Irreality
A. S. Kline © 2012 All Rights Reserved
This work may be freely reproduced, stored,
and transmitted, electronically or otherwise, for any non-commercial purpose.
Contents
The
Sunflower And The Heliotrope
Communication
Is A Purpose Of Meaning
Identity
Retrieved From The Sea
Mind
Is A Passion Of Its Own Creation
Reality
Is Imagination’s Mirror.
Body
Cooling, Your Mind Goes Cold?
States
Of Awakening In Louisiana
Its
Movement Is The Drama In The Mind
Far
Enough, High Enough, To Turn Back
Woman
The Pillar And The Flame
The
Man Of The Future Looks At The Stars
Everything
Is All Of What It Seems
Little
Figures In Enamelled Fields
Human
Order Is A Majesty Of Mind
Perceptions
Of Metaphor Out West
The
Dark Green Poem Of The Mind
The image of the motion
of air in the seeing
Eye troubles the
In the dark of the
mirror an image of motion
Reveals the imagined
movement of the cedar.
In the eye of the
mind the image of the mirror
Is the image of wind
in the image of the cedar.
An imagined wind
blows the imagined cedar,
In the eye of the
mind, in the darkened motion
Of the image on the
glass of an imagined mirror.
In the imagined mind
the motion of air disturbs
The image of
night-bound cedar in the shining
Image reflected from
the darkness of its mirror.
An imagined
reflection shimmers on black glass;
It is the image of
an eye gazing on blown cedar.
The image of the
motion of light in the night air
Disturbs the
movement of the nocturnal cedars.
The image of process
of mind in the seeing eye
Stirs the mirrors of
sight in the gleaming branches,
Reflects the
invisible stars and the planets rising
Behind the mind in the
darkness of moving cedar.
The mirrors of branches
in the glittering cedars
Stir images of
unseen stars and planets rising
Out of the silence
of glittering dark reflections.
The vast wind
carries the stars among the cedars
In the unseen image
of
Darkness of branches,
tremor of imagined motion
On mirrors of minds in
the wild tremulous night.
But is our cold. The
frost and wind
Are names of thoughts,
the reality we create.
The thought of a
sadness shrieking in the air,
Is not the sound in
the ear of wind and cold,
But simply the sound
of sad mind shrieking.
The wind and cold
have no minds for winter,
But these minds do.
Likewise the bright sun
Rising in the eye
over larch and birches
Heavy with snow, is
not minded to mourn.
Where does the black
crow sing between
Worlds? Is it happy
or unhappy, dancing
Over the crust of
light? Bare morning burns,
Whether with ice or
fire. This landscape now
Is what you make of
it, dreaming, are made.
The mind of the bird
and the un-mind of Earth
Are one. We
interpret their beautiful signs,
That point over the
drifts of the frozen plain.
Some parts of the
mind are bright. Some glow
With last night’s fires
and the far galactic veils;
We are not deceived.
Equally, cold thickens.
A word of cold and a
word of heat contend,
To form the language
without indifference,
Order without intent.
The lack of purpose
Exuded by your
thoughts of the universe,
Is a reason for
believing in cold and heat
And not the joy or
misery of the season.
The thought of the
frost and wind and sun,
Is the thought of
what you the maker know,
In the inner making,
is never the thing itself.
Heliotrope its
fragrant purple turns,
Singing the high praises
of the sun.
The flower of the
sun turns in seething space,
Becomes a sunflower
in the turning mind,
Call this what you
will,
You bring me the
sunflower’s midsummer blaze,
You bring me the
heliotrope burning in violet.
I eat the oily seeds
of becoming.
Whatever we were is
changing in what we are,
The white sun draws
ours eyes from time and space,
Into the inner
stations.
I am the sunflower,
if you say so, you are star
Or heliotrope in its
purple obeisance.
We turn to the light
Of galaxies, turn to
the orbit of selves, turn
In the splendour of
green leaves and storms,
To every token of the
daedal Earth.
And the vast light
beyond the window
Were both more of reality
than I am.
And the huge past
which was thought,
Was more than the
far external glow,
Or less; as the
gleam beyond the glass
Was less or more
than insubstantial past.
I hovered between
the two. But the two
Were hovering in me,
so I proved more:
More than the solid
phantoms of the past,
Or than the light in
its first glimmerings.
Green poured from
leaves that were not green.
In the silence a
yellow sun shone that was not yellow.
(In the eye the
yellow sun shone from a clear sky,
Soft green leaves
flickered over a pebbled shore,
Above the cry of
long-billed gulls in the waves.)
The sound of waves
rose from a soundless tide.
Wind in the morning
light blew in noiseless air.
The cry of gulls was
a cry from the mute heavens.
(In the ear the
crash of breakers drummed on stone,
The gusts of wind
sighed through the moving leaves,
Thought wheeled to
the cry of grey abandoned gulls.)
The flesh of
tasteless fruit was on the palate.
The foot resisted
insubstantial sand.
Flowers without fragrance
hung in air.
(In our mouths the mass
of fruit broke sweet,
We kicked against the
blondness of burning sand,
Our spirits drowned
in the perfume of bright flowers.)
This is the sense of
I, the ground of I,
Like the perception
inside of a dark river,
The flow of power is
more than what’s in the eye.
Out of the air we
grasp the night-winds’ flowing.
The process sings
and we detect the process,
Beyond the mere flow
itself in the form of flow,
Which is the sense
of being beyond becoming.
Here are the poles
between which charged veils ride.
Here are the
contrasts and the opposites,
With which the mind
is charged, its deep conjunctions,
Here are the symbols,
fleshly analogies.
How is it that you
catch the world gone by,
The red-breasted
bird in flight, the magnolia
Fallen, the whirling
eye of the storm,
Except through
feeling?
The I proclaims no
necessary meaning.
Among the welter of
necessary facts
That follow from the
constructs outside,
All the boundaries
that organize themselves,
The I declares no
necessary purpose.
The feel of freedom
is the eternal feeling,
That brings on fear.
The bright poles glimmer.
The thought of a
feeling may be a feeling.
What begins must
begin in memory, and ends there.
The meeting is the
inward resolution of what goes back
Into the morning
bayou;
Its dark reflective
green, its moist wet trees,
The snapping of
fish, the alligator-silence.
The first encounter
is the last beginning, which like the first
Takes place in
thoughts where daylight
Is mingled with the
mind’s fresh unfolding,
A certain
understanding of the shadows,
Which makes the
sense of fate, the false assurance,
Only the meeting of
dawn with the river.
There was the river
flowing in the moonlight, your river,
Showing what was
there and what was not there, being
Itself a symbol of
its progression,
An endless
transience, to which they gave a name,
Those peoples who
once lived along its shores,
And now give way to
others, enter in them.
The meeting is
already comprehended, as is the ending,
You so said. What
ends in memory always began there,
Only in a different
form of twilight.
The green and purple
storm has tinged the horizon.
The heron lifts from
the roots of some deep inlet,
Its flight a fold of
morning and the river.
As cloud stirs, crow
flies, white sun whirls.
What moves beyond
the mind moves the mind,
The forms it cannot
make surround its making.
What takes place in
the funnel of my thoughts,
Blown on by the
massive winds of darkness,
Is not the sum of
blackness nor the self.
The giant levers
move the tiniest motions.
The tiny motion of
the powers of thought,
Is gazed on by the
massive light of silence.
The image of the
feeling of an image,
Is this bright
symbol that we send to oceans.
The banners waving,
the high bright banners,
Signal that
something moves not mind alone,
But in the mind’s
conjunction with being.
We cannot say what
moves beyond the mind,
Except that it is
not something we created,
Else why these
massive winds of light and darkness?
The
The hum of the giant
mirrors of the sky.
Its castanets follow
the flow of skirts,
It’s a rhythm heard
on a street
In another century,
The vibrant strings
of the guitar.
The strings of the
air quiver in your mind,
The castanets beat
on your memory,
A concatenation of
sounds
That progress in
time.
The fandango of time
dances in your mind.
The sounds in your
mind dance over your feelings,
Their rhythm joins
with that of castanets.
A flow of skirts
entangles memory,
That flickers in
another century.
The tremors of
feeling form a dance in time.
The feelings in your
mind dance around you,
Their castanets
chatter, their skirts flow,
You are a rhythm on
a street
In another century.
Mind in the air
dances the fandango of time.
A reddened glow in a
corner of the morning.
There were the
senses, too, the mind of body,
There were the
senses, too, the body of mind.
And your face, there,
the simple skin and bone,
Was still your face.
The tough-skinned fruit
Hung there between
the real and unreal, as
Pledge of the
movement between realms,
Uniting them, the live,
the dead, that exists
In memory only, but
memory is held inside
In the form, if the object
embodies meaning,
As frozen reflection,
as a mirror of the real.
Memory is
Persephone’s dark realm; the poem
Of mind is feeling,
overt thought, a messenger.
The flickering
swallow it flies through night,
Battered by
turbulence, over death-black seas.
The form contains
the past as image. Meaning
Is stored there,
mind alone provides the key
To unlock the
process that is a re-creation
Of meaning in the
present from frozen form,
Which is also the present,
where alone past is,
And all the potential
futures of imagination,
As all the potential
futures of the dual world.
The artefact, the
object and the self, they are
Strangest
embodiments that go on persisting.
Not change alone
creates the perception Time.
Rather the change
followed by persistence,
Persistence opening
vastly in fresh change.
And both in the
mind, and somehow in the real.
The pomegranate hides
its blood-red seeds,
Which eaten are a
pledge of the re-creation,
A gift of the dark to
us for our gifts to the dark.
So the pips of
existence in your mouth, the blood
Of being, substantial,
on your tongue, the rind
Of time and space, the
bright glow of the globe
As it hangs from the
zenith of
It chants itself
across the burning bay.
It forms the wind and
sea for company,
It ruffles the
leaves of spun reality.
Out of disorder,
order with no design
Wrings the bells of
the flowers azure,
Holds up mirrors:
the great glass of sky,
The black glass of
the river roaring on.
It is
self-organised, our singing world.
Its chant in you is
the chant beyond.
Form is the essence
of the real outside
And in, not simply
matter that is energy.
You must have a mind
of chaos to sing.
Out of the dark
relation will appear notes
Of the scale of
mountains or of clouds,
Dots on a stave of mysterious
mutation.
A chaos deep in you
will transform itself.
Glimmer of lucent
meanings hovering
In the bright water
show a fin or ray,
The fierce burning season
plunges there.
Or of ore, argent of
silvering, almost a form
Is singing there
below the conscious threshold,
But that also is
you, whether asleep or woken,
It is the churning
of the unfamiliar tide surprise.
Descends into
American seas.
We pass our dawn to
you.
Your evening ends in
Pacific mysteries.
Stars of the great
steppes rise in our East,
The Moon I send you
is no moon of mine.
The jewels you
receive
Are some green necklet
of the windblown brine.
All our deliverance
from exhausted night,
Comes from your
depths of phosphorescent dark.
The blackness that
you see
Out of our skies
ascends in its effulgent arc.
Fashioned of
brightness blown towards our West,
The galaxy hangs
milk in a web of fire.
I send the turning
Wheel.
It brings the
burning Swan, the Eagle and the Lyre.
Is it the word we
could not give each other?
A blue wind gathers
over the
The ferryboat is
blue in the evening breeze.
Where are the
markets for the depths of soul,
The burgeoning
markets with living wares?
Why are the days descending
on the squares?
Green alligators
cruise in the blind bayous.
When comes the darkness
cradling us in light,
The delicate
darkness filled with orange stars,
The Gulf of being where
the squids fly high,
Argentine fish and
emotions of deep ocean?
How shall I say the
word I could not say?
Was it the word you
gave, already given?
The blue wind runs in
reefs beyond the bay.
Black cars climb
bridges in the evening sky.
In the
looking-glass, the mirrored river
Flowing through the
caverns of the mind.
The imaginary glow
of intrinsic moons,
A world on the
mantelpiece, a house
All dark in twilight
under a cloudless blue.
And why not the
silent woman in the stars,
The shape of
humanity against the sun,
A dove in the wind
green-foliaged a tree,
Feathered limbs
dissolved in pumice stone,
A strange machine its
purposes unknown?
Still there’s deep
logic to the imagination.
To startle the mind
accept the mind has laws.
Of values, that is
not the end of values.
The peculiar music
plays, the barer shapes
Twist on the canvas,
sparse the poetry,
But you and I are
love in the breakers’ roar,
The breakers fall
true on the glittering beach,
The shore sings
beauty in shining resonance.
The world beyond the
mind is given meaning.
The bird that sang,
the bronze-feathered bird,
The one
Imagination sings on
the perch of night,
Its cry is what the
alien dark sings long.
It is a cry of
energies without purpose,
No less tender than
more cruel to hear.
The world without a
purpose is the void,
The void without a
purpose is the world.
When being seems to
be and seeming is,
The form of the mind
is in the poetry.
The form of the
poetry is in the mind.
O bright values call
on the twigs of night!
For you and I are
love in the silvered dark,
The darkness gathers
true on a shining shore,
The shore sings
beauty in gleaming resonance.
We grant the world
beyond its only meaning.
The iceman and the
snowman may be one,
Carving the drifts
of darkness,
In the mirror,
Spreading the sheet,
watching the body lie
Like soapstone
angled sharp to oblivion.
But let us not make
death a personage.
There is no form
under the skeletal skull,
Waving its silent diktat
in the air,
Above your head,
Vanishing in shadow
down the night,
Gathering bright
cold in the atmosphere.
There is no empire
and no emperor.
Its limousine idles
at no dead man’s door,
No ghost gusts
across the empty floor.
Your sighing
Is memory in the
deepest plane of night,
Gathering in its
arms what was best-loved.
I understand: you want
it real.
You wish it then
incomprehensible,
A tree without cedar
bark, or swollen cones,
Un-rooted, waving to
galactic veils
A tree that is not and
yet is imagination.
It is a tree that
cannot touch your life,
I understand, you
wish it so.
Since if it could it
would be the tree within,
And simply then a
pass of the fantasy,
Making, as I, a
universe from mind
Although I say the
universe is given.
Your tall tree bows
down somehow to brush
The signs of
suffering from your cheek,
Yet cannot do so.
It is a tree with no
Platonic grove
To give it
immaterial meaning there,
It simply hovers in
the
You think I cannot
comprehend the wish,
Or cannot comprehend
the depths of pain,
Or more the joy, the
sheer delight?
It is its shade that
chills me, how it cheats
The burning sun of
all its depths of night,
Casting its own deep
nightfall on the ground.
