A. S. Kline © 2007 All Rights Reserved
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Contents
out of the animal mind,
out of the silent grasslands,
out of the curving shorelines.
Earth the given, sacred,
out of the singing woodlands,
from the bend of the river,
the half-light and the trees.
Where did the love in us come from,
the love that we refined?
From the first denial of violence,
from the nurturing, from being.
And all things were the circle,
within, the truth and meaning,
circuit of stars around us,
ocean of light inside us.
call out their being, their eternal voices,
their presence in the Now, their wild un-sameness,
of each the like, unlike.
All things inward show their outward form,
call out unique un-saying, private meaning,
disclose, give, spend themselves, go naked
to the fire of revelation, and the I.
All creatures show the one thing, show themselves,
burn in their transience, flare in their senses,
as Earth flares, lovely now, in incandescence,
as Moon flares, trembling, through water’s essence,
all things the same, where nothing is the same.
the voice of starlight over grass.
I am the alder, red I pass
root-wet in the gathering streams.
I am the rowan leaf that gleams,
by woodland-edge where silence grows,
I am the moonlit hedge-dark rose:
tremor of daylight and the night,
I am the purest mask of light.
I am the alphabet of trees,
garden-grace, comfort of bees,
I am Earth, bringer of breeze.
Where are you? Time is dream,
the frost-white dawn, cold pines
that grasp the mountain, stream
that foams in sleep. Enmeshment
with the world: these things arise
together: mind, not-mind, time, not-time.
The smell of frozen bark: rock smokes,
Orion fades through thorn’s split timber,
flowers weighed down, the dying heart
the resurrected mind, ‘world changes,
but this world’s the world within.’
Where are you, child of light? Whom Shelley
saw, sliding down the moonlight
of the mind, what Coleridge said (Within!)
Waking in shadow, winds, cloud, peaks,
my place among the constellations,
‘Worlds pass, but this goes on.’
Things slip away, dust, night-snow, cliffs,
grass bowed, bent in dew, eternity there.
Far west, empty fields where no religions
came, where we began, our painted walls,
our hearths, our sticks, our stones, all
time is dream, the dream, where are you?
to this last moment, which is every moment?
What do you bring here, and what do I?
Without love; sensitivity; mind: nothing.
Without truth, nothing: beauty, nothing.
What is it, here, to this Now we bring,
to the fiery ages, dark between starlight,
to dawn’s exhausted presence? Ourselves,
free of all assumptions, ghosts of time.
as now the small trunks burn,
millennial light, five hundred springs,
five hundred summers. Stir the sparks
with a ten-year branch, galaxies, nations.
Four thousand years, so little care for truth,
but now, but here, this last,
this godless universe, intention-less,
so sweet now in its beauty, un-deflected
moving sphere of chance and form.
Grass of a day we insects climb,
our ladder of imperfection, scuttle
through shade, still again in light,
we thousand springs and autumns
of the spirit, stirring the fire,
burning now with the universe.
Do you know what you do? Each interference
is a failure, to see, not see, this last betrayal.
Reclaim the sacred, the intention-less world,
the given-beyond-us, fragile place of yearning,
our prison in the stars the mind walks through.
Do you see what you do? Each interference
is a pang, a failure, a denial of the sacred.
flesh to flesh was mine
but mind to mind
thrills both.
We two, in the darkened city
and the beauty,
sweats and strains,
at the long river’s
benediction.
Night air on cooling flesh
in this eternity,
naked you sleep
who walked beneath your clothes
through spring and autumn,
everything there,
cold anger, shame and pain,
love, accusation,
tenderness, joy, craving.
Mars, Venus, Jupiter
so near,
a glittering triangle,
this night.
this pot climbs
to surface –
hands made it, Earth.
From its dead language
now translate,
‘clean, rinse, cool,
drink,
resurrect’.
Dark clay
unknown fingers
beauty’s detail,
time changed
to space, dark object,
climbing through
the centuries, to the eye,
warming the spirit,
now – re-born.
good for the near and tender,
the mind-made slowly-grown.
