# No Mind

Smitty - Unsplash

Translated by A. S. Kline © Copyright 2016 All Rights Reserved

This work may be freely reproduced, stored, and transmitted, electronically or otherwise, for any non-commercial purpose.

## Contents

No Mind

The Poet of the Irreal

Blue Azure

The Mountain Stream

This Unique Day

Leaving the Self Behind

And Beauty?

Chaos and Order on the Mountain

Old Granite

The Wrong Way

Night-Walking

The Movements of the Mind

Wherever You Are

This Moment

Credo Recalled

This Nature

Clear Evening

The Mountain Path

Strangeness

The Hawk in the Sky

Lighter, Still

At The Full

Silent as the Stream.

The Individual

The Process – Evening

Aspen and Ash

Hisen (Waterfall

Metamorphosis

Conversing Among Flowers

The Flicker of Birds

What Odds?

A Little Song for the Poets

The Deer Dance

Nearer to Home

On the Edge

The Restless Spirit

Flesh is the ‘Mother’ of Mind

You and I in the Darkness

What I Have Lived

The Glowing Day

Last Night

The Death of Why

Once

At Blue Creek

Archaic Eyes, No Violence

The Bones of the Hare

Index Of First Lines

## No Mind

A whisper of light, from a distant galaxy,

Intrigues the eye. Here for no purpose, I

Consider the dark, its solace, its far ease.

Emptying mind is harder than one thinks,

Which is never a space, more liquid flow.

To void the fountain, is to kill the source?

Consider the greater fount, the universe,

Gone falling into itself in every moment,

Now, to remain, the all that it becomes.

Consider the trees, black on the horizon,

Over which summits rise, as in far China,

Consider the grass, worth consideration.

Can you preserve the dying, or the dead?

Better not to embrace the Buddha’s bones.

Better to simply contemplate the mirror,

Our night-glass, bright, our interpretation

Of signals from the air as sound and light.

My age is quiet; yet I love its beauty, yet.

I love the contours, and their subtleties

Of bright and dark, the chiaroscuro,

And the contrapposto, hard to learn,

As emptying the mind is hard, the self

Rendered down to not-self, to a hiss

Of stars the aboriginal, native hunters

Listened for, at the hearth of survival.

Condemning nothing, love, hatred, is

Our nature; what is this that condemns?

Bring it to light, show it to me, ah!

Mind is a slippery motion, silver-quick,

Mercury’s substance, ever messenger,

Never the message, ever the silent thief.

A mirror, and not a mirror. Free of dust?

The dust we are, a whisper from the stars?

## The Poet of the Irreal

The poet of the real sings

The sheer solidity of things,

Yet insubstantiality

Inheres in everything we see.

The poet of the irreal knows

Tree, stone, and grass that glows

In the softened evening light,

Within, are darker than the night

That gluons, and photons, blind,

Mediate, and tightly bind,

All the constituents of matter,

Quarks, leptons, of the latter,

The inwardness we cannot see,

The being-so, of what may be

Obstructive substance to the flesh,

Yet, deeper, a dark, unfelt mesh.

I kiss your lips, I trace your face,

Banishing the irreal, with grace,

Yet in the darkness feel all slide

Into the soundless, sightless tide,

Where, the drowning man, I roil;

Through weightless agitation, toil;

There’s Sartre’s ‘nausea’ at the root,

The Tree of Knowledge bore ill fruit.

Here’s rock and root, yet ice and snow;

The opaque veil hides all below;

Its essence, though we see its form,

Ignorance, habit are the norm.

Let you and I not here dissolve,

Though inner doubt tests our resolve,

Though science queries every art,

And in the mind now sets the ‘heart’.

At ease with the irreal, we’ll lie,

Matter, beneath the golden sky,

Rendered eternal, like the past,

Yet mind to mind still, at the last,

Selfs un-selved, to grasp the now,

That to which all power must bow,

Fluttering here, softly, in the grass,

Birds of bone, thoughts that pass.

## Blue Azure

Ema Pandrc - Unsplash

Blue azure here, a hint of breeze,

Grasses wave

In the coolness, cliffs upstream,

Once,

In a while, heron glides in,

Makes stalky landing,

Flick of the feathers,

Bows to the stream.

The heart, so full of pain, no machine

Feels the

Pain of being, pain of

All

The creatures, merciless

Nature’s endless circus,

Stab in the dark

Mind takes, but here:

Here’s blue azure, the touch

Of air, the purl

Of water, beauty

Bright,

Flowing, fuelling

Mysterious love of form,

In the eye, in the brain,

Love, that’s beyond desire.