I plant my own trees
in the dark beyond.
Green glittering
branches of eternity,
Baryons fleeing
through obscure space-time,
Fragments of light
from pasts beyond recall,
Ready to launch some
later universe,
That neither you nor
I are ready for.
Tree not of my
design, who could create
Anything as
mysterious as a tree,
That even when
explained is not what we are?
Its flesh is other,
its sap, its fruit, its fibre.
It made itself out
of the otherness,
And resurrected
itself in me. Mind is the tree.
Of light on the
screen. It takes no time
To cross the floor
or pierce the glass.
Riding a light-beam
is outside of time.
The light’s a memory
containing meaning.
We measure time
watching it cross the floor,
Or cut the window
plane in fire,
So faint it hardly
matches our desire
The longing at the
very heart of us
For beginnings and
for endings.
Strange that the
ancient mind considered
Light flowed out of
the eye to illuminate,
But simply a
confusion of light with meaning.
Meaning flows from
the mind to explicate;
Meaning surrounds
the oldest galaxy.
Mind merged with the
world is irreality.
The poem gives the
massive force of feeling.
The massive force of
feeling is from thought.
Thought goes down
into the memory, process.
Out of the memory,
process dredges feeling.
The massive force of
feeling empowers the poem.
So you step from a
bright lawn with statues,
Out of a white
building filled with paintings,
To face the camera
on a day of meaning.
The shutter blinks
on eternities of feeling.
The photo lost, the
mind retains the image.
Cars and people
framed the eternal fury.
Light shone as in
some nuclear explosion,
To lay life bare and
shatter all illusions.
The massive force of
love becomes the poem.
Into autumn, into
the bowl of trees and lake,
Round which the
white statues stand musing,
If they could. The
beautifully human glistens.
It is the child
feeding bread to the silver carp.
It takes a while to
understand the human is greater
Than the inhuman;
there is no poverty in the air;
We are not less than
we have been, we are more,
A more moral world,
a scientific comprehension
Of what flickers
through the mind the universe.
Because both are
one. We cannot leave the play,
And what plays
without us has no meaning,
Though it has a
presence out of consciousness,
Whatever that would
mean. The stars rotate,
In a glittering that
is still a thread of promise.
A moral eye looks
out, it is filled with values.
It brings you beauty,
a word, and affection,
It brings you the
neutral consciousness of light
From autumnal
galaxies that have no autumn,
But you will not
look neutrally on these skies.
After the flowers
have fallen the children play,
In a space that is
overblown with leaves and petals,
The grass shows the
print of others who were there.
They are the figures
in the unfinished drama,
Each one the flicker
of mind, invented, re-invented.
Why then we in ours?
Its weeds and stones, its shelves
Of light, do not
provoke a musing about its thought.
Its surface and its
depth are no names of thoughts,
As ours are. Pike
feels without describing its feelings.
So creatures, planets,
stars and the galaxies: universe
Not
self-descriptive, other than we are, is unresponsive
Mirror, reflecting
back ourselves with no new message.
Look in the deeper
mirror inside to reveal the ghosts,
The phantoms of
thought swimming through memories,
The dreadful glass
that reveals yourself, strange pierrot,
Who wait forever in
the wings of a spectral darkness,
Never to be called
on stage. Pale clown on the ladder,
Lifted above the
boards, waving at moons and starlight,
Look in the deeper
mirror to see your bare exiled self.
Pike moves through
interior dark which is endless glow
Of its own element,
between earth and air, never a fire
Burning to reveal
the alien being. But we are self-exiles,
Strangest of things,
reflective mind, stranger than dumb
Universe, whose only
strangeness is self-consistency.
But we are
difference. Where the pike glimmers slowly
Through dark
silence, we in our particular language rave;
This human that
partakes of the same matter, tint, form,
That shouts to the
muteness, howls for identity, thinks
Itself far from
every origin, distant from every consolation.
Being is the river now
immersing everything,
The long black flow.
Outside the river is
nowhere. We are inside
The river we cannot leave,
it is inside us.
As it seems to flow.
After the turbulence
passes, the current’s whorls
Dissolve the river
that was in the river that is,
It is still the
flow.
It has no shores;
sun, moon, and stars are inside
The river, night and
day, its lights and shadows
Illuminate the flow.
Trees (with white
hair of leaves) and reflected trees
Are both within the
waters, they shine there,
Phantoms of the
flow.
The dead gather there,
inside the minds of the living.
Populate its bed with
fish and birds, houses gleam there,
Deep inside the
flow.
Every perception is
water, we would like to know
Something of its
source, or its destination; it has none,
There is just the
flow.
Stepping through its
blackness there is no force impelling,
But to walk upstream
through memory is hard,
Against the flow.
As in space, where
no gravity exists, we swim and breathe,
In volumes without
air, our fires are drowned,
Submerged in flow.
Other creatures,
plants, existences, our dreams, sway there.
Down its cascades,
like flumes, the debris surges,
Embraced by flow.
Under the light and
air, appearances, there is the river.
You ask the purpose
of the river, it has no purpose,
An un-purposed flow.
The cry of the birds
is the cry of the mind,
In trees that sigh
with the intellect’s sighs.
But the bright sun gleams
on the bay.
Waves break in the
breakers of thought.
Over the shores of
thought, bare feet
Tread the shells and
the pebbles of thought.
But the sun rings
out in the sky.
Slowly a boat of
imagination, its white sail
Cutting the farthest
tint of azure horizon,
Crosses the gulf
with barely visible wake.
But the sun on the
hillside shines.
A cloud, or two,
selfless, create themselves,
And un-selved float
alone in a tranquil blue;
A gull, a ‘y’, soars
and cries, sinks, floats and cries.
But the sun proclaims
other and I.
It trembled in the
storm of evoked emotion.
The power of the
emotion bore no proportion
To the solidity of
the face in its real existence.
I considered the
meaning of its real existence.
It had been the
other that impinged on mind,
But in separate
existence of that mind; a mask
Which was then solid
in primary perception.
It might now be
solid or not solid, an unknown,
As the state of a
place we saw but are absent from,
Or a place whose
name is seen, or the room
Beyond the door, but
to live is to assume.
So the real and the
unreal are one in the irreal.
The face as it was
and the face in memory,
The face in thought,
the face of emotion, are one.
None of them is less
the face, or more the meaning.
Now I considered the
storm of evoked emotion.
This implies that what
the face contains is more
Than the face
itself, it drags along the person,
And other faces,
bridges, cities, rivers, speeches.
So the face
encompasses tracts of time and space.
The face in effect
is a world, with a world’s tremor,
An atmosphere, a
challenge, a resistance, a fabric.
The face is a globe
that surrounds and lights me.
The face is inside
my mind and I am inside it.
I explore the
dimensions of its remembered arc.
I try to explain the
vast tides of feeling, blown,
In the eye of the
storm, over its errant landscape.
The power of the
storm bore no obvious relation
To the extent of
country I observed beneath me.
There was a howling
in the wilderness of air,
And then a calm. In
the calm I saw the face.
What you can leave
behind is only yours.
A little more than
what a photo might convey.
A little less than
others, a strange identity.
It is as though you
recomposed the picture of self,
And merged it with a
picture of the species,
Or took the seasons
of life and drew from them
A sketch of the
possibilities, dim inexplicable.
What you create can
never be what you are.
The icy analysis
will not capture the laughter.
Creation is what you
are and what you are not,
A constant turmoil
whose artefacts are other.
Behind the Greek
statues, the anonymous artist.
Best so. Since even the
named are anonymous.
And what you think
you know is only what seems,
The vagueness around
which unrealities hover.
You would leave
behind your particular sun,
The trees in your
mind, the skin of your world,
The
three-dimensional taste of your century,
And not the past
which has only the one dimension.
You would leave
behind what you loved, yet
You take that with
you, or rather take nothing,
To become the
particles of a new arrangement,
Which is dissolution
and transformation both.
You would leave
behind a message and a pointer,
A sign set high
without name, without direction,
Conveying the fact
of inner destination outwardly,
The purpose imposed,
the values to be conveyed.
You would pass like
Mercury over the horizon,
Close to the sun,
carrying its sole communication,
The feel of its
light on the skin, the sense of its fire,
The strength of its
burgeoning in the green fuse.
You would find a
metaphor to convey your self,
Though you cannot
find yourself when you try,
Only the blacks and
whites in their faded frames,
The paper,
splinters, fragments of stick and stone.
Gold was the
luminary of the sun.
White was the
snowfall and its landscape,
The lack of form,
the blankness of the void.
Black, purple,
silver were his colours.
Blue was the azure
of the wild surround,
The mirror where the
clouds went to and fro,
The colour of the
sea the breaking sea.
His was the twilight
of black, silver, purple,
And the shadow of the
angled depths at
The
Floating a barque
across the bays of mountain.
Green was the word
of life, the sphere of life,
The poem of the
summer mind in its occasion.
Yellow the sunflower
singing to the sun.
Silver, black and
purple were his colours.
The wine is on the
palate, the stars fall down,
Imagination weaves
in the hulls of darkness.
His were the tones
of silver, black and purple,
Shrouds of the evening
in the tangled wood.
It was self-same at
every level of being.
Its boundary was the
detailed infinite,
Its repetition was
never the same arriving.
An order plied in
the heart of our dimensions.
It hovered about the
form of its renewal,
Returned along the
paths of its unseen centres,
Marked out a domain,
between a space and space.
An order moved, but
never the same twice seen,
As the flow in its
flume, braided in infinite motion,
Never the same,
coils in the threads of water,
Ever the same dark
current in the living mind.
An order, not our
order, fills all our objects,
Makes our horizons,
spins the processes,
Reaches down through
all the planes of being,
Reaches out to all the
folds of the universe.
An order,
self-organising, self-created,
The un-designed,
presents its scaled invention,
Exemplifies
spontaneous artistry, perfects
The rigour of the
care-less hand and eye.
An order, given,
un-made, free, marvellous,
Shone through the
garden to the statue’s base,
That held there white,
uncompromising beauty,
Form of the human,
cast from chaotic mind.
What would be mind
in the cells, the metal?
As for me, what
comes without emotion,
Is the motionless
orbit of blind eyes and skin.
As for me, I can
only understand being,
By feeling the
texture of a comprehension,
By taking sides in
the inwardness of values,
By reading the world
over and over again,
Until there are
favourites, influences, forms,
Until on the pillow
at night the shape cries
And the objects
shift in mesmerising dark,
In the inner dance,
or in their inward storm.
Values are the
decision of their passions,
As beliefs are the acts
of the inner human,
Truths of the irreal
though not of the real,
Our only paths to
the gestures of meaning.
Mind is a passion of
its own creation,
Which lies below
creative consciousness.
Consciousness is the
identity of mind,
Projecting meaning
onto the mindless world,
And into the
empathetic stir of the other,
Human or creature,
wherever circuits glisten.
We wait the shadows
on the moonlit screen,
To cast our shadows
on the silvered lawns.
Beyond all my
conception.
You sail phosphor
seas
On a shell-strewn
shore.
Your pastorale is my
cavatina,
The psaltery,
theorbo of hours,
Diaphanous
limpidity, transparence
Of
You are the artist
of the verb I make.
My making is your
tune,
Melody of light, of
shadow,
You sail seas,
White with primeval
foam of mind forlorn,
Moon-creature of
desire
You are the blanch
Of ivory meaning in
the frost of dawn.
Atramentous night,
where I exist,
Simply clothes the
pale hull of your sails
With branches full
of constellated fruit
To hang in tinkling dark
about the moon.
What use the
frustration of intelligence?
The plain sense is
mysterious enough,
The figure fully
seen its alien face.
There is a necessary
move to bring
Existence to the reader
in the light,
After the night’s
insomnia, the rain,
The green glass of
stars, the restlessness.
Slowly the obscure
world unwraps itself.
It is a figure of
the dreaming mind,
And has no value unless
you set it there,
And has no meaning
if you move your place.
All the extraneous
is to make a music.
It is never the
music that we wish to hear,
The one that brings
a purpose to the lack
Of purpose, the one
that mirrors there our face.
Stare if you will at
the morning window.
This is the hour
before all time begins.
Welcome the form of
its obscurity,
It denies for you
the absolute of things.
It was there in the
green glass. The mind is a bee,
Creeping close to
the trumpet heart of the crimson
Flower. And the mind
is a flower above the flower’s
Meaning,
anticipating the rain the flower does not
From those
thunder-headed clouds of dark and grey.
Mind will go chasing
meaning forever down paths
Of the universe. And
meaning is the signification
To self of patterns
of existence in mind’s languages,
Which may or may not
correspond to world, as bee
And flower do, or
the act of perceiving both. Soon,
We will have to have
a new metaphysics of meaning.
Meanwhile the child
chases memory into the green
Mirrors, into those
shimmering frames of receding
Selves, each fainter
and more distant than the last,
Each moving, gazing,
troubled, waving, smiling.
It is immaterial
whether or not there is a mirror.
The deep green
selves are chasing a deeper light.
Reality is
Imagination’s mirror.
Mind causes the
grass to be green, stops
Us dying of the
intolerable emptiness
Of the void, or
dying of our crying.
The poem is the
strength of its succession;
The eye in the dark
the proof that we are
Dreaming; our dreams,
of the real. That death
Is absence of
reality, the mind its presence.
The poem is the
power of its conceiving.
Those memories in
the head walk and talk,
With the living faces
of forty years ago,
Pick the flowers, are
a tempest roaring.
The poem is the
force of its conception,
The strength of its
seriousness, of the mind
Beyond it, of the
world behind the mind,
Of the power to
resist the phantom night.
The Other, the
repugnance, the mind interpreting,
Foisting a meaning
on a wholly valid alternative.
Sartre’s root,
poking itself into the heart’s nausea,
Pure alien. If we
met minds in the universe other
Than human, they
would be less alien than root.
Or fly. Some can’t
love everyone however hard
They try. Or embrace
the void. Or float here free
Of all
responsibility. Some grapple with the tree.
Or say the elusive
resonance of instruments
In the silvery echo
of the gone mind’s conception,
Therefore flickers
in the landscape of the hearer,
In echoes above the
mutter of the fall and river,
And becomes a stream
of feeling silvery falling,
Plummeting now,
shattered on those black rocks.
Which are Death, or
its representation in music,
The silence after
the echo, the septet before septet
Again, and after
feeling. There is a distance from art,
A work of art, that
increases and decreases, sometimes
Across a chasm,
sometimes too near then for the spirit,
Like this. The black
frames of the stands glisten, the chairs
Are people and the
people chairs, the phantom vanishes,
And the movements of
the sounds transpose reality.
