in this landscape with its slower
diminution
of birds and fields, its persistence.
Then
you can contemplate the ways and where
they
lead: to those we loved and those we love,
or
to the singing and the sighing of cities,
to
creation or destruction, joy or fear;
or
you can circle on the map, take in surrounds,
scan
neighbours, since a crossroad forms radii,
quarters
the circumference of our presence;
or
meditate like Romans building empires,
or
T’ang poets trying desperately to evade one.
Here
we lay down power, assume our powers,
of
feeling and sensation, trace creation’s gyres.
A
hawk in the wide sky, looks down at life.
Every
moment of history is a crossroads;
humankind
is free to choose another path,
to
where a second Mozart comes to pass,
or
another Leonardo sketches the living grass.
the
cello plays that Boccherini piece,
the
tune he heard in a Madrid street
transformed
to the meaning of its joy;
ideal
order, all that art can know,
an
order of freedom, outside these lives
ever-disappointed,
a failure to cohere,
in
the marshes where no craft can steer.
Not
the order of life then which is greater,
though
ungraspable; the best we can do
is
lay the stone tiles that ‘thatch’ a roof,
or
maintain the walls that others built.
Art
is no subtle mystery, a sole republic
of
the free, yet no society; past the reach
of
that to which the heart gives no assent,
to
which mind has no duty, innocent
of
all the moral pressures others bring
to
this sad earth where we congregate,
a benighted
species, dominant and late
to
the feast of natural, but lost, delight.
Art
is a gateway in a curious corner,
where
you must forget yourself,
all
other aims, and concentrate
on
the shining entrance to the well,
which
may for you hold water, or
still
reflect the stars, implicit order,
spontaneous,
self-born, and internal,
the
pure meaning at the root of truth,
or
beauty, or the love that terrifies.
Any
moment may, before your eyes,
reveal
the sacred space, no religion
will
ever encourage you to enter,
the
space of the clear mind, free
of
what was said or thought before,
including
this; the space of being,
the
one no being ever brought to be.
Now,
at evening, the moment of order,
the
only deep happiness, the rest
anxiety
and its attendant pain,
or
a joy grasped at before it ebbs,
but
this the words that flow in lines,
though
not of the will, only by doing,
exercising
powers so strangely ours,
which
might have been missed in us,
so
that we killed the creatures, yet
failed
to paint the caves, heard cries
but
composed no sounds of flutes,
analysed
but forgot the living mind.
Art
is the little gate among the trees,
that
leads into the green wood, silently,
to
where you are, love, and love exists,
all
hurts forgiven, all failures eclipsed.
It
was the harbinger of alien stars.
Confined
within the orbit of Mars,
we
studied its brightness by the door.
Its
light was the light of Parian marble.
Gods
struggled there and goddesses
to
be born, knotted darkly in eternity,
as
we grappled with the mathematics.
It
was never important we were there,
only
that the appearances were kept,
no
spilling over into flagrant being;
that
the night lay open where we slept;
that
the senses flickering now and then,
knew
the stellar music, still unbroken,
in
distance neither lucent nor opaque
where
the depths of night coruscated.
We
needed time: to become the dark,
to
understand the other forms beneath,
over
which the orbs of planets strayed,
shedding
a comfortable sort of glow,
reflected,
tolerable to our weak eyes.
We
observed the planet on the wall
turning
to blueness from silvery grey,
still
more beautifully than we can say.
but
it will not be loved as this day is loved,
as
it unfolds the valley in the light
and
looses vivid wings
as
though itself alive;
not
loved or envied
for
its carelessness,
as
this beyond cares
will
be loved and envied.
We
are the creatures neither stone
nor
water, constrained as one, fluid as the other,
rebels
of earth who do not ascend,
on
flickering wings,
resentful
of
this
forced obedience,
we
cannot break or better,
far
from the place of love
where
time runs slower.
I
might make the poem perfectly,
but
it would not be loved as you are loved
or
as this place is, this dale of light,
where
on wild wings
time
above the grasses
over
all clear things rises,
the
bright tongue ends,
and
far beyond language
emulation
rests.
is
curious,
what
I need;
a
different perspective,
a
slab, a stream,
the
glittering hills
resilient
grass
in
bright cracks and hollows,
a
clearer mind.
A
way of elaborating
on
mountain air,
expanding
the
little mind,
the
wandering senses,
freeing
the weighty heart
that
always wants
ridiculously
to
fly.
A
crystal presence
like
the creek,
would
be a help,
a
glass existence
through
which the sky,
the
clouds, the birds,
might
be refracted,
another
form of the eye,
another
nature.
was
not benign:
what
artists mourn
that
biased crew,
is
the useful strength
of
metaphor, in which
power
was invested,
power
now void, power
the
familiar emptiness.
It
is hard to achieve
the
scope for every
new-born
individual
free
at last of the mass,
every
devotee of mind,
that
the privileged few
historically
achieved,
we
feel confined by self,
but
that is existential.
Escaping
from the past,
(hearing
Shelley’s cry)
seems
beyond our wit;
war,
poverty, disease
still
scourge the planet,
while
we, subject to age,
and
death, we transients,
saw
at the branch below,
erode
the habitat we steal.
That
world is insufficient
for
us is a matter of mind,
the
genetic chance of mind,
allowing
us too far, too deep;
and
of desire; and the need
we
have for interest, of our
cruel
proneness to ennui;
of
that confinement intellect
experiences:
self’s a prison,
unless
our selves make self
otherwise,
with only Athene,
if
we must choose, the deity
to
guide, goddess of mind,
though
rather choose the Tao,
the
pathless way, free of gods,
by
which we relocate Nature,
in
the spirit, spirit in Nature,
and
learn to see whatever is.
Only
the social entity needs
myths
to live by, blessed by
the
power nexus as they are,
since
myths ensure stability,
a
while. But this is the age,
the
intellectual age I mean,
of
the Individual, not myth,
Kierkegaard
its curious hero:
he,
ironically, drew the lines.
It
is hard for the Individual,
and
always was, who must
deceive
society to survive,
yet
be honest with the self.
We
must propitiate Athene
to
abolish her, she is truth,
and
only she might lead us,
in
the end, to love and beauty,
saved
at last from Aphrodite.
the
moon must wait,
silent,
before rising
over
rock and scree,
ash
and fir,
the
blue groves of evening.
In
some unseen thicket
the
stars must wait
before
emerging
over
the misted fields,
the
cold grasses,
the
chill clefts of evening.
What
holds them back
mind
knows, they rise
out
of some deep
involuntary
volition,
white
moon and stars,
scaling
the cliffs of night.
was
the tale,
combined
with the power
of
metaphor,
doubly
powerful.
Practical
people
have
no need of myth,
they
write
descriptive
poems,
with
a tweak of feeling,
express
empathy
with
the ordinary,
speak
plain,
have
no desire
for
philosophy,
refuse
to strain
against
the given.
We
must admire
the
steady eye,
that
rooted spirit.
But
the universe surrounds,
the
mind’s alone,
time
flies
and
there is work to do,
to
save humanity
from
itself,
assuming
if you do
it
is worth saving.
Freedom
is worth the cold
wind
of apprehension,
the
sting
of
angst and anxiety.
To
those who say
‘Why
all the fuss?
Embellish
the real further,
act
like us,’
the
sovereign mind replies,
‘I
see the night
where
you see light,
demand
a space of self
beyond
all skies.’
still
framed his paintings.
The
wild composer
copied
out the score.
The
poet of freedom
confined
his words
to
an artificial
analytic
form.
The
whirlpool swirls,
the
hurricane agrees.
The
pollen-frenzied bees
perfect
their hive:
Mind
alive.
The
work of the Renaissance
and
the Enlightenment is incomplete,
if
it ends only in mute technology.
Yes,
religion’s done, as far as mind’s
concerned
that is (and the tyrannies
of
patronage: this is the age of free
creation,
the mind un-coerced at last)
Yes
the old dreams and fantasies made
beauty,
seduced the heart, bemused
the
intellect with non-existent havens,
though
the greatest masters were in love
with
the material, the form, expression
of
the human, that deep secular stream
that
flowed through centuries of power
not
theirs: and now that specific beauty
is
frozen. And yes, we feel confined,
but
that’s an existential problem, so
did
all the rebels of the ages who hit
tender
hands against artificial skies.
Beware
lest intellect’s a matter of mood,
like
poetry! We are neither more nor less
imprisoned
by what we are than we were
in
all those savage ages of the past. Even
though
we’ve proved ourselves destroyers
on
an earthly scale, the creative urge is
always
a gateway to fresh eternity, a new
native
land: the Renaissance has not ended,
expressed
as it is now in science, ethics,
and
if we wish in art; the sense of failure
is
only a veil in which the failed conceals
a
momentary faltering; and no matter why
the
Individual pursued the game of forms,
the
motive was only life, their art the thing,
the
changelessness encapsulating change
human
intelligence has always craved,
against
the transience that drags us down.
It’s
nothing new, read between the lines
of
history, don’t take Clio at face value,
she’s
a goddess indifferent to deep truth,
who
only likes to keep her temple clear
of
all confusion, and hates blank walls
would
rather cover them with new décor
from
the more verbally expansive ages.
The
situation of our time is the situation
we
were ever in, the same analysis
that
Buddha articulated best appertains,
but
not his solution. If enlightenment
means
anything it means the freedom
to
open the mind towards this universe
we
never chose, and practise thought
rather
than diving for the confessional.
To
escape from becoming into being
is
our dream, but the way there is not
through
following. The gate of grass
opens
only for the traveller alone.
If
modernity builds higher towers:
if
forces Baudelaire and Kierkegaard
knew,
working to stifle the individual,
intensify:
well, freedom always was
a
difficult road; conformity is easy,
Virgil
almost said, yet at least we see
that
power is empty; that worship is
for
those who stumble into obedience,
out
of the heaven of free invention;
that
a universe runs fine without intent;
that
brain is us, such particular process,
complex
and subtle, lovely and strange.
The
model of society where some were
born
to rule and others born to serve,
was
fragile as the violence that made it:
no
tyranny of the spirit can endure;
the
desire for freedom is unquenchable,
more
powerful than submission or love
in
the end. We must be free, or lose
what
we prize most, Individuality.
And
history was full of rebellious minds,
if
most were silent. The secret goal
they
aimed at was not always what
they
craved or thought they craved,
but
often simply freedom from constraint,
to
think against the powers that were;
so
science began as curiosity, love
of
the liberated mind, and must be such,
and
what liberated minds see, too,
just
like those nostalgic for the past,
is
the darkness we humans end in,
when
we forget what we must leave:
the
light, and fail to cherish it enough.
Nothing
has altered; the past ages
were
full of dumb, blind, mute minds;
the
great was always beyond the state.
No,
our machines are neither here
nor
there, though how we use them is;
and
we should beware of listening
too
closely to dark religious voices,
mourning
their unrealised dead gods:
a
loss of false heavens is a blessing.
Juvenal’s
a siren too, he’s master
of
all the failings we can muster
but
hardly the whole story. A little
science
is a dangerous thing, we
need
more. Truth being the thing
we
still can choose to labour for,
love
and beauty, all truth can bring.
In
time we’ll find the better art of being
is
to consider where true beauty lies,
so
engineer existence for that beauty,
refuse
the empty exercise of power,
and
reinvent the nature of our world.
As
we destroy the landscape of our world,
not
Earth itself but its more human music,
or
that at least whose ruin is in our power,
indifferent
to the damage done our being;
and
with that human music human beauty,
the
metaphors in which our meaning lies,
we
must not deceive ourselves with lies:
we
are not the sole meaning of our world,
nor
are we the source and end of beauty.
There
is another and a deeper music,
that’s
mute beneath the surfaces of power,
but
signifies what granted us our being.
Through
the in-woven process of our being
plays
the deep truth beyond our subtle lies,
pointing
the way beyond their sterile power.
Our
bounded origin’s in the creature-world,
within
whose utterance was born our music,
the
language of all love and truth, all beauty.
Below
the stars exists an earthbound beauty,
apparent
in the eyes of every being,
the
tremors of the mind that are our music,
the
movements of intelligence that lies
within
the depths of a remoter world
where
every creature exercises power,
and
is unique, that individual power
to
be a self, which is the core of beauty,
to
find a place in world, and be a world,
beyond
the sphere of our habitual being,
to
express the universe despite all lies,
and
turn the silence of the hour to music.
Beneath
the lies always the hidden beauty.
Our
being is not wholly in time’s power.
Mind’s
music is the meaning of the world.
is
simple,
no
clue is needed in the hand,
meeting
and acquaintance
are
the door
through
which we stumble
into
the labyrinth,
disbelieving
in the Minotaur
or
unaware,
of
what, deeper in, moves there.
To
enter in the other requires
no
hard questions,
no
difficult assessments,
no
stealthy attempt to extricate
self
from the not-self,
mind’s
light from darkness
and
the hidden power
of
the other,
its
groans and sighs
with
which we empathise.
That
exit from the other is not easy,
we
never learn,
have
no strength to forget;
the
nerves are bound;
there’s
loss but after loss
the
void is full of sounds,
clashing
of metal,
and
the roar of anger,
the
howl of pain, eternally,
that
engenders pity.
No
one prepares for love
or
hatred:
nothing
will educate the machine
to
comprehended passion;
within
the self,
even
the lover cannot guide us,
our
cowardice our fears
the
only markers,
through
winding tunnels
subterranean
funnels,
caves
of the sunken streams
that
flow through channels
cut
by acidic water,
following
the strata,
(not
in turn soluble: resilient,
but
always in the end compromised)
to
flow to some new place
where
they appear
strangely,
escape
to
unknown landscape.
Metaphors
of complexity.
Caught
in the other,
we
discover neither,
but
in confusion hold
to
the dark’s illusion:
cradling
the beast,
beauty,
for us at least,
is
the compassion,
that
strange echoing thing,
otherness
may bring.
under
the scope of a December sky
wrapped
in the leavings of a deepest fear,
that
in this glittering we’ll disappear,
of
ice, in the arbour of the hostile air,
where
the blue light encompasses a glare,
where
tremors in the mist, of metal leaves,
shine
their antipathy to whatever grieves.