Against the complex structures,
power, the dependent, free
only in self-creation, clear
in solitude, for grass, trees, soil,
and direct touching. Born
for love’s, beauty’s, truth’s
triumvirate, and here
and now, and not ideal.
here by form’s wild intricacies,
here by the random code’s sweet permanence,
the sieve of Earth, by time and circumstance,
the one true miracle.
All here under Deneb, Altair,
deep in the inner silence,
four million years in spirit,
grass, wind’s breath
and our reality.
All here in the fossil trail,
in the folded rock,
in the galaxy’s
cool wave of light,
and lake of darkness,
all here, in us, blind chance.
I love eternity.
Pale stillness of the light,
dark skies, the clouds between,
not understanding time,
here lost in time.
It flickers in the silence,
in the calyx of the rose,
through summer-lightening,
sound-less after sound,
the sound itself,
world moving on.
Present falls to past
within this present,
future, the blind chance,
its subtle pattern.
The night, beyond.
I love eternity.
Lost in time.
off
under the oceans,
the great singers flow,
in coils and toils
of trembling light,
giants breathing
in ancestral patterns,
these mammals that
returned to the sea.
All the wealth of ancient being
to make this poverty,
this beauty,
this remnant we destroy:
those billion years.
And if we vanish
only mind is lost,
and there are others?
Are there other whales?
In the blue Pacific’s
far north-east, whales turn,
as we destroy:
their distant constellations
grouping, re-grouping,
the unpredicted, as we
were unpredicted,
flowing through moving starlight,
through the infinite waters,
in oceans of the night.
the line is implicit,
the line is in the mind.
The life follows the act,
the act is implicit,
the act is in the mind.
After many lines,
the brush becomes the line,
the mind becomes the life.
in the glitter of water,
and in shadowy depths
of trees darkness flickers,
over the stones,
mind flickers, deep
in the reaches
of spirit’s ancestry
thought’s journey.
Nature flares,
perfect in detail,
self of so many selves dispersal,
sieve of things mortal,
flares, subsides
to flow downstream,
to cry this marrying
of form and beauty,
we now exercise.
fed only fantasies.
The heart of the human
was in the creature,
Earth our blue vessel
sailing infinities,
Love, truth and beauty
that made us, we made.
All of the centuries
dispelled the Mysteries,
the
Nature is sacred,
Mind the maker
of deeper realities,
our only creator,
to ruin, or save.
Mind is process, world is flow,
all we are is passing, so,
dance my heart with transience.
Dance, Mind, with Nature’s essence,
all we are is Nature’s flow,
part of all the winds that blow,
dance, Mind, with Nature’s essence.
Dance, heart, in mind and sense,
dance with beauty’s transience,
Mind is process, world is flow,
through eternity we go.
1
the lone boatman
casts his line
towards heaven.
2
Shiver of stars,
the night-wind
moves in silence
through the mind.
3
Sea of silence,
glitter of stars,
this universe
without a cause.
resonance. Nothing’s here,
no mind, no thought,
one nature, vanishing
in sweetness.
Cutting the leaves and stalks,
feeling the touch of breeze,
the stirring of the trees,
everything gets done,
is simplification.
The earth grows lighter,
the stars nearer,
as mind grows older,
heart clearer,
in love with this
vanishing world.
(aspect of mind)
talking to itself.
It is a void
at the centre
of ordinary being.
It is a ditch
of light, filled
with bright rain.
It is a giving
and receiving
from within.
It is a silence
beyond
the text’s silence.
It is the earth’s
simple
eye.
these feelings, all this being,
pass without stirring the grass.
The heart is not this senseless mass
of all our making, not in this world’s
owning, light, we pass.
Within is value, in the spirit, meaning,
civilisation is this, to make beauty
where there’s no beauty, attend where there is.
This is the music played when mind is freed.
Like the subtle movement of the seed,
Nature’s billion trails of circumstance.