And if the septet is
not the real septet, but the tremor
In the mind of a
ghost of the hearer’s own conception?
Then we understand
the one artefact has many meanings,
As many as there are
minds. And even these sciences
Can only describe
the structure the process perceived,
And not the exhaustion
of all movements of the process,
Which is the non-computable
nature of unfolded being,
Infinitely
recursive, loquacious in its ambiguity, and so
As unrepeatable as
the septet, and the feelings it evokes.
The world is locked
in repetition, of beauty, of meaning.
Immortalising, yes,
a specific fly, you can’t kill
A fly you’ve just
put in a poem however much
The buzzing annoys
you, it’s no worse than
The buzzing of an Earth
of phantoms round you,
And maybe in a
hundred years no house, no flies,
But the glory of the
wastelands, glowing softly,
Nor the impossible
frenzy of all these mad rituals
Going on and on in
the buying, selling, screaming,
Laughing, worlds of
the shadows, nations, dreams,
Senseless artefacts
of the minds, not enough mind.
No harm in the fly.
Plenty of harm in the world,
We put there, beyond
the fly, the glass, green
Summits of trees
hanging on clouds of white, one
Patch, no two of
blue, above dark volumes of grey,
Which is to say further
this way so higher, apparently,
And the hum of
traffic which replaces the buzzing
As the fly halts to
consider another kind of irreality
Utterly than mine, I
assume, but it’s not the specific
Fly that becomes
immortal, it’s the meaning of fly,
As it’s not the poet
who is immortalised (ah, fame!)
In the poem, but the
meaning in the poem, its buzz.
Nor you the split
boughs cased with ice,
The dazzled mastery
of the unintelligible
Shivering before the
advent of the sun.
Love cannot be the
windless leaves creaking,
Over the frustration
of the bared white grass,
Between the dry
canals, the chill underpass,
Where shadowy
concrete underpins the light.
Love cannot be the
cry that rang unintended
Over the criss-cross
of the phantom sirens,
However dull and
colourless world’s leavings
When feeling lapses
out of your arteries.
Love cannot be the
billowing of dumb cloud,
Passing in what we
call the blue serene,
Though devoid of any
instinct for serenity.
Love is another
meaning of the sun, as bright as fire.
Than reality, as
mind is something less than a black hole
Sucking in matter from
its galaxy to message-less death,
Or a rebirth in
chaos? You equate power to kill us
With the great? And
the lack of morality, of values,
Manifested in winter
or the veils of gas
Shrouding the
cauldrons of hot forming stars, blue-white,
As an indication of
the triumph of nothingness?
Yet all’s the void.
The ant, the grass, your eyelid, clouds
And constellations,
they all subsist in the emptiness,
Which lacking
purpose is forever insubstantial.
Consider: if there’s
no mind out there, the deep fields
Lack meaning: more
interesting than a crossword-puzzle,
Or a game of chess
because defying analogy and intuition,
But much less to us
than the sight of the other across a room,
Less than the wisp
of thought called art, less than a leaf, perhaps,
Which being leaf of
a tree in a memory of a place on a planet we love,
May mean more to
mind than two galaxies colliding,
Or our understanding
the equations in the fruitful maths of our era.
So fiction may be
the body’s imagination, its fine fantasy,
Which may in turn be
no more fantastic than your claimed
Reality, which when
it comes down to it is ever in mind,
Though it’s given in
darkling powers and may oppose us:
A fantasy perhaps: that
cannot kill, yet can give the spirit life.
Then the black
wilderness beat like a heart-beat
Under the vast
conflation of the stars.
We were subdued by
natural forms.
The wilderness we
aimed to civilise
Turned out to be a
civilisation
More subtle and more
humble than our own.
Its very power was
its humility.
Its secret was it
had no secret purpose.
It grasped at
nothing, nothing was achieved.
It had no sense of
ownership or meaning.
Without a brain or
heart it had no life
Except in the things
it granted life to,
Without knowing that
it did, or could.
Our forms
dominating, dominated nothing.
The slave had no
idea of its master.
Till light faded, we
walked through the landscape.
There were trees
greater than earthly trees.
The river flowed
with brightness in its sound.
The fleshy leaves grew
taller as we passed.
The dark diver in
his element,
Swirl from the
swinging
Residues of time
In foaming grey
And cerulean blue.
Let liquid eyes,
Black orbs
Of
Scan the beating
brine,
And braid the
moonlight,
With thoughts
eternal.
Nothing in you
begins
Or ends. Plunge
Through wild arcs of
glass,
The green arcades.
Shimmering with fires,
Embrace the darkness.
There is nothing
more.
Fishing
In the elemental
wastes,
Hanging
From the residues
Of time.
Sees what is and is
not in what is and is not.
I am the self that
remembers and the memory
Of selves. I am mind
behind the conscious mind.
Here is the void
without purpose, silent, dark.
One meaning
flickering outwards is enough.
There is no way to
stop the dawn’s immense weeping.
It is a greenness of
tears containing the yes and no.
Squirrel navigates
live oaks on the black power cables.
The machinery of
money pounds still in perilous forms.
Naked in the light
dreaming is the correct posture
Of the poet. Alive
or dead is in no way germane.
I do not mention the
river, the river mentions itself.
It brings down the hills
of
The barges are
Rimbaud’s barges in emerald spume.
The ferry-boat is
Charon’s barque of glittering cars.
No one could begin
to imagine the breaking of dawn.
The breaking of dawn
is the beginning of imagination.
Lonely our courage,
trembling forever enduring innocence,
Flies as it flew with
last night’s moon of monstrous white.
Violence under the
stars a continent screaming in tribulation,
Eternal existence
tender in silence shivering in empty air.
Butterfly vast of
bayou light on the red shrub sip at being.
Pale dust on the
stairs where I sat to consider the darkness.
The trees were open
and hidden the cicadas open and hidden.
The movement of your
thoughts in the air was open and hidden.
The denial of dawn
is magnified by lightning by rain on tar
In the deserted lots
where the weeds grow as valid as we are.
A rejection of blue
is not an acceptance of grey, neutrality
Is not a state of
the being with breath, we go on without us.
Again and again the
plane lands there in the rouge of sunset,
An ocean out there
west over billows of land the snake below.
Over and over the
plane lands over the big lake the highways,
In the quivering maw
of the dawn in the delicate iris of mind.
And in the melodic
moonlight of the Chopin
To persuade the
heart that all is well.
There is sufficient
in remembering the gushers
Of water spouting
from the hill after the rain.
Nothing is less, the
dwindling light is fulfilment
Easing its way over
the rim of tree-starred horizon,
Soothing the anxious
mind with irreality.
The moth on the leaf
of night continues to flutter
In the roof of the
mind, its pale wings beautiful.
The Schubert too is
perfectly capable of continuance.
This is how the
perpetual recreation has to convince,
Be left as the
chosen path of contemplation.
It is no source of
similar sounds but a free uniqueness,
Which persuades of
that terrain we could return to.
Human hands striking
the keys have become such tremor
Of notes in air, as
mind of the performer interprets here
Past mind of the
composer from printed score
Of another century, to
stir the hearer’s feelings and flow
Like the moonlight
itself through the moonless room.
It is irreality’s
simple demonstration of meaning moving.
The transfer of even
a single bit reveals the power enough
To lift the moth
from its leaf among pallid threads,
And pass like a
glance or a murmur or a silent touch
Through whatever
medium separates mind from mind.
With the
no-more-being-here or the harm to what’s left
Behind, or the
process itself of dissolving ongoing process.
Death is the
nothingness about which there is nothing to say.
Not even a figure
from myth, or a form dancing the horizon,
Not a sound or a
sign or a particular place in space for long.
If darkness appals,
then it’s simpler to think of the light,
The amazing
flowering we only now begin to understand,
And how the place
where we end contained its beginning.
The skull is an
emblem, we in the cave, under the ground,
Or the death’s head
hawk moth’s furred embellishment,
Or the scythe in the
field or the patch of Trojan blood.
But death itself is
not. The emblems reference the life
Of the living, not
the dispersal from planet to galaxy
Of the handfuls of
atoms with their lost bursts of light.
Beware of the
metaphors that disturb the imaginings.
Beliefs are beliefs
of mind. Wandering these stones,
These sleepers in
quiet graves are not even sleeping.
And a slight
persistence is about the minds of the living,
And loving, about
memory, meaning and performance,
That burgeons above
the hillside like the rising glow
Of a plenary
satellite dented blurred by time’s assault,
But still lifting,
over and over the silhouettes of trees,
In your forest of
night where no single bird has died.
Is it singing?
Spiritual, of the spirit.
However clever?
The issue is not
even translation, or imitation,
But singing of the
spirit, whoever’s spirit,
However done.
If the machine sang
(as it will) that were not
A singing of our
meaning, we, that is, this side
Of the machine.
If the sound simply
emerged from space
And not the space of
the poet and the singer
But empty space,
A moaning of the
intentionless universe,
A cry of the other,
in a like mouth not ours,
Would that be
spirit?
Phenomenon
certainly, perhaps even artefact,
Captured, art,
subtle to our interpretation,
Through being
granted meaning,
(So that the sighing
of the trees is art, the fall,
The night-bound
sirens) but not spirit
Until we make it so.
If you sing without
sense, obscurely, too much at ease,
Where is the cost?
Was Mozart facile?
The spirit laboured.
It may cost a weariness,
but did it sing, of the truth
Of things and not
the easy lie,
With love or beauty?
The poet is the poet
of his conscience, it is this self
The harsh voice in
the evening light,
Delivering
judgement.
There is an art
outside of art, which is action
Of memory on a world
that is merely concerned
With living. Art can
be a contamination.
Art that goes out to
capture the ordinary world
Is an abomination,
which should be actionable
By the mass of human
lives, the artist shown
How to return his
thefts to the inartistic world.
The creator looks
with abhorrence on creations.
Own work’s
uncomfortable, the concept died
Somewhere in the
making, there is a silence
And a stillness that
every creator knows, a rest
From whatever it was
inside possessed the mind.
Who spends their
time wandering the graveyards
Of their own dead,
is it wise? Then keep reality
For mind’s
sanctuary, but still cherish the irreal.
The irreal is where
we all live, but from the real
Flows the fierce
stream filled with flumes of light,
That absolves us of
our black arts, our languages.
Nothing of the
limestone the domes of trees,
The mirrors of the
twisting snakes of water.
They are there in
that same way.
They present
themselves to the light,
They wait in the
river of light which does not flow.
They are being,
competent, complete.
The drama is calm.
So much is real
Only because we
consent. Deny the myth
And it evaporates
into real un-meaning.
Do you guess the
thoughts behind
These inscrutable
faces? There is no heat,
The pale blue sky is
cool. Is it ritual;
The pre-destined
perfect silent and unveiled?
Shadow in the world.
Silvery moonlight
spread its gentle cloth
And the emotion went
chasing over the floor,
Climbed the wall,
settled silent on the ceiling.
An emotion like
every emotion in the world.
It was loneliness,
or longing, or the pain
Of an inevitability.
Its inner cry was
the long wail of the bird
Crossing the unseen
blackness of the sky
And falling into the
moon. It was death
Or the fear of
death, and life, green and sighing.
It gathered to
itself time, the companion of late affections,
The transience that limns
Beauty’s poignancy,
and the torments of possibilities
Unseen and
un-pursued; it gathered remorse, regret.
It was the shadow of
whatever is real, and unreal,
The fusion of this
outside us (to which we can only point),
And the imaginative
projection inside the moving mind,
Which are, together,
Interweaving the
woven web illumined by the shining full,
The waning crescent,
every net, every tremor of the human.
The shadow on the
blind like the shadow of the fir was etched
By moonlight, it was
almost the shadow of a man, wavering.
Was not a sound of
mountain but of feeling.
The vision is ever
the same eternal vision.
The dream is ever
the same transient dream.
The feel of the
space of vision where he felt
Was the space of an
emotion turned inside-out,
The emotion being
generated by the dream
Crossing the sky of
the dream, over the mountain,
In a gust of sound
which was the gust of the wind
Blowing on the real
or imagined tracts of stone,
To make a metaphor
of time in the imagination,
Dream that flickers,
the vision that does not pass.
The unreal space of
the world is always the real
Space of the mind as
the unreal space of the mind
Is forever the space
of the real, the image is one,
A gust of the
construct blowing inside the process.
The thought takes
place in time but feels a surge
Of language inside a
space, words like mountains,
A range, the peaks,
the troughs, the snow-fields,
The warmth of the
mind against sun-wet stone.
The gust of words blows
through a valley of time,
Time being movement,
you can smell the herbs
Which are not herbs,
hear the shiver of water,
Which is bright in
the corner of the inner speech.
The wind in some
sense is being, as being seems
A movement of
whatever is not stasis of not-being,
A presence which is
the wind and its wild swirling,
The curious feel of
stone, air, self, substratum.
Mind in the wind
feels the thought whirl in space.
The mountains of the
dream appear taller, closer,
Their flanks are
clothed with curling, vibrant seas.
He becomes the sound
of vision where he climbs.
And the woman of
summer wanders, leaf in light
As she appears to
the mind of a man, despite herself,
That which is all
things nurturing, all things solace.
She strives to shake
off the metaphor, why sun and moon
In the sky of a
human planet, why the gold and silver,
Why sky and earth,
or earth and sea, why the single tree
The wild apple white
with its far-breaking foam in spring,
Or the hawthorn, why
now green summer, the virent wave?
Today she strays
across the lawns of emerald, malachite, verd,
To become in the
memory of a man the determinant,
Though it saddens
her to be metaphor not engagement,
She would be what
she is and not symbol or mythology,
And will be what she
is without aeons of association,
She will be free
mind moving in the suns of summer,
In the eye of the
wind, the snow-peak, the shaking tree.
It is some kind of
beast or bird,
It holds inside
itself all the quiet of the room.
It is ivory or wood
or bone,
Polished, it has no
immediate meaning,
Except its
stillness, the stillness, whereas the evening
Is a shadow, a
half-formed, unfinished medium
Hanging in the glass.