Love
be clothed in beauty where you are,
below
and not above the wintry park,
antithesis
to every fog-born star
that
glows to terrify us from the dark.
Leap
with the mind into another’s eye.
As
being and becoming, give the lie
to
every heart that is encased in stone.
Be
dangerous, know danger to the bone.
So
I find pleasure in those images
I
would detest in reality,
an
intellectual charm,
colours
and contrast,
the
counter-play of forms,
but
would take no delight
in
their true existence,
their
dirt, their odour,
or
their polished surfaces,
devoid
of meaning.
That’s
the lie of art,
of
discourse, language.
What
in reality I detest,
evade,
is so transformed.
Light
falls between
the
words, the images,
and
my disgust. Grappling
with
life is not art. We go
darkly
through landscapes
that
seemed sweet below.
Though
we hate violence, violence attracts,
sexuality
or degeneration,
power
or its opposite, torment,
delight
or vengeance,
joy
or annihilation.
It
is the mystery of being human.
The
psyche feeds on all experience,
it
dreams the tale, the story,
but
mind knows better,
awake
to harm,
aware
of the inner fury.
Tomorrow,
though we may think so,
is
not today, the light has changed.
Unfamiliar
planets move elsewhere.
Still
our decision whether we choose
to
live in the ruins of a civilisation,
or
re-create one, in another image.
The
constellations are a little older,
but
not so the eye would notice,
the
breeze a little darker, but there
lovers
go, the children, the creatures,
empowered
by summer, in its light,
and
our defeats, our failures, material
though
they were, the memory harsh,
regret
like ice, attributable to ourselves
alone.
The universe beyond our artifice,
gleams
in the night sky, sunk stars rise
through
the leaves’ resistance, the grass
cleanses
the heart, we re-learn the cry,
in
the inner mind, of all that concerns us.
and
in my mind
an
image of Venus rising
with
the sun,
over
dark water,
a
tiny black
sphere
on a bright balloon,
here
the stream is clear,
runs
thin between stones,
into
the eye,
relation
glimmers,
a
deep concurrence.
How
do we steer through life?
Not
by orbit,
not
by the risen metric
of
the planets,
but
perilously,
over
dark water,
learning
to ride the flows
of
chance, or failing,
a
stream run down
one
way or another
from
the sky,
in
consequence.
Their
valleys are repositories of silence.
The
silence is of winter and the morning,
Bright
dawn illuminates the wintry valleys.
Pale
birds are circulating in the silence.
Wings
flap against the solitude of morning.
The
morning light illuminates the valleys,
And
scatters birds along the edge of silence.
Lone
birds go foraging along the morning.
The
landscape resonates in lonely valleys.
The
winter light encapsulates their silence.
The
trees below the birds darken morning.
The
misted stands of trees along the valleys
Hold
birds, the dark intelligence of morning.
They
cluster, minds, inside the sylvan silence
Whose
dawn illuminates their wintry valleys.
valleys
shaken in darkness, sheerest tremor
in
folded stone under white stream, shudder
singing
soaring down mind-swayed channel
errant
brightness crying in wilder patterns,
bold
scrambling runs edged over precipices.
See,
in mind’s eye, now, scale green passes,
clash
of the wind, seeker of distant shingle
knock
of the tide, slither of shining pebble,
of
metaphors of the heart, unbridled seeker,
wind-bent
music, wildfire of sudden being,
or
simple cluck of the stones on icy beaches,
gather
them seeker, bury in moving matter,
tremors
of thought, fingers of lunar beauty.
falls
to another creature,
tides
strip bare
each
coastal feature,
Nature
lacks all reproach,
though
we care.
Slowly
the valleys are exposed to light,
time
makes them seas.
Storms
unaware
dissect
the trees.
Slowly
the valleys alter
as
they wear.
Time
denies all reproach, why do we
in
our remorse, too late
to
disturb what’s there,
think
to re-calculate,
to
live without error,
as
we dare?
root
on green islands
split
the white fall:
all
here is unsure,
foam
flows,
the
Tao,
is
its own metaphor.
Rain-smoothed
rock, pliant juniper,
hunched
pine in stone
dissect
the stream,
who
dare ask more
than
this pure
being,
its
own metaphor?
was
his own voice singing.
The
seductive lie
is
already within.
Athene
fights
to
counter Hermes.
The
wise articulation is the worst.
Better
a simple cunning,
how
to make
wooden
horses;
stay
away
from
Helens.
Floating
by desolate islands
is
no life for a knower,
(though
we do it)
even
when
written
up later
by
some cleric.
The
one-eyed giant
we
blinded
was
our self.
We
should
have
stuck
to
eating lotus,
seen
that Calypso-Circe
was
Penelope,
turning
us
endlessly
into
her
errant
suitor;
been
more aware
of
time and distance,
less
reliant
on
the wind and waves,
more
careful
of
our friends.
Between
Scylla
and
Charybdis
what
difference;
evading
passion
and
emotion,
by
the skin of our teeth?
a
contour of intelligence that moves
with
the line of sight, is the eye
at
a peculiar angle
or
the voice inside the mind
which
is not the voice you hear,
I
could not reproduce it,
the
poem its echo,
a
solid fragment
of
ethereal life,
already
wavering
in
the stream of the other.
The
poem is an intelligence of feeling,
the
urge which is a form endorsing logic
and
if you think thinking is achieved
without
feeling, think again,
though
reason is founded
in
the world
its
reality is endorsed by feeling,
not
merely that things do as they do,
but
that they do as we expect
or
not,
as
I exist, making, in your mind,
or
not.
Poetry
without intellect, is no better
than
feeling without intellect,
is
not this place to breathe,
where
something of being-here
is
transformed to place,
to
object, form, shape of the mind
at
the edge before the scream,
or
having screamed in the space
Linus
or Orpheus left behind,
a
trace betrayed
of
what
we
swim through, gasping.
Poetry
is beyond its particulars, not
as
Plato imagined, but like mathematics,
the
feeling of a form, the tilt
of
a life, of lives,
but
no greater
than
its smallest element,
the
flick of mind,
which
is likewise the element
of
which we flow,
ephemerally
here,
on
the edge
of
something.
Poetry
is an unfounded act of the primary
imagination,
flight on the edge of night,
along
the line of interior landscape,
a
mimicry mimicking a voice,
half-heard
of self,
in
mind, all unqualified
to
search the mindless,
except
by virtue
of
a certain feeling,
in
which so tentatively
filled
with darkness
thought
comes to life.
If
only we could convince ourselves
that
we were mind and let mind flow
with
all the ease of these appearances,
a
pianist lost at last in the performance,
free
of name and form, the expression
of
no audience, no self, only the music.
Being
is not what mind emerges from.
If
only we could be what we now feel,
a
sense of the dim crescendo or the jar
of
furthest assonance, slow modulation
through
all these shifts of recognition,
these
touches of the light and darkness,
if
we could be as subtle as they seem.
Being
is not the movement of the leaf,
or
the fall, at once shifting and still,
form
and its ephemeral manifestation,
word
and its utterance, symbol in our
equations,
some thing or process out
of
all cognition, beyond the tangible:
being
is music, being is what mind is.
the
echo of ourselves as inconsequential detail,
the
air in a void of space that is almost human.
We
have time for our re-assertion of existence.
For
a moment there we were lost in the others,
distracted
by too much given and not needed,
given
and unasked for, too many dull voices
like
a heaviness in the body, fear in the mind.
We
confused ourselves, looking for some reply
in
our own clear speech from what encircles us,
expecting
reason in the wildest of un-reasons,
an
order where nothing has decreed like order.
Now
we climb again to the rock-bound stream,
its
flow pure ice, its colour the sky’s clear grey,
and
try to lay aside what it is we brought here.
When
all else fails we still have time for this.
deep
in all history, discover
what
lunar magic mind once made
here
in the leaves so displayed,
to
eyes’ delight
at
dead of night;
as
at your door must now be laid?
You,
was it, learned when hours are gone,
mind
transformed by dreaming done,
no
beauty once is beauty past,
the
thread that’s tightened holds time fast,
and
all desire
white
web of fire,
is
through those endless waters cast?
That
this bright arc like daylight pure
shivering
in silence, gleams as sure
though
time and change erode again
both
face and mind, there is no when,
and
all the joys
clear
light employs
erase
the flow of now and then?
Here,
in the well of dark, my lover,
shall
you, once more, such truth discover
that
lunar magic mind has made
and
in the bright leaves so displayed,
sweeter
than all
the
stars that fall
must
rise again, dispel the shade?
associated
with reality
that
the mind
cannot
evade,
that
is poetry.
The
world behind the head
is
no longer relevant,
the
truth is there
the
mind is bare,
that
is poetry.
Though
we would like
to
evade the sheer
effort
of trying
to
speak without lying,
there
is poetry.
Nothing
that you can say
or
do can silence
what
calls to us,
enrages
us,
that
is poetry.
It
is not here or there;
in
the everywhere
that
forms us
and
deforms us
is
the poetry.
Another
nature there
another
world
another
universe
unrehearsed
that
is poetry.
Beyond
allegiances
except
the one,
a
challenge to
all
integrity
that
is poetry.
The
tree where golden fruit was hung;
pale
lamps that lit the leaves green
with
mysteries of the night, unseen
but
bright with that unearthly glow:
branched
imagination, here below.
What
will I wish when time is old?
The
tree of light, its phantom gold.
The
substance of our universe directs us,
like
puppets in a play we must perform,
although
we might detest the characters.
Our
tongue creates this morning language.
We
re-shape the substance of our being.
Like
Ariel through reality we whisper,
disposing
of the elements we conjure.
The
way we go is not the way we wished.
The
meaning of character is this rigidity,
imposed.
The outcome of the final lines
is
as the first breath sweetly indicated.
At
every instant this new world exists,
the
old is done with in our macrocosm.
Though
self is but its choices, we chose,
and
not some arbitrary force beyond us.
The
words of evening calmly speak to us.
The
meaning of our time is what we made.
The
world is not a stage, we still reserve
awareness
far outside the roles we play.
Our
unpredetermined voices murmur,
in
a dialogue with what surrounds us,
the
irreality where self and universe
become
the one thing we experience.
The
language of evening is this silence
in
which a wisp of meaning implicates
us
in the destination and the journey
neither
of which were quite as we think.
yet
inside; we assess its gentleness, its curve
of
green fields endlessly retreating to far slopes
that
gather cloud, gleam with occasional light;
it
snares the wind, arcs a stream,
mixes
bare deciduous with pine,
acquires
names, remains itself,
is
nothing we could have dreamed of,
eschews
assertion, adumbrates
an
aspect of ourselves, intentionless,
seems
in motion always,
dropping
into a valley, raising a hill,
complicating
into detailed woodland,
smoothing
slowly fine across horizons.
An
island in an island, this limestone dome
has
its own form of light, strange tenderness:
hard
not to sound anthropomorphic; secretive,
we
say, meaning folded into hollows,
declivities
of shade and stone, rivers of dark
clear
water, emerald weed, heron shores,
pebbled
lairs of the smallest fish,
territory
of the dipper and the wren,
wild
flowers and grasses,
an
uplift leading from the dark moor, childhood,
to
this pale landscape of freedom,
where
the mind is answerable to nothing, no one,
where
human fate is an awareness,
where
beauty is truth in Keats’ sense, form realised.
Drift
the long valleys, along the visible or invisible
waterways,
cross the rakes, climb the slopes always
steeper
than they look, the dales deeper, the cut
of
tree through stone, stone against tree, sharper,
the
eye led gently into finer purer gradation,
or
travelling the landscape, raised
as
if physically, to feel the heights
and
know that shape of flow that moves
out
of the dark valley there to the green summit,
the
place from which unsung peoples looked west
towards
uncrossed distance, setting suns,
or
east towards edges of the upraised land,
south
to outfalls, north to the watersheds,
dreamt
of the clear silver, watched it rise.
The
places of imagination, like those of love,
are
not metaphors, though in the intentionless
we
grant things meaning, say that a holly leaf
is
a boundary between form and not-form,
identity,
expression of all presence; a stone
is
the transfer of time, its flaked adherence
to
us, its totality of moments in the moment,
which
are only the thing it is, and no more;
that
distance and nearness are two faces
of
the sole phenomenon, and both are real;
but
these things are not metaphors,
they
are the transmigrations of our thoughts
into
the substance of what is not-thought,
the
significances which we endow.
And
beside everything we might do, the landscape
has
a character; shows its own cast of features,
to
which description does no justice nor
the
effort to choose words that exceed, as words,
the
reason for their placement and become
glittering
lumps of language that detract
from
the object of our love; we need
a
speech as soft as the dialect of lost places
that
lingers here, in long savoured vowels
gentle
as pure stream-water, ash-rooted:
that
might seem more fitting to a lover,
since
how is that loved which is not its self,
and
how can its parts be loved and not the whole
distillation
of unique identity?
We
missed the essence: in familiar notes,
in
the endless attraction of the superficial
that
represents a style and not the sense,
losing
the person in the impersonal,
which
is the fate of art; conjured there
an
old intimation of anticipated music,
not
that new and stranger shift of keys.
The
wrong hands touched the wrong face,
the
wrong wave fell on fallacious shores.
The
landscape we love is what he always
faintly
disliked, the too well known echo,
and
what he loved was nothing of all this,
but
the real landscape and the other music,
the
one that sounded in an interior silence,
not
meant for us, or any semblance of us.
has
something of our own childhood,
the
open question or unanswered call,
the
shapelessness before accepted form.
There
is always a resistance involved,
too
pliant a protagonist is weakening,
life
drags us unwillingly along the way,
though
granting us its secret helpers:
the
world’s foolishness and cruelty,
our
own perception of love and beauty
beyond
the mere fragments that adhere
to
whatever landscapes we inherited;
the
material must be hard (or what credit
accrues
to the adventurer in setting forth?)
the
chisel has to rebound from marble;
or
over-soft (extracting gold from mud,
is
equally meritorious). There is a climb
against
impossible odds, chance involved,
but
that succession of successes, destiny,
and
not the usual fumbling and failing,
though
an admixture of human weakness
confesses
the lovable nature of heroics,
that
no one knows why they are done,
least
of all the heroine or hero, they
are
too busy with the task, the skills
required,
the vicissitudes of fate, the time,
the
weather, the next puzzle to unravel,
the
next angle of the labyrinth, prepared
for
anything but boredom, the true peril
that
surrounds us, our ultimate danger.
