Op. 132

No explosion into space, but space created.

Expansion blown forever from within.

There is no boundary, no edge

Every single locus is its centre.

Dark matter coalesces with the bright,

Dark energy pushes things apart.

In sickness the mind collapses,

Now it climbs again to ancient freedom.

Strange to gaze into the far deep field,

Look back; those pulses in the infra-red

Declare something stranger than time,

Or the variable stretches of light,

More the irredeemably non-human,

More the intense intellectual cold,

A murmur of unsatisfied equations,

That fall short still of the mystery.

From the starlight to the mind,

From the mind then to the score,

Instruments and purpose combined,

A movement intricate in time.

Here are voices, is it a sole voice?

These are voices rising from the wood,

The strings, the bowed heads,

The bowed minds, listening,

Or is it all one, the ear, the eye, the mind,

The body and the bow,

Until the first intent is clear;

From universe to universe, the flow,

Carried outside death, now here through time,

Down the outspread page,

To cry, and praise, and vocalise,

To utter?

Bend to hear the primal universe,

Bend to catch from world to mind to ear,

To instrument to score, the flow;

And then from score to player’s eye,

To mind, to ear, to instrument,

This involuted circulation,

This orbiting of light and fire,

In streams of re-creation.

Escape from time, in time,

Is the first freedom.

Escape from death to life,

From illness to pure being,

From deep field to creation,

From creation to true time,

From time to the absolute performance

In this small hushed space.

From performance to the listener’s ear,

To the mind

Projecting the sky’s cerulean blue

Through silent windows,

Imagining a night sky

Over tundra,

An intentionless far dark,

Of inanimate motion,

Its depths where we exist,

The forms we stare at,

A creation-less music we praise,

Beyond the music,

Out of the heart

Then to the heart,

A finest flower

Of blue Earth: its human tremor.

Mind In Its Essence

Sky in September blue,

Pale isles of white cloud

Spreading an inner grey,

Rise on the far horizon.

Mind is free of purpose

Freed by intentionless space,

Free of the transfixed self,

Free to assert its values.

The light falls deep in the trees,

Shines on the back of leaves,

This yellowed oozing light

Of marvellous September.

Mind set free of its prisons,

History, power, illusion.

All meaning created by mind;

Mind in its essence – meaning.

Nowhere To Go, Everything To See

There, at the end of space, the light is calm.

How the enhanced humans will long

For the motions of the heart, for poetry

In the spirit of the superseded species!

How the heart will long for past

Innocence and the simple beauty

Of a done world transformed in time!

There, at the end of space, there is nothing

New in the heart, simply the old sweetness.

The Classics echo: Confucius knows

The need to conserve the deeper dream,

In the tinkling of the ritual called life.

The Classics echo: and Rome delights

In honeying the drama of the Greeks,

Forever. Nothing-truly-new is freedom,

Nothing new in the heart that is, except

Maybe the unanticipated horrors,

The new terrors, but nothing new

Of sincerity, affection, the eye’s resilience.

Still beautiful here at the end of time,

Before the end of my time, still alive,

With what we never came for, creation,

Our creation, and the creatures before us,

The crying of the strangeness of ‘to be’

In the infinite freedom of the void,

In the delightful tremor of the abyss.

You, of the future: here are the guardians,

The makers of the meaning of the mind.

Matter Is Spirit In Process

Consciousness, awareness is simply this,

The projection of meaning onto the world,

In the irreality of mind fused with being,

Process with matter, process of matter.

Memory is always this, our rehearsal,

Of what the flickering meant, the store

Of potential meanings, of the shadows,

To enable us to re-enact, then act.

Mind is always this, the theatre

Of our drama, and we, as Pasternak

Once said, are on stage in every act,

As Hamlet, wandering through the dark.

Time and space are always this,

Great surprise, the continuing surprise,

Unsettling and disturbing of the Now,

The quantum tremor, the displays of light.

I am always the mind and its memories,

The matter and the program it performs,

The unpredicted, never pre-determined

Oscillation of the protons and the dream.

Stuck In Gaol In Rome

There’s a way of writing about fields

And streams, that cheats the reality.

The natural life is dull; if the world

Is beautiful, it is the aesthetic carries

All the meaning, not the life there.

We sit in cities, talk about the high

Mountain peaks, they’re in the mind,

Where all our values are, shining.

There’s a way of writing about

A rural pastoral world, like Virgil

Offering the Georgics to a busy Rome,

A solace for the Imperial nightmare.

But the pastoral is in the mind,

And charm, seductive, charms

Our thoughts away, if we relax

One moment from the mystery,

Which is the challenge of the new,

A search for freedom, liberty of thought

From our own thoughts, the dark

Matter of the feelings and the web,

Its silken threads, so beautiful

Drifting in mists of light across

The gorse. In the Imperial ‘gaols’,

The prisoners laughed at all the charm,

The sycophantic praise of ugly men,

Wielding a power too great for sanity.

I’m with Propertius, not Virgil:

Smirking as the triumph passes by.

Oh, Literature!

Here is the assiduous gatherer

Of his own myth.

He comes striding across the fields,

Swinging his memories,

Which are no doubt false,

Since writers are all liars:

The language twists

And turns in the mind,

Like Grendel in Beowulf’s grip,

And escapes to gnaw

The hero’s head off,

But not in the epic.

Here is the cultivator

Of the perfect reputation,

The apotheosis of the social,

The celebrator of ritual.

On the lonely moor

Emily scribbles light.

Anne’s hand trembles

Under the papers.

Death catches them short

Of debilitating fame.

I go there to refresh my spirit,

With John Keats and Cavalcanti.

It’s Tough

Tough to contemplate the dead, the raped,

The tortured and the starving.

Tough to consider a planet now unfit

For human consumption, soon consumed.

Tough to gaze at the empty beauty,

The quantum flicker, the seething void.

Tough to be mindful of the past,

The parade of glories dependent on power.

Tough to imagine the future of the species,

Lonely among stars, melds of enhanced matter.

Tough to be going before all the joy is over,

Tougher to live forever, shuddering.

Tough to be blessed with what we created

We and the long line of creatures before us,

The beauty, the love, and the meaning,

Given to the stars, freely, endlessly

Tough to be human.

Little Song Of Immortality

We are programmed for immortality.

Life itself is tuned for survival,

Darwin patiently explained.

Curiosity, cunning, cooperation

Aspects of the program of the species,

Tune us for immortality.

And now the way appears:

The conscious machine,

Projecting meaning on the world,

Becomes a receptacle for mind,

Our minds or its mind, no matter,

Metal, plastic, cell or whatever,

Replaceable, undying shell of being,

In which mind rides to immortality.