The meaning grows. It
is from a human hand,
A long lost human touch,
it carries its maker’s sign
The meaningless sign
of creation,
Its curves are clean,
and its hidden angles
Its undersides are
equally complete,
They communicate a
sense of values,
A desire for beauty
cherished, the love
Of the maker for the
finely made,
The deeper
signature,
It means all art,
all struggle to achieve,
All skill,
experience, longing, wisdom,
It means the
humility of the small validity
Of the shaped in
shapeless night,
It means two sides
of the globe, the matter
Of the creatures and
their forms,
The purpose and the
function of the made,
Two languages in the
head, an echo
Of cultures merging,
and one more ancient;
It means a man
sitting quiet in a quiet room
Writing the meaning
of the silence,
The tremor of
ceasing the tremor of going on,
And the mystery of
those dual tremors,
Feeling the little
presence, delighting there
In what offsets the
darkness and the quiet.
The irreality of
things,
The mind-world
objects,
The shadowy
processes.
What is, is a
reflection
Of how mind
processes ‘is’,
What it projects
On all these signals
it receives,
Forms it
acknowledges, creates,
This mind in world
Which is the world
in mind
Perception in ever
motion.
What is real outside
is re-created,
What is real inside
is re-projected,
Your blue, your
dark, your intellect
Your feelings, all
these sounds.
They assault the
night
They draw the
constellations in.
The instrument is in
the music.
The music is in the
instrument.
Something more than
the ragged sense of self,
The flower we don’t
cut down, but leave to grow
In the untamed
corner, in the dew and dust.
It’s the object the
dead would come back to see,
And cherish as a
token of the given world,
The one that
blossoms without our intent,
And is destroyed by
our wrong intention.
The one that would
tell them, yes, they felt
And what they felt
was ridiculous existence
In all its strength
demolishing the body,
And setting itself
embodied in those leaves,
Coarse and hairy, on
their ribbed green stem,
Bowing to escape our
words that don’t describe,
And forever don’t
contain. The language
Of the dead would be
objects, exchanged
Held there in hands,
or what passed for hands,
Or pointed to, or
wept on, or possessed,
In the spirit which
is all transient possession,
The nothing owned
that is a moment cherished.
The blue-flowered
weed is so laughably itself,
So boldly unplanned,
superfluous, filling
The wasteland and
the deserted slopes of air,
To never a purpose,
simply spontaneous life,
Which the dead would
envy, silenced there,
Lacking all trace of
drama, or achievement.
This we would come
back to see, beyond the pain,
Beyond the white
silence of the extinguished heart,
To watch the light
fall on the fluted pillars,
Hanging pure
blueness on the edge of meaning,
To touch the rain-filled
fibres, the moist flowers,
Wild beauty waved in
planetary colours.
Floating a blue
delight in the starred blackness,
In all the
intentionless energy of the silence
Beyond this human
species. Now turn back,
And watch the
violent without sense or mercy,
Nail their shadows
to the masts of moonlight.
Where’s the design
in this? Though there is order,
The self-created
self-sustaining order burning
Its crazy candles fleeting
in the flying universe,
The order of the
flower and the glowing crystal,
The order of
breakers, cloud, the season, light,
The questionable
order of the mind, its desires.
The Muse of tragedy
is the muse of destruction,
Its banality. Her
agony is too much pain for us,
Who are sated with
pain and agony, who stare
At images of distant
galaxies and grow calmer.
She acts in silence
on an empty stage, peopled
By dark ghosts, the
ghosts of power, the bells,
The hollow bells of
rituals crueller than death.
The tragedies are
monuments best left in night.
An age of empathy
prefers bright constellations,
Hanging white fruit
in the non-inimical mirror;
Prefers Ovid’s
pathos, the gentle humanist,
Or the sweet
redemption of The Winter’s Tale.
Of my irreality.
Does
I am clasped round
by the technologies,
Data of worlds, and
yet the self is still
Tender and fragile.
More so. The rays
Of night converge
from the deep abyss
On the lonely mind, darkly
it is exalted.
I sit and watch the
stars, the flow is real
I am a part of:
relation there and form;
No way to step from
the river, or halt
The current, or
stand like stone or glass
On the hill of our
own creation, outside
Nature. We are inside
what we observe.
I sit and watch the
stars, outside and in,
Shining slowly.
Erosion is not all of life;
I am species, and am
more than species,
Mind, self-created
and creating, flower
Of three hundred
thousand generations,
Blue-green in the
blackness, glittering.
I sit and watch the
stars, through which
I fall. Singing
Earth is never left behind.
It is the bitter
root, the transcendent leaf.
The sea sounds
deeper than our metaphors;
Our metaphors are
deeper than the sea,
Bursting on time’s billion
shores, forever.
In the day that has
suddenly darkened
With summer storm.
Sweet lightning.
The dark is an early
twilight, the green
Of the trees goes
black, the rain hisses
As it must do in the
Tropics mutedly.
This is not the end,
not even the presage
Of an end. Mind
lives through anticipates
The brightness, this
is the very centre
Of the metaphor, the
white stars weep
Somewhere beyond the
clouds over
Washed leaves
glitter, the colour returns
To flowers, there is
a sunbeam seizing
On a twig. The mind
inside is flame again.
And there is a
tinkling from the gutters,
A last sinking
glimmer in the roadway,
Quailing before the
immense hot power
Of whatever it is shines
in whatever glows
In whatever space it
is encompasses thought,
If you understand
space as implied relation.
This was neither a
melting nor re-forming,
Of what is. Merely a
resonance repeating,
A bell-note
sounding, a ringing in the Void.
Nor one feeling and
its counter-feeling,
Nor a thought and
the diametric thought,
There are the
complications. It may be
In the world of the
mind that a thing
May exist as its
opposite, a feeling
Be twined with polar
transformation,
The thought embracing
its contrary.
There is a clash
which is not a clash,
But the deeper
understanding of form,
Such that a blue may
raise a ghost
Of yellow, the act
appear to counteract.
So you are not my foil,
an antagonist
Within the play a
dramaturge performs;
You are not placed
at my antipodes
To sing the night to
suffuse my dawn.
All the mutations of
light are one,
They are the quantum
states of self,
This the
entanglement: that we discern
The essence of the
self in each other,
Which is not the
self, never the other.
And the moral being
is just this care,
Discerning more
closely fluctuations
In all the complex
mass of subtle shade.
Tell me what rises
from your silences,
I’ll match it with
these voices of mine:
Say what you see in
skyey mirrors.
Distinctions are the
cradle of the mind.
It is the movement
of what is not the butterfly
Or the beat of its
wings, pure blue in the light;
Yet not merely
movement in the inner space,
Of mind which would
be to distinguish form
From form, the form
in the senses, that is,
From the form of
what is beyond the senses,
Moving slowly
through whatever is the real.
Both are forms of
the form, aspects of each.
This is the
essential entanglement of irreality,
That everything is
both being and perception,
Perception and
being, or part of unnamed void.
The void is what
exists beyond perception, full
Of the energies that
manifest themselves in this
World of appearances
which are also actualities.
Can you separate
mind from body, day from light?
Slowly the butterfly
settles among the flowers.
It is the motion of
what is neither the butterfly
Nor the beat of its
wings, pure blue in the light;
And never merely movement
in the inner space,
Which we call mind.
The bee rises in the air,
The honey-bee
barrels through the golden air,
Humming a sound
which is in me a feeling,
And in you a word,
an image (a metaphor?).
Ah, of vulnerability,
on the brink of falling
From moment to
moment through the night,
Hearing the lapping
of wavelets on the shore.
Nothing comes out of
death, but the verge
Of death is a place
of amazing resonance,
Accompanied tonight
by the watery sigh
Of leaves about to
die unknowing of breeze.
It is the world’s
unknowing amazes us,
Coupled with our
deep knowing, deeper
With time, this
consciousness of presence,
This tangled net of
selves grasping selves,
Of self seeking
self, walking
Listening to rhythms
from which the escape
Would be lack of
music in the universe,
Lack of the grace,
the meaning we granted.
Mind cannot wish
un-mind, cannot conceive
It. The peace we
seek is simply a harmony
At the edge of
death, at the uncertain margin,
With bright forms,
beauty born of transience.
We could not make
the world which is more solid
Than we are, is
glutinous, vibrant, tangible,
A foreign world
glimpsed across mountains,
Its soil, the
villages, the alien trees
With glittering
flowers and unknown fruit,
The birds and
insects we cannot name.
A single leaf is
beyond us, or a cloud.
The sketches do not
move, the flow
Of notes and words,
the gestures are always
About us, when what
we desire most
Is something not of
us, and not our past,
Something we have
not (the species) known
Before, easing
curiosity, the boredom.
But the place of the
imagination is irreal mind.
It makes the world
it knows and knows the world
We go on making made
time after time.
The rest we pursue
is rest from self and other
Selves, rest in the
stimulus of not having
To imagine this
world any further, simply to move
In a universe of
forms that are not our forms.
That no one told me,
You have to know
By living through,
Is the gradual
disengagement
From superficial
Aims and purposes;
The denial that
those things
We all were told are
true
Or even worthwhile;
The sense that my
values
Are not their values,
Or maybe your
values.
You assume your
values
And bring them to
me,
Saying: ‘These are
the values
Of the world’.
Try to comprehend:
The mind before it
vanishes
Must be true to
itself
True to its nature,
True to its learning
and creation.
Why should I be part
Of what I did not
create
And was not born
for?
I have engaged;
I have been deep
enough
In those pale
shallows,
Trodden dead water.
‘We lay waste our
powers.’
Why accept the
wasteland
Or the wilderness?
They too are acts
Of the imagination,
The morbid, dulled,
or weary
Imagination that
makes worlds.
Don’t involve me in
your schemes,
Your expectations,
I am your freedom.
In that distant age,
saddens.
Some poor sacred
ritual
Designed to appease
The perennial gods
of violence
Or denial,
Leaves its trace in
the peat.
Anaesthetised before
death, perhaps,
Posed in peaceful
stillness,
No, he is not some
metaphor
For the mystery of
the divine,
Or the darkness of
other violence;
He cries the thing
itself,
The evil I
confronted in another
Country,
Its casual random
cruelty,
Its mindless cause.
For freedom? Faith?
The only freedom,
Is non-violence,
kindness, empathy.
I will not celebrate
his physical
Reality, its
survival;
Nature is unaware;
no goddess
Took him to her
heart.
Nothing will
germinate from ignorance,
The language
Of death and its
devotions,
Dumb repetition.
Here is the
beautiful freedom now
Of mind in
intentionless eternity.
Of love, truth and
beauty, if only for a moment,
Then they are always
here,
Always a potential
of creative process,
A possibility of
this universe.
This is the
unforeseen output of the equations,
The flower
un-guessed from the seed,
Though once seen forever
inferred,
Eternal prophecy of
self-organising being,
Which is always more
than energy;
Becomes form. Though
the black river
Is being, and flows
on, as alteration,
The dark builds
levels, structures, light,
And bursts in mind. Reality
presents itself:
We are the mask
itself our minds project.
The way is its
destination.
Beware of the
sentiments of suffering,
When empathy becomes
obsession.
The only freedom is
to begin again,
Our ghosts are
always with us.
At the end of the
road there is no depth,
Only space, in a moment
crossed and gone.
Flight does not
escape the phantom,
Only the spirit can
do that.
The sound of the
bamboo flute signifies
More than hollow
nothing, more than void.
The uncreated dove
descends in uncreated light,
To coo in the
emptiness.
The metaphors of
loss and pain are endless,
There is only one
metaphor for joy.
At the end of the land,
watching the stars,
A consciousness in
time.
The dream has always
been that the others will one day
See as we can see.
In the reddened
light what forgiveness for all that pain,
The violence, the
mindlessness, the ignorance?
Dionysus and Apollo
are both gods of power,
And all the gods and
deities are foolish.
Sensation is not
craving but the source of the real,
And pain and beauty
are intertwined.
Our fault is not in
thinking too much and too deep,
But in not thinking
well enough.
The selfless state
of consciousness is not in itself
Desirable or
undesirable.
You cannot find a
non-existent purpose. Every why
Ends in either a
purpose or a how.
Don’t fill your mind
with metaphors and fancies.
Truth has no icon.
The worlds of
passion are endless and destructive,
Passions must be
transformed to be understood.
All art is a frozen
passion, the energies pass
And leave their
trace behind.
Compassion implies
superiority, empathy friendship.
I am on the side of
empathy.
Feel with those you
can feel with, love those
You can.
Creation and
preservation are the ultimate values,
Destruction is their
opposite.
If there were sin,
which there is not, and a primal sin,
It would be
violence, against body or mind.
What has no absolute
reality is not therefore only
imaginary;
Imagination is
sacred irreality.
Understanding is the
thin margin at the verge of knowing,
The boundary that
finally eludes.
The more sensitive
the mind, the more pity devastates, the more
Tragedy destroys.
Nothing demands we be destroyed.
Every poem exceeds
the understanding, but so does every word;
Words are bounded
only by their usage.
The mind may be
destructive despite itself; its purposes
May be
self-defeating.
Reality looks
different a thousand feet up in the air;
There is space on
the mountain of the self.
Lack of talking is
not silence. Silence is the contemplation
Of that about which
there is nothing to say.
What we do not value
is ultimately empty; but emptiness
Itself may still be
valued.
If we only value
purpose then what is purposeless is empty;
And we search for
purpose in the intentionless.
The freedom of the
dove is to fly above its own past,
And descend towards
its own future.
My regions of the
mind, they were not given.
This is the age
beyond mythology, its metaphors
Are out of nature as
the universe presents itself,
Not as the fancy
amplifies, gathering charms.
Consider the
stories, but comprehend reality,
The gods and demons
are our self-made ghosts
Haunting the corners
of the dark imagination,
Or the bright, not
these mountains, trees, walls,
These forms found in
the grasp of re-projection,
In that interplay of
self and sense that makes mind.
I wander regions
beyond those I was born to,
Trying not to be
seduced, to discover by thinking
What the mind has
done and can do. We create;
Creatures of change,
not stasis; seize the substance,
Build from the
materials granted; this pale stone,
This wood for fences;
these clouds and hills, these
Feelings, thoughts
for poems; this flesh for life.
Sings and aches and
melts with the dew and rain.
The world in the
head is made of all it sees there,
And the mirror in
which it sees the wild mind makes.
The world in the
head is wild with the wind and stars,
Scouring the pines
and larches over the mountain.
The world in the
head is made of the constellations,
The whirl of the
galaxies is its own bright whirl.
The world in the
head sleeps in the silent moonlight,
Sleeps and aches
with the sadness and pain of Earth.
The world in the
head is a moon-world, foam and fire,
The ice of rest and
the light from the mirror made.
The world in the
head is the only world of our being
Summer, moon, wind
and mountain keep their silence.
