Pollen In
The Air
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A. S. Kline © 2011 All Rights Reserved
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‘You must scatter the pollen of dawn on your
trail’
Navajo Oral Tale
Contents
Scanning Deeper PAGEREF
_Toc305746807 \h 19
The Reality Inside Which We Imagine
We’re Getting There, Back When
Veils and Crowns PAGEREF
_Toc305746822 \h 35
Every Constellation Only a Pattern of Mind
The Folded Thing. PAGEREF
_Toc305746824 \h 38
Not There Until You Made It There
Can A Polar Bear Stare Upward?
Bearing In Our Hands: Bearing In Their Hands
At the Back of the Eye, the Whole Universe, All Time
Moving Pictures PAGEREF
_Toc305746841 \h 63
Saying Goodbye at the Edge of the Road
Immersed In Time. PAGEREF
_Toc305746846 \h 71
How We See Form.. PAGEREF _Toc305746847
\h 72
The Idea Of Cold. PAGEREF
_Toc305746861 \h 91
Mountain Meeting. PAGEREF
_Toc305746867 \h 99
A fly on the brilliant
surface lifts, lands,
Crawls, glides; is it moving
in joyfulness;
Or dancing to purpose; or
simply alive
In the light? No beauty like
spring; no
Air like this air, as the
body flames; no
Return like Earth’s return in
its orbit, now.
Pollen and ash on the wind,
ash and pollen,
Spirits shine in mist on
voids of appearance,
And the dead, we own to, sing
in the mind
So that we might perform
their resurrection,
Returning them gently again
to the levels
Of light, silver masks of
fractured memory,
Dazzling the heart in
snow-barked spring.
And the single oak sapling,
with umber leaves,
Dry scrolls of winter gone,
rattles and sighs
And whispers in this spring
wind over the hill,
Becomes symbol to me, is
life-in-death, is the
Fierce coming-again of our
mortal transience
In the form, is the
individual presence, bowing,
Slighter even than grass, to
the vagrant energies.
On to other hills,
Are they immune to change
Where nothing is?
Freedom is to defy that past,
To move on,
To say no inside your heart
To the unacceptable terms.
Looking down through levels
Of pine-trees to an angle
Of one blue lake,
And the rim of a second,
Stumbling on stone left by
Another century,
A downed wall split by
A sapling of its day,
Walking down through tranquil
air,
Beyond suffering,
Though that’s life’s irony,
Nothing is.
The oldest art,
Glistens?
Thirty millennia
Give or take a few,
And we began?
Bison, rhino, horse,
The horse
Over-painted,
By different hands
Five millennia or so
Apart.
Were they then
Free, loosed
From history, uncaught?
Or was it
That concept mattered
Not the painter?
Like those images
Of Buddha,
Or Siva dancing,
Out beyond
Individual lives
On the Wheel.
Horned bison,
Naked woman,
A minotaur
Ochres that labyrinth,
Torchlight
On vivid faces,
The essential human
Is not what
We know
Or what we feel,
But what
We have made
Of what we are.
Earth shaking,
Heated underneath
The plates slipping,
Chains of volcanoes
Simmering in darkness,
Waves roll up sands,
And set there
Scuttling life.
Cool behind a rock,
Breeze blows
On naked skin,
Ten thousand years,
A million
Makes no difference.
Life and non-life
Vary only
In the process.
Waves flow, the heart flows,
Hills of bamboo leaves
And remain,
Lots of waveforms
In this picture,
These endless
Tremors
Of the universe.
We dig down into the Earth,
Try to hang tight,
Cling to this surface.
Gravity helps,
But only so much,
We’re fragile
And light
As gossamer seed,
Chutes in the breeze.
Intensity of feeling here
Seems to vanish
Behind such still faces,
Eastern deference
The cultured calm,
But underneath
Our planet boils,
Deep quakes make minds
Blaze and foam.
The Creator
Before he vanished
Back into Mind
Had the creatures gather
Pollen from every plant,
And so they did.
They fetched ochre too,
Clay, white stone
Turquoise
(Always peaceful)
He drew the outline
Of Man (it’s never Woman
first)
In pollen,
In his own image,
Coincidentally Man’s,
Set the rest inside
And made skin, flesh
Sinew and bone,
Then breathed in Life,
‘Don’t look!’ he said,
Wise words, creatures,
Don’t look at the singing,
Shouting, laughing thing.
Then Man dreamed Woman,
Both before
Sun or Moon,
So it goes on.
Pollen blows in the wind,
Man comes from the womb
Of Woman
Who in every sense
Was forever first,
The Creator always last,
In between them Mind.
As far as I can tell,
I still am with myself
And every thing is well.
Mind and heart flew out of
the body,
Between wind and star
A banner of silk
Was flowing,
This universe sheer light
Falling on tundra.
I was the shaman of
The creatures were minds
around me
Shifting ghosts inhabiting
Absurd form;
I sang
The only language we have
The only cry.
I saw beauty there in the
silent field.
You understand: no human
beauty;
Far from the tribe,
And the language
Of the tribe,
The music of the starlight
Split my bones.