There
is a prize, even if only the sense
of
order achieved, in our own image.
Everymanwoman
descends the mountain
clutching
something, if only self-respect,
or
exhaustion, or the escape from mindless
duty
into the freedom of the purposeless.
Thank
goodness for friends along the way,
for
our insensitivity to the ogres’ feelings,
the
sense of black and white, the simplicity
of
journeys where right is other than wrong,
where
truth and falsehood show emblems
of
perfect clarity, and we can always pity.
There
is no shortage of interfering guides,
opinionated
knowers, unthinking ritualists,
and
no shortage of passages to negotiate.
Yet
for the one self, whose flag is freedom,
who
cares nothing for the fate of worlds,
there
is always another mode than epic;
mind
makes no assumptions, mountains
are
plains, prizes are stones; every thing
is
an answer, and a question; moving
nowhere
as challenging as to advance.
The
eighth son is the one who refuses
the
quest, the eighth daughter quietly
slips
away before the action opens,
into
the grass, beyond the limits
already
seen and understood. Rites
of
passage lead to the dull labyrinth
where
the old roarer waits, like Lear,
to
annoy us with irritating ramblings.
Thankfully
there’s Arden, better still
what
survives Arden and renews us,
an
unexpected universe dispersing
our
absurd cries in its immense void.
where
form dissolves,
the
water flows,
the
sea, the cloud,
the
forest leaves,
the
grass, the moor,
moonlight
and the dark.
It
is not true that form
is
what all art seeks,
it
equally
seeks
the release
from
form,
sleep
and forgetting,
dream
deliquescence.
Sweetly
we go as deep
shaking
off faith, free
of
past loyalties
(though
who’ll confess?)
once
again
loosed
from the womb,
ready
for anything.
deep
in the forests of the night,
despise
the worldly, late and soon,
whose
only lure is appetite?
In
your eyes I see all that’s bright,
the
clarity of innocence,
unspoilt
by years of foolish sense,
that
from the wrong extract the right.
Shall
we be free of world that never
owned
our allegiance, sweetly sever
every
tie that binds us there
to
the universe of care?
In
your two eyes I see those deeps
that
nullify ten thousand years
of
human interests and fears;
in
your two eyes, where beauty keeps
her
true domain, the waking dream,
in
which all ages only seem,
a
fitful and a passing gleam
along
the margin of the stream.
that
much we understand of the plot,
the
given, but never confuse
the
why with the how,
the
how is what is important
not
the why, which is mere science
or
Freudian superstition.
Analysis
is not the life lived, is not
what
burns along the veins and harms
the
reason, the mechanisms
are
not the revelation,
which
is always self and the desire,
always
more important than mere science
which
explains nothing.
I
do not descry the science, in its place,
which
is not the place of significance
we
think, there are no gods
not
even human ones,
and
if you do not see the darkling plain
and
feel the brilliance of the stars,
how
can this help you?
Climbing
the mountain
of the self
the
heroic come to a blind gully,
where
there is nothing more
to
confront but the self,
that
is the plot, we know it,
but
the plot is not the confrontation.
She
sits beside the stream and is his fate.
by
making more
of
the world than it makes of itself,
by
generalising,
until
the sole self is universal,
the
bloated everymanwoman of the plot,
or
vanishes into the social, the sway
of
crowd en masse that some adore,
though
mind would make more
than
a social ant heap.
Mind
moves in metaphors.
The
Self abhors
its
selfishness that feigns a tolerance
it
does not feel
as
the price of functioning at all,
puzzled
but admiring of those who go
so
related to others they do not know
that
they can see in them humanity
and
not the simply more
of
all too much.
Mind
dies into its own metaphors.
They
become moral laws
science,
religion, ritual, everything
claiming
to define us
who
are forever beyond the definition,
instanced
by those who elude always,
not
tokens in the games others play,
so
do not figure in our histories,
of
whom the others cannot hear
their
more than silence.
they
left behind;
once
standing sentinel perhaps
on
the green ridge
now
the shaped circle seen best from above,
this
ditch and summit
littered
by these pointers,
unknown
usage,
unimaginable
peoples
all
shadows here
as
we are shadows here
of
a different impermanence.
A
long slow walk to reach here
over
fields between grey-white walls,
green
hollows of rain water
sun
in a high sky,
the
silence cool and certain.
Lots
of their leavings
under
the ground,
nothing
apparent
but
the tumuli,
these
tables of sedimentary stone,
suggestions
of their tracks,
though
such might be younger.
All
of it shifting too, under our feet.
Why
description is never
enough,
history being solely
what
exists,
no
more, if denied our inferences.
No
stone axes no figurines,
no
more than in passing we leave behind,
no
language,
no
upland art
except
these big stones
brought
here somehow
no
one too sure how.
You
can read what you wish
into
such ‘monuments’
all
ideas are valid,
the
truth no easier to read
than
our thoughts
(as
we turn, to return)
of
spirit or matter
this
place or elsewhere,
ritual
or aimlessness,
dream
or appetite,
why
not say all of those,
humanity
in every mode?
The
purposes we think we build for
are
only aspects of what we create,
sometimes
the least.
Perhaps
courtyards are greater
for
the thoughts that passed through them
than
themselves,
the
living and not the dead function,
these
stones, say,
on
their green summit,
attracting
transient mind
acting
as nodes,
fusing
the centuries.
Civilisations
weary,
imagination
fails,
but
the view opens.
Whatever
crashed down
cleared
the brush,
carved
perspectives,
became
an insect hollow,
fuelled
regeneration
through
quiet decay;
wasteland
or great pond
neither
is here to stay.
The
patch of wide sky
was
never visible from here,
until
the structures fell,
the
ruined timbering.
Absence
of thought,
the
palsied silence,
is
not a consequence
of
lack of matter.
Plough
over the dead,
exercise
a freedom,
release
the butterfly
from
its shroud,
watch
it soar as if
it
never felt the web,
shrug
off the sense
of
the inevitable;
have
we not learnt by now
nothing
human is
inevitable,
necessity
is
as the mind requires;
boredom,
inspirer
of
curiosity, cries
for
new horizons
in
the darkness,
whatever
you may say,
or
tone you may adopt;
content
beats style,
ultimately,
the
seducer’s voice
is
emptiness and cold,
absence
and subtle chaos,
a
sense of alien dumbness,
but
we, the only givers,
can
never rest in style,
(our
endless matter
is
the far universe)
the
most seductive
most
to be resisted,
howling
or keening,
or
describing either,
yet
we must hear it;
it
is not in the voices
of
those happiest
with
world as it is,
the
perilous music.
The
world is not asleep,
mind
has no end,
we
are fire and air.
the
mind suspended, eyesight
without
intention, flows instead
blue-grey
fissure, layered rock,
whose
thorn trees root in shallow
matted
grass and moss, where
an
angle of dry-stone wall runs
against
the outcrop, and ceases.
The
lack of anything to grasp
or
feel, cool as drenched fields,
may
be a step closer to what is
without
inflection, is language
less,
and devoid of expression,
but
even this the mind interprets:
we
call the landscape benign,
the
weather, as it is, peaceful.
Even
here the branch of a thorn
flung
across its trunk, the mask
that
eye conceives above, this
smoothed
shoulder turned, fall
into
material echo of half-seen
ancient
face, some shape caught
as
in a moment of odd movement,
arresting,
memorable, changing
the
aspect of this run of ledges,
on
which it sits, a woodland god,
teasing
imagination, forcing us
to
declare a meaning, realise
that
this is what we do, minds
indissoluble,
un-resting, even
when
they seem to be asleep,
forever
interpolating meaning.
No,
even with the mind quiet
we
are no nearer the mindless
inner
core of nature, distant
still
from such thing in itself,
insisting
on metaphor, symbol,
tracing
out the boundary lines,
imposing
significance, owning
recognition,
anticipating word.
Standing
silent to empty mind,
it
fills remorselessly with forms,
fragmented
shadows, memories,
interpretations
of elusive darks
and
lights, becomes the corner
of
some old master’s canvas
where
a detail we’re unsure of
resonates
in turbid chromatism,
until
we see more power there
than
in the ostensible subject,
like
those elusive figures seen
in
formless stains, the patterns
of
the virtual self we compose,
fluttering
phantasm in the flow,
as
we ride currents of thought,
grasping
at gleam, flare, tremor.
So
here despite the passive mind,
its
enervation, this inner silence,
the
stone is not simply limestone,
the
trees are not simply thorns,
the
core of place not simply there.
We
seep into it despite ourselves,
without
exertion, putting out no
effort
in assimilation, no reach
towards
the immanent existent,
all
perception being a re-pass
of
meaning in this afternoon;
all
objects subjects that must
transcend
whatever being is,
to
be whatever this we realise
of
their uprising; hand, eye
and
mind already universe.
or
worse.
The
seal its liquid eye caught in the foam
filled
with flotsam
rippling
over tarmac.
What
should they understand
of
what this is, result of us
(though
indirect)
Pity
the uncomprehending eye
the
alien warmth
out
of oily coldness
briny
being.
We
can’t laugh now at indulgence, only
feel
this endless sense of recognition,
or
worse.
The
tanker riding high, the wave-washed jetty
are
no longer simple objects of beauty;
the
apercus, the descriptions
without
moral significance,
except
that inferred
by
gazing,
are
not enough.
The
over-sensitive must shut their eyes,
blinded,
blind as the insensitive,
an
irony.
There
is only so much one heart can take,
displaying
empathy is not a weakness,
nor
its silence something we can buy
just
as no one has a price
coercion
is no purchase,
mind
is free.
The
dying whale has judged us,
the
tarred gulls stop us resting in nature,
the
seal wallowing disoriented
in
our sordid flotsam
disturbs
the mind,
the
shining lady
naked
from her swim
has
lost the living robe
we
cannot return,
till
even the dark of the breeze
troubles
us now.
the
kiss of a stranger,
the
hand of the clown,
the
bringer of danger.
The
distance is fatal,
the
darkness obscure,
that
shape in the mist
is
the perilous lure.
Here
is your heart now,
the
flurry of wings,
the
scratching of thorns
the
newcomer brings,
a
bringer of danger,
the
kiss of a stranger,
the
hand of a clown,
the
newcomer’s frown.
and
killed him. It began as perception, swelled
to
his words, later reached out its octopus arms,
searching
him for his ethical stance; his view
from
surrounding hills of the central summit;
his
metaphysics; his ability to defend pure art,
rather
than show the gifted performer’s talent,
despite
that excess of skill beyond the others.
The
object grew deeper, translated his history,
became
the succession of lies we call making,
until
he no longer possessed himself, but that
image
of self, promoted endlessly, enervating.
World
had a life of its own, seemed to mock
the
stance of the creator through the uncreated,
always
more copious, wider and more intense;
an
antithesis of the dream that possessed him,
without
his knowledge, of freezing time, place,
and
his particulars no one else dared confute,
which
in time become a minor myth, the sort
worth
an hour or two, capable of being traded.
The
object loomed over his conventional grave,
squatted
like Fuseli’s nightmare above his dust,
the
gape of its mindless features, the furrows
in
its solid face like a worn smile of dismissal.
The
object, swollen, occupied his landscape,
questioned
authenticity, laid out for us errors,
bare
inconsistencies, showed him not the man
he
had believed himself to be, not even close.
The
object, which would endure long beyond
his
fatal evanescence, flaunted his epitaph
in
eloquent silence: he ended still where he
began,
in glittering mastery of the easy truth.
are
not your region. Time flares,
where
you are, in flowing seas,
cooling
the shores of everwhen.
Where
we meet in dream must
be
enough, where we conjoin
in
words that are the meaning
of
the mind, at least its dower.
You
are the image of our hour.
If
we owned to a mythology,
you
would inhabit trees, arc
in
streams, be breeze or bird.
As
it is, night must condescend
towards
us, this real century
lie
between us like the waves
in
which our passages elude.
Because
time seems to move, be wary,
it
is the world that re-configures where
you
lean above the abyss on that chair.
To
move against the dark flow of time,
would
be to question fate we imagine,
so
push against the all of what we are,
and
yet we are the river where it goes.
The
shining appearances, the shimmer,
are
not some revelation of the hidden.
They
are the depths all on the surface,
and
being is this presence in the mind,
which
also is a presence in the world,
and
world in mind as mind in world;
the
reflection is the mirror; phantom
trees
stand firmly rooted in the void:
we
walk between their immanence.
Where
you sit the night is deeper,
but
what is moving in the vortex
is
no separate essence to the mind.
Being
is not an attribute of things,
as
mind is not an attribute of self:
you
change the universe, beware,
merely
by rising from your chair.
which
was altogether an aftertaste,
a
feeling for the feeling gone by,
or
for the feeling in anticipation,
but
never the momentary itself.
It
would have required those powers
of
acceptance, acquiescence, we
never
possessed. Freedom required
an
always moving on from always
moving
on, an unrest to be savoured,
which
in the moments when time stood
still
and we two exceeded time passing,
we
now remembered as true happiness,
despite
that unhappiness still persisting
in
the other layer of our savage minds.
the
shadows of the hills make identity
from
curves and hollows; they stand
over
against eternity much as we do,
flashing
by to the hiss of radio static
as
we lose the channel in singing air,
and
the orchestra left quaintly hanging
as
a resonance somewhere in substance,
in
a stranger meta-level of civilisation
layered
on more ancient rocks and trees.
Out
beyond stacks of gulled stone lies
the
flashing code of Virginia’s lighthouse,
or
not exactly hers, but her metaphor
for
the goal not understood, wished-for
and
deceptive, on these different shores.