The world in the
head grows from the wild mirror,
Shaking in storm,
showing lightning, azure, glass.
The mountain of
desolation shone in the cloud and fog.
He climbed, without
ropes, in the gravity of his heart
Dragging him
slope-wards, he climbed at first in hope.
The track he
followed was neither up nor down, it ran
Through the long spaces
of his dissatisfied dreaming.
He carried his
sorrow on his back, his pain, all death,
Disease and
suffering, all desire, all beauty, craving.
He carried the
world, to leave world behind weeping.
The mountain was
there, it neither watched nor waited.
What he wished, a
sign for his life’s direction offered
By sun or wind, was
not forthcoming, only dark scree.
He carried himself
curled tight in the ache of his being,
Setting it down against
rocks, by tarns, in stream beds.
They were all parts
of the mountain that denied him,
The mountain, the
metaphor, hanging in the mind.
His body was on the slopes
of the real, his thoughts
Floated in
brightness of peaks, of the shining pearl.
The mountain gleamed
in the stillness of its being,
Existing through
aeons without sense or time.
In his restless
spirit he was already descending.
To live with the
self is not a question of wishing;
Perhaps a matter of
discipline, of temperament,
Intention perhaps,
indifference to the pain of truth.
Finally he was
neither himself nor the mountain,
Which is never a
mountain, always a part of mind.
He travelled the
same road inwardly as outward,
Over a continent of
night bathed in dust and flame.
From the ornate
ceiling of the dome.
It swung slowly
beyond my feelings.
As I returned from
inspecting caves
Of remembered dead;
the brassy bob
Moved silently over
the marble floor.
I returned and sat
to watch the pendulum,
Or rather gather my
thoughts together,
The movement of
fragile dark emotions.
This is how the
earth moves and the dead
Move with it, and
the living, while here
The swinging path
stays in one plane,
Moves delicately
about its strange attractor.
My feelings
oscillated in one plane, my body
Moved through air
and light, circling.
The pendulum seemed
to move infinitesimally,
Without the tick of
the clock of measured life,
Making its traverse
below the massive dome.
My thoughts
accompanied, slowly circling,
About the strange
attractor of my fate,
Beyond my feelings
oscillating in one plane.
I felt the science
of inarticulate pain, how others
Fade into distance
marked off by an intense
Feeling, making an
island of the lonely mind.
Something about the
height and weight of it all,
Building and
pendulum and clouds and city,
Oppressed my feelings,
those agitated feelings.
The tall pendulum
swung there in space
Through the ornate
silence of the dome.
It swung slow, far
beyond my feelings.
Words closer, each
word weighed and placed,
Out of the english
horde, to make all solid.
He thought there was
a virtue in precision,
That things in their
silence grant emotion
Breathing-space,
communicate a meaning.
His exteriors glow. His
interiors shine
Like something from
de Hooch or Vermeer,
Only modern, of a
long-benighted country.
His rightness is the
rightness of things seen.
The observed
rituals, the conventional feeling,
Deepened a little,
made more spiritual-seeming.
He was of earth,
earthy, dreamed he was more,
A poet of spirit
perhaps, one born to dead faith,
The slowly
dissolving face of the missing god.
He placed his bricks
as if they were great stones.
He built the
charming walls that hedge him in,
Yet which seem to
frame his portrait perfectly.
The trees in the
gardens,
Statues in the
square, those benches, flowers;
Vanish into the
green river trailing,
Into the wind
howling round the bridge-struts,
You are your own
ghost,
Gentle and
delicately moving
Among the fragments
of your southern city.
Carefully you
display no sign of permanence,
Nothing too sharply
set,
Nothing defined,
like the edge of a bench,
Or the bushes
bordering the flow.
You prefer the
shadiness of leaves: blind cicadas
Crying to the inner
darknesses,
Are not your
meaning,
Drifting among the
butterfly alleyways.
You are the gift of
moonlight in the mind,
A variant on
creation,
Its mysterious
obscurity of being, ambivalence
At the smallest
magnitudes,
Un-measurable by
experiment, intangible,
As the unspoken,
unspeakable
Expression of
uncaught feelings,
Seething below the
frontier of your thought.
You are not the
lightning, the tempestuous rain,
Beating on the bedazzled
glass,
The wind blowing the
long curtains skywards,
Or burning pit of
light,
Or crash of the
inevitable, the grind of gears
From the all-night
world,
Its arrogance, its
harsh cruelty.
You are half-light,
half-self, my ghost of being.
If it slipped and
slid, more than viscous,
Unbound in any series
of equations;
If reality was more
than non-linear, intangible,
Beyond the maths,
beyond the senses,
How could mind and
irreality exist,
Even in some inexplicable
form?
If reality existed
solid for the mind, transparent
To mind, not needing
to be caught by our equations;
Then mind would be
the world it projected,
Fused with it in
some deep symbiosis.
To touch the world
would be to touch
The world and not
ourselves, not the mind,
Where all we sense
is subtle self projected.
As it is we exist
between the real and the ineffable,
In the space of
interpretation and creation,
Where mind itself is
part of what is
In mind, the process
and the object seeming one.
So world exists
neither imprecise nor solid,
And we exist between
knowing and unknowing,
In the mastery of
the senses, their powerlessness.
Writing your own is
creating its fiction.
The difference
between the storyteller naming names,
And the shy employer
of ideas, musing.
If I named the real
place how would it help you,
To be me I mean, not
to read a story?
Even I am not sure
of what I saw, or the emotions,
My sense of truth is
an obstacle to speaking.
I admire the
confidence with which others do it,
That harking-back to
the great days of being,
When everything was
outside, like chopping wood,
Swimming in the sea,
or walking the trail.
But at the other
pole of poetry, this strange season,
Nurturing an
art-form sliding into prose,
I fail to clear
ideas, to hurdle the deep confusion,
Held back by
feelings, limited by the mind.
Do you really read
your own poems?
Once past the tree
it’s not worth going back,
Crossing the fallen
needles, brown on green.
I stumble along the
path to newer woods.
Watching the fresh
configuration of cloud,
Swirl in the
silence, cumulo-nimbus,
Icy castles,
contrails, streaks of light,
What was the last
configuration of the real?
A jet plunges into
the sun and re-emerges.
But you I read, your
descriptions of everything
Around you, where
you were and what was done.
Bearing witness is
the reason for our sweat,
Working in the shade
while they sing in the sun;
As you did, though
your poems say otherwise.
In the sad light of
blind reality.
Will we be free?
In the sad light of
blind reality?
Our mystery:
In the blind light of
sad reality
You’ll sing to me.
A peacock-feather,
bead, pelt, mattress,
The campfire,
meadow, trees, fog,
The mountain, the
city, all the people.
I realise now for me
it’s not the same.
Reality’s
transparent, there are phantoms.
The ethereal air is
ethereal space, the vast
Towers are maya,
blind appearance.
I poke a hand
through the store window,
Tremor up, down,
sideways like the leaves.
When we touch body
passes into body,
Mind into mind, the
invisible exists.
Soul, spirit, they
are nothing religious,
Simply the unseen
processes unfolding,
In the empty
skeleton and its sad flesh,
Beautiful though
evaporating in silence.
And nothing
permanent. The work’s not done.
Creativity is
forever, the words control us,
Deep down, not we
the words. No lament.
This one life is the
unlikely gift, un-given.
The invocation of
things is fine, but that alone
Can’t save us from
the spiritualization of time,
From the sadness of
existence in bright eternity,
The translucent ply
of energies, conservations.
But no lament. There
is a tenderness in seriousness,
The spiritual music
will play if we give it space,
The monsters, the
phantasmagoria will fade,
And women and men
luminous will walk free
And radiant from the
heart of the living furnace.
There is a conflict
between the vision and the dream.
There is a conflict
between nature and the machine,
Unresolved. The
billions in their innocence deceived.
The world un-solid
slips from out our grasp, in change,
And though you claim
the power of things about you,
I ask for
consideration for the intangible other-life,
Which permeates like
the winding river of dark being.
Even your thoughts
seem substance, granite matter.
You celebrate the
rock, the creek, the vast moon
Gleaming on my
lamp-lit evening. Do we take mind
For what it is, the
in-woven cradle of the self, the real?
I gaze down into the
space of the screen, the whiteness,
And there I place
these words to shine, dispersing,
The cry in the ear
beyond the presence of the ear,
A part of the music,
the shuddering of the voices.
Seated. The walls
are blue, Behind the lace curtains
Blue trees, white
houses. A child in arms,
A child standing.
Crumpled white fabric
On another chair.
Blue vase, saucer and cup,
Blue fruit (an apple?
blue) on the oval table.
Blue shadows on
white blouses, one blue skirt,
There are yellows in
the folds of lace
Of the curtains at
the single window.
The flowers in the
vase (chrysanths fading?)
Are yellow, pale, and
purplish blue.
One child’s head
(standing) is of blue shadow,
The other the infant’s
head has strands of gold.
There are shades of ochre,
pale sand, umber,
Here then there.
The furniture is
dark, the blues deepen
From people towards
things,
In the azure world a
movement blue
In which no movement
exists.
There is a stillness,
softness, absorption
Of mother in child,
mother with child,
A tenderness
unexpressed, harsh almost
But gentler in
surfaces of light, deeper
In pools of shadow.
The painting is unknown?
The chalk-white
gleams, in fabric, folds,
Overlaid with lapis
lazuli, cerulean blue.
This is a world.
Never in reality?
Filled with the
essence of reality,
The cool intensity
of imagination.
A form of leaves
scuttles between the hedgerows:
Its movement divides
the deep green shadows.
A whirl of beauty
catches the watching eye,
Cries its vanishing,
speaks of transience
In the tones and
subtleties of its existence.
A whirl of light
contests the road’s blackness,
Its tarred silence.
A spiral of time unwinds
In a moment of time;
the one thing here and there,
Is that one thing,
or many? What sways in the eye
Is it swaying and not
what sways? A whirl of silver
Leaves whirls in the
mind, in the emotions.
It is the whirling
of life in the silvery wind light
As thistledown
passing along the fences turn
And turn again of
the substance of being.
It is the whirl of
beauty, sweet in the watching eye,
Sighing of
vanishing, rustling of falling low,
Over the dark roads
deep through viridian shadow.
While the stars from
Bringing all
The arc of the world
mirrored in skies
Black with the winds
of the Arctic tundra.
Gaze in the dark
glass, feel the universe
Tremble and press
its magnitudes on you,
Unseen, rolling the
world around you,
The heavens of glass
that shatter in silence,
Send light to
eternity out of no anguish.
You there and I
there, the water trickling,
While freaks of the
eye align over us,
Bringing the east to
meet the west of us,
To die in vermilion,
lake and damask,
Free of pain, free
of love, free of hatred.
Which passes deeper
into language.
The introspection,
the individualistic
Longing of these late
centuries is not
Reflected in the
earlier language,
Which takes its cue
from society,
As society from its
means of speech.
So the late interest
in landscape.
And we no doubt
consider our own
Hoard of words
exhaustive, as they did
Once, the players on
a different stage,
And yet the same
reality? Where
In the Classics are
my trees and roads?
We gaze in the
distant mirrors sadly,
Longing to see
ourselves, finding only
The language of the
past, its opaqueness.
Did Ovid agonise
over the real, unreal?
Did Propertius yearn
for Faustian spirit?
Did Catullus caress
the bark of a tree,
Or Horace feel the
shifting of the mountain?
A sensibility
informs a language, its tongue
Drives the dark
rivers of a sensibility.
Minds of the forty-first
century, will you
Be mystified by our imperceptiveness?
Being and gone. The
world, the place, are
Still the world and
place, but other world
And place. An energy
alters and remains.
It is a green energy
flickering in the torsion
Of the trees which
is: the trees themselves,
Which are never the
trees but rather the flex
Of branches and the
passage of the wind.
Reality is the
movement of reality, in mind
Or space. Unmoving
reality would not exist;
As nothing exists in
unmoving imagination,
Which is self-contradiction,
mind moves.
The movement of the
branches in the wind,
Is the movement of
universe out of which
Trees emerge,
greenly expressing form
In the flickering
eye. And mind uninvolved,
Observer of the
scene, never the frozen man,
The man of glass, at
the heart of endurance;
Never the oneness of
the flow of lucent air
The being, the
concept fixed, and the motion,
United in a single
river that is always passage.
Even the stone not
the stone but the moments
Of the perception of
stone, the moments here
Of the engagement
with a universe, the flight.
That does not
deserve our kindness. Give
Affection as a gift,
it is a form of creation,
The silent kind,
perhaps the best of us.
Forgive, if you can.
There is so much here
That does not
deserve forgiveness. I have
Seen evil, it is the
selfish spirit coruscating;
Others as objects; a
psychic greed and fear.
Love, if you can.
There is so much here
That needs our love,
as we to be needed.
Love is free
sharing, and a common
Tongue, the deep,
the true consideration.
Last out if you can.
The warmth of mind
Is all we have
against the silence; rituals,
In the end, of
kindness and forgiveness,
The being so to
create our being so.
Of thought around
identity, as the tree
Is the tree in the
wind, the river runs on;
Form almost solid,
almost being there.
Or rather what being
is, within the chaos
A relation among
efforts that still holds
A fluctuation around
that central core,
Within the form, the
outlines of shadow.
In its strange orbit
the planet moves,
And the moon of the
planet, like mind
Around identity,
which is then the orbit
Of the self, with
its attendant moons.
Blues cluster around
blue, creating blue.
These tremors are
the image in the eye,
A something
abstracted out of movement.
The word’s the word
in congregated meaning.
Here is the music,
here its interpretation,
Never the same
crying twice, always one.
The world seems
solid, almost central form,
Then time ravages,
the scene’s translated.
To and fro the
pendulum in its path, making,
Living, the
unrepeated tracks of repetition,
A trembling of green
in the unstable mirror,
Or these moving
constellations of the stars,
This icy skating
round the lake of darkness,
That burning
oscillation of the sun, its tropic
Dance, that rise and
fall of lives, civilisations,
Till the ragged
measure’s tread seems uniform.
Here is the music.
One Schubert rises delicate
From the Antarctic
ringing, the snowy towers;
The bespectacled
image fades, the silent score,
And over the tundra
the black puma prowls.
On a day of weakness
the strong rains wither,
The wind diminishes;
the dark green sky,
Driven by black,
weighs its mirrors without
Meanings on the
heart, turns flesh to soil.