Now there are
Equations for all
This tremor
Of wind, light, dust
That overflows us,
Undermines us,
Bifurcating process,
And fractal steep.
Mind wavers in air,
Soon there’ll be
Description for all
This tremor,
Of cell, pulse, wave
That embodies us
Creates us,
Self-organising rhythm
Unconscious deep.
World wavers in air,
This lucent envelope
Its delicate sighing,
Slow-moving cloud,
Out there, black voids
And glittering stars,
Too great for our
Small, anxious, swift,
Propitiatory sleep.
Water and sky; mind threads
self and world,
Stitches place and process.
Hours a mystery,
Or say that change is;
recalling, anticipating,
How everything churns
through/inside being
Cloaked by all stresses,
strange to understand.
The boat glides over sixty
thousand feet, hums
With the flying fish, the
jellyfish, the glow of
Inverted stars in the
galaxies of ocean-foam,
Hangs on the clarity, swims
through the light,
Navigates this skin, this
boundary, this web
Broken by wing, fin, limb, a
universe beneath.
Face in the mirror is surface
dividing process
Of self from process of world
both undivided!
Part of the body I see/feel,
so part of the mind.
Self is a boat floating on
water of silence, lost
Between flesh and cool air,
tissue and distance.
The boat slides over sixty
thousand feet, hums
With our understanding. How
much we know
How slight a difference that
makes to the raw
Experience of being, taste or
feel of the edge,
How the limit of field and
ditch, water and sky,
Self and other, elude, vanish
into the complex,
Into chaos, that order in the
disorder of things.
Realms within realms, far off
shapes of islands,
The infinite coastlines, the
sea-horse tails, spray
Of in-wrapped light, form and
stress of feathers,
Stone roughness, fern-arcs,
palm-trees, bamboo,
Phosphorescent stars, the
Mariner’s sea creatures,
Harmless beauty, coiled
energy, heart’s harmony.
It’s there, our delight, it’s
there, it has never been
Other, it has never been less
than the whole earth
Held out before us, then
buried deepened inside us,
Sweet landfalls, and
interwoven delicate currents
Of flow, not lines but
planes, transformations, ice
And fire, billowing of a
universe more than ours.
The electron microscope,
A grain of pollen,
Shaped according to species,
Has the form of a doughnut,
Or a wrinkled fruit,
Coral, a knobbly mine,
Or some strange sea-creature,
A tortilla,
A cowrie-shell,
Bread-mound, lattice,
Ribbed seed,
Eggs in a basket,
Fungus, capsule, pillow.
Lovely complexity
Out of simple forces,
How natural form,
The play of a relation,
Appears, all stresses flow
To cast the shape of leaf,
The cloud on the hill, the
grain.
A billion years of form in
the twig
All our history moves in the
body,
And you linger in my mind.
Wind in the pale grasses,
Deep blue, cloud, blue
Hangs swirling, forming
Altering in the air.
No one understands the veins
Of feeling,
Ramifications of what was,
Living on.
Like the first peoples I
survive
By the power of my dreams.
You surprise me everywhere
Lost, returning,
Out of unconscious being,
Sleep, gaze, image,
Memories above all, those
Strange constructs
Half-visible, half-felt,
That shake the flesh,
And coil around the spirit,
Arteries of leaves.
The track of the moving line
Separates what is near,
Brings close what’s separate,
An infinite path in a finite
region,
I know all the equations,
All the non-linear shifts of
light,
But description’s no
experience,
And ‘to live a life’s not to
cross a field.’
Out of randomness, some
unknown order,
From some small flutter, a
beginning
Unfolds in multiple
trajectories.
We love the structure deep in
chance,
How death is chaos, life is
form:
Forever flowing, Heraclitus’
river,
Standing still forever, like
the fall.
Unexpected order, as if from
distance
Gradually the figures, as we
near,
Take on their being, reach,
gesticulate,
Emerge from indistinctness,
speaking.
Life’s order is this movement
in the dark,
Below the surface of pure
tangibility,
From a distance, where all’s
inaudible,
Invisible; the pollen grain,
the protistan.
Like Earth from space, or the
streets
Seen from some high building,
looking
Down, or through the
night-dark glass
The incomprehensible scene,
the screen
With sound turned down, some
drama,
Of genesis, coupling, or
destruction,
That makes no sense, or deeper
sense
Of patterns of existence on
the dark.
Out of order, in the
un-shadowed air,
Glittering now as if all
truth was there,
Bright but unseen, felt along
the skin,
The in-stressed flickering of
the solid,
The moving force, nearing
form now
Veering away to other forms,
or on
To an apparent formlessness;
order
Is hidden, truth is found by
seeking;
The order our mathematics
grants
A visible being, not Plato’s
forms
But the inner flows and
shapes of
Nature, constrained by what
may be,
Symbols of transformation in
the dawn,
As beauty opens, flowers, is
dispersed,
Into its distance, change,
annihilation,
Now a pure shape, now a
nothingness,
Beauty like light
constructing messages
From the hidden universe,
singing form,
From all the mysteries of the
summer sky
From wintry hills, and
snow-flaked boughs.