## The Mountain Stream

Plunges,

Plume of light

Over stone

Cascades,

Glistening, scattering,

Falls, like Universe

Into itself

To become itself

Once more,

Gone, found,

In every moment.

Flows

Sheet of silk

Over stone,

Glittering, gleaming,

Distance, silent

Measure of space,

Time, silent

Measure of change,

Remorseless slide

Of all that exists

Silent as vision.

Sinks

Plunges in foam

Over stone,

Challenges rock,

Becomes

The pool,

The swirl of a leaf;

The weightless

Pebble

Spirals in shallows;

Endlessly, to and fro.

## This Unique Day

Walking in the pines

Under the stars,

Thinking of the future

Of the species.

Without feeling,

Where’s the life?

Mind in flesh

Is mind deep-rooted.

After all this,

Nature still remains,

Or rather the non-human,

Blessed, intentionless,

Pure, and wordless

Whorl of being;

Every instant’s

Unrepeatable motion.

Without beauty,

Or affection,

Where’s the life?

In pursuing

The restless spirit’s

Bright embodiments,

Robotic chatter,

Mere mirrors of the self?

Behind language

Is what there is

No language for,

The pain and joy,

The walking in the dark,

The water’s gleam,

The unprecedented night,

This unique day.

## Leaving the Self Behind

Three that will do for

Gods, serve as ideals,

Truth, the desire for fact,

The existent, the stable.

Beauty, desire for form,

The complex, the easeful.

Love, desire for the Other,

The unique, the sacred.

Fact where I am grounded,

Form where I transcend,

The Other that is not I.

I enter the gulf of night,

I sense the stone, the tree,

I leave this Self behind.

## And Beauty?

Raychel Sanner - Unsplash

Aquinas said: Integritas,

Claritas, Consonantia;

Wholeness, brightness,

Harmony, the thing ‘itself’.

Yet I love the fragmented,

Too, the dim, the half-seen,

The dissonance of night,

The amorphous nocturnal.

Beauty’s the shiver of form,

A complexity of detail,

Or a lack, simplicity, pure,

The affirmation of light,

And so, the blade of the real

Entering the core of self,

Seen, unseen, in a moment,

So, not the Gothic choir,

With its own magnificence,

But Nature, seen on edge,

The breeze in the grass,

The tremor that eludes,

So not Piero’s skies,

Bellini’s line of cloud,

Or Titian’s distant storm,

Though they too transcend

By entering the silence,

And the stillness of being;

No, rather the enigmatic

Denial of mind in-solid,

Is what I crave now, time

Visible in water, passing

Clouds, a quivering leaf,

Whirls of sand in the pool,

And not death’s quietude,

Though ever seductive;

Beauty now, in the new,

Changing, configuration.

## Chaos and Order on the Mountain

After the rain

The bright stream

Runs clear,

The bounded fall

Repeats its infinite

Thread,

With no two variations

Ever the same:

Liquid order

In liquid chaos.

Drops slide

From the leaves,

A branch unbows

In flecks

Of light,

Random movement

But, beneath,

The delicate pattern,

Imitating

Life.

After the rain,

The clear stream

Runs bright,

Here nothing’s owned.

Behold the three:

The Present

Moment,

The Play of Energies,

The Individual

Life.

## Old Granite

This breeze on the mountain is best,

Green pine,

And below, oak and ash,

A thousand feet high,

And dreaming.

Old granite, and cool air,

Pondering the mystery

Of why we love what we love,

Why certain forms,

Why certain people,

Facts, that quiet the mind,

Facts that disturb.

There’s a complexity

At the heart of it all,

Not single reasons,

Grounded by what calms,

The unique, the bright

Other,

And the non-human

Distinct from the self,

Hints of the purer species,

Clarity of tone and texture,

Harmonies

Of the natural,

Pleasing the senses.

Half-physical, half-mind,

A mental state,

The stone-wet stream,

The sighing flow

Pine-cones and needles,

This high floor, the spirit

Walks on, breathing

The atmosphere of light,

Wild air,

The realm of creatures,

Who live close to the land,

And know the ground,

And not themselves

Other than as purpose,

Pain and ease.

Here are the best trails,

In the sun,

Or under snow,

The years of fact

Of silent form, beyond us.

## The Wrong Way

One more species gone,

One more

Insignificant insect,

One creature less

Of the primal world,

Gone to the something

Crushed under your thumb,

Yet this time

Unrepeatable,

Irreplicable form,

Leaving a startling pain;

Mere unalive matter.