Hear
the music play! The waves return,
and
into them we vanish, to reappear,
or
not exactly us, rather our metaphor,
the
moving wake art embodies, gleams
of
complexity in a departing landscape.
the
loss sometimes as much as finding,
or
rather the dissolutions surprise me,
attentive
to those feelings that ramify,
unlock
strange corners, re-emphasise,
expressing,
like the trees as light goes,
their
images, tremors twice forgotten.
What
the world claims should liberate
often
proves a prison, conventional
expectations
of what hearts should
feel,
or the mind display, but then I
am
not the self the world conceives,
nor
even the self as known, rather I
am
the shifting self all this has made.
That
quiet man in the corner refutes
in
himself the bright acceptable tear,
that
woman resting is engaging now
in
slightest moves of the inner spirit
that
reconfigure this whole universe,
which
for us is perception, purpose,
and
not its intentionless unknowing.
What
the world claims should free me
feels
like death, and my own self life,
not
to be hidden behind, nor traduced,
but
listened to in its integrity, purer,
beyond
any fictions the past created,
whose
ties are those I choose, there
in
the depths with which I commune,
whether
consciously, or unconsciously:
what
will science know of what is held
only
in language as it moves and plays,
in
the languages of feelings, individual
tongues
imbuing words with meaning,
where
the outcomes exceed the scope
of
the model, and exist in irreal time.
Be
prepared to feel other than you are,
and
not as others anticipate, be true
to
what within is the unrepeatable
burning
of the individual fire, not
some
result of superficial wisdom.
What
makes me free is not as you
may
dream, nor what confines me.
such
shadows in the air of unfamiliar
beauty,
like the dancing of the hare,
a
dancing over hollows, of snow
and
icy ground, between the fir
plantation
and that stony mound,
a
dancing on a bright field, through
a
gateway in the rain, beyond a god’s
conception,
all making, and its strain?
the
mind from matter, shows the error
of
distinctions, the need to concentrate
instead
on structure, the self-organised;
the
magnitude of Darwin’s revelation,
made
more shocking by the realisation
nothing
external to the means at hand
was
necessary or essential, so nothing
needing
adding to the elements, forces,
in
order the whole thing be composed,
in
one continuum from stone to sight,
the
human form out of the non-human.
The
constituents of ferns, the beads
of
water, the layers of rock, the hand,
the
eye, leaf-bound clatter of wings,
all
one moving course of energies,
self-born,
sifted in the bright sieve,
as
if a pure winnowing in the light
gave
birth to shapes, this plunge
of
life like the water from a rock,
sweeping
through air and shifting
in
its fall, cascading in plenitude,
like
an act of mind, and yet not,
instead
self risen out of not-self,
the
processes of matter making
the
consciousness of mind until
in
the glitter of outpouring light,
the
human, the inhuman are one.
in
a medium of light and dark, one eye
vanishes
into liquid silence, one is hurt
and
aged, the brush has lovingly moved
over
the textures, but left the geometric
background
bare, an old wall’s bareness
filled
with Leonardesque lines and form
in
which anything is possible, like dream.
Looking
at all these selves, which is self,
or
rather how shall the substance speak
of
hidden process, except by revelation,
which
is a question of what life betrays
in
the face? For instance a young mind
moves
in an old man’s eye? Age serves
better
as metaphor of transience, suits
therefore
expressions of tragedy, loss,
not
necessarily the inner flow, which
may
be responding not to deep pity
for
the human world, but natural light,
and
the landscapes of distant memory.
The
face in a glass reflecting, the face
in
a window superimposed on nature,
a
ghost on the trees, knows inwardness,
a
place perhaps where chasing the word
mind
sinks onto what seems to unravel
the
mystery, the shock of being here
and
to be gone, the essential absurdity,
what
the poor circus clown points at,
the
impossible shoes, the giveaway nose
on
a piece of stylised flesh, ridiculous
being
eating away at all sense of flight
beyond,
the intransigence of ladders.
Here
the face of genius is exactly the face
of
all of us, and the inwardness ambiguous
form.
Shape suggests our true dimension.
The
thistle stands resilient in the corner
of
a field. The tree suggests survival,
the
fractured stone vicissitudes of time.
Energies
and their lack create metaphor,
in
the realisation of what indicates us,
natural
energies, the dark our background;
the
lights that frame the head a signal;
the
stance the gaze absorption; the tools
in
the hand I came, I saw, I vanished.
The
words on the page unread move
already
in mind towards the leaves
on
windblown trees, leaves of glass.
The
phantom in the green light is
body
not thought. Mind more real
than
what is outside the process
contemplates
its strange eternity
outside
time, a product of time.
So
all function, in its connection,
dependent
on time but timeless,
that
will fulfil itself uninterrupted.
The
library of uninterrupted voices,
is
already in the mind, the unheard
louder,
as the moon is already risen
though
the sky is dark and empty.
The
stars are already glinting far
on
the edges of a peculiar galaxy
singling
itself for points of mind
flickering,
small, in its immensity,
but
larger than the leaves damp
with
the passing showers green
with
the deep light now that sings
and
lives, and is still irreducible.
smoke
blows
across
a long perspective,
the
slopes waver
thoughts
float like bits
of
bark on water,
steering
them
with
a breath
a
leaf shakes to a leaf
the
air tastes
rock
is cold
frost
will glitter later
to
feel a deer
emerge
from trees
would
be good
to
know it there
in
the shadows
watching
unconcerned
and
delicate
as
the tones
of
landscape
quieter
than
a cloud field
quiet
as a mountain
in
white fog
the
fields
of
hollow light.
penetrating
to the deeper valley,
between
these limestone ledges
these
scaly layers, the outcrops,
until
at the furthest corner where
a
tributary valley falling merges
there
is complete and satisfying
silence,
with not even a bird cry,
only
cloud, rock, bare dark trees,
and
no desire to break the calm,
rather
the need to intensify it all,
the
muddied grass, mossed stone,
dormant
wildflowers, ash slopes,
resonances
in the depths of mind,
until
from beneath a beaten path,
out
of a crevice, the source rises,
clear
gush of water into the light,
and
sounds its way along the cleft,
past
the roots of an ancient hazel,
heart
now imagining the power
of
what vast volumes once wore
this
place, carved out its heights
and
steeps, its hollows, formed
that
angle of silence, not human,
and
this constant noise, this flow
itself
like quiet, the shining peace.
and
there you walk softly,
bringing
the hours love
needs
for its calling,
the
hours without end
equating
to minutes,
the
infinite moments,
where
being is falling.
There
you speak softly,
and
there you go slowly,
bringing
the accents love
needs
for its sighing,
the
accents of music
that
no longer speaks us,
the
infinite accents,
where
being exceeds us.
There
you walk softly,
there
you walk slowly,
bringing
the strength love
needs
for time, dying,
the
strength of the stone,
the
light of the star,
the
strength to endure
the
love that we are.
are
in a language with deep associations:
do
not infer beliefs or reasons simply
because
they echo your predilections.
Language
is as we define it, prior use
must
be overtaken, existence shaken,
by
the reclamation of words, renewal,
so:
blessing, redemption, love may not
be
as you determine, nor the bright dead
making
their claim on eternity, doomed
instead
to ebb and transience, our destiny.
In
speech meaning drowns as in the sea,
its
wreckage moves submerged appears
to
the light again transformed strangely.
Take
language by the scruff of the neck
and
make it express the lambent spaces,
which
in their emptiness add resonance
to
words that posited a hidden presence,
and
what resounds after the dismantling
may
be more precious now, more human.
the
sunlight brighter, the imagination clearer
as
shadows vanish. What has departed was
always
too faint for light, too insubstantial.
The
human mind flickers now under the leaves
which
also flicker, in another manner, green
eyes
of assurance, structures made of nothing;
flares
on the branch of day with no poverties.
What
left was never as strong as we imagined,
stronger
when seen as the glow of imagination.
Now
the great sun rises as before, unlimited,
the
gentlest word is a movement of its flames,
the
slightest look a galaxy of meaning, all time
resonating
in a landscape free of the darkness,
each
self the self it is, calling out its suchness,
in
the bright afternoon of the great sun rising.
high
in the branches of the pear tree is making
a
song out of something embedded in a feeling,
greater
than self, than the dark boughs of the pear
bowing
to the southern sky, than the mechanisms
of
the song, the bones and flesh of the taut throat,
greater
than the space in which it exists, or that
to
which it cries, the outer space which is inner
and
so bounded, and so equal to the limitations
of
identity, no larger than a thought, less intricate
than
the modulations of the song which is not even
human
but which we comprehend gratuitously,
knowing
the infinite spaces cease to matter, are
simply
matter and not mind, that the bird is mind
singing
beyond the canopy of vibrant half-light,
in
a state of unconscious exaltation, unintended
grace,
fulfilling the residue inside of millennia,
careless
of galaxies, the whirls of ice and light.
Its
song is a life flowing outwards in the air,
this
trembling in the confines of the ear, purer
than
matter’s conjuring of light, night’s sighs.
in
the dark where bright stars glittered,
I
imagined you, your being echoed in
the
spaces there.
Where
Venus in the west hung glowing
smaller
than mind would wish it, knowing
its
light reflected fire, its glimmer
an
orb laid bare,
I
thought of you, to nothing’s fabric
bringing
an altered flame, fantastic
shapes
of the mind, ideas approaching
that
bright flare,
its
silver abstract gleam no message
its
meaning simply what we granted
in
our mythologies and might alter
if
we care,
finding
the thought of you as cogent,
your
being in the night as lucent;
how
to see beauty and uniqueness
and
not compare.
now
uprooted,
walk
the bends that reveal a far green landscape
of
darker coils and windings
hidden
waters,
follow
the margins of ash and hawthorn,
hazel
and alder,
that
fringe the track,
savour
the clouds, flashes of sun,
the
shelter of the empty cuttings,
the
momentary height on bridges,
the
darks below them,
until
you reach the familiar place
where
some alignment of sundry hills,
the
angle of the fields, the lack
of
roads, the sough of wind alerts you
to
a fierce perfection.
Stand,
stranger here, where time
neglects
your desolation,
attenuating,
grasps the light
and
thrusts it through a needle’s eye
to
fall to the deeper clefts,
to
change your mood,
its
offer a land of farms and villages,
fieldstone
walls, soft coloured slopes,
things
for which there is no analogy,
then
follow the contour’s curve,
the
bedding planes, the fractured rock
explosives
split, the camber
of
a long-gone passage to the north,
past
wildflower steeps to fields,
past
gateway silences,
and
nettled corners,
to
the heart of this.
wheel
in the old young sky,
hang
over distant dry
fields
down there
clear
to plummet
buffeted
to slide
through
the blue,
climb
steeps of liquid air,
watch
far below
green
fields, accustomed detail,
but
each new gust new freedom,
down
stands of pine soughing,
past
layers of windblown rock.
Life
brief, not complicated, getting by
in
soaring fiercely over spaces,
patrolling
bright ridges,
heather
scrub and streambeds,
or
the long
cool
green
slopes
leading out of stillness,
contained,
absorbed in flight;
and
when the work is over
end
it
and
survive.
everything
working, nothing intended,
the
plants perhaps most
beautiful,
grass
waves in the light,
no
nations,
the
first possessors
un-possessing
flowing
through.
Million
years, one year, at a glance,
the
land un-blurred
a
lightning
stand
of
stone and bone,
of
seed and stem,
languages
of instinct, all of feeling
in
the fading vision,
of
living earth.
If
we had not got here,
if
we had not:
a
world without purpose
without
ethics,
(much
as now?)
but
not without pain, delight,
affection,
how
else
to
conceive of paradise?
of
too much repetition,
his
rites are brutal, see his shrine,
a
world in demolition.
Let
Ares sleep, his work is done,
no
purpose in petition,
the
innocent may plead, the plan
demands
their slow attrition.
Let
Ares sleep, his heart of steel
is
free of all contrition,
untroubled
by the blood and pain,
destruction
his sole vision.
But
let him sleep, for he is tired
of
forcing each position,
only
to end where he began,
imprisoned
by his mission.
with
no end, and no intent,
the
outcome peace, simplicity,
freedom
from contention,
wisdom,
healing, beauty,
all
in it from the start,
as
are their opposites.
The
way proceeds lightly,
with
leaves, twigs, dust,
and
pollen particularly,
yellow
mist on wych-hazel,
and
no intrinsic errors,
everything
open, all free
to
give and take each other,
power
slipped away,
instead
a growing,
a
simple passing by of what
no
longer concerns us
a
dream of slow creation,
its
balm, its music.
continues,
stone endures,
the
muddied silence dries
or,
rain-washed, cleanses,
and
compared with us is always
beyond
death,
under
Deneb or a winter sky
of
circumpolar stars,
the
slow moon rising.
Life
is the essence of the survivor, place
endures
by presence not absence,
and
if water grieves
its
sudden falls its deep submergence
there
is no trace of sadness
in
its glitter,
equal
in being to the distant points
of
flickering light above,
astringent
in their coldness.
Within
the magic ring of settled stones,
such
calm at evening magnifies
the
spirit thrilling
to
minute life of plants and creatures,
the
going on, the endless
going
on,
keeping
the heart from care, yielding
nature’s
only meaning
a
beautiful persistence.
Lodging
something deep in the mind,
the
message of the universe:
have
no fear,
the
absence of thought itself a thought,
your
empty body before you were born
your
heritage
the
white bones of the mouse, the wren
blending
with earth, and no
more
dying then.
vanishes,
the skyline lost,
trees
gone too, no breeze, light
soft
and smoky as wet leaves,
anticipating
cold the farms silent, tractors,
trucks
parked in damp yards,
the
stone houses quiet,
the
world a hollow place
but
deep in there hidden fires.
Walking
a long slope over Lathkill
ash
trees loom, mind gentles,
the
heart adrift from misted shores
floats
in the lake of air
and
breathes a thought then another,
small
thoughts, a lone idea,
the
sound of water.