Don’t ask the purpose.

The purpose is the program.

Survival is a no-end in itself.

See, there we go, sailing

Through infernity.

Behind, somewhere, the heart

The moral heart of all the meaning.

You, the ones who live forever,

Remember

We who only lived a little while.

Part Of the Choosing

There’s no fixed self, we’re free.

Within a boundary.

The one self fluctuates,

As the unseen dictates.

Through us and not despite

The worlds emerge to light.

In everything I will to be

The universe is willed in me.

Everything’s determinate

Within the traveller at the gate.

The free is not the random, true,

Nor pre-determinate in you.

It’s in the Now world comes to be,

And so it does in you and me.

Though all things ran on rails of steel,

The eye would see, the mind would feel.

Oh we are free, have no doubt,

Morality will find us out,

Caught between the right and right,

Or wrong and wrong, we seek the light.

And freedom is the choice we make,

For truth for love for beauty’s sake.

Delicacy In Evening Air

Did I set you free? Did you set me free?

We lie down in the grasses of night;

They smell of ash and absence,

We lie down in the tender night.

There are fingers of darkness between us,

Whorls of the hurricane,

Great mouths of the snow-falls,

And the sigh of the endless plains.

Who is free? Not us, not ever.

Bound by invisible chains

In the sweet counter-fugue of night,

In the downfall of light.

Our punishment for life,

And our reward,

The swift roar

Of the moment going by,

And losing itself softly

Among leaves.

It is neither here nor there

That sigh of memory.

It is the trembling space

Never quite empty

In which the detail left

Grows always greater,

A single word, said

In the dark,

The planet hanging

From the celestial tree,

Or the bridge and the trickle

Of green and eastern water

Murmuring syllables

Of a desiccated language.

The water brims, the light

Emerges,

In a kind of singing lament;

In a transport of echoes and joys.

Stranded here,

My feet sink in the sand of islands,

In the soft mud between

Visions, recalls, shores.

Did I set you free? That’s blessed.

The mind enslaved to the eye

Is never free,

And ever free.

The past is always arriving

In the present,

Exactly like the future,

Now more so.

The quiet that arrives, a freedom,

Descending in shadows of misted air,

Making you as I wish,

As I wished, as I half-remember.

Yourself, not me, but freest there,

Inside my stillness,

Delicate images wrinkling

The mind’s awareness,

Sinking deep, then rising

Over the silhouettes of the trees,

There the dead day goes on

Reverberating, free

To assume a new space in us,

An unshared fragment of meaning,

That is mute, behind cloud, behind air

The mind would push through.

Contrapposto, Chiaroscuro

Here is the shining pool of darkness,

Beyond the face.

Here are the silhouettes of fir-trees

On a mountainous horizon.

The grey, white, blue peaks fade

Through endless air,

And reality descends.

We are also matter.

Here I speak to a friend

Over distance,

To whom one can say

Things silent here.

Words of the vulnerabilities,

Of the fears and failures,

Words of the inner night,

In a frame of twilight.

Here are the grasses, vital,

Springing, furious leaves,

Tendrils, buds and stems,

Flowers writhe under the hand.

Here are the shining pebbles

Of truth, of terrible truth.

Here are the gestures,

Tender as the eye of light.

Here is the distance from humanity.

Here is the human closeness,

The neighbourhood of lids,

Hands, stones, and trees.

Here is the line, delicate, the shading,

That crosses the contours

With the movement of nature,

The fractal deep.

Here is a life in the mind

Shining through flesh,

And the mind alive

Speaking mysteries.

Not the mysteries of ignorance,

Or superstition,

But the mysteries

Of knowledge,

And what will be known;

The science of being,

In which the object,

The force is always beyond us,

In the space of reality,

In the moment of light and shadow,

The twisting movement,

The flicker of the left hand,

Travelling over the surface,

Until mind is still.

The end of all vision

Is contemplation.

I speak to you, friend.

I contemplate your

Indissoluble meaning,

The tremor of the Other.

Afterglow

Beautifully in the darkness

The universe accelerates:

Dark energy, I sing of you.

Purposeless vanishing,

Intentionless motion,

World without our consent.

Without recognition

Of our presence,

The greater shining.

Sweetly in the night

The galaxies go dancing,

In veils of gaseous fire.

Whether the absence grows

Or contracts to the pinpoint

Prick of planet.

Whether the heart is one

Or many.

Wherever, whoever we may

Become, and have become,

Heirs to the past lives,

Or their afterglow,

Beautifully in the night

The universe flies apart.

Dark energy, I sing of you.

Dragon Bamboo

My head woven of fire,

Goes circling round the moon,

Shivering in the stream;

A recluse in cold pines.

All the words of the wind,

Grieve for the lost friend,

Fingers of light and snow,

The clear arc of the eye.

The bird soars among clouds.

The hollow stone is light,

Travelling through the depths,

A rippling emptiness.

This green creek all bright,

The fragrance of pale time.

Where now our illusions,

Where’s the unbroken tie?

Inexhaustible night.

This high cold ridge.

Rock and wild bamboo.

These drifts of flame.

South Mountain

Moon on the rock-edge.

All of the mountain

Borrowed whiteness,

Forms of wild flowers.

Gazing at Being exactly:

The black pine-in-itself,

The dry heather blooms

And veils of leaves,

Precise, the externals.

No way not to be:

Incomprehensible

To be so, to be them.

Face to face

With the World,

In silence, solitude,

Here’s the free spirit,

The ephemeral ‘I am’,

In the infinite ‘It is’.

No deeper mystery

Or terror.

Autumn Moon clear

Born from dark rock,

What is all this world

We keep naming?

Freedom and Meaning

The lack of purpose frees us,

Free to create the purpose.

Free of the fixed self,

Free of the generations.

Free to make decisions,

Freed for the moral choices,

Constrained by genetics,

Unconstrained by the idea.

Free for non-violence,

Of mind or of body.

Free from oppression, vice,

Warfare, self-abuse,

Possessiveness, deceit,

Destruction, self-deception,

Free to delight in knowledge,

Science, affection, empathy.

Freed from illusion, maya,

Free of all the phantoms.

Free of the craving, grasping;

Power; all materiality.

Freedom from greed, corruption,

Grandiosity and status,

All the creatures freed with us,

Free from our persecution,

In the fraternity of sharing,

Free of planetary exploitation,

Free of action, interference,

Free of wrong technologies.

The free Individual,

Free to develop self; to be self,

Freedom from false systems,

Faiths, religions, superstitions,

Free not to follow, or to own,

And free not to believe.