The ground gathers,
the hand reaps nothingness,
The leaves run wet
with the effort of being leaves,
Though each leaf is
only the substance that it is.
And never an
intention launched across the air.
The music of the sea
is not a music of form,
Rather a muffled
roar of an absolute fury,
Chaos its calling,
or by the cliff a sheet of calm,
Without head or fin
or buoy or fishing craft,
A grey corner, or
green-purpled bruise of foam
Breaking on
shattered steps. Where is your cry
For order? Is it
enough, the quietude, the lull,
In which you are not
argument, engagement;
Or the discrete
roaring, of unstructured afternoon,
The turmoil of the
lion in the air? Your strength
Is the hold of the
tenacious limpet on the rock,
Or the weed
clinging, rubber, to the breakwaters.
And no superiority,
by virtue of consciousness.
An enervation
darkens the teeth in the mouth.
Reality seeps from
irreality to stand outside,
As though belittled
mind was less than stone,
When mind is more, more
stone than stone,
Infused with our
stony tongue, stone history,
The stone on stone
of the granite language made,
Standing high and firm
towards the starriness.
It is no more, this
mood, than the other of fire,
Nor less, and is a
construct of the ebbing process
Before the moon-ripe
crescent of glittering flow,
And is no more
reality than the majestic other.
All human reality is
mind, irreality, the fusing
Of the purposeless
sounding with a human music,
Whose notes are the
small ascents, the low hills,
One step in front of
another on the rough slopes,
About which there
seems nothing great: a phrase
Catches, hooks at
the heart, a repeat in moonlight,
Over the carved
leaves, over the shades of chairs,
To fall on the table
here, suffuse glass with time,
And you are no
longer withered. The melody moves,
A form unwinds, a
ribbon of mind in the brightness,
Quivering with
memory, trailing its aches and sighs,
A track of awareness
that is the only transcendence.
The wind scatters
drops of the lamp onto shavings
Of black. The tiger
of flame blinks an eye where
It waits concealed by
landscape, a deep yellow eye;
And there is no
death before death, and no dying after.
Over the edge of
horizon,
On pinnacles that graze
upwards:
Whispers then in
silver.
Moon, unafraid, in
black grass
Makes dimness near-green;
The trees, the wild pillars,
Nature’s
declaratives.
Un-trembling, the
moon
Holds the dark tufts
at bay,
Fills the bowl of
the heart
With wet argentine.
Moon, unafraid, moon
brighter
Than stars,
dissolves glass stars,
Ice stars, the
shattering stars
Broken in night
lakes.
Moon, courage maker,
bares
Pale lips to the
terrible dawn,
That exhibitor of
being, fear;
To unmediated glare.
Moon, sweet as the
flower,
As the flower of a
face
Here once, and never
again
(Who will know of
its flowering?)
Moon, without
terror, intentionless
Moon stepping out
through the air,
Unaware of our dread,
Un-diminishing
witness.
Moon of the darker world
Moon from the far
side, climber,
Treading the vapour
of cloud,
Down the wind-blown
heart.
None of our dreams
and visions,
And mercifully not
our failures,
The faults and the
evasions,
That have fouled the
living world.
Perhaps there will
be a big desert,
Cold and bright in
the starlight,
Out of which bare
hills rise,
Overlooking the dust
road
Where the last car
passed by.
The music will cease
to play
From the abandoned
café,
Or the motel where
the fool
Stared at the dingy
wall,
And inside cried and
shrank.
Perhaps there will
be wild ocean,
Azure and gold in
the evening
Past the belt of
shattered trees,
For Earth’s poisoned
symphonies,
Slowly washing
clean.
Or a drift of
magenta cloud,
Covering fenceless
meadows,
Where mad horses
gnash
Moon-teeth at the
bitter night.
Perhaps all will be
light.
Our shadows on the
wall,
Not visible then.
But the silhouette
Of fresh forests
standing
There, wholly
unaware.
To reality? Perhaps
the bright appearance
Will seem less, and
the memories deepen,
And yet, and yet,
perhaps this is not night
Approaching, or
winter settling in iciness,
Perhaps it is the
intimation of other fires,
The return of keener
sight, no reduction
To the shadows of
solidity, its phantoms,
But Imagination’s
movement in the eye,
A new empowerment, as
the very first,
That silent sun
almost unnoticed rising
Over a freedom in
time, the bright grasp
Of the flesh on raw
felt being, expansion
Of horizons, to the confused
unknown.
Perhaps there are
forms that are revealed
Only by intricate
consolidation, only by
The kaleidoscope of
fierce mind musing,
Beyond the learned
rituals, the artifice;
Its ambition, not
self, world, but meaning,
A guise not
pre-destined, a far glittering
Not calculable by
stars, or shapely orbits.
Is there a sigh of
knowledge, the carrying,
A gravity
long-endured; is this the silence
That involves the
grass, confirms the night?
Or a pause of forms,
a slow hushed circling,
As the colours and
the outlines transform,
Create new insight,
re-arrange themselves
In other structure:
no slide to dark season,
No gathering of
gloom, no obscuring there
Of the
constellations that forever gleamed
On the mad
enterprise, the unforeseen end
Of all awareness:
the ever-strange origins,
This burning
transience, mind in its cabin,
Body afloat in
time’s mutual dissolution,
The wildness of it,
the blind incongruities.
It is morning still
on the far side of Earth.
Every state of the
mind is equally present.
The
The billion
yesterdays, tomorrows are one
Moment in time, the
moment of your being.
The breath of dawn
now is not the new light
Creeping in
whiteness over the upper snow.
It is not yet first
redness, flush of sentience,
The waking thrush,
the blackbird on the grass,
The swaying of the
poplars’ starlit murmur.
You dream there are
no possibilities, no words
Other than those in
the books over your table,
That the ghosts
would not return were they only
More than the fictions
of our hopeless longing;
Return, crying for
life, on fire with its singing?
The day is not dying
into its own destruction,
Nor is night laying
down its silver masteries,
A broken moon
fluttering to rest in the sea.
The universe churns;
the energies are not yours,
And so not lost to
you, those flocks of air;
Everything lifts from
dark arteries, re-sounds.
Erased, burnt,
thrown to the fire in joy,
The secret writings,
and the coded life;
Work no one else has
the right to see.
Crazy irrepressible
laughter of the wild
Non-conformist mind,
hiding just how
Little of this given
world it believed in,
How much of the
regions of the spirit.
Cries of the private
soul gone up in flames,
Shredded, or
cancelled, cut from the file,
Blown from the
screen, nobody’s journal,
Held back from the
spurious confessional
(Since no one can claim
a real existence,
Only the tissues of
half-confused recall),
Given in atoms,
electric discharge, to the sea
Of nothingness which
is the great fertile Void,
Full of coming
voices, as yet un-natured howls.
Send your plough,
like Blake, over the bones
Of the dead; bless
transience, maker of beauty.
Watch the flutter of
pages obscured by smoke,
Gaze at the empty
screen, and celebrate this
True personal and
one-off mind, swiftly gone,
In hidden deliriums,
agonies, pure delights,
Its tremulous
ecstasies, crying to be re-born.
As he turned the
lamp to illuminate his hands.
It seemed as if the
words though unexpected
Waited for his
absorption, his embellishment.
They were not the
speech of an alien mind,
Though not the
speech either of the everyday.
The mind of another
mind opened on the table,
And it was as though
a light shone softly there.
The obtuseness of
the language was seduction,
The end of the
thread at the labyrinthine sill.
She: life, nature,
world, reality, had wound it,
So that he might
unwind it, with a challenge.
To reach the
Minotaur at the heart of being.
In the last corner find
the creature keening.
His sword and shield
were only papier-mâché,
His helm was the
spiky Pre-Raphaelite helm,
Of imagination, and
not the true Greek original,
But it served. One
had wound his way inwardly.
And left behind
these tablets of folded stone,
A name (not his) a
form (other than his person).
In the green
twilight the book was like a torch,
Alight, planted
solid in the outstretched hands.
It shone on bare
walls, on black window glass
Beyond which grew a near
presumption of night.
It gleamed on the
fixings, surfaces of his life,
With an odd
continuity of self, as though one
Solitary thought at
once gleamed in two minds,
Dead and alive,
though moving in only one,
As down the dark curves
of the subtler ways,
A shadow shuffled
through its animal soundings,
And waited for him
there. He adjusted the light,
Lifted his hands, in
a silent uncoiling of the clue.
It is where ‘I’
exists. I imagine the leaf that is.
Reality is the black
river flowing. Irreality
Is the mind conceiving
the glittering current.
Every mode of our
being takes place in irreality,
Which is also the
process, we infer, of reality.
You are irreal to
me, I to you. But your
Reality seems
greater than my own.
We make the model
and reality conforms,
Beyond our
reasonable expectations, Nature.
The irreal model
fits the irreal measure,
And reality is
there, in its new dimensions.
If I step forward
into irreality I also step
Out into reality.
The world is where I thought.
Surprise is the
essence of the real, and un-surprise,
That the holly-leaf
is there, that it remains there.
One world in many
minds, no minds in other minds;
Empathy too is how
the irreal proves real.
The bird, in the
masque of air, felt the wind. I know
It was not just the movement
in my mind.
All that went into
the miracles of our meeting: irrealities
Converged on the core
of reality, on the flame.
The beauty is in the
given and in the going,
In the zenith of the
star, and in its setting.
It was raining, but
beyond the sun was shining.
You were silent, but
I heard your mind speaking.
Behind the thousand
footprints I saw
The marvellous
shadow of your passing by.
It has or has not
meaning, as beyond
The form of science
is correspondence.
So poetry too bears
witness or does not.
Poetry is the cry of
the witness. The mind
Of the poem is a
mind to create a form
Of the irreal mind,
as a science creates
A form of the
tangible real in the irreal.
Neither poetry nor
science can be mere
Invention, even if
their content is babble.
The form of the
utterance communicates,
Even beyond its words
of sense or nonsense.
The poem is a fact
as the mind is a fact.
Its serious intent
is to change the world,
As every true
presence alters the possible;
It calls to the wild
and free imagination.
It is the individual
flare in the darkness,
That illuminates
mind in the glare of stars,
Weakness of thoughts
that dove-like glide
To possess the
future with a moan of value.
This creek goes down
to pools of granite,
Sculpted smooth
ledges and flakes of light.
The child throws
pebbles in the dark flow,
Which on inspection
is translucent, glass
From the highest
fells above this valley.
There is a twisting
and turning of motion,
A cascade like hair
and pearls, strands
Of braided
brightness, coils of shadow.
There is a roar of
endless going down.
It fills the spirit.
Here, there a bobbing bird,
Under the bare
branches of the trees.
We clap our hands
and regret disturbance.
We are a part of the
unnecessary cry,
Without which
nothing here is diminished.
Each of the many
worlds has equal weight,
Equal presence,
equal validity if not value
For the mind. We
must learn a new humility.
Man and woman bird
and stone and child
Are one. The vast
vigour churns in its far
Remoteness. Nature
seems more not less.
When heavens fade
real heavens brighten,
And the little here
shows its magnificence,
Without a word,
jubilant slight existence.
Goes up, invisible,
in the singing of the sun,
Performs in process,
suffused with feeling?
Before and after,
Shelley knew, pining for
What is, and what is
not, the poet’s trilling,
Gloom of the night
under the silent lamp,
Chill of the real,
sad winters in the mind.
Perhaps the bird too
feels its own existence,
More lightly than us
maybe in the breastbone,
More deeply though
in the outstretched limbs,
Over this landscape
welcoming but spare,
In which we are no
longer truly at home,
Despite our littered
fragments in the soil,
The shattered rocks,
the bare non-witnesses.
If only our minds
could merge with the bird’s
For an instant, and be
what we shall never be,
Even if we observe
in the subtlest of ways
The workings of its
irreality. Do you doubt
That it too creates
the world in imagination,
Constructs,
projects, feels, thinks, limited
In scope perhaps but
not in pure immediacy?
Doubt that the world
flares brighter in its eye,
At a hundred feet or
so, and that what sings
To me, as to others,
in the depths of meaning,
Is a shadow of that
gleam, a phantom blown
From the presence of
that ethereal burning,
I, less and not more
through mind, further
From nature, more
distant from the child,
Though on the dark
moor, where song rises?
The seduction. Those
rhythms
Of feeling in the
exhausted mind,
The roll of
transience, the roar of love.
Poetry is the call
of what is
Beyond call. The
wind’s order,
The sea’s order, the
gateways of the stars
That lead us back to
where we are.
Always new planets,
new galaxies,
Fresh poems. There
is no
Single way to sing
our witnessing,
Even the lost moons
bear testament.
Poetry is fiction
only as life is fiction,
Pure irreality. The
tongue-tied mind
Stumbling over these
truths that undo us,
Startled by
Not the Tao.
There’s truth in the
casual,
Though form and
beauty too
Are in the purposes
Nature hones,
Or rather the
mindless sieve
We call Nature.
We see purpose
everywhere,
Not the Tao.
There is spontaneous
truth,
Though form and
beauty too
Are in the
purposeless
Roar of Nature,
Its silent lion-roar
of brightness.
An incantation and
an arrogance
Not the Tao.
It is not here
inside.
They look beyond,
beyond the stars.
The god of gaps
Is absent.
They look for
purpose.
It is not there
outside.
They look within, beyond
the mind.
The god of gaps
Is absent.
They look for
purpose.
It is everywhere.
Self-ordered,
self-created.
The god of gaps
Is absent.
Old and poor is not.
Those nights were
beautiful,
Before the dark was
not.
Wisdom worth the having
Was in the early
mind.
The knowledge of the
old
Is the learning of
the blind.
Young and poor was
beautiful,
Old and poor is not.
You were always
beautiful:
That truth worth
every thought.
And we are here
In the bright light
of a raw afternoon,
In the back end of
February.
But now at last we
see each others’ faces.
Here are the human
voices,
The beauty of chants
Against the cruelty
of wind and snow.
Collapsed balloons
end as rubbery shreds
Caught on the wire
fences,
A dilapidated
silence grips the park,
But there is no
poverty of thought.
True we are caught
still in the detritus
Of futile violence,
un-creative power,
But the glow is in
the air,
The winter’s depths are
merely attitude.
Now at last we see
each others’ faces,
The what-is that was
always all that was,
Disguised as
stranger things.
Now at last we see
each others’ faces.
Broken rafts, odd
islands, shallows
And seasons lost
beyond horizons,
And the wars of
others’ causes.
Cloaked as a
stranger now it seems.
Things were lost on
the voyage, friends
And objects, places
and moments.