Rocks
are slippery, paths slide,
ice-cold
source undermines
a
shelf of cool limestone
flaked
and crumbled,
snow
hangs somewhere
off
the Atlantic reaches,
dumb
savage waters, here
the
wet cliffs and cold stretches
of
winter river dim the soul,
dark
aspect of the body,
and
mind waits
for
sky and earth to change
for
something other
and
wind-born to begin.
almost
there in the old sense
simply
us lacking reason,
(the
fox, alert, the wren,
and
all the others, flexing
mind
in their own way,
inferring
the object of their intent,
hoarding
memories, anticipating)
rather
that what they do, being
their
own fulfilment, is as valid
as
what we do, though it may not be
counterpoint,
verbal tricks,
pure
mathematics, and now
we
realise it.
Harder
to kill and eat where you see,
if
you look close enough,
your
own deeper self revealed, reflected,
in
the apparent sadness of those eyes,
in
their resonant features, the puzzled
glare,
the half-embarrassment of eye,
the
seething of those feelings,
out
of which our tenderness, our hatred
came,
ranging from innocence
to
reason’s tyranny, the pretences
that
so inadequately disguise our passions,
or
a painful lack of passion, greed for power
over
things, people, places and ideas,
especially
ideas, the most dangerous.
Who
in the past ages could have guessed
the
one continuum, the seamless segue
of
species into species, that the mind
sprung
from the dark eye’s gleam,
that
patient silence, the subtle communication
would
conjure, fact, affection, and delight
in
form, that we would end in empathy
with
what was once the prey, would see
in
the questing look, the need for more language
in
a frustrated world deficient
longing
to bridge the void,
that
they and we confined to the irreal
making
this place out of the imagination
would
end as deepest echoes of each other?
past
a stile, along the upward slope,
climbing
a green way, beside the wall,
looking
over into the deep limestone
valley,
across to an abandoned quarry,
steep
turf slopes scattered thorn trees,
beyond
tops of ash, over the ledges,
in
the bright sun of the December day,
dreaming
of another world than this,
or
another universe, where this place
would
be the core not the exception,
its
intense green, everywhere, soaking
into
the spirit and the mind in balance
between
the outward and inside, held
by
the light, in the calm intensity, alive.
To
speak is easy, to say what we mean
harder
than granite, the words slipped away
smooth
over marble, or sinking in quicklime,
neither
this wordless communication, call
it
poised (line of a cleft in the wooded slope
where
flakes of axe-heads hide under scree,
or
the solid profile of a stone barn waiting
for
nothing, winter or erosion, on a hill
carved
by winds all winter, sleeping summer
in
a windless haze) call it form, solid,
stronger
than words, asserting whatever
clings
on to being, constitutes its pressure
against
the void, resists the spatial emptiness.
When
pastoral is not pastoral what shall we
call
it, when the surfaces give way, when
the
bright green meadow has a darker shift,
which
is its meaning as existent, its flare
in
the mind, the sudden fierce perception,
edged
with ten thousand years of human breath,
glitter
of grass, where the windhover
buffeted
by breeze hangs in the air,
scanning
a hillside for a beating heart,
flickering
out again over littered slopes,
to
slip once more into deep imagination?
There
seems a foreground and a background,
a
sense of scene, a sense, that is, in which
mind
is other, mind placed, as if set in place
and
not as in truth the work of chance,
a
sense of the drama, which is only ours,
beside
the drama-less working out of nature.
Or
say it remains simply pastoral, framed
in
the trembling shadows, the quivering
leaves
in daylight, but with that intensified
which
the Renaissance saw, the feel
of
what is also present in the shade,
what
underlies the flicks of paint
imitating
stone, or the real landscape
imitating
art, a sense of the frailty
of
our imagined backcloths, the silence
behind
the stillness of forms, those
frozen
gestures, their motionless
wavering
caught in the wink of an eye,
that
questioning of what it means to be:
et
ego, and I too in Arcadia.
where
the deer went in bracken
and
over the fields,
or
how the mice went by on the turf,
even,
but
for me, delicate silence
the
afterglow of something
like
the flow of perch in the stream,
or
the kestrel’s hover,
glint
of spider silk over furze,
snail
shell on stone,
whatever
intricate passing by
makes
of marvellous chance,
insects,
others, whoever
leaves
no trail, so nothing to follow,
cuts
across our track
without
our seeing.
Lore
is sweet, understanding
of
the ways, but there is a sweetness too
in
letting be, in not understanding,
a
deep non-intervention of the heart,
morally
culpable perhaps,
a
standing by,
a standing
over what passes,
but
ranges of distant hills
make
the heart afraid,
shiver
of the solitary, the inhuman,
into
which the deer pass, the mice,
the
kestrel, with their cries,
and
perilous for us to disturb
the
travellers in the wastelands,
our
alien kin,
their
afterglow.
turned
with outstretched wings,
towards
the iridescent blue of sky,
towards
what’s there
forever,
or a while who knows,
the
soughing trees in the wind,
a
patch of snow,
the
noise of the stream,
what
all mind fears,
the
stillness of stone,
the
silences of years,
but
wild up there in light
he
lifts the heart, a kite
and
we are raised on the string,
to
share his rest
to
share his beating on the wing,
fearless
and free, we trust,
and
that he will survive, his kin,
the
levelling,
and
soar over pine, the resin breeze,
in
these central valleys,
like
an act of mind,
eye
of darker than amber, feathers of air,
beyond
us like the gales, like the snow,
like
the hills and seas,
not
ours, not of us, not our ground.
should
be as deaf, as mad,
buried
in forms of feeling,
head
and heart, conflicted.
If
this is where the mind ends
let
it end in just such a melodious
tension,
the lack of why
meeting
the un-comprehended how.
Focussing
on the movement within,
contained
between octaves, inside
the
keys, with not even the fingers
flickering,
hanging there
invisible
notes on unseen lines,
goes
deeper: this is meditation,
as
if you focussed
on
a run of boundary wall,
the
individual stones, the moss
the
nettles and the slope
of
grass where ash has rooted,
the
bird in the fir,
all
that’s beyond us.
Control
is not power, it is the open
gateway
on a flow
of
strength which is not us,
but
is our inner being,
born
of those centuries of survival,
the
quieter study of everything
that
exceeds us, and outlasts us
even
when it vanishes before
our
eyes.
If
this is a foolish ageing sentimental man
considering
another, it is self also,
the
speech of being outside this
world
of limitations where, deficient
in
how to live, we live more fully,
as
the eye lost in form is not
this
awkward figure on an evening sky,
but
has become the shine
of
headlight on a far slope of road,
the
layers of blue-grey cloud,
the
shadowy mine, dark clumps
of
trees, patterns of domed fields,
everything
that forms an aesthetic,
and
transforms the heart.
If
this is only a human utterance,
it
is wholly human,
the
force denied by tenderness,
the
gentleness by astringency,
logic,
the inner logic at play
with
circumstance, each stutter
of
technique a mastery,
each
mastery a means of laying down
all
claim to everything,
in
taming silence.
he
found the shallowness of every hour,
filled
with displays of force, platitudes
the
subjugation of the ever-unsubdued,
the
spirit escaped to a place he’d left
long
ago, or never knew, the empathy
that
might have formed a human, deft
at
personal creation, common sympathy.
He
had the complement of ancient gifts,
cunning,
skill in obtuse communication,
the
ability to rage and instil fear, that lifts
the
bully always to authoritarian station.
Yet
proved again the barrenness of fame,
who
by destruction, death, gained a name,
in
repetition of that strange phenomenon:
all
such exceptions join the crowd of one.
between
the earth and stars which are alike
in
their intentionless performance,
absorbs
somehow this maddened dance;
the
earth and stars combine
to
ease the mind,
and
set us free.
Blue
atmosphere: will it survive our games,
between
the earth and stars which signify
in
their pure mindless void of existence,
the
purposelessness of our purposes,
will
earth and stars combine
so
that we find
time’s
mystery?
Blue
atmosphere, which is the secret hidden
in
nothing between earth and stars, instead
it
comes of looking, wary of machines
that
serve and steal our souls, all blind
indispensables
that combine
to
mute the earth and stars,
dull
our identity.
Blue
atmosphere, here’s the peace of afternoon
between
the earth and stars, one subtle kin
of
natural energies, where matter
melts
to the deep uncertainty beneath;
the
earth and stars combine;
life,
yours and mine,
a
fierce fragility.
forest,
planted (since everything here
was
cleared way back),
the
cloud white skies
of
empty beauty, pure vapour –
all
of it sliding slowly
away,
lingers
in
the mind, out of love,
and
the flights of dark crows whirling,
the
creatures hidden in the undergrowth,
not
yet at risk, are all at risk:
departing
wave.
No
more primitives; the species,
back-tracked,
erasing its past living
features,
leaves the spoor;
no
more visions, except those
of
the mad; no more drums
tapping
out healing; no more
medicine-less
un-science;
no
dancing, singing
at
divine thresholds;
no
more goddesses, or gods;
worlds
we don’t enter.
Not
for us, painted caves,
curious
figures (shamans perhaps)
on
hidden walls,
basic
survival –
or
what price civilisation?
Mozart,
Da Vinci, not here
by
stones and spears,
nevertheless,
nature was always
breathing
there behind them;
the
breaker falls and out
of
its green cylinder slips
a
universe of stars,
and
little ships,
floating
in a universal silence.
The
roadways kill, are not the way,
the
logged wilds founder,
the
white whale
buries
Self deep in concealing seas,
circles
the void,
prepares
to vanish,
to
reappear in galactic light,
Cetus,
and bright beginning
out
of the end of days,
the
white whale, all intentionless
energy,
the questioner.
Here
you can watch it going, the whole
thing
moving, dropping
like
scree on the river slopes,
carrying
the dead away,
in
a reality not cognisant
of
motive, error, blame,
but
solely what is,
trickle
of ruin, loss, but neither
ruin
nor loss to mindless planet,
the
loss is ours, for ourselves,
the
earth, the stars wait, suffering all
without
suffering,
stream
ebbs from stone,
falls
dwindle,
rock
lip dries,
elsewhere
the opposite,
some
new spray breaks
from
the departing wave –
richness
we love may vanish,
the
wealth we find in everything,
but
mind has chosen
to
hear the hiss,
to
contemplate the slow retreat.
In
behaviour, both are working, mind the interplay.
The
Freudian, the Jungian explanations in the sane
are
only two of many metaphors: myths are potent,
and
the sexual forces since they offer a dynamic
of
the passions, fears, arousals, but never the joys
of
intellect, our subtleties of thought and emotion,
antipathies
based on intellectual hatreds, delights
based
on our subtleties of love. Few motives are
unmixed,
all mental energies are moving, the self,
both
conscious and unconscious, in mature beings
is
also a product of its own happier choices; mind
un-explained
by its components, but by the whole.
that
music in the ear?
The
white moon slipping by
at
the turning of the year.
Catch
in your silver fingers
the
threads of love and light,
the
white moon is ebbing
in
the courtyards of the night.
What
is that shadow on the grass
that
shadow in the air?
The
white moon keeps the pass:
beyond,
the heights are bare.
Snatch
at the light that lingers,
all
that she grants is right,
fierce
ache of her departures,
deep
fire that stirs delight.
that
idea of the spirit that adjusts the scene,
as
counterpoint to the spirit of malevolence,
the
baser side that must always come to grief
or
where’s the art, or still more so the human?
Was
it out of some arcane book of mysteries,
a
bright Cabal, or simply the obvious, the sum
of
what had been, and where the way had run,
over
the fields, through woods, to the boards
where
passion plays at self, and mind arrays
its
dreams, doubts, insights and poor evasions,
until
he found self on self’s island working
to
reconcile, to find cold harmony, a light
enough
to call an end and set free the mind,
conjuring
mercy with no rod or book, only
the
parting words, and the defenceless look
into
that peopled darkness, into the world?
Still
no solution, though the lost are found,
the
guilty forgiven, dead pasts resurrected,
simply
the agony, wholly personal, unseen,
the
twang of the bow as a new flight began,
from
there, but not as his; for those to come,
searching
for something on an empty shore.
Daedalus
set him at the labyrinth’s heart,
the
honeycomb at the windings’ centre,
to
roar his torment at the lost sun’s burning,
the
anguish of a birth to crippled wings.
Sometime
the hostile blade would come,
and
life, by a thread, be released to death.
Daedalus
bowed his head and still created,
wax
in his fingers, a raised spine of feathers,
for
one more flight into the woman’s realm,
to
where she danced on high to ritual song,
and
was not the child on fire, the crucified,
the
falling angel, or that concealing wave,
but
herself, in the sacred place, inheriting
the
calmer, gentler earth; the un-betrayed,
not
abandoned to a god, but stepping down
over
limestone pavements, a dancing floor
he
merely cleared for her, from his hands
receiving
the sea-shell, its pure mystery,
holding
intellect to the windings of the ear,
unravelling
a little moving seed of wisdom,
she
being the earth itself, such gifts already.
which
can transubstantiate
even
industrial things,
the
soft shade at evening,
or
the red of morning,
the
flame of nature that
converts
our dross to gold.
The
domes and spires
of
soulless buildings
acquire
a meaning,
which
is all of form
and
nothing of purpose,
so
that architecture
may
be found an art.
Even
where the only
human
thing in them
is
the obscure intent
the
embryonic image
that
lay in the design,
even
when mad power
has
so commandeered
the
fabric: it will pass,
and
the symbolism pass,
and
the naked form
floodlit
and beached
in
darkness, acquire
a
sphinx-like stillness,
under
the swirl of stars.
So
cities find a self
in
light, and tremors
of
the light, an alien
meaning
if we vanish,
a
token to whatever
comes
after, of how
the
forms defined us.
shrill,
hiss, sough
in
live-oak leaves,
and
darknesses confound
the
mind with sound,
beyond
the human ear, or here
loud
enough to hurt;
their
own delayed
heart’s
music,
where
is mine?