Free of the institutions,

Causes, movements, nations,

Free of false-limitations,

Pre-conception, prejudice.

Free of history, the ghosts,

The pasts, the haunting.

Free of all afterlives,

Careful, transient, caring.

Free from the valueless:

Poison, waste, vice, ennui.

Freedom to think, to dream,

To imagine. Liberty!

Freedom from threat and fear,

Neglect, want, poverty.

Freedom from needless pain,

And a painless end to mortality.

Freedom of conscience. Life

That sets the other free.

Freedom from intrusion,

Possession; total privacy.

Freedom as equals to create,

Free spontaneity.

Free of time, eternal Moment.

Free of biology, through culture,

Free of the species, single selves,

Freed from the universe through mind.

Free of loss, stasis and constraint.

Free from every tribe and sect and creed.

The Individual forever above society.

Meaning and the inner conscience freed.

Scrambling Over Rocks Is Fine

Long winds through silent canyons.

Emptying the heart,

Emptying the heart.

Everything Moon always in flight.

The mirrors of tarns,

The mirror of stars.

Downstream, downstream

These thoughts of you,

Whirling, plunging, in confusion.

Scrambling over rocks is fine

To sit at last on wordless shelf,

Birds, clouds, mind up and gone.

Identity

Watching the foam, phosphorescent flicker

These coils of water wound in the stream,

Their obstinate centring round a hidden pole,

Their identity moving, returning, moving.

Crests of foam, wrinkled troughs, fire

Of stars scattering over the surface,

The riders of ripples glint from summits,

The spun glass, the whirling hair

Of pale rose networks grass-green gleams,

Matter in motion like slate, steel, pure tin,

The glitter and flare of the mind’s excitement

Entering deeper in the world.

Watching the water slide under the breeze:

The opposite of mind’s petrifaction,

Here is individual existence,

Not only ours,

All forms, beings; between matter

And self no true distinction,

Here the tremor of leaf on the twig,

Here the pebble afloat in the pool,

Here the mind deep in memory,

In thought, in imagination,

In the pain and delight,

The transient meaning of being.

Watching the moon, the cloud

In the blue and the grey,

The crescent sliding with stars,

The past slipping through dream,

The longing still, and the love,

A movement of spirit,

Watching the delicate tremors,

The speeding tremors of light,

The nameless, the silent,

The grey-white patterns of forms

Which die and are ever the same

Varying selves on self’s secret axis,

The twisting, untwisting

Tendrils alive at the centre of change.

The quick motions of being.

The permanence of what passes.

The flakes of frost stars over the lake,

The sparks that rise, flare and fly

Into the dark of the trees,

The shiver of mind in its snow.

Watching the foam’s phosphorescent flicker

The snake-shapes writhe in the stream,

The endless tremor round a hidden orbit,

The identity moving, returning, moving.

The insight into the rule of that voiceless motion,

Whose invisible bound is the magnet

That draws its track,

As the memory does the feeling,

That glimpse of the spectrum of all

Those identities of nature,

Their selfsame inner vibrations,

Their cries without sound,

Their returns without knowing,

Their fixations and stagnations,

Like mind in the mesh of matter,

Coming again to be.

Other Day

Waking from sleep to find the Self still here –

It’s how matter moves like mind

That terrifies us:

The tiny flap of leaf flickers to and fro,

In humming circles of the wind,

To roof’s repeated creaking.

Waking from sleep to find the Earth still here,

And white light making shapes

Across the wall.

The round of returning motion,

Orbiting strange centre,

Like mind around the self, is ever there.

Waking, the sad Self surfaces,

The ‘I’ is reconstructed

From memories; from the dream of being.

Waking to find universe still there,

Is always there,

Eternally existent;

Until, that is, our future absence,

From the void:

That is true nothing.

Otherwise waking, here, to life,

The massive beauty of the Sun,

The nameless world.

Hearing The Singing

I hear the world sing without us,

In the many silent forms of nature.

I hear the winds over the savannah,

The breakers, and the hiss of stars;

See the nameless patterns change and swirl,

Quicksilver splits, or petrol over water,

Life’s speed of wild unwinding matter,

Spreading over the silence, moving

In the nameless spaces, beyond time,

Where the inanimate lingers becomes

Animate, alters the content of universe,

Makes of process matter endless mind.

I hear the planet sing without us,

Forests and rivers, seas and sands,

Singing the one true song, in the veins

Of leaf, in the flakes of burning foam,

I hear the universe sing our absence: we

Sing our presence. Earth, without feeling,

Sang of spaces where we were absent,

The void where blue orbs fall upwards,

The spaces before and the spaces after:

Though mind once possible must repeat

Somewhere in the infinite eternal. What

Has been forever now a potential of ‘It is.’  

I hear the moon and stars sing without us,

Without our empathy, appreciation, our

Verification from which the values came,

Love, truth, beauty: our virtual legacy.

I hear the Earth sing without us,

In the nameless silent forms of nature.

I hear the pine-tree on the mountain sigh,

Bending towards the glow of Jupiter.

Self Is The Strange Attractor

Blue light of evening falls on the web of leaves.

Self is the strange attractor, mind the orbits

Around the continuing poles of being,

Again, again, and never the same track twice.

Blue light of evening, and the Earth and Sun

Have changed subtle alignment in new transit,

But exact enough for world to seem constant,

Blue evening light on dark leaves.

The sky wholly clear. The wing-beats almost,

Never, the same quite twice, heading west.

Memory there. Self is the strange attractor,

Vibrating heart, pebble in the whirlpool,

Carried together we part, are carried together,

Around the maelstrom’s gleaming surface.

Deep in the indentations of the wake,

Where we once stopped to find each other.

Lives circle round the core of their being,

We are the self’s interpreter, translator,

Vague fragile memory, and simple orbit,

Caught in the flow: yearning, surrendering.

Four-Stream-Mountain

Birds all gone in the silence.

One last cloud dissolved.

The mountain and I, lost

In eternity, are each other.

Look, mist gathers in dim ravines.

No wind to blow all feeling away.

I climb upward thinking of you,

Cross the midnight stream alone.

All sound of sadness in the wind.

Night wind blows lonely in the stars.

All of it mindless, intentionless,

Caul of beauty, black deep mystery.

Wandering, far-off, empty, mind

Gathers wool on a slope of pine.

Down there, Self hangs in the water,

Bright reflection, transient light.

Snow Is Free

While the mind was sleeping,

Its night-heart beating,

The snow blew, falling,

White rain over the fields.

While memory dreamt,

Its dark veil drifting,

The stems were bowing,

Earth was shouldering.