Form at the core, but not our form,
chance, there, but not our chance.
The mystery is like your mind.
Its beauties too are happenstance.
after the error,
mind will become the mirror.
Sinking into it (without reflection)
all things will be reflected,
in the light of non-action.
Not-mind will vanish, or become its image,
a symbol of the silence, and the void,
spontaneous un-doing.
One day, new as ever, Earth, our lover,
after the error
of this age, wild will flower.
white fire, moon in the cloud-leaves,
writing universe and mind
through slight living mysteries.
Now the heart is wreathed in fire,
white fire of the stars’ leaving,
a meteor of depth and time,
wrapped in bone and flesh’s being.
Now the dead are clothed in fire,
white fire, seething memory,
sealing spirit, body blind,
in yearning, this intensity.
caught in your passive, kindly patience,
part of the now-betrayed ideal,
how shall I know your world, reveal,
except by my fresh imitation,
the copybook of generation?
Watching the earth turn, far away
from the passions of your yesterday,
humility, your warmth of heart,
still penetrate my present art,
your thought not mine, yet your spirit,
nevertheless I here inherit.
Yet where we meet is always Now.
The light reflected from your face
brings me a past-in-present space.
We cannot grasp its core as such
but here’s existence where we touch.
The bird flies through a sky that is,
while there I see a sky not his.
Words alone wrap mind in sense.
They pass between us, worlds immense.
Bring your depths of time to me.
We shall create eternity.
At our backs the universe,
womb and cradle, bed and hearse.
Turn us to its living fires,
Now and Here all our desires.
this one, far out,
all ways, un-hanging,
held by all,
no place to fall,
since all makes space,
and space makes all.
This yellow seethe,
its wave of light,
thrown out to planets
not through night,
since night is only
what we call
reaches with no suns at all.
Our sun, our star,
the un-possessed,
the strangely given,
and so blessed,
without whose radiance
your nor I
ever would have seen the sky.
fish swim through, in the night
whales, tigers, eland swim through,
women in labour, women in orgasm,
naked men, swim through, eyes,
limbs, words, thoughts swim through,
shadows of leaves, stars, rocks, grasses
swim through, in the net of dreams
minds swim through, love swims through,
kindness, courage, trust, swim through,
light swims through, in the silence,
space swims through, time swims through,
being and knowing swim through,
birth, death, swim through,
leaving it all
behind.
smoke-arms stretch out, touch above deep valleys,
cliffs of light, spires of darkness, rock,
entangled clouds.
‘Always reach out for me’, I said,
‘to always find me’. Tenderness
curls soft against black granite, shards
of ebony schist.
Day’s-heat gone, rains fade,
brushstrokes black off summits.
Like cold snow, the touching
clouds pass through.
roaming, untidy presence,
free of civilisation, its longings,
poverty, blind will, old emptiness,
deathly limitation,
free of quests,
quartering mountains
watching cave-creatures
in bear-country, birds, deer,
crossing high snow-filled passes,
grass-deep sun-rich meadows,
drinking rain,
drying out in shacks, lean-tos,
seeing, imperfect, Nature’s perfection,
her individual, detailed,
spare, specked and marred.
Your hobo’s mind,
your grand refusal,
walking it alone, waking alone
embracing creation, self-created,
non-action, spontaneous, incomplete,
on a shelf of stone,
by a cleft of stream
free of ties, laws, codes,
following
nature, affection, peace,
lovely habit.
Your vagrant spirit,
clearer than mine,
free of death-wish, self-wish,
futile yearning,
senseless craving,
shunning the ways that lead
to exhausted mind,
seeking old tracks,
by lakes and hills,
along dark cliffs,
through the white cloud
blown by all winds,
by joyous feelings,
climbing the high ridge,
forgetting
names of trees, peaks, trails,
drifting north-west,
grasping nothing.
all the voices,
the bell-note void, pure, ringing,
beyond the names and forms,
all there - expression
in the simply given,
the thousand spaces
of one being, art,
alive, the naked form,
free of all intention now,
intention-less,
this gesture of no-hand,
this tongue-less word.
we make them stand before us,
and cannot contemplate
our summoning,
they closed in ourselves,
in nothingness,
we, open to all feeling.