Say what we have done

To the planet –

Which needs no saving:

It’s you and I,

We are the ones

Need saving,

And the landscapes

We love,

The hills we love,

Where creatures still move

And meet the day.

## Night-Walking

Watching the moon

At midnight; straying

Along dark slopes,

And needing nothing;

Wandering off the path,

To find the way;

Nothing is sacred,

Everything is sacred.

All of it of itself,

And through itself,

From within itself,

In self-derivation.

Celebrate the Earth,

The creative forces,

The freedom of solely

Natural constraint.

My freedom is creation;

All of the wisdom

In the world needs

Little time or space.

Everything of itself;

No line between life

And matter; life mere

Matter in process,

Autonomous replication,

Growth, self-modification,

A step beyond rocks to trees,

Eating minerals and light.

I go the sacred road,

Where nothing is sacred,

Where the moon is free,

The grasses at liberty,

Among glistening leaves,

To find the masters there,

The ones who only cared

To try and comprehend

This world.

## The Movements of the Mind

I speak to the ones

Whose internal life,

The life that lies

Behind the face,

Being finer and deeper,

Is worth more to them

Than the public world

And their external life.

I speak to those few

Who sense the flow,

And only need to stop

For a moment to feel it;

Those whose thoughts

Reflect on the source

Of order, within,

Life born of matter.

Out of the inanimate

Came life, the living,

This landscape seen

From the peak, alive,

With its crystal streams

And wave-like grasses,

Its flowing mists, the cloud,

The breeze, in process,

Since all process to us

Forever seems alive.

I speak to those few

Who, though knowing

There’s no way back,

Find their meaning here;

Those whose values lie

In the delicate silverpoint

Of the half-smile’s tenderness,

In visions of light, the tremor

Of the world behind the world,

Freed from its gods and demons;

Those who gaze within,

Hiding, in inner being,

Behind the silent face,

The movements of the mind.

## Wherever You Are

Wherever you are

There is reality.

Rinzai, indeed, said

Something similar.

If a star dies unseen

In every way,

Did it exist?

Oh, I think so;

And the past eternally

Past, which is

A thing the living

Can’t be robbed of.

The real cannot be

Spoken of, it’s wordless.

We, the irreal,

Bow down before it,

And not in any language.

No art

Imitates nature,

Pure and godless,

Art is new creation,

Out of mind,

Enriching mind.

Nature beyond

What was within.

And so, the real

Is only here,

Is only now,

And our worth

In our intensity,

The reaching out,

Trying still to touch

After a lifetime,

The existent other.

## This Moment

This pattern of pine needles

On the floor of the wood,

Unique, the pattern eternal,

Once only, once and forever.

Unique the motion of mind,

The flickers and tremors

Of memory, these feelings,

The unprecedented hour,

The passage of shadows,

Of what I must grasp,

Eternal, opened, gone,

Bright flare of its burning

World in which I exist,

Feeling the beat of my life,

Of my heart, this moment,

This moment! This moment!

## Credo Recalled

The truth, and only the truth.

Whatever is shared, increases.

Form, affection, and freedom.

The creative life of the mind.

Whatever is given not made,

Whatever is silent inside us,

My memories, my emotions,

That the sacred is not for sale.

## This Nature

Stumbling from place to place

I find my space of existence,

Below the mountain pines,

Under the birch and larch trees.

The mountain paths are fine,

Cool in the heat of day,

Traversing wooded slopes,

Stumbling from place to place.

‘It’s in my nature to love

The hills and mountains.’

T’ao Ch’ien, said it, so.

His nature. This Nature.

## Clear Evening

Mark Basarab - Unsplash

I look at the brightest stars

And feel the silent planets,

Circling and rotating,

The endless stony masses,

Orbs of gas, in every shade,

With molten or icy moons,

All the places empty of mind,

Of human love or intent.

I stare at them in silence,

As the flow of air goes past,

And the grasses sigh and stir,

And darkness soothes the eye.

I imagine alien shores and seas,

But mostly bare rock and dust,

The unblessed and intentionless

Universe, devoid of purpose.

Empty therefore meaningless,

Meaningless therefore empty,

Leaving us to find our space,

Thankfully free of destination.

Those like myself who value

Freedom, to be one’s Self,

Who witness and seldom join,

Who love forgotten corners,

Embrace the furthest stars,

To live and die with them,

Amid their fire as we are,

Holding to damaged Earth,

Clinging to this blue sphere,

Tinged umber here and there,

Never quite what it seems,

Spinning on without a care.

## The Mountain Path

There’s no way to describe

The mountain path.