While passage was suspended,

Space ended,

The snow blew, falling

Silently.

We Are Never Truly Here

The trembling, illusory self,

Whose now is not the world’s now,

Its place not body’s place;

That re-creates itself each day in process,

Surprises with its voices not our voice,

From depths not our depths,

But the creatures’;

Is all we have.

Its freedom is the freedom of the rose,

Not to be bound,

To burn on the arc of branch

Above the water,

As nothing else but rose,

And nowhere else but here, wherever here is,

A messenger of the silence,

As all things untarnished,

Un-soured by words, are mutest messengers.

Its meaning

Is the meaning of all these tremors

Around you:

Immanence!

Inherence, the indwelling

Potency of what shimmers

In us as being, transience,

In all of which we are not truly here.

Settled Ash

The sky that’s grey, that’s almost white

Is beautiful.

Not warming, cheerful; only beautiful.

The bird flies through it, does not sail,

Eager to get, it seems, to the other side,

Although where sky’s concerned

There is no other side.

It is a textured cloth of subtle pearl and snow,

Gripping the heart

With what is beyond the heart, and then

Easing the heart with what is similar,

Not purposed on being, saying,

Loving, killing, dreaming anything,

To itself nothing, least of all a question.

I love the sky that’s verging on pure light,

But colourless,

No fractured rainbow or cerulean blue;

The shade of winter water

Its ghost vapours, aged ice,

Like the regret for what’s past changing,

The settled ash.

To The Bringer Of Stars

Bringer of stars from silent spaces,

Twilight of mind among the criers,

What will you call of what we are

To mark the coming transformation?

Bringer of stars, on ancient towers,

Hills of silence, winds of mourning,

What will you weep of what was done,

To warn the simple and the love-wild?

How will you bless this planet, crier,

How will you uphold meaning, freedom,

Truth in the words, sincere affection,

Urge to create, or tender being?

Bringer of stars from every grass-land,

Every mountain, every ocean,

Cry the long, bitter ancestry,

Our potency, decry betrayal.

Bringer of stars from twilit spaces,

Voice of the silence among criers,

Mute with the sound of all this being,

Tell me, what will you cry?

The Silence Of The Animals

Is not our silence.

Ours is a stop to speech,

A pause to words,

While words go on trembling in the mind,

And the eye closes on vision.

Theirs is a lack of the symbols

That define us;

Their symbols of the senses.

Which in no way denigrates

Their intellect;

Being is deeper

Than understanding,

Minds can manipulate

The structures

Made of being,

Beyond words,

Though they too have cries,

Sighs, utterance,

Or we have theirs,

The long inheritance.

All from the one sieve,

All the un-deleted,

Stable in transient

Ephemeral persistence.

Down the slow light

Goes the dolphin

Speechless, below

Green waves,

Mandelstam’s creature,

To whom our language

Might seem

A logical consequence,

But our grasp on life

Strangely weak,

For the greatest

Of survivors.

That is, in the sense

Of most versatile,

Most ghostlike,

Mental in symbolic spaces,

And so most swiftly perished;

The years of thought,

Gone in an instant

Like a power-less machine.

So we inherit

Too the greatest sadness,

In perceiving

The deepest value.

Mind in its beauty,

Ah, gone down,

Through the far calling

Of the silent creatures.

But Oh Be Careful Where You Interfere

No I don’t advocate quietism,

Or not exactly.

Participate where you can make

Better from worst.

But the true weight of being

Is only found in vision,

And the end of vision

Is contemplation.

In the end we learn

To consider Being,

And that, in itself

True contemplation,

Leads to what mind

And heart in mind call love.

The adoration of the silent,

Inexpressible presence

Of the curve, the tension,

Hopkins’ inscape, inward, inner landscape,

The folds and curls,

The stress of being here,

Which is so much more

Than mere description,

The what science is,

And why art survives,

Expressing the always

Inexpressible in human terms.

Why when the mouth is closed,

And the eye gazes,

The spirit is freed

To roam in ancient spaces:

Those stars much as we saw them

Glittering on grass and desert,

Those rivers and tides, those hills

Of the most delicate blue,

Those eyes, those leaves,

That godless blessed flow of fire.

Closure

There’s the power in us to erase every darkness.

Closure is in the last repetition

Through which the poison flows

And flows away.

So the marred and fruitless vanishes,

And a veil of cloud hides hills,

A shower of rain conceals the night,

What resurrects in the mind is light.

The conscious has power too over the unconscious,

We are not slaves forever to the silence

Of dream, tremor, strange anxiety.

Don’t bury the dead, scatter their secret ashes,

Watch the memories blow across the day

And erase themselves in whiteness

Or in the water, or in the vibrant green

Where the briar bird sings.

Freedom is ours. Plough history, shatter

The old conventions, break the mould,

Pull down false idols, topple

Thrones and altars, raze the hoards.

There’s the power in us to find liberty,

Escape the chains and ropes,

Kick down the door,

And reach the living world again,

Which echoes cool clear in the first dawn,

The stone and tree and pool and star of us,

Risen out of centuries of darkness,

Hanging silent in the eye of being.

Words To The Waiting Self

Go softly now where you exist.

Who needs your stridency or your surprise?

Hide your life, that is the deepest freedom,

Absent yourself from the expected places,

Since silence is the greater prize.

Live in the quiet and the moderate,

Though the mind wild with passion,

Still wanders furthest, unexpected spaces.

Conceal yourself from those things that imprison,

Forms and powers, states and superstitions. 

Be, face to face with the universe,

As you once were when a child,

Dreaming through other centuries,

Discarding everything around you,

Invoking other minds in the grass.

Live in the places where the free exist,

Find another meaning of your soil,

A resonance that trembles in the stone.

Make your own deep self your country,

Undemanding of your allegiance.

Most of all live beyond violence,

Violence to the spirit or the flesh,

Which if there were sin would be the greatest,

Remains the deepest crime against the human,

Its punishment its own darkness within.

Create. Being summons us to create,

To make, outside the self, the self inside,

And all our other values are its echoes,

Truth, beauty, love, freedom and meaning,

Go deeply now, once more, create yourself.

Pure Pointless

Into the long silence of the healed horizon

On slow hills that quench the anxious heart,

Where reflected water lights the clouds.

Lured into memory by the calm, then beyond

Memory, with the tremor of the bird and then

Beside it, into the forgotten and the lost.

Under the intentionless sky, dreaming to be

Gone, vanishing with the banished races,

The exiled species free of human taint.

In a quality of sunlight, in the equality of grass,

Through the nothingness which is everything,

Down the pure pointless air, the random gusts.