Reality
alone may be beauty:
or,
should we say, beauty
may
lie in rough strange things:
the
fierce obduracy
of
how an insect sings,
that
marks a place in time,
never
to be returned to,
as
no time can,
but
is, like everything, a symbol
for
us, a deep allegiance,
to
what is life: an autonomous
moving
through, a replication,
an
intent, mindful or mindless,
no
cry too small
nor
any human heart.
pure
Chinese,
the
levels and the hills
a
showing through
of
light that flows
in
white silk volumes,
sheerer,
impossible
to describe, as
all
nature; words
are
never even music, music
too
much of us for this un-form,
which
is as yet
an
unintended sweep
where
we drown.
Far
in, and deeper, only grey
drenches
the mind,
belies
the eagle view
something
once more glimpsed
from
a car,
a
sight too far,
a
winter-pure instress.
beyond
the complacencies, this cognizance,
towards
the essential
thing, which cannot be
the
dream of something which does not exist
and
yet by being named seemed an existent,
that
god that was, the word that made a god,
heartfelt
projection, inflation of pure person,
the
power that returned by us from the
drama
was
a symbol of the mystery of this, the mind.
There
is a question of how far description is
the
path to what we longed for, or mere data
that
shows like substance of a canvas, frame
paint
and all, but no sense there of any artist,
no
mind, no thought of a maker we desired,
who
long ago vanishing into the far human,
expressed
a cry, our presence, a raw texture
of
unequivocal purest nothing, so declared
through
water, lines of trees, the silent face.
All
that is certain here is no former myth
contains
it, though all those myths grant
symbols
that are more or less resonant
with
our condition, moving among stars,
on
the one planet, tokens of that planet;
yet,
through mind, denizens of the irreal,
where
alone consciousness comes to be,
the
mirror of this universe itself the glass,
mind
in the world, world inside the mind.
coincides
with some purpose of the other,
of
the group, we are often most creative.
Not
pleasure but fulfilment, achievement,
realisation
of a goal, to defeat space, time;
self-centred
motives, but where the other
or
the group may benefit as well, not wholly
selfish
not in the strict meaning of the word,
not
oblivious to the wider benefit; a bargain
in
some sense made with life, with others,
a code
to live by, whereby we come to seem
ourselves,
or may choose to die by; dying
for
a cause, a principle, another; or the image
of
our loves and our delights, accepting pain
for
a delayed
gratification; or the right feeling
of
that choice of a delay: such things are real.
Call
it self-sacrifice or altruism, we forego
one
self to choose another, all self-centred
but
not wholly selfish: beyond that negative.
thinking,
self and the world are one,
this
is how we go,
unable
to hold on, unable to break free,
caught
on a rock slide, sheer descent
sliding
without end and part of this
that
never
ends its fall always here,
which
is part of us one and the same,
this
now, going nowhere,
out
of nowhere,
shifting
changing rock,
unchanging
stream.
Stumbling
helplessly stone to stone
past
boulders, taking cliffs along,
wild
by the ice-cold pool heart gone
a
beating tumbling fear of falling,
on
dizzied flickering slope of time,
which
is a moment
ever-tilted,
never
itself slipping sliding away,
the
slope of mountain
which
is the mountain in us,
the
world in us, this whole universe
in
us roaring downwards.
Mouth
open to the water, the air,
drenched
in the spray of light,
trying
to catch self, self fleeting,
self
a shadow in motion
fluid
as lizard, gone like snake
out
of the noise, disturbance
but
still of all this,
and
all this inside,
carried
by gravity, moving
helpless
and hurried
bound
to the inner outer
slipping
through void.
tranquility,
the clouds and hills,
nothing
rising,
nothing
ceasing,
gone,
off the wheel,
past
limits, all delight.
Delight
in the clear sky
peacefulness,
the clouds and hills,
embracing
world
releasing
world,
now,
at the heart,
blown
clear, pure delight.
vast
moon over snow
makes
the silence.
Less
fuss, no noise, the self
that
sketchy thing
black
pine on white hillside.
All
the fields under cold,
ice
and light
held
on an empty brush.
Mindless
nonsense
air
and stone,
going
nowhere, seeing nothing.
same
moon flying looks otherwise,
and
the brown rose is no longer
a
connotation of the night,
things
once more as they were,
as
have always been,
independent
of the mind.
Standing
by the roadside differing
perspective
makes cars machines,
gives
a vision like a cloud’s
coasting
in the blue; strange
to
think medieval people saw
the
same grass, leaves we do
and
not as in their paintings.
Don’t
see through history or art,
look
through the eye; your thin
music
was not all there is,
and
weariness is time-specific,
the
song of the universe goes on,
beyond
our aberrant metaphors,
the
insufficiencies, form is light.
In
another moment alter being,
walking
field-side trails by low walls,
far
from the alien ominous congregation
of
assumptions, assume another guise:
here
the dumb moon flies down
again
an elemental, the blank rose
lifts
from the ground pure substance,
stems
of grass are again stems of grass,
we
free-fall, down-slope with time,
or
with our perception of a flowing, flow
without
resistance, such is ease,
ease
of the moon in its flying there,
ease
of the rose in its secular being,
the
text
forgotten, the soil scarified.
there
in the poem, or in the beyond it
that
its presence signifies, say
to
the reader: become the writer. Talk
of
the widening imagination
in
a space, that is in the end, purely,
a
sign to return to the power of things
that
have no power: say
or
be silent.
Say
to me otherwise, critic, than repeat
words
out of words, or in the dusk retrieve
volumes
of grey-black cloud,
billows
of sombre majestic light
on
a shore of sky, talk
instead
of the cogency of thought
that
defies, that is, in summation, held
a
flame in the hand, pain and joy
a
sheer feeling.
Say
to me, critic, say what individual being
makes
of the speech of wholly secular
worlds,
dead gods abandoned;
makes
of the rose without the name,
the
grass without leaves,
the
sun over ice, still more beautiful,
of
the summer free of phantoms,
say
what the sunflower says
in
its secret turning.
can
construct itself but not
the
summer night –
the
rain is drumming on earth
beyond
the heart, and greater,
and
our love a humility
that
makes peace with things.
Nowhere
the dead return but in mind
too
late, nowhere their speech
other
than time –
the
wind ruffles the river surface
beyond
all thought, and free
of
the fear in us, our anxious
clinging,
to world, each other.
The
human tale is our sailing close
to
the wind, is the delicate navigation,
through
intangible seas –
the
snow blows on silent water,
beyond
the mind, and here
is
neither cold nor beautiful,
and
yet seems both, in truth.
but
not the phantom of things,
‘energy
is colour’ we said
and
the world’s flickering,
as
if purpose flickered, there,
over
our heads,
feel
of the ghostly opera,
the
blind backcloth appearance,
a
shifting there
of
a substance-less fabric,
shape
and not constellation,
heart-troubling,
like white foam, like wings,
like
the opened hand, or an eye,
with
translucencies beyond us.
The
play of intelligence
over
the world is not this
swarm,
this ethereal dancing,
uncanny
as of the galactic swirls,
out
of quantum depth, or the inscrutable
void
behind the black entity
whose
boundary sucks light,
whose
rim eats matter,
and
is not Melville’s metaphor,
is
no symbol
of
our abstraction,
but
the powerless real of magnetic powers
the
undirected gleam,
mindless
and sweet.
It
is the tremor of the feelings,
the
shifts of thought,
as
if the blank sky of the familiar poem
came
alive in the hour
when
the mind engaged,
showed
living words, idea
trembling
in a dome of seeing,
the
hemisphere an eye open
on
a universe, and we beyond the eye,
or
the universe inside,
it’s
the quivering of consequence
inconsequential,
it’s
the sweep of unearthly green,
shade
of a polar ice, a frozen ground.
Beauty
to us, as the poem may be
beauty,
though not to alien glance,
beauty
out of human perception,
beauty
we make; our gift
to
the universe of form which is only
beauty
in embryo without the mind
the
maker. The poem
must
speak of itself, in itself,
or
be dumb, as mind must give
of
itself, in itself, that is beauty,
a
framing of flash and fire,
the
threadlike glow, the sheets swirled
of
those veils, the far
motion.
There
is no cold north, no frozen tundra,
lights
climb the pole,
time’s
visible being
the
un-timed tremor of vibrancy
coils
about the arch,
over
a whiteness, a vacancy,
a
void that is not a void, an expanse
of
the lonely and the fearful heart,
un-housed,
burned by a kindling,
not
overseen, but by an unseeing-ness,
a
masterless flutter, a pageant blazed,
theatre
of doing and undoing,
idle
of diamantine, pearled adrift,
space
of no person.
The
named fell behind the eyes
to
be the nameless and the non-existent,
sight
opened again on cloudless clouds
of
a bright concordance,
of
a being, an attendance, an indeterminacy,
found
us wedded to intelligibility, fused
to
the meaning that defies obscurity,
after
a path into the world, not over,
and
transformation
of
the thoughtless stage to performance
for
the self, asserting self,
to
a non-assertion,
whose
gemmed singing spell
is
of our singing too.
The
fluted walls of wild space-time
carve
themselves from light,
our
mystery these glittering cloaks of cold
their
frozen straws, their smoke and shine,
the
all-transparency
in
which we must believe,
who
live by faith
but
not by the faiths of any past:
these
are not masks these movements,
these
patterns, these chaos forms
our
deepest kin,
barbarian
hordes across the frozen lake
the
inhuman out of which the human
comes,
that into the human falls.
These
lines are not the lines of any scenery,
are
not landscapes to the given,
are
not injunctions for the indebted,
these
scrolls, swerves,
levels,
planes of the greater nothingness,
the
ground of us,
its
in-wrapped webs and columns,
throbbings
and extinguishings,
are
our crystal echo in delight,
a
bareness of our beauty to affirm,
are
the fate that is no fate, no destiny,
and
the innocent roads of our contriving,
that
lead into the thoughtless free,
doffing
the mind.
the
little sighs of fire,
between
the two, we stutter
the
terms of our desire.
Night
shadow under leafless oak
flicker
of raw flame,
between
the two we utter
the
nameless name,
that
is the best of us,
a darkness
and a light,
black
universe inside us,
and
a constellation bright.
it
neither leads us through,
nor
out of, nor into,
it
is un-music, alien
to
the human that desires
human
response from all,
least
of all appreciates
our
cleverness, our
intellect
of chaos.
The
silence of the house
dissolves
its walls
through
greenest glass,
becomes
unspoken word,
the
mindless reader,
finding
leaves
the
insect chews,
the
walls fall down
and
were pure vapour.
Of
void and void,
the
empty path
invites
us to begin again
one
foot in front now
of
another, the light
sharp
as our intellect
to
slice through calm,
and
swinging there
to
perfect quiet,
its
tremor over.
So
in the empty space,
left
behind,
which
was no space or time
but
simply being,
keep
still.
The
way is not a way,
the
path goes round,
or
is no path.
The
house outside
is
the inward room,
a
library
of
inarticulate texts,
in
a summer night,
no
longer physical,
written
in air,
or
in the electrons’ presence
not
of orbit.
We
are the house outside,
the
house without walls
or
doors, windows
or
foundations, without
history
or owners,
past
or future.
We
are not the way
except
in faring
without
ceasing,
except
by what
we
cannot help
or
hinder,
the
un-remorseless
un-ground
glittering,
that
never
asks
the
way, the careless
something
other,
something
over,
that
going never leaves
and
leaves -
nothing
behind.
world
the words,
so
your utterance
in
the darkness,
which
is not an utterance
in
this central world
of
the present night
but
a prior speech
codified,
a singing,
unseen,
silent,
so
beyond the real
but
part of a real.
Say,
shall we, we do not
believe
in the unseen
intangible,
grant hoary sense
of
limit, metaphysics
vaporising
world;
go
close the ear
to
passionate mewling
or
this subtle flight
of
something understood
not
simply words?
Or
say words vivify
are
filled with life, our life
that
meaning needs
only
the slightest of mediums,
bird-tracks
on clay,
or
O’s and I’s of time,
white
cloud-or-water writing,
rosetta’d
leaves
that
speaking eye,
its
secret semaphore,
wild
bark of trees
or
these
the
faintest tremors of an energy,
to
lever universe.
the
ones who never
were
asked their names,
the
ones we rendered silent.
Here
is the space they lived in,
never
owned, skimming
the
land, of the slightest layer
between
earth and sky.
Here
is the dust they tilled,
the
birds they loved, the grains
of
pollen like those they scattered,
the
lost dreaming-grounds.
Here
is the silence:
they
saw the beauty.
Here
is the breeze:
whose
are the trails?
Here
is the ant,
the
beetle on a stone,
and
time will tell –
who
clings here longest.
in
motionless blue evening,
their
dark bare farness,
my
branched awareness,
networks
that bind
the
labyrinthine mind,
sing
dark,
make
resonances.
Blue
deeper
as
light passes,
the
gleam across swaying bushes
now
sky goes green,
and
cars slide by,
a
birch in distance, lace,
the
upswept pine
are
fine.
let’s
dream of distant stars
no
longer as they are,
bathe
in light.
No
the universe is not our dream,
it
is outside us and it is inside,
if
not quite in the forms
that
we imagine.
The
ghosts are ghosts of something there,
as
we are ghosts
of
something past
only
less ghostly.
If
this is an act of faith
then
it is the trust
in
what free intellect
can
make of being.
They
arise together,
what
I make of things
and
the things themselves,
the
unreal and the real in the irreal,
which
is in turn a faith
in
their unintended messages;
that
what I make of things
is
and is not the things themselves,
the
tangible but not the intangible,
the
given not the un-given
which
eludes (why should
we
expect it all?);
that
the solid and in-solid are one,
the
act and the theory
in
a deep connection,
that
we too are the universe,
the
ghostly light,
and
are still
the
sole real presence
in
the sole real moment.
is
difficult,
the
mind would like
to
see a purpose in the pain
that
brings despair;
in
the mind awry.
We
cannot relieve
things
that are as they are,
cannot
extract
meaning
from unmeaning,
the
irretrievable
has
no restitution.
That
longing like despair
is
damaging weakness,
somehow
we must make
what
we are out of what
we
are, the good
offset
the bad,
without
rationale,
without
a name for evil:
the
malice
of the crow
was
not intended,
the
old dead satanic
has
served its time.
But
it is not easy,
to
accept blind moves
also
inside us.