‘The scent of pines’

Is not the scent of pine,

The floor of the wood,

Seeds, needles, tufts of hair,

The upturned soil.

‘The shining lake’

Is not the shining lake,

Its gleam,

Its quivering brightness,

Piercing the mind.

Words are not senses,

Human speech fails.

‘Sound’ is not hearing;

‘Taste’ is not biting

A stem in the teeth;

Touched by the breeze,

‘To feel’ is not feeling,

The turmoil,

The joy and the pain.

Texts are not life,

Though they leave,

Footprints behind

For a while,

Traces of being,

Pressed in the earth,

Imprinted on stone.

I have no language

To say what you are,

What you know,

In the transient flesh,

Though you grant

Me meaning,

Walker at daybreak.

All this Irreal of ours,

Where Mind

And Matter meet,

World and the Self,

Vanishes tenderly:

Now, wash your Mind

In the mountain stream.

## Strangeness

Waking in morning light, reflecting

On the total strangeness of the world,

Often inexplicable, well, to me at least,

Starting with existence, the Universe,

The something, rather than a nothingness

Which is, in itself, meaningless, of course;

The consequences of the speed of light,

Or of its constancy, which is the mystery;

The fact of entanglement, pure paradox,

‘Ed eran due in uno e uno in due’: Dante.

The ease of disproof with a single fact,

The impossibility of disproving fantasies;

The reality, the experience, of colours:

To the gazing eye, how red appears red,

How blue shows blue, all the features

Indeed, of vision, even in our dreams;

Mozart’s music, and all Da Vinci’s art;

The impossible odds of there being life,

Intelligent life, I mean, on any planet;

The experience of Beauty, ours alone.

The existence of empathy and affection,

In a species that was honed for survival;

The vast complexity of human feeling,

And how sensation ends as sensibility.

Consciousness, of course: not the theory

Of mind, or the networks of the brain,

But the raw experience of being I and Thou;

The ‘thatness’ of the Other, of the World;

Truth that is truth for ‘I’, but not for all;

And Love: that which involves the whole,

The entire human being, body and mind,

Sense and sensation – Love, and its power;

The absence of design, our chance presence;

The impossibility of imagining being dead;

The thought of the void versus the non-void;

The thought of all those mind-less planets;

Our inability to live the life of other species,

Blake’s bird flying in a spacetime of its own;

The essence of change, and nothing changeless;

The eternal vanished past, the imagined future,

Therefore, the slippery nature of the Moment;

The experience of force, of potential energy,

The world poised to become, and yet remain,

And all without mind, and all without intent;

How the determined, not the pre-determined,

Manifests itself, through us, not despite us,

And how the will, unfree, still nonetheless

Expresses the individual; we are the bud,

And the bloom on the stem, as is the rose,

Which would exist in no other universe,

No more than we ourselves; all forms unique;

How Buddha was right to hold a single flower;

How fragile everything is, and yes, on fire,

But with the fire of creation, self-creation,

The as yet undimmed light, against the dark;

Magnificent language; the life-giving Word.

## The Hawk in the Sky

One green pine on the slope.

Watch the hawk in the sky.

Mist on the sombre cliffs;

All this shadow and light.

Begin again, in the silence,

Always be the beginner.

Scatter the pollen of dawn.

Watch the hawk in the sky.

Recall forgotten purpose,

Be the river after the rain,

No need to search for truth.

Watch the hawk in the sky.

## Lighter, Still

Ice and snow, on Cold Mountain,

Rain, mist, and winter winds.

Grasses sigh; the summit shines.

There, is peace; here, the restless spirit,

Glinting light, flickering leaves,

Black pine-trees, the mind’s illusions.

Here’s the real and not the image,

Here’s the feeling, not the words,

Bright torrents, and the bright path.

Wandering late; above, a full moon,

This place is limitless, this hour,

This world, lighter than a feather.

## At The Full

No place to rest there, in the sky;

Listening to the breeze, is beauty.

The mind is loose, thought is free.

Deep night, among the galaxies.

Cascading back through time,

Falls the fountain of true being.

In the crystal stream, white moon,

Lost far down, all noise and stir,

The night sky is my inner home.

I know the Way’s never closed,

That all is form and process,

World and life in the detail.

## Silent as the Stream

Thorsten Hack - Unsplash

Back in the place where the cliffs are high,

Watching the green fern flick in the water,

Bathing my feet, now, cleansing my mind.

Summer or winter, it’s all the same here,

The deer gaze back at the creature in me,

The sun in the mist is tender, and bright.