Released in the self’s twilight, then free of self,

Sharing the light, pain, meaning, in compassion,

In the empathy that is the deeper self.

Crossing the boundary of life and matter, the life

Of matter, the similarities, mirroring of process,

Until the weight of that distinction passes.

Beyond the being and the dead, purified by air,

By the whisper of air, in the wake of worlds,

Unattached, alive among the shifting planes.

No longer earthbound. Within the re-enactment

The enactment, of all we were and all before us,

This adolescent species, at the core of wandering.

Into the irreducible, irreplaceable, into the stillness,

Through the flicker of joy, now un-remembered,

Into the intensity of Is, the brilliance of Now.

Back to the first encounter, forward to the fire,

Carrying the self, and setting the self aside,

In the vast freedom that is our meaning.

A re-invention of the grail, a non-religious

Movement of the spirit towards the thing itself

The sheer embodiment, mind in its flesh,

Turned inside-out and layered on the stars,

Until the universe and the idea are one,

One flickering, one working-through

Of the innate potentials, in the mystery

That is existence, mysterious not with

Some other looming from beyond space,

Time, or self, but mysterious in Being,

By right of being, the mindless outside mind,

From which mind rises, like the bird,

A calling, quivering of passion, a high cry,

All that is real, concealed and unconcealed,

In the sublime exhilaration, the ‘here-alive’,

Nothing else will know, can know, exactly

Like this, through the no-mind, no-sense,

Wild pouring-out of engendering possibility

Into the undefined, the vague, the melting

Speck of fragile passage far in light,

The half-heard tremor of the beating wing.

The Mind Is Wild

In each blade of grass the wilderness, in each flower,

As the heart, the mind, the self in each emotion.

Depth is the spirit moving through its refuge,

The archetype of time, as it falls through water,

To end as the fossil in cretaceous limestone,

A weathered fragment of the green-floored dale.

In inwardness the wilderness, the banished one,

That is never under threat since always free,

Though its external spaces are eroded, though

The tyranny of our passing ends their silence.

In every stone, at the pebble’s core, is the wild.

The diamond, meaning, coruscates and trembles.

Nothing can be destroyed that’s made of nothing.

We can never deflect a nature without intention.

Our freedom is never limited, thought’s infinite,

And the feeling endures, in its infinite spaces.

Though there’s an ache in losing all that beauty,

The wilderness remains, the mind is wild.

Moon-Mind Music

In the chaos, always the threads of order.

A finger’s touch and they are drawn,

Like veils of light through which the feeling glows.

The cloak of order hides the seeds of chaos,

From which the meaning always takes its life,

The mind is not imposed from peak to base.

Moon rises from the trembling in the water,

Within the moon a shivering appears,

Form is fractured, the fractured forms itself.

Its shape it leaves behind: the form in time,

As though the hands have moulded transient being,

Placed it as an echo in the heart.

And delicately now the music moves,

The silence is the form that it goes seeking,

The silence where it’s perfect cry began.

Without Tongues

Language is the artifice?

Bolted on, as it were, to the human,

And now the deepest part.

We grow tired of speaking,

Writing, listening to words,

The silence is deeper,

The absence of language is silence,

The silence of painting,

The silence of music.

Birdsong’s a silence,

Landscape’s a silence,

Love, sex, beauty, gesture, touch are silences.

The language of painting is in vision,

The tongue of reality is movement,

Its vowels are colours, its word the line.

The phrases of music are its tremors.

I hold you as we listen in the silence,

You hold the silence that we are.

All past genius dies in our mute stillness.

Its silence is the gift that echoes,

Through our voiceless squares of spirit.

Though we are made of language,

Our power is in the silence,

The thousand movements without words.

Beyond The Touch Of Language

The un-meaning of the world is not in language,

That is its freedom.

A world without intent

Is without meaning,

Since meaning is a mode of thought,

Though thought is not only word.

In the beginning was the wordless.

The universe is self-created,

Or at least self-perpetuated,

Half of our life is free of language,

What we touch, and taste, and see and feel.

The space in which our language stills,

Is the space of silence where we breathe,

Whose meanings are feelings and perceptions,

Which we cannot name,

Mind’s deep phenomena.

Beyond the touch of language.

Keep Thinking

The heart lives in time as well as space.

We time-travel, there is no need to fly

Over the seven continents, five oceans.

Walk back into the past instead, or wait

Peacefully for the future, here it comes.

Thought the encompasser. Returning

Takes us as far as the three thousand

Mile journey, or even further, deeper

Into the spaces of the lost, those hours,

Glimmering enigmas we call memories.

We are free to leave this time and place,

We time-travel there is no need to race

From one end of landscape to the other,

All the time in eternity, and the timeless

Movement of existence, reality’s dream.

Inside the heart various Chinese boxes

Unfold, and there at the core, the tiny

Creatures we are gesticulate, then rise

To become the genie-monsters, weep

And laugh then touch ambiguous tears.

Keep thinking. It’s the escapee’s pass

To another million lives we’ll realise

As much or little as our own. Subvert

The expectations, dream beyond them,

Greater than we know. Keep thinking.

The Work

No I’m not interested in becoming you,

The creator, you are only myself turned

Inside out, and exercising your fine talent.

The greatest talent is called genius. You

I prefer to vanish behind the creation, or

We’d be trying to live each others’ lives

Though one is dead. I would have been

Uncomfortable in your skin, more so than

In my own. But the work: let us instead

Focus on the work. There you made form,

That I can study, read, identify with, use,

To enrich my own existence, banish space.

Biography is simply a lie, more of a lie than

Those we tell as creators carving out creation.

What we think we are touching is not a self

Different to our own, though the life may be,

But the common self, the human experience,

A ghost from the web of language, conjured,

A veil of words that mean other things to us

Than their meaning to all those lost referents.

It is a construct of ourselves we find raised

On the ruins of time. Do you think you know

Me? I cannot know myself. But there’s the work,

Let us rather focus on the work, evade the myth.

It is not the aches and pains of Beethoven’s life

I hear in his music. It’s the world sighing, then

Compressing all the grief and pain, joy and light,

Turmoil and tranquility, that hurricane, the calm,

Into the work. It is not Mozart dying young, lost

Music that I hear, it is the unwinding in process,

That builds a shape in time, and then the silence,

It is the work. The inexorable undying bars unfold

In interpretation. Note, word, line of sight, forms

Breathe and move again. These are our ongoing,

These are the patterns we make round us in the air,

In our brief lives. This is the making you inherit.