Not called unless we call,
their cessation
of desire is never ours,
ours intensified by their absence,
or become pure un-possession.
They have no will,
are not, as the gods are not,
are our illusion,
echoing endlessly.
there is no mirror,
there is no other place,
strangeness
is mind’s consequence,
and not our nature,
no introspection
brings us home, we cannot
think our way to joy,
true being
sings.
its glassy curves,
clear volumes there,
on solid rock,
its running fall,
the Second Law,
Time’s arrow,
and the mind before
the poems and the galaxies,
one pure universe
no more,
slips onward, inward,
world a fire
of beauty, things,
excess, desire,
constraint and entropy,
granite, slate,
and water flows
Time’s concentrate,
washes the scree,
bathes boulders, runs
towards the billion setting suns.
mind in the dream,
‘this is the poem, form,
a planet in its orbit’
Star through the big pine
lights dark boughs,
in its space-night
makes day in ours.
Oh, little star on a far limb,
whirlpool-core in native dance,
bright among bushels,
star-seed, senses’ lance.
the love is within
and can belong
to others, to the world,
species’ anonymous
cry,
under whatever name,
and emblem
of our presence.
Always beyond, always
the stepping beyond
into oblivion,
the utterance
always intense
more intense
until it is ripe, enclosed,
a call, a shout,
of pain and purity.
anonymous beauty,
deeper than the named.
The great caves singing
with lightning, with colour,
freed from their religions,
silent now beyond them.
And the cherry by the eaves,
in the Zen garden
is an arrow fired,
suspended in the sky.
Civilisation, tender,
the deer, and the bison,
those calm golden faces,
the depths of our being.
Lovely, and anonymous
the given, and not made.
she stepped into this world,
the logic on her side
does not apply on this.
Here the irrational is queen,
and king, and all the laws
of space and time are illusory,
her chessmen give us pause.
Here there’s no allegory,
here she sees what is,
a mad earth, turned inside-out –
and where’s the pool of tears?
When
she alone spoke with flowers,
all meaning on her side,
all foolishness on ours.
be mirror to the furthest star,
the something-in-you’s deepest gleam,
alight on the galactic stream.
There are no gods.
We are the dream.
tilled the dry ash soil in all these canyons,
built walls, ran herds, wove cultures.
Now dark-skinned girls in soiled slips,
men’s hats, sell goods by dusty highways,
mind’s potency deep-buried in their eyes.
Why visit other lives, dissatisfied
with ours, we pillagers, like buzzing wasps
that narrow-sighted feed on honeyed plants?
Who will come to view us, trade our smiles,
film our pain, disturb and dislocate us,
what jaded, future-wise, resigned off-worlders?
How long will they last – these books?
Fierce sunlight then the cool at night.
Show me – how your body burns.
Electric rain on shutters, blue glass.
How long will our culture last?
Wild stars then the breeze at dawn.
Show me – where all feelings are.
Pigeon’s world is placid.
Pigeon’s creed
is wait, watch, hope, a meal
may be likelier than we know.
Pigeon’s clumsy poet’s walk
turns beautiful in flight.
Pigeon sails the light
and hides at night,
when darkness flows.
Pigeon knows
what it knows.
blue beauty some place, unknown to me,
in space, inside time, a wheel,
light flowing, energy (motion, mass)
moving into the eye, I see
galactic beauty, learn, a moment only,
for this one moment, truth, humility.
that’s hard to believe,
all the creatures,
clear, enduring, aware,
all the lives and processes,
no pointing, not a sign,
nameless and complete.
In clouds the mountain stream,
pine needles fall, wind blows,
world-waves, inner silence,
Nature without a word.