We
still desire a name
for
evil, some
powerless
redress.
bound
to tundra,
or
losing the jungle in the mind
the
lush actual,
would
be death to the imagination.
The
instrument of the feelings
will
suffice,
the
intricacies of the heart’s sonata.
Make
out of love and truth
the
singing beauty
transcend
the stage.
Winding
the green leaves round us,
we
contrive
person
and person, in the gold
of
sun or sheets of grey,
delineation
of a leaf,
delights
of creature.
It
is about a confidence,
a
letting-go
not
before time,
of
the depleted symbolic,
an
acknowledgement
that
all beyonds are inside.
who
are nothing, the skandhas,
and
everything, the wild flashes
of
hurricane light, form, affection.
The
dead magnificence slides away
to
become some period of imitation,
the
pastiche of an imposed meaning,
(and
not the life itself) for no audience.
I
sing the private self, offering nothing
except
as a resonance of the universe,
a
realm time touches, of pain and space,
not
to be caressed away with words,
needing
no reader, an essential freedom,
no
listener, and no eyes, the silence as
when
Mozart sits there growing a sonata
letting
it breathe, without the intervention,
hands
picking half-conscious at the keys,
but
with the full force of mind-awareness,
until
as in poetry the secret yearning, that
which
underpins the reader’s inner voice,
reveals
a feeling, and gently surrounds it,
becomes
the yes that extricates the self
from
selfhood and embeds it in the flow,
this
delicate
yes that affirms the universe.
Say
that the final faith is in the duality,
the
reverse of the metaphor in the mind
its
opposite, and the wasteland gleaming
there,
the creature of endurance leaping
with
flickers of sand or a rotation of leaf.
Say
that the breeze of death brings renewal,
that
the colourless winter is full of colours,
that
form stirs everywhere, and solids flow,
that
even the feelings that obsess the heart
can
change or be changed, that the galaxies
are
not waiting for their youth or their age,
that
the moments of the outward universe
are
each eternal and undying, if forms fade,
other
forms mutate, each makes a difference,
beyond
our weakness, our inner limitations.
However
great a use of words, it is the ideas
that
order us, and style gives way to content,
that
not the voice but the thought is judged,
the
worth and not the person, who recedes,
far
from the howling or the sighing, becomes
the
persona not the self, the observed and not
the
unobservable. The image cannot sing
without
human meaning, mind has no edge,
and
its dark circumference is always central,
a
point in seeming from which world radiates.
The
in-itself is the boundary where we hover,
mystery
the stop to imagination, exhausting
all
attributes, mistaking being as such, held
to
the instant where the music ceases, void
becomes
alien, reason ends, and self other.
Yet
say that the void is never for us a void,
but
the seething of innumerable potentials,
that
out of the icy waste a tiny figure grows,
or
in the black leaves there’s a fleck of light,
that
implies our presence, is our projection.
Not
outer dancing grace and form of wild
creature,
the tiny one that scuttering runs
its
track from the predator that plunges by
and
misses, not a beauty of line and form,
which
when we see it in the human almost,
even
then we look for a mind behind, find
a
wall, or the conventionally un-revealing.
We
are not the aesthetic species but simply
the
species that creates the aesthetic, beauty,
always
recognised in the forms outside us,
the
ones we are not, though we might find
them
and display them, in a mind’s creation,
but
never the mind itself. A beautiful mind,
what
would that be, one free of its own flaws,
an
inhuman mask beside the forms we make?
the
dream of earth dissolves in the real of her,
and
it is the extent to which mind and meaning
penetrate
and project that makes image of her:
there
is still the dream, but a dream of meaning.
So
in the darkness if we give the poise, warm
presence
of the multivariate, the many-coloured
regions
that embrace us, of her clouds and veils,
her
substance and her sighs, it is our own speech
we
wish
her on her tongue, our self in her selves.
The
cloud is a text, the cry a syllable of our eye,
the
leaf the hand, her emptiness our abstraction
from
her, the winter we inject into august veins.
This
is the sending-out of mind, the embedding
of
human in what can no longer stay inhuman,
detail
of dream in dream, and a greater clarity,
that
no obfuscation, or hankering-after serves,
the
things must be words as well, though we
long
for the outside language, for the music
that
utters further than those forms we heard,
still
all too human. We have need so to place
in
the great outer void that rises with us, the one
that
contains reality and is contained, we so need
to
set there, the sole gifts we give, those of mind;
what
earth’s minds have created, echoing selves.
and
strength to resist the human stream,
or
ignore it. Obedience is no freedom.
There’s
an inability of the creative self
to
take orders, it’s need
to
exercise its own clear potential.
A
world of obedience, yes, achieves,
but
to what purpose, unless it liberates
the
individual
being?
I
am talking of creation not destruction,
of
liberty not the irresponsible,
the
flowering not the harming of the self.
of
pines at night, and larch,
of
the slow sweep
of
rain and wind across the slopes,
after
the hawk fall,
lovely
lady,
to
a further valley,
the
scattered flowers, white
stars
in the grass.
The
un-pretended and the straight,
the
right, even when awry,
in
the places we can
no
longer live without appurtenances,
sites
of a truth
we
cannot match,
as
here the stars
in
glittering pines’ dark boles,
strong
occupiers.
Clarity
of water, peace of truth,
the
oldest wisdom simply
a going
straight, a levelling,
nothing
pretentious,
no
fuss living:
but
how can that compare
with
sweep of wing
or
air, or the silence
at
the centre of the flower?
the
arbitrary tyranny of deity,
the
mind is free,
to
be within its bounds,
to
yield the gifts
we
give the universe, the mindless:
love,
truth and beauty,
our
inheritance from the forerunners,
the
grain here from the winnowing,
our
uniquenesses,
that
otherwise
the
universe would lack,
and
don’t ask the need
for
giving, that runs deep,
the
creative must live beyond itself,
the
moving on requires a divestment,
a
disbursement, all renewals
that
sing the green soil.
The
human has no temple, has no need
for
what religion preached,
the
rites
of
subjugation, if only to a concept,
an
idea.
Sartre
was right in that;
account
for the genetics, for the sieve,
for
culture, language,
all
we carry,
but
then our fate is in our hands,
and
all codes our own to unmake,
not
in contempt for life
in
the name of life,
our
existential freedom,
beyond
the dark roots’ solidity
which
is not ours
and
in another body, it may be,
forging
another nature.
quieter
for those capable of speaking,
closer
to us maybe, of the colour of us,
shaped
of the human, its deeper figure,
and
not that alien language in the stars.
In
January beauty the trees grow still,
accustom
themselves to burgeoning light,
a
blue beyond the hyacinthine shadows,
a
hint of crimson in the dissolving frosts,
a
spangled a new-fangled weight of air.
It
is of the black figure time, its silvered
presence
under the moon, along the field,
an
absent jiggling of the stalks of things,
an
unseen spring almost we send toward
your
east coast shores, Floridian dawns.
There
are words on the tongue that tell,
forms
of another bird beyond desolation,
the
wren it seems, a continuous music,
on
the rim of the pool, over the stones,
and
another form of moonshine, subtler.
What
is beyond cleverness is a moaning
of
the surf, your tide’s soft foams, pipers’
beaks
prodding sand, adamantine clouds
barring
the reaches, a glistening of world,
turning
again, shaping the human regions.
a wistfulness, a resignation,
the sweetness
of
a memory, the affection, time’s erosion,
the
persistence unchanged of things external,
this
world that takes us up and sets us down,
the
beauty of the deep experience, its gleaming.
Disentangling
the murmurs of the heart, life’s
imperatives,
our inability to cling to the summit,
the
thrilling of an exhaustion, the depth of rest,
and
beneath the sadness the strength of being,
a
firmness of the spirit, this endurance, how
a life’s
emotion makes form, the essence clear.
of
leaf, layers of Shelley’s leaves, metaphor
for
us, and the west wind ruffles the water
of
this clear pool between sills of limestone.
Mind
after mind, this intricate inner making,
then
our one descent to a thready simplicity
that
might as well be the life of a lizard, less,
the
life of those fibres in the grass, a passing,
if
it were not for the trace mind leaves behind,
fragile
as the spray of stream blown in the air,
wet
skeins of leaf plastered against the ledges,
the
layers on layers of stone stained with being.
the
you that I am, the I you make of me:
in
us the minds that can declare the self,
the
minds an empathetic force discovers,
only
in us, and only these subtle instants
where
we construct a universe, or render
what
is a darkness and a light beyond us,
against
which we are silhouetted, making.
There
is nothing of you in this conjuring,
nothing
of I myself, but in our communing
the
principle of form transforms to process,
the
potential world becomes so actualised,
in
our resonance reflects itself unknowing,
that
we are not mirrored but the mirroring.
Such
is the something of us in the dark,
the
you that I am, the I you make of me,
flares
of the far light on the midnight sea,
heart-stopping
meaning, instantly undone.
you
can still see them in the low sun,
places
where the predecessors
carved
out a life, sank in,
sank
deep,
to
strips of existence between stone walls,
or
following in summer light
the
flow of pollen.
Pollen
is life, the light,
echo
of the sky, air,
at
the mouths of caves,
child
from the dark
the
makers
of
human meaning in hidden valleys,
in
the soft green of the hills,
now,
gleaming grasses.
Do
you pretend, do I, to some
greater
being,
some
more refined existence?
More
forms, true,
more
products of the makers,
knowledge
like fire
that
lacerates the spirit;
but
more being?
Time
bows to time,
all
ages own their foolishness,
life-wisdom,
truths
astringent,
deep
affections.
Did
they love this landscape
less
than you?
This
beauty?
Here
starlight grazes the surface of quiet water,
I
gaze at water, and am aware of starlight,
in
darkness of sacred air, in the earth’s moment.
Say
to the purposeless: how quiet you are.
Sound
is intent to us, and not the stir
of
the intentionless, trees, grass, air
moving
over a hillside. World is hushed
and
goes on, in its own inner working
of
which mind will never be a part.
Grace
though, in the sacred. I become
one
with the untouched universe, its light
at
the end of speech, where the word succumbs
to
a reality which is not word, and gives
no
sign. The quietude in me is not the world’s
but
this stillness for a time, and a time only.
The
stream moves soundlessly, the leaves
flicker
beyond me. I ache for their being,
for
beauty not mine, for a fusion beyond
the
tongue, for presence without knowledge.
The
stream moves soundlessly, a bright flow
at
the end of speech, the un-aching being
whose
beauty is not awareness, not self;
in
a not-nature free of memory or love.
Enough
to live true ourselves, or try to do so.
Since
the only way back is the journey through,
and
the only home for the human is the mind;
enough
to search out what may help the process,
and
restrain the violence, destruction, erosion.
To
do for the sake of the doing not the reward.
To
give for the sake of delight, and give freely.
To
find again every flicker of the silent earth,
to
cherish its creatures and find grace in being,
and
not in the foolishness of invented deities.
To
recover the self despite the irrecoverable.
Freedom
is already there and not to be granted.
Restraint
is a denial of movement not freedom.
The
self, the mind are free by the very reason
of
the universe’s non-intention, and its silence
which
we must fill, its stars only we aspire to.
We,
out of our heritage, create love and truth,
and
are compromised by our being human, all
trapped
in ownership, selfhood, fear, loss, pain,
but
all a part of the world graced with unreason,
the
mindless world that glitters with pure being,
the
world where the grass is, where the trees are,
but
where mind is a ghost, self a process of time.
It
is enough to understand that to err is human,
and
to focus on our ethics, not on our failures,
ignore
the blame, see cumulative consequence
and
that not everyone chooses the same path.
So
we may find a way through not a way back,
and
a road to the future, out of our tortuous past.
flows
below birdsong, and blackbird moves
in
a place which is also mind, but subtly other.
The
stone is the stone, and the place the place,
solid
in time, where silence is a deepest calm
out
of which clouds and trees and hills quiver
to
be as they are and no more, secede from time
under
the breeze among the sounds of the flow,
and
hush till they are the breathless statement
of
what trembles in you and me, what shudders,
faint
as a thought against the sough of breeze,
a
motion of acknowledgement, an acceptance,
of
the slightness of all this transitory selfhood.
Be
quiet in the limestone quiet and listen there
to
the conversation of things, their communion.
The
smallest tributary creeps from under the lip
of
a fractured shelf, and is almost a statement
of
what you are, a glimpse of being’s fragility.
but
the revolution of ethics and aesthetics.
Who
builds a world they wholly hate? Assume
your
hatred is your hatred, perhaps not theirs.
It
is not the close community of interference
we
need, but the space of decency and justice.
Who
allows community to lapse but all of us
who
value privacy, interests, our selves more?
It
is not the reality that fails us but the dream.
To
see history you must listen to its message,
that
all was not happy, life is not some poem,
that
ethics and aesthetics were often lacking.
Don’t
hope for the revolution unless it comes
bringing
ethics and aesthetics in its very being.
Do
the best you can in your own life to create
love,
truth and beauty in the world around you,
but
don’t blame those who bow to other forces.
Hope
for the revolution of ethics and aesthetics.
in
an act of love, is to be in-gathered,
to
words that share, to words that give
in
the grace of understanding,
live
in the life of the best of what we are;
is
to join the communion of spirits,
not
ghosts, but minds,
the
meaning of souls if the word has meaning,
bent
on the pure particular, on the act
of
creation, interpretation, true translation,
to
invoke the intense light
of
another’s flame,
and
make that your own…
No
the audience is not less than the creator,
both
are a pulse of being,
and
the created, the score, the text,
the
artefact once made are givens,
only
great in that all must freely share them,
diminished
by restriction,
lessened
by any breath of ownership.
Chopin,
for instance, no longer cares
to
possess the outpour,
but
here for us in a breathless flow,
like
the bright pond in the moonlight
like
the small rill that slowly feeds it,
sounds
like the natural sounds we call silence,
being
there, free of anxieties,
for
a while
under
the stars of an uncreated heaven,
making
the singing ours.
This
is the essence of the human,
the
gift of the other, given;
the
truth for its own truth’s sake;
the
little sliver of beauty
that
outweighs the pain;
the
flower of discovery;
the
sharing of what we love;
the
song of delight.