Experience slipped
over his back
Like an old turtle,
he the blind minstrel
Of his own tale’s
retelling.
Shrewd as a limpet
on the rock of life,
Callous with
certainty of death, its workings,
Loyal to something,
wife or
Or youth, or the
olive tree of his survival.
An old fox on a
summit in the lightning.
Sign of the cunning
man, the sign of nature.
You forget the struggle,
celebrate endurance,
Pack your lyre for
another court,
Another fortnight
paid for while they feast.
The wanderer brings his
mind intact from the sea.
There were the hills
of
The hum of the night
was the throb of wheels westering.
Of black wheels
turning on black roads hilled with silver.
He drank the feeling
of space, the roar of what passes,
Which is ever ourselves
left behind as reality changes.
He knew the craving
for peace, rest, end of craving,
Which is also the
craving for watched purpose not ours.
Where there was no
spring, in an autumnal desert, he saw
Tiny creatures hop
bright in the sand with the magic hour.
He was one with all
broken species of ancient mourning,
The tribes of red
dawn, the bleached bones weeping in earth.
And one with those
men and women of the present, keening,
Each in the solitary
centre of their dark un-reconciled mind.
He was the angel of
empathy, construct of imagination,
A shadow of earth
projected into the infinitude of stars.
He sobbed, and the
plants writhed. He shook and the clouds
Shook over the
canyon rim, the clouds of too-deep knowing.
He lifted his wings
of light, and they stirred whispers of dust.
He became the
stillness of night, the magnitude of darkness.
Some cloud danced in
the emptiness, some veil of silver
Around the essence
of what he was, a declaration of mind,
Swirled at the distances,
thrust out beyond the moment,
To form which is
timeless, being which is infinite.
Quietly in the dark
he stood in the desolation of time,
At the conjunction
of the marvellous with the banal.
Irreducibly himself
he vanished like a glitter of nothing,
A shimmer of
permanent atoms in the impermanent void.
And as imponderable
as we are ourselves.
They will be as
strange, creatures of the moons,
The stars, the
likely and the impossible planets.
They will spring
from chance, exist grieving,
Joy at form and
light, extol amazing beauty.
If they come
carrying weapons, those will be
Human weapons,
instruments of time’s anger.
If they speak, it
will be to warble a human tongue,
Not unlike
bird-speech but a subtle twittering.
When the aliens come
they will come as minds,
So like our own
thoughts we shall be terrified.
When the aliens come
to us here in Andromeda,
They will bring
tales our tales new tales once more.
Breaking out of the
far Atlantic breaches
To pound on the
windblown gravel shore.
You, recovered and
lost again like the orb
White light in the
sky plate of bent silver,
Gone down with Venus
over the trees.
Found and let slip
somehow, gusher of ore,
Gold water after
rain from the stone wall
Spewing down under
the shattered bridge.
Trawled from the net
of night, loosed free,
Sent down with the
flesh released to life,
To thrash through
green water kick of fire.
There’s a tremor of
destruction and we fail.
Accepting the
killers near, those dark hands
That twist the
breath out, slack the bright
Movement of being,
callous appendages
To minds made
brutal, hearts turned stone.
And there’s the
deeper tremor of creation.
So then, we tried.
Built and now washed away,
Pillars of moments,
carved notes in fierce air,
Precious because
both minds touched together,
Caught and
un-caught. A gentle unfastening,
Finally, one that
keeps hurt beneath recall,
Memories of
fondness, inklings of desire.
Recovered and lost
again like the headland,
Stretching its green
tongue towards the tide,
Angling in spume
towards the far
Logs of soft air, big drums of rolling light,
Over the inlet bays, black with rough weed,
The green sharp
upland, and the craggy hills,
Airy with time;
confused by what is neither
The end nor a
beginning, this pure boundary,
Of wild tide and
rolling grasses, blown free
Of whatever brought
you here, down fearful
Winding lanes, by the
crush of chewing cattle,
Those leathery
tongues-out of the natural world;
Until you stand at
the outer edge of sea and land,
Watching the slow
grey cloud of rain approach
Like a dim sail on
the Ancient Mariner’s sea,
A spectral barque
where Death and Beauty play.
Landing at night to
find cold waiting guns,
In the feverish
hands of soldiers on patrol;
The undercurrent of
violence, like the street,
Where a scraggy
youth from the projects ran
To try and snatch
his pickings from the prey,
Clasping a piece of
metal, death as its end.
It is the complexity
of life and beauty, fragile
Brightness clear
years nurtured, shining there,
We fear for, the
knowledge of the true good
That unmans, tremor
of meaning against pain,
The deep detestation
for the cruel and selfish,
Whose hands we
cannot cleanse in reparation.
These are the people
who bombed themselves,
Who pay lip service
to some god of loyalties,
Bound by the dead in
their mad dance of death.
We walk through
their host, like creatures of air,
Or spun glass, like
feathers swung in the breeze.
We know the bright
glaze of mice in the hedge,
The alert attention
of the flickering bird, quick
Between fences, the
knowledge of the victims,
Who carry in their
hands the invisible treasure.
Or invent it. Are
those who live in cities
To imagine fields,
are the urban warblers
Barred from barding
wet streets at
If our technologies
are devoid of charm,
Those past slipped
into disuse in the silence,
Are we forbidden
from creating worlds?
I sing the laser
night, the dark automotive
Sliding electric
down its track of shadow,
The pod, the pad,
the satellite, the siren,
I sing the slick
modern free of wood and stone,
A plasticized
reality, a flare of oil and diesel,
Pulse of acetylene,
glass, steel and concrete.
I sing the blind
future, on a damaged planet.
And in its
stillnesses, the love and meaning,
Forms of the
unknown, joys of the unbidden.
In a stone, and the
stone buried in a city,
Under dark pavement,
awaits the jungle.
The world in a
sound, and the sound sealed
In a gem, and the
gem set in the forehead
Of an icon, of a
statue, awaits the jungle.
The world in an
image, the image sealed
In an eye, the eye
flickering in snowdrift,
Between beetling
hills, awaits the jungle.
The world in a cry,
the cry uttered at dawn,
The dawn ascending
in fire, the fire licking
The world in
silence, awaits the jungle.
Is to know you as
you were forever.
Not to have you in
the soul again,
Is to have you in
the mind forever.
Now the dark wind blows
offshore,
Carries the
fragments of the cloud forever.
Not to possess you
is as it should be,
Who should be
un-possessed forever.
The past is in the
mind the past is dead,
The past is a lost
mode of the word forever.
Not to hear you
speak ever again,
Is to hear you utter
in the night forever.
Now in the darkness
the ocean heaves,
Waves roar on the
granite rock forever.
Not to see you
follow catch your name
Is to see you in the
The past is the
child’s book, the eye’s delight,
Irrecoverable, fixed
in thought forever.
Not to know you in
the flesh again,
Is to hold you burning,
in the heart, forever.
The reason for
shipwrecks, continually.
Honest simplicity,
simple honesty, is hard.
Why memory
re-constructs, dream re-orders,
Mind rationalises,
and language lies.
Sailing over the sea
of words, cleverness
Is not enough.
Beauty seduces, siren music,
The body of work
confuses, self-importance
Corrupts. Plain
truth is difficult, since every
Feeling involves its
opposite, and others.
Every thought’s
vague, even in diamond speech,
A life is not the
life we think we lived.
Our limitations are
not as imagined, we are less
Autonomous than we
know and more,
Less free of
background, freer in intellect.
Always the black
barque breaks on a hill of foam,
And slides over
slippery stones in boiling light,
To evoke the endless
echoes, the foundered texts;
But there’s a lamp
of mind on the splintered mast,
A white bird whirls
to meet the hammered flag.
Of the present:
tradition and reality dictate.
Whether the possible
poems come to be
Is a question of
whether the poet arrives
To create them,
within the boundaries
Of the possible.
Where the possible ends
And the impossible
begins is unknown.
But we see the
towers of the impossible,
At the heart of
their country, and we see
Tracks towards the
unknown borders.
Beyond mythology and
imagery there is
The real soul of
poetry, its deep matter,
Reflecting the age,
the nature of language
In its time, matters
of meaning, description,
The absolute nature
of that witnessing,
A tone, its
coldness, heat, the self-projection.
The poet projects
the self as the self would be,
Not as the self is,
or rather makes the self,
Which contains the
poet and the person,
What self sees what
the other sees of self.
No complex mind can
ever be disentangled.
There is no true
portrait of the self-creator.
The poet daubs
parodies on the twilit wall;
Calls slogans;
gestures; falsifies a region.
Insects, mice, tiny
turtles heading seawards,
Everything
scrambling, flasks of life and death
Entering the sieve.
Everything glowing, growing.
Stars in their
birth. Planets spinning out of dust,
Particles flickering
in and out of form, energies
Of the great wheel
turning, strange life, burning
Fires of the
universe, little veils of spider eggs.
Incredible
resilience, tough defence in the fragile.
Fear is its own
reward, and many forms of courage.
Puzzling over the
mind that sends us far from origin,
The San may laugh,
the Bushmen, caught in Time,
But we can be only what
we are. We the ongoing.
Thousands beautiful
little natural things unfolding,
Storm of being,
plethora of forms to the winnowing.
Between dark flesh,
bright mind, a curious cunning.
Lianas of
Depths replete with
insatiable noise, damp sounds,
The wild seething
movement past abolished winter,
Is the stage of life,
is its ancient mysterious drama.
Let the mind lash
here among pillars of viridian air,
Over the black river
being in its islands and flows;
Foam in the
cataracts; thrash with the savage churning,
Know its own
irrelevance to the universal un-making
Re-creation, the
observer stripped bare in observation.
The dark blue poem
of the mind in bruised excellence,
Flower-jets;
black-winged butterflies hovering, moving,
Too large for
comfort of mind; poisonous, protective,
Tough-skinned life
cascading defying the civilised,
Where we shelter,
homeless and alien, in the fearful.
And the yellow moon
over the webs of shadowy water
Murmuring night; and
the shrieking skittering other
Than us, making its
peculiar music, as valid, a meaning,
Not ours, spilling
umber notes of the dense cacophony;
The yellow moon,
solid moon, world in its matter rising.
Is what makes an
art. Or for that matter anything
Human, any game, any
delirium to pass the time.
Practise is
substitute for ritual, placation of gods
Those non-existent
phantoms of the fearful self;
An exercise of skill
on behalf of the real external.
So we like to hear
the tangible description of acts,
Performances, with
all their little appurtenances,
Their special terms,
their times and proper places.
As we like to hear
about the moments of suspension,
The gaze into
vacancy in the pauses between action,
Which is the look
into the nothingness after being.
Death in the sense
of the abeyance, the converse
Of the movement, the
denial, is always present
Counter-pointing
human affairs, the after-silence.
So from the dark
stillness of the trees a gust of wind
Moves its black
shadow through the silver meadow,
Travels near, asks a
mute question of the unlit house.
To declare this love
for the irreplaceable unique,
There, what existed
for us and no longer can exist.
Like reading Byron,
all the magic of that mad life,
The free spirit that
exhausts the finitude and feels
Only in the subtle
connoisseur’s extreme of feeling,
The electric depths,
love, beauty, set against truth.
Or Ginsberg on
Kerouac, Jack the Wizard, mind
Disembowelled for
the non-existent meaning, lost
For the purpose
absent, blown in
Something special
past, Dante or unnamed foetus,
Poet on your
instrument play the mortal concerto,
The impromptus,
those fantasias for four hands.
Mourn and keen and
grieve, with wind and rain,
In the empty concert
hall, our bare universe.
Lament the passing.
For corpse encased unseeing,
Blind puppet head glaring,
grey ash mute returning,
Or unseen atoms
whelmed in the ocean’s churning.
For the moment that
makes the magnificent, birthed
To stir strange
enchantment from our dull soil, music
Of Pushkin or
Akhmatova, or Chopin’s dark singing,
Out over the moonlit
snow, through the black park,
Along eighteenth
century walls to Mozart’s room,
The pale sharp-nosed
face intent on the Requiem.
To be doubtful of,
and atheism; no theism to ignore;
Out to where the
universe glitters in bound array,
And the dance of
time becomes the dance of light.
Not the end of
desire, or the end of our perceptions,
But the end of the
fantasia, the false forms vanished,
The hierarchies of
the human now women and men,
No mystical
succession, no faith in power ever again.
The great democracy
has flowered beyond its forms.
History’s prisons
are opened, the mind flies free.
The individual, the
golden one, unfettered, rose
Stretched arms and
legs, and reclaimed the divine.
A godless Prometheus
waved the brand of fire,
A godless Blake
beheld the human form shining,
A godless Dante sang
the communion of spirits,
A godless Whitman
hymned the human friend.
No more sad strains,
the music of fear and dread,
No more beliefs and
faiths, no more ghost shadows.
Out where the
phantoms fade, the dancers dance,
Galaxies pulsate, those
billion new worlds glimmer.
The body of the work
unchanging left to change,
Imagined changed in
the reader’s eye of ages,
Like a landscape
altering but always fixed.
The author is that
volume on the desk, a page
Remembered burning
on the screen, there
Undiminished and
more himself than seemed
The tangled mess of
wild concealed emotions,
Of which the work is
a peculiar shadow, greater
Than the self, the
unique individual, and less;
A dangerous persona,
a blind force that rages,
Swaying others
through the common language.
The dead are safe,
extreme. The bright chanting,
Rilke, Rimbaud, or
Baudelaire, ends when we
Close the book, refresh
the page, refuse to hear
The strange cries
warbling in night’s shining tree,
The cries of death
or misery or refusal, the denial
Of the softer world,
those long, charmed solaces.
The incantations are
not of flesh and air, true mind
Goes echoing down
the centuries: we know them.
They are alien
worlds we enter at our peril, those
Of the stranger
dead, the bell notes chiming deep
Behind the façade of
our solid world. There are
Authors whose voices
we fear, those who bring
Our selves to our
own benighted comprehension.
And still we stretch
for the poem beyond the poem,
The world beyond
this world, past’s other tongues,
To that utterance
they could not grant when living.
On the yellow water.
Shallows of mangroves,
Winds of Carimata.
The heart is never its own,
Never, we are always
going, wavering, returning
To some shape of
shore, a strip of foaming sand,
Which is the
spirit’s familiar, the uncertain ghost.
Silence of
Where what we commit
to is mystery of faith,
The madness that sets
mind in thrall to mind.
The heart is never
its own, never. We sail on,
By curious
promontories, alien coasts; they are
The strangenesses
that summon, the summoners.