When darkness falls, there’s the universe,

A solitude, one that glints and gleams.

Back in the silence, where it all began.

## The Individual

Escaping from Purgatory

(A metaphysical concept,

Though the pain is real),

One is never sure at first

Or even later, where one is.

The pines are taller, the air

Is purer, the insects, birds,

And creatures’ presence

Nearer, the light is brighter.

Over the bare rocks, solid,

Free of shadows, of ghosts,

Where the stream descends,

Through a bouldered bed,

Observing clouds forming

Changing shapes in the sky,

One inspects one’s thoughts,

Abandons preconceptions,

Every rule from the dead,

Till the world’s made new,

The delicate light on leaves,

The flow of water and air.

Escaping from Purgatory

Into Paradise (though not

The one the book ordered,

Rather the one mind made),

One forgets what is done,

(Though the past is eternal)

As if starting again, clear,

Like the stream, again, again,

Maintaining its perfect form,

The motionless, ever-moving

Moment, the endless fount

That falls forever into itself,

Where the Individual is born.

## The Process – Evening

The flight of birds, the movement of water,

The floating mists, the flotillas of cloud,

Sunset and shadow, contours and planes,

Branches in silhouette, dark leaves blowing,

Shivering, flickering, glistening, flaring

Grasses like wisps of hair, heads of hair,

Billows of vapour with facial expressions,

Falls and streams over rocks and pebbles,

In pools and meres, across shelves of stone,

Flowerets furling, briars reaching, coiling,

Beetles whirring, and grey moths settling,

The planet, its moon, in silence, orbiting,

The darkening sky, shimmering twilight,

The altering heavens, Venus, descending,

Bright gas-plumes, veiling spiral galaxies,

The hiss of the night air, the cry of the owl,

Calling from solitude, claiming its presence.

## Aspen and Ash

Moon of silk, cool breeze, and no noise.

Water and clouds, what do you bring me?

Mountains and flowers.

Here’s contentment, clouds in the pines,

These, the permanence; those passing.

Age-old pine, and parting mist.

Everything clearly revealed in the dark,

Bright, lucid, pure, in our ancient home.

Perfect night, and unrepeatable,

And always eternally lost in the past,

Once having been, the never-undone;

Aspen and ash, filling the mind.

## Hisen (Waterfall)

(After Jakushtisu Genko, 1290-1367)

The breeze blows the flying spray,

That being the noise of coolness.

Moon-rise on the mountain ledge,

Here, the grasses bend brightly.

To grow old in the deep valley

Is more and more my desire.

If I die at the foot of these cliffs,

Then even my bones will be pure.

## Metamorphosis

Here, the Nature human art mimics:

Form, the dancing of light, the music,

The murmuring almost of words,

Almost a voice;

Persephone’s, or Eurydice’s

Whisper from below.

Here, the creature, softer than stone,

Is harder than water, than air.

Here, the fractal, chaotic, ordered

World of process,

Flows through all; transforming

What seemed so solid.

They dissolve, the mountain, the moon;

They become a sweet misted light

A dance of the photons, electrons,

Muons. All things

Are equal in their uniqueness,

You and I the unique.

Developing, changing, existing, simply

In order to cease mere existence,

In order to thread the labyrinth,

Descend, inside,

Where life vanishes and reforms,

Perpetually bright.

The new is born from the oldest place,

The figure ascends and descends,

Eats of the seeds, and renews,

Harvest by harvest.

Living is process, always unstill,

And being – becoming.

## Conversing Among Flowers

A thousand feet down

To the valley floor,

Scrub-wood, birch wood, and pine.

The wind as light as a feather,

The endless fragrance,

The falls filled with light.

No calendar here, suns

And moons, wild

Stars, the gentle, tender heart,

The mind silent behind.

Mysterious vagueness

Wherever love resides.

I hold your face in my hands,

To feel the resonance,

All purposes quiescent,

Unscheduled, living world.

Conversing among flowers,

Imperceptibly changing.

## The Flicker of Birds

The flicker of birds,

Everything clear,

Nothing hidden,

Nothing twisted;

Granite and loam,

Birch and aspen;

Noticing light,

Admiring shadows.

Don’t be casual

About the process.

Once chance only.

The flicker of birds,

Here is paradise.

In the end, every breath is precious,

Every hour, every minute,

Every moment of the day.

## What Odds?

And the wild rose, in the hedgerow,

The dog-rose, under the stars,

No god made you.

Rose of the sieve of life,

What odds your spiral,

Absent on every planet?

Yet this, the light of the rose,

Stares at the worlds, the show,

The mind below.