Hollow Reverberations

And if the poets don’t sing freedom and values,

Who will, if the poets don’t call out, lacking

Consent from the powers, lacking that mass

Endorsement, dark remuneration, absent

The sponsorship of the movers of money,

And the sellers of faiths, still un-approving

Of the world, given unseen, the emptiness….

Hollow reverberations in space place to place,

The lonely world needing a voice, lone voice,

To confirm the Void, to reiterate the absolute

Eternal presence, value, worth of the individual

Weak, fragile, transient: stand up against system,

Machine, crowd, institution, weight of enshrined,

Enthroned, received, authoritarian, ever-unjustified

Undeserved: against solidity, on behalf of ghosts

Of the sensitive deep-lived past, and the gentlest

Phantoms of the future already staring strange

At voiceless screens of dead warring mysterious

Factions drained of meaning, and in their love,

Warmth, quiet care, ships of feeling, reborn trails

Sending us all waves of incomprehension, pity.

Oh America, China, Russia, what are you, what

Were they: stand up the individual, glow the person,

And, no more part, fail to believe, neither follow nor

Own to, in lonely tears in sad eternity in the weeping

Of cities broken landscapes seas and forest poisoned,

No compromise once more with honest truth, simple

Beauty, silent love, free heart and dance of meaning.

What use our cleverness? In a lightning flash vanished

Human history, course of the species, armies, thrones,

The last conversation, the first universe, language, time

Idea and concept gone with the mind, the long the never

Lived, the strident masks, the vicious mutes, the secrets

Hardly secret, the vast movements of feeling hidden

In faces, the night-lit planet the empty city-less skies.

Bent to the beauty of nature, listening again, seeing,

Considering works of the mind not the execution

In lurid space of the interventionist nightmare dreams

Of the powerful, learning to leave all this alone, alone,

Poets like horses neighing, like birds sprinkling sound,

Nor needing forgiveness for words, seeking right ones,

The re-born fragments of human abandoned on the way.

Beyond Belief

What the sutras say, the final freedom

Is the freedom from Mind; why

They claim no path, no suffering,

No wisdom, no self, and no attainment.

The vision is a vanishing not into some

Great construct of the lost divinities,

But into what is, and beyond the Idea,

The shifting of process, energy, the tao.

So that nirvana is all around you, in you,

What cannot be seen or touched, what

Cannot be walked away from, Being

The veil, the shroud, the flesh, the form.

Language is simply left behind with mind,

So there are no sutras. Darkness and light,

The infinite plethora of moving processes,

Which the sutras suggest are therefore one,

But different, nirvana and samsara are one.

You don’t get much from teaching or being

Taught the Way, good posture, temperance,

A certain ability to deceive the mind-self.

Faiths are hocus-pocus. It’s good, feel free

By liberating yourself from mind. Watch

The waving grass, restrict your idle vision,

But don’t leave your mind by the way-side.

Keep carrying it. Otherwise, where meaning,

And values, where aesthetics, where love?

Truth is not enough. Old time temple beauty

Was not created by lax hands un-forming,

And the things of the world are not no-thing

In nirvana which is at best a dubious state

Of non-naming beyond the names of things,

And not freedom, sceptical beyond belief.

Too Much

Often stepping back from the deadly tangle

Of human emotions, from Beethoven.

Listening for the clearer, voiceless music.

As though art might free itself from us,

And vanish into Nature, be leaf or stone,

Process of water, or convoluted breeze.

Cherishing the anonymous, undocumented

Life, the maestro lacking the biography,

The nameless corner thick with weeds,

A luxuriant growth of nothing in particular,

Unidentified space, slope hidden in the map,

And devoid of the human, careless of us.

Often stepping back from the bright abstract,

Which is mind disguised as non-mind, art

Of the self pretending to lack all selfhood.

Seeking relief from the heart’s insistence

On recognition in the dumb unrecognised.

Waiting for the creator to lose that self,

And somehow disappear, why the lesser

May sometimes exceed the greater, by

Being purer truer flow of light or sound.

Certain polyphonic voices can achieve it,

The illusion of selflessness, the form

Exceeding the content, certain landscapes,

Of the non-human, the World, that has

No meaning, purpose, object or intent,

No claim on us, no point, no ownership.

Often stepping back from the terrible

Reiteration of our human affairs, so as

To find the un-false, un-pained, un-strident.

Between The Words And The Experience

Pain in memory is often merely pain,

An association turned away from, hurt

Of pride or self or stinging of remorse.

Or implicated indissolubly with beauty,

Regret, the loss, the freed and freeing.

Thinking of you without seeing you,

The ache of memory is often beauty,

Those places echo, the atmosphere

Shines and glows in the deeper mind,

Trembles with the high planet, shining

Between the words and the experience.

Here there is sky over endless rock-fall,

A moon in a fir, ten million years or one,

Dry light. A small bird flickers, present

Between shadows: there is a life in nature.

Can’t Catch This

You have to be losing it,

Before you value it, that’s half-true,

That the passing world,

The never-to-be-returned to, never

Quite caught and lived,

Haunts with beauty missed.

You have to be contemplating

Ends and not beginnings, to begin

Again to appreciate what

Was neglected in the action,

Hoard the thoughts,

And study the intense reflections.

You have to be going

To appreciate staying, saying

Goodbye to savour welcome,

Turning back to look

To see what the mountain meant.

You have to be part of the moon

Emptying reflected light out

Over a desolate sky to feel

The quiet of the air among the pines,

To attend without attending.

A New Cosmology

When the planets were abolished we had to hang

New ones in the sky, globes of matter,

Orbiting energies, in a dance

No longer of false signature

But still a harmony, their re-assurance,

Beyond the evening breeze,

In the frame of night.

When the light is gone, the past disappears,

Yet the light keeps coming,

Flare of the first moment in the last,

Which will also be the first,

And though there is no script

There is always the tremor

Of the mind being.

Though the jingling of rhyme is finished,

The lines continue to reverberate,

There is music of a different kind

Persuades the sole intelligence

That palms are swaying on Hawaiian shores,

That cedars creak in rain-blown Washington,

That waves break azure bathing Florida.

Mind is the only ground of its own being.

Poetry is no fiction, still the cry

Of the whole imagined spirit

Echoing in the spaces of its dreaming.

We have to say the simple things again,

The poem is stronger than the wind that tears

The cry of utterance from the crier.

Affirming The River

Immersive, there is a river of Being.

It moves with imperceptible flow,

And black with perpetual function

But un-repeating, a form of forms

Which themselves appear with no

Repetition within its pure identity.

Nothing looms either side of the river.