Through the bodies
in a world transparent,
Inside each one a
simple glittering arc
Invisible, of
irreducible spirit.
Look deeper in the
empty sky that hides
Our absence in the
mirror where we lurk,
A lack of language
that betrays our mouths
Bleaches the feeling
from our faces.
Look deeper in the heart,
the lonely heart,
Pure trembling
bodies, minds’ sweet union,
Down to the empathy,
the all that is, irreal,
The You and I, the
Human Mystery.
How would we deal
with the terrible sadness?
If past were there
beyond and tangible, and not
Dependant on recall,
the ample lie, the self;
If future was a
space where we could go, solid
And stretching bare
before us, waiting for us;
If time existed, was
a true dimension; if we
Could travel through
our being, to and fro,
Return to moments,
sample them again,
The ecstasy the
pain, anticipate our living,
Until we were the
one continuum, the coexisting
Instant of
existence, and nothing to be feared
But everything, and
nothing to be newly known,
How would we ever trust
ourselves to speak,
Or to create, the
voyeurs of our selves and others,
The gazing eye, the
adult and the child, neither
Comprehending; strange
scenes enacted, insights
Mutilated, a union
of beings endlessly fragmented?
If life was
pre-destined, if we unwound the thread,
Rewound it, every
move and word foreseen, if we
Were pitched, at
random, into the bloody mire,
Forced to live all
again, live all before we lived,
Outside time, continually
returning to the moment,
How would we stand
the lightning’s dark exposure,
How would we bear
the scream within the silence?
Not mere recurrence,
an ignorant ‘being over again’,
To which one might
say yes, but absolute knowledge,
The word already
heard before the tongue, the shame
Engraved, re-etched
with acid lines across the mind,
To feel remorse for
what has yet to be, expecting nothing,
Forbidden utterly to
intervene, a long regret, a witness
Hovering within the
impossibility of anything but error;
If we were not the
ghosts, the transients, the phantoms
Of our irreality, but
were the perpetual victims knowing
The very instant of our
execution, the little drops of pain,
If we knew the
sufferings of the loved, anticipated loss,
Were drowned in
longing, for a freedom without truth,
A shadowy vague
greenness bright with light, not that
Cold plain of
stillness, filled with our timeless echoes,
How could we dare to
offer or accept love, if we knew….?
Over the natural
world. Our lives grew
Smaller in empathy,
larger in possession.
Same for the hunters
as the seed-sowers,
One paradigm of
power and propitiation.
Still the killing
goes on, the desecration.
I too an inheritor
of all our mutilations,
A beneficiary of the
species’ masteries
Of creatures and
machines, full of regret,
Sensitive now to the
fall of trees, pained
By the marred
fields, the concrete slopes,
The silt and soiling
of a cancerous journey,
That leaves no one
innocent, no one free,
Way back to the
slaughterers in the grass,
The ancestral trees
and shores, the failure.
After the storm,
grass quiet with resurrection.
And we reclaim the
stillness before thunder.
Make this the place
of imperceptible passage.
After the lightning,
calm with nothing human.
And re-possess the
language of our morning.
A space where stars dipped
on a green horizon.
A curved moon ran beyond
the leaves of silver.
And we claimed all
new islands of beginning.
The place where
cloud over a restless ocean
Breaks dark green in
embryos of being,
And movement trembles,
a peculiar motion.
Beautiful peace in
the country of white streams.
After the downpour, slopes
express renewal.
And we reclaim
thought before the rhetoric,
That silent thought,
the metaphor-less dove,
Flickering from its
hiding-place, the fearful,
Gliding through planes
of broad non-repetition.
The sublime
unimportance
Of the equestrian
statue,
The played out
passions
Of the empty
quarter.
Black railings round
a tree.
The dog in frost
Scratches its absent
flea.
An autumn wind
Flows over concrete
posts.
If death was a thing
It would haunt the
benches.
A mass of cloud
hangs
On the aerial wires.
There is no mercy.
Contaminated
thoughts
Jostle together.
One is remorse,
One is
embarrassment,
At minor failures,
Venus scuds on a
shell
In granite
On the embankment.
Her hands are
fiddling
With Botticellian
hair.
There is a
discontent.
It inhabits softly
The inner
wrinkled-ness of evening.
Rain in the night
Would seem a
mitigation.
Life was incomplete,
and its solace, affection,
Proved always insufficient.
The flesh incapable
Of forging the role
in action he envied, while
A frustrated sense
of grievance burned there,
Obfuscating thought.
Poetry was mere effluvia,
Though it still
captured the essence of the man,
The lack of
correspondence between what heart
Yearns for what the
human circumstance offers.
There was strength
in Nature, or the creatures;
Strength in the love
of women, while the branch
Glowed in the
blazing fire. There was landscape
To view, causes to
espouse, phantoms to attack;
The husks of power, the
shibboleths, the tyranny
Of idle and
accustomed usage over true freedom,
The lip-service
paid, hypocrisy, the endless cant.
There were lands of the
imagination, the islands,
The seas, the
languages and peoples, the hot sun
Vivifying mind, the
space to breathe he needed.
There was
friendship, and the talk and laughter;
There were the
silences, those black oppressions;
There were the
worlds to toy with and despair of.
Never the centre,
never the place to be complete,
At the precise core
of self-established meaning.
He sang the
transience, the sweetness, the regret,
The wasteland of
vanished passion, and the fury
Of the unsatisfied
heart, tilting at every windmill.
Inside him there
remained the idealist, unfulfilled,
Despising invention,
a rider between sand and sea,
Forever leaving, and
forever loyal to what was left,
The deepest part of
self, the loves, the lyric of fate,
The places where the
fragments of shattered heart,
May congregate a
moment, be gathered together,
To form a temporary
whole, the greater language.
Between us and
paradise.
The coils of wire
distinguish where
The species failed.
The tanks and guns
waver in the heat
Of deserts, sweat in
leaves;
A trail of unburied
corpses leads
Into the hearts of
the un-dead.
The powerful are not
the great,
A disregard for
status is a virtue.
The universe unmeaning
shines
In silent aeons
overhead.
The soldiers in the
darkness give
Way to intelligent
machines.
Their wars will be
the play
Of unimaginable
games.
It is hard not to
consider
The future with
terror.
The past with pity,
Life with empathy.
The armies in
darkness move,
Woe to the weapon-wielders,
Those who deal
Eternal
mindlessness.
Is a transfer of
meaning, but only to those
Who understand the
language of voice, is
A flow of
information knower to knower.
Your voice being
your voice, the invisible
In the undulations
of air, a shaping form
In the ear, carries
meaning merely by being
Yours, it is the
voice of the known knower.
The meaning of the
voice is not only language,
But intonation,
expression, the self moves
Between selves in
dark unending unfolding,
Which is more than
the electronic simulation
Of feeling in a
possible mode of the machine.
Likewise the wind
moving in what it moves
Among is more than a
shift of the atmosphere.
What moves in mind
is also part of the motion.
Your voice being
yours moves inside mine also,
And mine in yours
and the neither one nor two
Is a form of the
complete billowing of meaning
In the night air
which is filled with moonlight.
Now the moonlight too
becomes part of a mode
Of being in the
space in which self and not-self
Form this continuum
that reaches to the other
Greater than self
and a music in the moonlight,
The moonlight of
your voice, the greater moon
Swimming in
atmosphere of brightest meaning,
Between tongue and
ear, complex form moving,
Form without content
except it meets the human.
Lost, shut down, the
half-people of the ghostly past pass.
Four crows on the
fire-damaged tree consider the morning.
A seed and a moth afloat
in the air purposelessly correlated.
The star sinking bright
is not a star nor is it a planet Venus.
You are confused
with me and I with you but not in reality.
Troubled by written
word and the lack of echo in the light.
Absolute change
abolishes every last instant of being.
The eternal and the
infinite are pure aspects of time and space.
Eternity and
infinity are simply where we were, are and will be.
Eternity’s trail is
time infinity’s track is space, both in mind.
Two crows have a
mind to leave the charred branches and fly.
The spectres of the
dream flowed out of far light, enormous.
Now waking is the
solace while the flight of phantoms recedes.
Gone from the dream
and the lost poem of life
The never-written-down,
that lived sensation.
No continuance to
discuss, no means to bridge
The bridgeless
ravine, the vision faded in you.
No vast pain going,
a dereliction, sudden ache
In the brain and
then the drift to stunned silence?
All that gone,
centuries dwindled to a pinhead,
Then smaller than
the furthest galaxy’s pulsing,
Then….for me still
moving, you done with it all,
Rather it done with
you, and the ‘you’ dissolving,
Once mind, then
flesh, then the products of flesh,
The lightning over,
the last great flash of the sun,
Less than the tree,
the flower, the breeze, the dust.
All gone now. All thoughts
in their intricate music,
All unique
perceptions, the unexpressed, the word
Inarticulate
striving always to find its voice dark
In the mouth, the
tongue crying, the old phantom
Politics, the teacher’s
dreaming, all those dreams,
Who knows what we
each dream private in the dark,
On the strange
journey, we, loyal to life unto death?
No noise now and no
quiet, no speech, no silence.
No more getting and
spending, longing, sighing.
No more disgust, no
shame, and no physical ill,
Everything quiet in
One with the
buildings standing tall in maya,
One with the grand
illusion, not knowing here
We go, un-being
nowhere, a vast world folding.
The mind in the
world collapsed to mindlessness,
And the world gone
with it, down the sweet flume,
The world gone
taking the mind to voided chasm.
The world in the
mind shrinking to nothingness,
Like the white dot
after the film, then no after-image.
Not the release,
nothing left to be released from,
Swallowed by the
lion roar that consumes itself.
Not gone from the
world of memory, not yet;
Shade lingering, but
not shade of your lingering:
I cannot live for
you, nor you for me, in time:
Separate we sing all
to concatenations of stars,
Back to the atom all
the universe, space and hour,
In a flash, the
flesh, the hopeless unsatisfied mind,
With all its
caterwauling, fond delusions, we were.
The universe young
and old as the universe, in you.
Time and space
created in you, and then abolished,
Created in me and
not yet abolished, creating me
To be created in me,
and create all in me creating.
Mute as the bars that
Mozart left un-transcribed,
Gone with the dream,
and the beauty of the dream,
Nowhere on earth,
nowhere through all this being.
Through streets they
flow, how
Do they make a
living, exist in
Rags and blanket,
live and die?
Wild millions still,
co-existing,
Flesh and bone in
the pavement
Flow, no level down,
the basis,
Fill the interstices
of the species.
Vast flow of those
with nothing
Except the body-mind.
Persist,
In monsoon rains, holy
sun,
Something supports all
this void,
Forever, when one
flow ends
Another begins, food
spills down,
A little space,
moments between
Time and disease
flicker bright.
Beyond, phantoms of
other
Worlds buy sell
trade barter
Indulge the
sweetness of flesh,
Delve mind, imagine
selves.
All vanishing like a
dream,
Leaves this space,
beggars
In dark-light below
anything
We understand.
Empathise?
Like empathising with
force
Of nature, or
leathery kick
Of matter, glutinous
place
Of the primal dumb
disgust.
Recoil. Retreat to
vision.
Brown river carries
down
Its corpses, bloated
cattle,
In slow snout-nosed
roil.
Shadow of the city
burns
In semblances of
eternity,
Activity outplays
sadness,
Tenderness blinded,
lame.
Conflict of
emotions, weight
Care and shame in
the ghost
Flickering through
the dust,
Of no account,
indulgence,
Though the true
reality
Of what is felt,
outside
Crawl, stench,
ingestion
Of true, false, fusion.
Night no release,
dark
No bright lone
silent
Glitter of lights
high
Over this flesh
ocean.
Conscience clamours
For no good reason,
Compassion flickers,
But the hands
tremble.
In eternal sadness
Buddha
Bronze gazes, no
problem,
Beatific smile over all
this
Play of matter, pain
of self.
The real world is
the whole of its reality,
Of which the poem,
this form in change
Is part. I watch the
words pause, appear.
The motion of the
foxglove in the air,
Its to and fro, is
not this evolution
Of fragments of the
mind in ecstasy
Building a pillar on
the afternoon,
In mystery of order
in the chaos,
That of itself the
foxglove equally
Projects; these are
the regularities,
Broken, the
imperfect arcs of shape,
In a perception of
the foxglove’s being,
Deliberate making,
ache of the perfect,
Our dustless
mirrors, our measurements,
Our counting out the
beats of alteration.
This is the irreal
motion of the mind,
Lifting its column
without the sun,
Or the benediction
of the moonlight,
No ancient warmth,
in modern season.
It is the ecstasy
robbed of its rhetoric,
Calmed of its rage,
gazing at pale stars
Dripping their wet light
down the reaches,
In the metal and the
glass of our presence.
It is a strange
enchantment, crystalline,
That layers tiles of
beauty on the dark,
Though not a beauty it
can comprehend,
Within the order
that its chaos makes.
The singing about
singing is still song.
Words of the sun and
moon not ours,
Would be the fitting
subject for the real,
Of which imagination’s
a component
As valid as the
bundle of perceptions.
What should we edit
from the real world,
To shape the irreal?
Each contains the other,
All places in us where
the deep field shines.
Coil of the sea in
seas before all seas,
Fluttering of heart
inside the inner motion,
Cry of the soundless
ocean in the dark.
I form your beauty
in the pall of light,
Veil of a dawn that
shines before the dawn,
And folds, an
attribute of deeper night,
The nascent mind
within the nascent body.
I delineate your
coalescing beauty, far
Song of existence
rising to perception,
Word before word of
flesh in utterance,
An airless speech of
air before its season,
A cloud of tissue on
the walls of coral,
Sunk deepest in
shallows of beginning.
I feel your curling
grasp of time unwind
Translucent fingers
to the bays of morning.
I turn your beauty
to the seething summer,
Beat back your
autumn, deny your winter,
In the wild rage of
spring’s incipient season.
I lance your sorrows
and defuse your pain,
Take on the mantle
of the ominous future,
That elemental
neutral, those green tropics,
Those cataracts of
meaning, the black flow
Of being down the mind-cliffs
of moonlight.
I am the years to
come will be your past,
A name that
signifies the edge of breath,
The legacy of flesh,
speech of the self,
Phantom of all we
are, ghost of the chaos,
Crossing the hours
and phrases of the sky,
Tossing the white
foam to the arch of stars.
I draw your form
inside the gates of life,
In filaments of
beauty, skeins of flame.