Just once, the light of the rose,

In all this universe:

Prove otherwise!

The rose in the hedgerows, wild,

The flame that’s borne,

The odds on another,

Infinite, do you see;

No there’s no

Guarantee, however long,

Six ‘million-to-one’ events,

Required, no odds,

Of a rose near any star,

Calculate, less than one star

In all those stars,

Less than one planet…Yet!

Earth hosts the rose,

The wild rose in the hedge,

The ditch-bright rose.

No calyx on other planets,

Yet the light of the rose…

No different

To the light of the mind.

## A Little Song for the Poets

This is the Way, the path

You chose.

Despite the darkness,

Plant the rose.

## The Deer Dance

The deer dance in the clearing;

A thousand feet high,

All is wind and light

Among the trees,

This moment, is your life.

The insect lives;

Fragile, transient beings

Swim in a blaze of light,

Not images of the world

But the world itself,

Creation, destruction,

Wheels of the Dharma.

A thousand feet in the air,

All is process and form,

Form and process:

Paradise, in the detail.

## Nearer to Home

The sweetness that lies at the heart

Of indifference;

Infinite being and true.

The wild flower, the white

Butterfly of more value

Than history – alive.

There is solace here

In whatever is not us,

And inwardly silent.

On this planet only,

The rose, the wild deer,

Being, not image.

Every detail of all

This vast universe

All is self-same.

Sometimes the past

Seems solid, but

Here is the world,

Not those landscapes

In which we are lost,

Ones nearer to home.

## On the Edge

A predictable silence gathers,

Around the predictable trees

And we are saved.

It seems that for a moment

The wind is beauty enough,

The air among pines.

Clear, and cold, and silent,

Mountain glitters, and mind,

The world is on fire.

You vanish, mist in my seeming.

One not the other, both one,

And so little time.

No, non-existence is not

Another form of being,

But beauty enough.

Under the bright moon

This world

Still light as a feather.

## The Restless Spirit

Out there, peace;

In here,

The restless spirit.

The tiniest of poems

Shows you

The power of process.

Image is only image,

I love,

The impossible real.

Back in the solitude

Where it

All began.

## Flesh is the ‘Mother’ of Mind,

Snow in the trees downwind,

In mind it falls,

And a bird

Flies through.

Cold glass the ice

On the lake,

The larch trees brace

To snow in the wind.

Cell by delicate cell,

Nerve by nerve;

Flesh is the mother of mind,

And life a performance.

Breath hurts,

Sight flickers,

The bird

Flies through.

Snow on the dust,

The leaf fragments,

Seeds and husks,

The floor of the wood.

All, surprisingly,

Inside-outside the mind.

The real is

The matrix of irreality.

Where does the snow fall?

Here, in the mind.

Where does the bird fly,

I’ve no idea,

In a world, as Blake said,

Of its own,

Beyond our senses five,

Deep in its own.

Oh, we’ve all got those,

All we creatures,

Suggesting

Where we came from.

You can have language

And meaning

Without them,

But not that which flesh creates,

White snow,

And green pine,

The being-here,

Granite and silent air,

The beauty we love

We’re here for.

Flesh is

The mother of Mind.

## You and I in the Darkness

Steve Gribble - Unsplash

You and I in the darkness

View

The cratered

Surface

Of the moon,

In lovely silence.

A lifetime,

Two, gone

In a flash

Of far-off lightning,

Slow resultant

Thunder.

Leading to quiet,

If not calm;

A deeper

Knowledge of beauty;

A closer

Bond in time.

The past,

Simply the past,

Not our view

Of it, is eternal.

Changeless,

Everlasting,

Unlike the world,

These voiceless hills,

Unless you call

The sighing

Breeze a voice.

Here in the dark,

This moonlit

Landscape,

Hoping

It lasts out

Our time.

## What I Have Lived

Incomparable strangeness,

Un-transmittable knowing;

All things not what they seem,

All exactly how they seem;

How stone is stone, and tree

Is tree, and both are neither;

The persistence of anger,

The strength of affection;

The eternal roar of the past,

The uncertainties of the future;

The illusory surface of life,

The fractal depth of the mirror;

The otherness of blind Nature,

Its non-human powers of healing;

That the smallest thing is equal,

In pure being, to the greatest;

That the democracy of feeling

Encompasses the creatures;

This fragility of presence,

The painfulness of absence;

The brightness of the dawn,

The solace of pale evening;

The darkness of obedience,

The fineness of true freedom;

The lack of clear analogies,

The limit of faith and reason;

The irreal, individual life,

This intentionless universe;

Your words in the darkness,

To my disembodied silence.