Here a stream without shores, paradox,

Enfolds every dark landscape inwardly,

Forests of feeling, stones of existence.

The river defines all freedoms freely,

The parameters of play and the fulcra

On which lives turn. You are at liberty

Within the arcs of possible horizons,

Which must shine through you to show

Glistening and shivering where you end

And they begin. Your freedom is the glow

Of light in the deep calyx becoming rose.

Nor does the river flow on from A to B.

It moves in place, like a dancer spinning,

Or the pale hands flickering over the keys.

No power can move it backward, since all

Flow in whatever direction is pure change,

Marks time, and backwards looks the same.

A river that’s all around we cannot grasp.

Its silent bed empty, but always present.

Impossible to escape, impossible to hold.

It’s what in looking deep we will not see,

But what in ignoring we’ll achieve again,

Loud in our silence and lost if we speak.

This river rolls through us, not despite us.

It’s the splashing of the un-reflected moon,

The tremor of self abstracted in the glass,

Like quanta, lacking metaphor, but singing

The woven meaning in the self-sown shape

That hovers in the memory, fuels the senses.

In the dead of winter it runs black as tar,

In the folds of summer glitters. Is the calm

That pours in sleep over the drowsy fields,

Is, suddenly, the lightning transformation

Of all that we thought or were. Depths

Where we drown, coils of our dissolution.

The Gift

You set me free. You told me the past

Dies in the instant, old forms survive

Only if minds allow, never kow-tow

To the powers, to whatever powers

Exist, never succumb, never subscribe,

Create the future that’s already in you.  

You liberated my heart from ownership,

Taught me there are no superiors, we

Come here naked and vanish blindly,

Best as beautiful ash in the ash of stars,

Galactic dust; that death not personified

Is an absence not a state; that life is all.

You set me free, to be a tree among trees,

A stream among streams, let the world in

And babble nonsense, Dada, if we would,

Which is a mirror bright with non-meaning,

With the intentionless, purposeless universe,

A concatenation of processes sans values.

You helped me comprehend we make value.

That the worlds of feeling are democracies,

No one holds a monopoly there, all equal,

When the thunderstorm echoes, the lightning

Falls, and emotion drives the outer mind

From its hidden recesses inside the inner.

You gave me the mountain and the empty air,

The everglades, the live-oaks and the cedars,

Taught me the human was the greatest poem,

Kindness the deepest value, candour, beauty

Not formed at others’ expense, expressing self

In enduring ways. You gave me infinite mind,

Which is our whole potential, form’s possibility

Beyond the miniscule, the Individual freshness.

You said that the truest art is free, open to all,

Whatever fences and walls are built around it,

In itself always free, speaking spirit to spirit,

A delivery of perceptions that any can perceive,

Therefore beyond and a definer of civilisations,

Not their slave. That violence against the body

Or mind is the greatest poison. That the traveller

Stands at the junction of past and future, both

Of which are always now, in the eternal present

Which is the unstoppable process of the world. 

That all being is a miracle and all un-miraculous.

That custom, precedent, authority are powerless

Against the depth in things which has no power.

That everything is equal in being. That liberty

Is the recognition of that fact; its establishment

Against every new tyranny of flesh or the spirit.

It speaks the language of the sole greater future,

The tongue of the wiser dead in the living mouth.

The Meaning Of Blue

A parakeet of purest blue

Squawks above a world of fire.

It is an emblem, azure-hued

Of coarse and colourful desire,

The feathered arc of self as flesh,

A case of cartilage and bone,

Over the forest’s earth and stone,

Gripping the iridescent mesh

That imitates the burning sun

In tiny orbs of glittering green.

A crier of the tropic scene,

Hung above the earth it shuns,

Half-capable of gaudy flight,

An icon of the true absurd,

Jewel in matter’s verdant night,

Flask of being turned to bird.

Free At Last

In our centuries Science at last won

And religion lost,

Its better values absorbed deep

In secular society,

Its worse ones gone to join

The madness and the rants

Of history

For which sad violence was done.

We reached the place

Where the view is clearer,

And love, and beauty

Still remain.

In our centuries the shapes of man

And woman

Began to merge with the world

Our substance shifted

The hardware more readily defined

Though complex, the software there

But harder

To establish, realised at last

In the movement that is Mind

Something Buddha maybe understood,

In opting for peace

Non-self, Mind stilled.

In our centuries those who could read

Occupied the library, saw

That those in power read no better

Often worse, that time

Like power is empty

Space a dream we live, love

What redeems us, to use a word

Among those we must recover

From religion

And bless with our new meaning,

As we go, living, through the galaxies

Free at last.

Actuality

Why speak at all if we can’t speak the truth?

“Describe what is,” they say, “describe,

Make a brighter show of being

Confess your actuality.

Though speech is not the truth,

Though ‘what is’ changes in what we seem

To see of what we are.”

The silence beyond us resonates more deeply.

We have no actuality but ideas,

The brightest show of being

Is not communicable

By words. Speech is our only truth,

And every landscape changes in its light

Within ourselves.

The Music

At night the sceptical music plays,

The chant of night is full of light,

The sea-foam and the cloud-displays

Bring me your beaches, moonlit-bright.

The surf has drowned us, rising time

Breaks in the bays, the singing sea

From out the deep’s impressive mime

Conjures its dark eternity.

Your voice is silent: be the cry

Though, that in thought imagines you,

Your healing shadow where the eye

Rests in the untrue made the true,

As the sea makes order, as silence hums

With a non-silence, as the wave,

Repeating the unrepeated, drums

On sand and rock, turns silver braid.

Declare the night is our night now,

Though we own nothing, that the blue

Moon-drenched spaces will allow

Our deep humanity its due.

Make us more than the selves we are,

Or are not, raise the notes, the tones

Out of the dark from star to star

From coiling shells and glowing stones,

Inside my mind, the waking dream,

That among palms imagines all

The movements of your heart, its theme

The waves that rise, the stars that fall.

Eye Of The Camera, Feet On The Ground

From the heights of the field

The slope runs down to a copse

Of ash trees,

This is the aesthetic perspective,

The grass is a deep green waving

In the wind, the grassy sea,

The sky is blue, white clouds

Move gracefully, the walls

Of limestone plunge and ride

Contours, the heart is high.

Crossing the field is other,

We wade through grass, we sweat

Towards shapes

Of trees, the real perspective,

Grass is the watery mass that tires

The body, wind and light beat

At the eyes, make tears of effort,

Clouds exude cold, then heat,

The walls converge to a gate

Where the mud lies deep.