The mindlessness
that’s hard to accept,
a universe of itself,
vast, pure, activity,
all the leaves free of your purpose,
all the grasses, seeds and skies,
your vivid glimpses of the Earth.
In clouds the cliffs going nowhere,
slow turning with the planet.
You know another eternity?
That’s hard to believe.
Not lasting, but everlasting.
Always moving, never moving,
just this single manifold.
Try to catch it, stop it, it’s gone.
Try to run, escape it,
it’s still here.
This self, what self, where?
All those lives
don’t even sway the grass.
All those lives,
don’t even stir the water.
Show me the future
and the past!
It’s simply – this,
and nothing else.
minds full of madness, of religions,
don’t think they’re closer to the Earth,
by sitting foolish in the dust.
But Nature and Being, understood
the intention-less complexity,
through that path relinquish all paths,
sitting foolish in the grass.
this civilisation.
This is not it,
the facelessness, the wars.
This is not it,
the way we came,
the movement, flawed.
In some other
century perhaps.
In some other
place and time,
the sound of laughter
from the heart,
not the laughter
of the mind.
Within you,
keep the flame.
Within you,
keep it light.
Learn to love,
Forget to fight.
and my heart
are one heart
in two minds.
Your eye
and my eye
make two eyes
and one sight.
Your hand
and my hand
touch one Earth
with both hearts.
Your spirit,
my spirit,
one Nature,
no other.
the ages move,
mind’s clear drift,
the sea of love.
The sun will rise
another day,
we’ll exercise
our species’ way.
Dawn’s cool light,
the Earth, a ball,
blue on darkness,
cannot fall.
We spin again
about our star,
around the core
of what we are.
almost gone, faded,
other spaces of the heart,
not to be imitated.
We try to capture
what we cannot be,
the inner life organic,
inimitable mystery.
Puma in the dark cave,
Kite, deer in the wood,
Miraculous worlds,
Moth’s spectacled hood.
What have we to give
to the beauty, to the song
of this universe? Love?
To love it, and belong?
Now when the other ways
of life are almost fading,
gone. Lay down our power,
join the living things?
flows slowly,
our foolish religions,
myths of the ruling races,
go past swiftly,
like weather,
greed and fear.
This rock, ten million
years old, cools us,
in the dark shadows,
burns us, in the light,
our hold ephemeral,
our culture slight,
our way is grasping.
on the leaf, fish, bird, mite,
all the galaxy, all matter,
mineral, sludge, fire, sea,
rock, lightning, all
this process.
Mind thinking it knows
what Nature is, is part
of Nature, knows which
is greater, all this flow,
the starry universe,
its voids, its powers.
The insect on the leaf,
the form within.
one perception, one direction,
from outside, it’s artifice.
Inside faiths, and ways of being,
all is truth and obvious,
from outside, all’s fallacy.
Inside all relationship,
time is ours, and powerless,
outside it, we exist.
the honeyed day, idle away.
Valley of the heart
and mind, may our loyalty be blind.
Heat and silence,
fill the hours, make them ours.
Light and shadow, quiet
flow, through us, below.
On this worn slope,
by day, let every starlight play.
Where did the love in us come from?
All things cry the one thing, cry themselves,
I am the hawthorn tree that sings
I wake from silence, among stars.
All lives converge, what is it that we bring
Locked in the tree’s core, time,
Woods go; forests slide, beauty’s destroyed.
All here by the beauty of blind chance,
Dance my heart with transience,
The blackbird and the wild flower’s
Through no-nature like a dream
Each accident of your mind is beautiful.
Now the world is coiled in fire,
My father there in the quiet distance,
Who knows what depths of time we plough?
Children and birds swim through,
We are not strangers to the world,
When Alice stepped through the glass
Burn like the child you were and are,
Natives (does that mean rooted, deeper?)
Bamboo shadow leaves on white pages.
An image opening, pinwheel galaxy,
Comes from nowhere, it goes nowhere.
Heads full of customs, rites and fictions,
Inside culture all is seamless,