## The Glowing Day

Survivors of the vanished gods

Reflect

The stillness of the empty stage

Fill it with objects

Stage-craft, small event,

Yearn

For the god’s existence,

Stumble

Among gleams of words;

Wistful,

Those half-sighs

Of final resignation,

The dumb mule’s

Acceptance.

Inheritors of ruins

Contemplate

The broken garden,

Its damaged leaves,

Destined

For the bonfire

Of the future;

Describing

Matter that moves

Feelings that settle,

Into the quiet

Of the bay,

Gleams of light:

But here’s the glowing day.

## Last Night

Last night the stars broke in me,

The light, absorbed,

Roused my thoughts.

They used to call this

Inspiration, breathing-in

Whatever is not us,

The un-made, un-created.

How great and pitiful

The things we spawn,

Extensions of the ape-form,

Self-engendered

Six million years;

Long enough

To dismay a planet.

Still, there’s the beauty,

The blessed indifference

To us, to savour;

The irony of our laughter,

The galaxy at night,

And seas and grasses,

The calm of trees.

Who reach a kind of peace,

Blessed be they,

Free of all religions,

Finding a way through life,

Harming nothing

Other than for survival,

Watching the crystal moon.

The crests of the trees

Bow, the mind bows,

The unnamed fall

Gleams

Frozen in time by distance,

The Earth bows,

In all directions.

Look to the floor of this,

Its seeds, its detritus,

A fallen leaf, a spray,

A trace of spoor,

Life’s delicate prints

That say

We passed this way.

The vast night broke

In a million stars

Cascading,

Free of intention,

Soothing

This universe’s

Strange anomaly.

## The Death of Why

A wildflower gleams, at night

Beneath the pole.

Arcturus glitters.

A rustling in the grass,

These passing creatures,

Sparks of the unknown self.

Thoughts incoherent, in-cohering,

All that I do not know,

The ambiguities of reality.

Where mere matter ends

And life begins,

Self-directed, mutating, replicating.

The parameters of beauty,

The dimensions of affection,

The complexities of fact.

But here’s a universe,

Glowing

Through the arc of my fingers,

Blake’s infinite jewel

In a single pebble,

Seen for an hour.

The wildflower, complex, life;

The star, simple, power,

The rules of form.

Up there, dark energy,

Dark matter,

The cascade,

Falling into itself,

Mysterious present,

Lighting the leaf.

The air is cool,

The darkness soporific,

Purposeless,

Therefore, wondrous,

Free of all

Things human.

At the heart of the flower

Is sweetness,

That of the gentle heart.

All creatures, flakes of the self;

All mind, a miracle,

Godless, and exquisite.

No, I don’t need to know

What’s passing by,

Nameless, and other.

I am I, star is star,

Wildflower is

Wildflower;

We sing identity,

Enigma of being,

The death of why.

## Once

Through the long grass bison ran,

Wild horses; in the trees,

Elk stirred, bears loped.

Now and then, lightning, fire,

Red glow among pine,

Flight for survival,

Now and then, gleaming snow,

Iced trails, the layers

Of summer settling.

Once, we were only one

More branch of being,

A clutch of species,

Innocent tricksters,

Claiming

Emblems from the creatures,

Symbols, from tree and star,

From cave and child,

Jung’s archetypes.

Once, blast and pick

Crushed-stone and tar,

Cable and fence-post

Were the unseen future,

And light and shade

The only true definers

Of the present where we were,

The past eternally over,

The future unknown,

Though at times predictable.

And we, the silhouette,

Dark on the far horizon

Not yet the greater dread.

Once, the green meadow

Edged by woodland

Was simply the buzz

Of a million insects,

The river a flow of glass.

Once, we made few trails,

Left only footprints,

And scattered hearths,

Perhaps a flake of stone,

A bone, the hollow

Where we slept in starlight.

Once, a civilisation,

Not our civilisation,

Sang speechlessly.

Close to Nature,

Closer,

But never close enough.

## At Blue Creek

At Blue Creek

The bones of the Earth

Show through.

Crystal water

Clears the senses.

All the world down there

Forgotten.

Can you climb the mountain

With no mind?

Gaze from the thousand-foot

Cliff?

Wash your head and feet

In the mountain stream?

And still be there?

From rock to rock

The water falls.

I fall, the universe

Falls with me,

Above, the solid wall of stone,

Below,

The broken line of trees.

Hold tight

To the thousand year pine,

Drift once more

With the clouds.