The terrible ecstasy of living possesses

Mind and bodies drowned

In actuality, you

And I move to its ancient rhythms,

The dance is being, these are the fields

That feel no past that exist free

Of whoever has ventured through them,

What they have raised, absorbed.

They are Now and Future, shoals

Of green beauty, dunes of unearthly light.

The Place Un-Haunted

The place un-haunted, the mind

Unhampered by messages

Scrawled on stone

Or signs from the blue.

A landscape devoid of battles,

Artefacts, event-packed levels,

The rocks yielding no fossils,

Surface reverting to mosses.

A world of wind-blown hollows,

Where nothing remembers.

Far to the south a forgotten sun,

The calm in day’s eye.

Nothing here waiting for Woman

To be born, for Man to vanish.

No cry of the leaves

Denoting meaning.

Moon-dune grass in the wind,

Slow slopes of silence,

A sense of how night will feel

And the silvered stars.

Billows of cloud on horizons

Free of associations,

Far-off hills without names,

Wildflowers without duties,

Breezes free of responsibility.

In a distance no one walks,

The weight of the earth

Hanging without effort.

Nothing immense, the tiny

Intricate, formed,

The fractal deeps ordered,

The chaos imaginary

As is the nothingness.

The bright wind dancing

Over the fields, the light

In the air following.

No hands touching

The gate of significance.

A flickering of birds,

With their sibilant calls.

An un-haunted space

In which to create

The shine of mirrors

The idea of mountains.

Advice About Nothing

Continue until the technique is subsumed

In the sense of flow, the right action arising.

Wait on the total constraint of the hidden form.

As in the art of free verse where nothing is free.

Allow the tools to work themselves, the shape

To sculpt itself, the notes to fill the clef silently.

Any sense of progress will always be a surprise.

Consider content, the path appears, mind follows.

Practise until the unconscious mind takes over

The role of the conscious self then anticipates.

The breeze is already into the trees, the wave

Has already washed the stones and gone by.

What is left behind is what you were not expecting

When you tried to hold the air and trap the water,

Until the act of opening the hands invokes the act

Of endlessly opening the hands to a falling light.

Then the dancer dances without dancing, fingers

Move un-moving, the maker is beyond the making.

Doing nothing, attend to the something in the nothing.

The something in the nothing is the shape of emptiness.

Repeat whatever it was occurred until it occurs again,

Consider the quivering presence of forms. Continue. 

Unwritten

Being comfortable with emptiness is a gift

I wish I’d comprehended when I was young.

Then I needed everything to happen at once.

Now I wish nothing to happen one at a time.

The mythology of a life takes time to create,

And we not even aware of our construction.

It may seem that a life occurs to and around,

In which the movements are an act foreseen,

But in fact every moment is a play of freedom,

More or less. Looking back the role expands,

The billowing of the backcloth grows familiar,

The scene one we somehow expected to create.

It vanishes. Thank goodness it’s lost to time.

At worst the things we made survive, not us,

As if you might think my mind remains in this,

When in fact the journey is already complete,

And the form stands in its own light, one more

Move of the species, attempt at creating Man

And Woman, our order out of the wider order,

Child’s pool carved out of the wash of the sea.

It’s your mind moves here. Language ascends

From the upturned face to the singing azure,

Chasing the images. The skies on fire glitter

With galaxies, distances, unwritten emptiness.

Listen To Yourself

Here is the inner voice choosing the self,

Creating the human. Fragmentary tongue

You debate the being of worlds, shatter

Glisten, rebuild, are moon in the water,

From which identity and memory rise,

Distorted discourse in a swirl of forms.

You are not a mirror in which I reflect,

But the river of I flowing over the weirs,

Curbed in the deep pools, weed-tangled,

Jetting, shooting the rapids of existence,

My calms, my coils and whorls of time,

My torrents and remains, my abysses.

Here is the bitter dialogue in the mind,

The argument begun in youth, never

Ended, until we spin from the first

Grasp the unforeseen consequences,

The voice that mutters and reproaches,

Shouts and cries in marvellous delight.

Here is the complex that makes the man,

And that strange attractor of personality,

The repeated, never repeating orbit flown

Within the bounds of Individual pattern,

Around the shifting flickering tremor of I,

Here is the voice, buried in un-dark deeps.

Harming Freely Cannot Set Us Free

Softly the deer shift over the slope

In the landscape of fear. The wolves

Are elsewhere but the dread of wolves

Moves round wolf like a field of force,

Driving the herd steadily onwards.

Watch a whole ecology shift towards

The predator’s existence. The very soil,

The air is subtly changed, the hollows

Fill with deeper hollows, expectation

Moves differently, our world’s adrift.

We see it in ourselves, why the violent

Must be separated forever from the web

Of fuller meaning, why the tyrannies

Of amorality and immorality must be

Countered with decency, why no cause

Is just that maims innocents, no freedom

Ever a true freedom that espouses hatred.

In the landscape of fear no more excuses

For the predators, and no space for their

Self-justifications, their erroneous creeds,

Blind faiths, claims, desires, possessions.

The fighters for freedom slaughter liberty,

That is a truth that demands true contrition.

Tyrants from above echo tyrants from below.

Humility is endless. A quarrel with ourselves

Alone will purge the violence of the species.

The landscape of fear is not the space of love,

The predators of fear are not to be celebrated.

Wind In Grass

The wind moves over the mountainside, so

The mind moves,

The mind moves so the wind moves

Over the mountainside,

In a not-quite-reciprocal dance of being.

The field of grass is in both our minds,

Therefore both minds are one mind

And two,

The grass being no-mind

No-mind in both minds.

The silence before the wind blew

Was not the silence after,

The present is never the past,

Only mind is made

From the persistence of the signal.

Why should I mind the brushing

Of grass over the skin,

Or the insect brushing

The grass with its feet?

Life shades into non-life.

And consciousness shades

Into awareness, awareness

Into perception,

Mind into what runs under mind

And through it.

The windhover undermines the silence,

Without crying

In the harbour of the wind.

Its cry the memory of its cry

Echoing.

The light in the grass

Is golden, the windhover

In the wind is golden,

The golden grass

Waves in the windhover’s eye.

Between us the rippling grass

Is like the stream of instants,

Its green light meets

The insistent searching of the eye,

Its net connects us.

The mind of the heron

The mind of the windhover

Are other.

My mind your mind

And their minds are other.

The cloud is a shadow over the grass,

The wind is a shadow over the grass,

You and I

Move

Over the shadowy grass.

Windhover flails in the wind

On outstretched wings.

It moves against the wind

That moves against it,

The wind that blows in our faces.

The language of cloud is movement.

The language of grass is movement.

The tree is a word spoken,