Not
all of the destruction was intended.
Mostly
it is a slow erosion, an accretion
of
the un-beautiful, untruthful, un-loved.
The
violence too is mostly a foolishness,
a
product of fear, a lashing out in anger.
We
drift towards the silence of the fields
and
hills, the way to the wasteland easy.
If
we accuse others we accuse ourselves
of
the laziness, the selfishness, the greed,
though
subtly hidden. There are all these
appurtenances
we need, all this possession.
Values
are at the heart of our problem, all
the
things we believe in but don’t perform,
unless
by accident, or a slow convergence
of
quiet intent on the better ways of being.
To
elude is fine, yes the way is for the lone
adventurer
on the trail of true self-creation.
To
evade false belief is fine, not to follow:
but
we need more, we need the gift ungiven,
which
is a form of love, or rather of delight,
source
of all ethics, the real mother of beauty,
delight
in form, delight in the shared delight,
delight
in speaking as true as the word allows;
delight,
a form of grace, like nature’s grace,
the
uncreated, un-designed, the unintended
in
which we can plunge to restore the heart,
which
we must accept, being still beyond us.
There
is no they, there is only ever us, only
the
flawed
species. Be kind to all the others
if
you can. We need what is in us, and yet is
never
ours, a performance in and of the self,
what
is not sold, what transcends language,
that
implementation of our deepest values
that
makes the soul, the mind, that is, alive,
with
the heart-felt music of the gift ungiven.
no
fight. The revolution has already
been
achieved in the gift,
its
afterglow is beauty.
Love
has nothing to do with power, there is
no
conquest. Unless the mind has already
let
self go, accepted loss,
we
impair the beauty.
Truth
has nothing to do with power, there is
nakedness.
Defenceless against what is
we
learn the true meaning
of
a remorseless beauty.
Freedom
has nothing to do with power, there is
no
freedom in subjugating others.
once
gained gives liberty,
its
sanctity enhances beauty.
Nothing
of what makes us human has to do
with
power. Grant no allegiance
to
any entity or force beyond you:
touch
the earth, learn beauty.
in
the heart’s surrender,
in
the moment of truth
in
the silence, tender,
we
hear a voice sing
of
impossible being
possessed
by a vision
that’s
lost in the seeing.
Its
the sweetest of songs
that
floats from the tree,
to
drift on the water,
so
perilously,
the
voice that delights,
that
soothes this poor heart,
with
a song beyond all
the
seductions of art.
It’s
the song beyond body,
the
song beyond death,
the
song beyond meaning,
the
song beyond breath,
its
time is the moment,
its
life is its presence,
the
space of a grass blade
is
its mortal essence.
There
no one is theirs,
there
nothing is mine,
there
the mirror is broken
where
sad stars align,
and
the fields flow green
to
the endless sea,
as
the sun sails on
mysteriously.
The
dark of believing
the
shadow of living,
vanish
in light,
in
the gift in its giving,
there
is only this sound
for
the music’s sake:
as
the eyelids must lift
as
the sleeper must wake.
There,
in the silence of unruffled water,
a
spectrum in the raindrop on the wire,
glittered
in all the beauty of the rainbow,
the
blue of sky, only a brighter, deeper,
the
emerald green, the warm leaf-yellow
in
February sunlight, in the lake-silence.
Water
flowed in my spirit, that reclaimed
from
those who claim to know what spirit
is,
the sole possessor, wishing a stillness,
wishing
to become the intentionless world’s
own
lack of speech, the gracious, graceful
earth’s
own mindless singing; mind-rending,
for
there, at the heart of death, life resurrects.
I
waited beyond word, the free unbeliever,
with
faith undiminished in the natural fire
inside
our theory, outside our understanding,
the
eternal bonfire, that festival of the light,
ice-stars,
red stars, blue stars, veils of green,
risen
unseen in an outer darkness shimmering,
when
out of the far end of the lake, travelling
a
kingfisher flew through February sunlight,
flash
of a hummingbird, rainbow on the grey
ease
of a voiceless water, and leftward gone,
downstream
to holly bushes, to the shadows,
glittering
in all the beauty of the rainbow,
the
blue of sky, only the brighter, deeper,
the
emerald green, the warm leaf-yellows,
and
I was re-born to the detail of the spirit.
the
lilacs as lilacs, yourself another being,
and
the sea the sea and not the sound it made.
Only
a moment to be a mind beyond mind,
feeling
the planet, feeling the unseen tremors
of
insects among leaves by diminished rivers.
It
took only a change of attitude to recover
intent
from the intentionless, but our intent,
to
banish the sadness of a waste of meaning.
An
instant to regain the vigour of evening,
the
remorseless sky’s unmitigated gleaming,
the
forms of cloud under the form of moon.
And
you were present suddenly like the lilacs,
the
ocean was present no longer lachrymose,
the
free light shone rebounding among stars.
our
earth as body, our universe as body.
Whether
the human will survive depends
not
on body but on the mind, not on this
landscape
that I love, this limestone valley.
It
is a mistake to confuse our own desires
with
human intent, the billion-fold fires,
even
if our own vision end in silence.
The
body of all I love will die, and I too,
and
nothing maybe of all this will be left
even
for a season. Though I too cry, re-cry
the
desolation and the desecration, the loss
of
the civilised, that slow accretion, recognise
we
are not body, as the universe is not mind.
and
it’s gone. The knot is un-knotted,
what
seemed abstruse, once shaped us,
only
a re-statement of the dumb obvious.
But
you are never the familiar, nor this
place
of water and wind-sculpted stone,
whose
pure light gleams on a landscape,
explains
to me a beauty of permanence,
one
that I never understood, the mother-lode
that
yielded, the ground that gave, created,
and
became self, all that hidden from me
buried
itself where waters ran sunlessly.
Not
you, nor the quiet pool, the grey heron,
the
evening planet above cliffs of starlight,
the
scents of the darkness and its meaning
to
me, a freedom that is grace of the mind.
Not
you nor the meaning of the universe we
grant
it, the integrity of flow never familiar,
as
clouds surprise, as the movement of trees,
how
the creatures gleam in worlds beyond us.
Earth’s
powers not our powers still belie
the
white inexpressive silence of the sky:
the
blackbird and the wren return again.
Energy
invades us, shadowy winter lapses,
and
the trees glitter with a rain-slick promise
of
fresh infancy, old minds rehearse new birth,
strangeness
warms, becomes the commonplace.
Being
is always in eternity, and so our freedom
is
guaranteed from nothingness, blank vacuum,
which
seethes with all that may be, and dictates
nothing
but self-creating self-perpetuating form.
The
budded leaves cry in the mind their potential,
cry
with the realisation of their appearances to be:
the
river of being does not flow, it falls, from here
to
here, out of the moment in the moment, falling.
The
planet we were part of goes on singing, light
is
quiet beside limestone streams, dark meanders
under
white cliffs, this is new knowledge, beauty
of
the far intentionless seething, undirected being.
No
I will not be what you wish, I will be myself.
I
will be the paradigm of silence, in other nature,
acknowledge
the nothingness all this came from,
other
power than ours, a reality opening cleanly.
Burying
the gods, the bones of the world tremor
with
that notorious absence, with sudden denial,
here
where the nothing changes and is all change,
where
what never
returns is a perpetual returning.
Daylight
brings freedom by the limestone stream,
I
live in the flight of the blackbird and the wren,
held
in no hands, un-graced by an outer regimen,
no
less part of the circle in the trees, the mysteries.
Reality
is swimming from somewhere to
somethere,
these ribs a skeleton stillness.
The
jungle spoke green fact, wet as it was,
against
which thought of the city ran mad.
There
the ice of the poem melted, and left
behind,
a damp spot; emotions skittered
over
the dry leafage, over the forest floor,
entangled
creepers twined, the sad lianas.
In
the belly of the giant whale, the world
is
beached and far from the sound of water,
Will
mind find a ground of contemplation?
The
poem is mad and drowning in the green,
dappled
by purple butterflies, whose shadow
posits
appearance over which beings flicker,
a
forest of seeming in the belly of the whale.
de-coherence
finding one world from many,
order
exists, like this glittering of the leaves
that
leaf by leaf declaim the being of the tree.
In
the quantum silence, entangled, non-local,
where
what we do predict, our only seeming,
describes
it may be some other kind of nature;
in
the randomness, free, pure, and undirected;
the
mystery of being is encapsulated, the mind
is
clear again. See through the world, go there,
go
deeper, to where the sum of all this matters,
matters
supremely and only as we proclaim so.
Know
the gift, mind in the mist swirl holding
the
world as world in its metaphors, equations,
marvelling
at miracles of order, out of a chaos
like
the chaos of winter, without thought for us.
The
wave in the wave equation is neither real
nor
unreal, is form like a ghost of further form,
a
hint of a something in the deeper continuum,
which
not to think towards is subtle cowardice.
No
we cannot grasp space, time, energy, what
these
forces are that whirl endlessly through us,
not
their substance-less substance, nor their life
not
ours, in the uncertainty of their reflections,
our
measures, as they the mindless have no grasp
of
mind: what we grasp is form, the conservation
of
measures; action, event, the macroscopic given;
the
desire for word and meaning making meaning.
Not
the world, we do not grasp the world, never
the
summer shining its way through veils of fire,
not
the sun in splendour, nor the far cold where
we
are lost, all those not the tongues of language.
For
us is the tremor of relation: this against that
is
beauty, delight is the dower of truth and love,
to
know things not as they are but as they are
for
us, to the furthest detail, to the end of being.
the
unspoken light.
Be
the pure fall in flowing.
Walk
with the shadows,
mind
in night:
knowing
is deep unknowing.
Render
the ‘child’.
Beyond
the end
of
being, is all being.
Not
what we are,
what
we create
the
meaning of our seeing.
This is the limestone
country, here light falls
A melding of galaxies white in the image
Ash trees, black candles,
blades, buds pointed
There’s the unsung labour
of centuries
The moral man in his gentleness considers
Here all is humble, with the humility of true things,
Bright light on the
December fields
The beauty the camera does
not capture,
The gale of wind travels
the muddy lane,
You could walk over this in
a day,
The language here goes
deeper into English,
Now, beloved, in this
moment now
Mind is the meaning that
cannot be said.
It might be you recognise
him, know his name,
This is a landscape where
no great names died,
Oh you will have to catch
the world in flight.
Its reticence is a
reticence of seasons,
Romans too idled at
crossroads, and the T’ang Chinese,
Now order is the order of
the day,
The planet on the floor was
formed of silver.
More science is what we
need, not less.
There is no deeper meaning
in the music.
To enter in the river of
the other,
Love be veiled in danger
where you lie,
It is all the voyeurism of
the heart.
After all this there’s the
world itself.
Green slopes in the dawn
light,
Dark birds are circulating
in the valleys,
Moving matter of light
leaps lunar beauty,
Nature lacks all reproach,
the creature
Wind-scalloped juniper,
bowed pine,
What Ulysses most needed to
beware of
The poem is grasped on the
edge of mind,
Being is not beneath its
appearances.
We have time for this, in
light between the trees,
Out of this light did you,
my lover,
What did I wish when time
was young?
The language of our morning
utters us.
The character of this place
is something beyond us,
The wrong creations were
anthologised.
Innocent, the heroine or
hero always
The spaces of fluidity
delight,
Shall we two walk by this
clear moon,
She sits beside the stream
and is his fate,
Limestone, also, these flat
stones
On a day when thought is
quiet,
Pity the creatures trapped
in our detritus
The object grew larger
climbed from the poem
Green pine and grey stone
walls
Being is not a medium,
that’s mere fancy.
Exaltation we understood,
not happiness,
Driving behind glass into
evening landscape,
What frees me is not easily
explained,
What god now could conceive
us,
That the self’s created
from the not-self,
His face itself being the
object fluctuates
In the green light the deep
life sings.
Gradually the quiet
intensifying,
Make no assumptions, though
the words
The world grows greater
towards afternoon.
There in the confines of
the ear, the blackbird
As I walked out where
beauty flickered
Follow the level tracks
where the rails ran,
The buzzards don’t call out
for something new,
A child’s eye view, a love
of planet,
Let Ares sleep, his mind is
full
Dying too is quiet here,
the landscape
The landscape under fog and
the old mine
It is not that the
creatures are
I came out into a world of
silence,
No doubt the expert tracker
would find
The kestrel with his brown
eye, ahead,
If this is deafness,
madness we
His little mind was
satisfied with power,
Blue atmosphere, that
tolerates our presence,
How distinguish the
conscious, the unconscious?
What is that music in the
eye,
After the histrionics where
did it rise from
Icarus fell and was the
Minotaur.
White fog on limestone
landscape
There is a question of how
far we can move,
Self-centred yes, but where
self-interest
Slipping helplessly down
scree
A change of slant what is
needed,
Say to me something,
critic, that is not
No the imagination is not
enough,
Ours the black shadow of
the moon,
Words make the world more
vivid,
And these were the ancient
peoples,
The ghostly universe is
bright,
To accept the evil is the
broken only
Without the evergreen
meaning,
The no limits us to what we
are,
Our beauty is often
inwards, mind beauty.
There is no who in the
green eye of summer,
Obstinacy, Pope said, and
Byron quoted,
Nature’s honesty, that
beauty,
The human is no god, but
nothing needs
After all the defeats there
is a speech,
Disentangling the emotions
embedded there,
Leaf veins cling to the
rock, pale skeletons
No there is nothing of us
in the darkness,
On the south slope were
ancient fields,
There is self and the
universe and this is freedom.
In the end who is to say
how others should live.
In the limestone quietude,
the small stream
It is not the revolutions
of power we need,
Listening to the knower
speaking of what they know
There is no they, there is
only ever us .
Giving has nothing to do
with power, there is
I was re-born to the worlds
of detail.
It took only a slight shift
of vision to see
It is a mistake to view the
human as body,
The familiar is diminished,
we unravel it
Daylight is quiet by
limestone streams.
In the belly of the whale
the world glitters.
At the level where a
quantum flickering lies,