Every wildflower here

Is worth as much

In being, as you.

At Blue Creek,

Can you throw the past away,

Irretrievable,

Irredeemable;

Let go

Of all that following,

Those beliefs,

Hold your life

A shining orb

Deep in the sky?

## Archaic Eyes, No Violence

Arrow-heads on the slopes.

Shell-casings

In the clearings

Where they practice.

Where are the deer,

The hinds, the fawns,

Lying?

Far-off, in the shadows.

At night here,

Seeing Altair, Deneb,

In warm air,

My soul is lighter,

Soul a facet of mind,

Or its root network,

Or simply the sense of self

Magnified.

Only the predators’ cries;

From the rest,

The gentle hearts,

Pure silence,

Our dreadful propensity

For violence,

Survival’s gift,

The sieved inheritance,

That – mars us;

All our violence,

The primal fault,

The inborn error,

Morality?

Commit no violence,

Of mind or body

Against mind or body,

The whole, the entire

Crime.

Respect the soil,

The creatures,

Our transience,

Love and beauty,

Thought creates

And feeling,

The individual mind

Below the stars,

The dance of Nature,

All we never made,

Deneb, Altair, Vega.

Between

The gentle heart

And the universe,

No barrier.

Breathe the dark;

Invoke

Those archaic eyes.

## The Bones of the Hare

Chris J Walker - Unsplash

In the grass of the limestone plateau,

The bones of the hare.

This is how

The universe ends.

Disarticulated backbone,

Delicate, bare

Bleached skull,

Ribs strangely un-scattered.

Here a civilisation ends.

A white glow,

Faint beneath

Uncivilised stars.

Over the bones of the hare

The night wind

Blows,

The absent ears

The hollows of eyes.

No more beauty of dawn

Peeter Snyers;

Albrecht Durer,

No more the gentle gaze.

All that’s done:

The final leap,

The zigzag trail in the dew.

No more mythology,

No more

Shape-shifting

Trickster magic.

A wisp of mist

In the evening light

In a green

Abandoned meadow.

But the spirit?

Where is the spirit,

Bound

In the bones of the hare?

It shimmers to life,

Resurrects

In the grass,

In the silence,

Timid and swift

Like the heart,

The gentle heart,

An omen in flight,

A phantom

The Self conjures

Out of stillness

And empathy,

For the grazer

On clover and herbs,

For the field,

The mountain, dweller,

The harmless

To bringers of harm,

Pure

Among wildflowers.

I could sing a litany

For the death of the hare

To the vast

Un-listening,

To the rising planet,

Veiled Jupiter,

To the setting

Glow of shining Aphrodite.

I could stand

To feel the wind blow,

The grasses stir,

The savour of in-coming night.

Form in its form was

The living hare;

See it stand

In the light.

Fact in its being,

Invoking mysterious

Beauty of line,

Vivid as flame.

Witness its brief

Flickers

Of almost

Affection,

For its secret

Resilient

Children; here’s

Purpose, incarnate,

Out of which

We make meaning,

Or die with the dead,

Lie down in the dust.

I could sing

Of the power of the hare,

The strengthless power,

Of the vision,

The leveret’s solitude,

Its patient endurance,

Its grasp

On the hidden life,

Individual Self,

That becomes,

One more spirit of Earth.

No Mind? All Mind!

## Index Of First Lines

A whisper of light, from a distant galaxy

The poet of the real sings

Blue azure here, a hint of breeze

Plunges

Walking in the pines

Three that will do fo

Aquinas said: Integritas

After the rain

This breeze on the mountain is best

One more species gone

Watching the moon

I speak to the ones

Wherever you are

This pattern of pine needles

The truth, and only the truth

Stumbling from place to place

I look at the brightest stars

There’s no way to describe

Waking in morning light, reflecting

One green pine on the slope

Ice and snow, on Cold Mountain

No place to rest there, in the sky

Back in the place where the cliffs are high

Escaping from Purgatory

The flight of birds, the movement of water

Moon of silk, cool breeze, and no noise

The breeze blows the flying spray

Here, the Nature human art mimics

A thousand feet down

The flicker of birds

And the wild rose, in the hedgerow

This is the Way, the path

The deer dance in the clearing

The sweetness that lies at the hear

A predictable silence gathers

Out there, peace

Snow in the trees downwind

You and I in the darknes

Incomparable strangeness

Survivors of the vanished gods

Last night the stars broke in me

A wildflower gleams, at nigh

Through the long grass bison ran

At Blue Creek

Arrow-heads on the slopes

In the grass of the limestone plateau