All around us, everywhere,
forever, until
We have no ever: this we were
born to,
This the unmade, un-given,
here and given,
The subtle spaces that steal
away the heart.
Shingle, hawthorn, silence,
The great sweetness;
In weathered strength
At Aill na Mireann,
The Centre of the Wheel;
White were the heights of
Almu,
Birth of becoming,
Cradle of rising;
Gold was Cruachan,
I reclaimed a landscape,
Sang on her breast.
I quartered the green island,
Reclaimed the spirit,
Gathered a loved landscape
The Ever-living,
And dark with stars
Was Emain Macha,
All violence gone under the
hill;
And light was Cnoc Aine:
Where the world shone,
I gazed at my shadow on the
grass.
As what you do. The
discipline
Of the tradition is what you
learn
Slowly if at all, unless born
to it,
Like those minds forced by an
age
To become their age, who
dream
Their work because it flows
light
As pollen to them through the
air,
From the world around them.
Oh,
We must take a breath to
survey
This Earth, what we have
done!
All the old aspirations
vanished,
Progress, uncanny knowledge,
Help from outside, the soul,
its
Afterlife, separation from
the
Creatures: time now to learn
Continuity, the first
beginnings,
This universe of bright
insentience,
Mind a flashing dance of
process,
No ism worth a moment’s
glance.
We’re getting there, back
when,
Behind the system. Turns out
Our destiny was never what we
Thought. New worlds for old.
Of Egyptian gods without
thinking
Of the word: pollen. Did he mean power?
I don’t recall them smiling,
except
The lion smile perhaps of
Sekhmet,
Smile of the destroyer and the healer,
Blake’s balm after a knock on
the head.
He meant Greek maybe, or
Indian.
Or perhaps he took the
complacent
Narcissistic godhead grin of
angels
Swooping down on unsuspecting
Man,
Laughingly, from medieval
archways,
As a token of the mystery,
like those
Basalt silences, those
granite depths
All surface, those polished
emblems
Of non-individual life, those
bimembris,
In which nevertheless a whole
species
Subsists and the social
vegetative being.
I prefer the shaman’s mocking
laughter,
Trickery, coyote-like,
shape-shifting,
Never caught in a statue,
never carved
Into the silence of the
stars, the system,
Wheeling eternally above our
heads.
I prefer the naked dancers in
the dust.
Up and down, the people drive
up
And down, all around nature
flowers
(Forget-me-nots) and the
trees glow.
Human behaviour always
intriguing
(This to prove you can write
a poem
About anything that breaks
your heart)
All unique doing what the
other’s doing.
But the women are beautiful
in the light,
And the children even more
so, and the
Flowers, hanging delicate
petals into
This burning, Buddha’s great
fire with
Which we are all, everything
is, alight.
And I’ll go doing the same
things if
I’m not careful, trapped in
this hour,
This age, this cycle of
strange being,
Before all falls apart,
hopefully in a
Sweet way after the
nastiness; to us
The species that does not
deserve to
Succeed, succeeds the pasture
and
The weed; or a thinking
machine or
Two, pondering the mystery of
their
Couplings, the terrors of
feeling, fire
Around them in this universe
all rim.
Of our difference. Nothing
alters
The way lives entangle and
stick
Like burrs along the path,
like ice
To the surface even after
sun, cool
Shards and plates, a layered
deep
Over which we so gingerly
tread,
Trying not to fall through;
in mind
The breathless corpse beating
at the
Roof above of glassy
stillness, idle
Hands, swinging in death, to
and fro.
I love you beyond all glacial
snows,
Love you like the hedgerow
and the hill,
The dark summer coolness of
those trees,
The hard warmth at the
field’s edge,
The trickle of the black
stream, the cry
Of the plover, the buzzard,
and the crow,
Everything that is life, what
you were
And are, behind the fence,
the useless
Wire, the deep un-passable
distance.
Relationship-the-sacred, our
difficulty
In living on; or somehow
letting go,
As Prospero gives Ariel to
the breeze.
The bond of love or
authority, sought for,
Lost; achieved; betrayed;
ended in pain;
Comedies with happy endings,
immoral
Forgiveness for atrocious
paths to love;
Strange badly-crafted plots,
with hard to
Credit characters, forging
the end desired,
Entanglement resolved, the
villains changed,
Or dead, harmony out of a
summer’s wood.
And tragedies with maddening
protagonists,
Redeemed by poetry, cleansed
by suffering,
Or brought in those last
sweet plays to find
The untouched soul, still
inward and eternal.
The tie, the knot, the bond
is all his meaning,
Sacred or secular, sought for
or imposed, man
And woman, comic; power
hierarchic; beauty
Transforming all this world
of delight and pain;
As in his own life perhaps,
exile and betrayal;
What usurped his spirit,
bent, and distorted;
All that he left, and found,
only to leave again,
Unburdening, feeling the joy of
that vanishing.
Clusters embedded in turf,
small stiff green leaves,
The five-fold twin-pronged
sweet-centred Campion,
With veined and swollen
calyxes, bell-like, pink urns,
Out of which wells a peace of
the spirit, deep as the waves
Or the sound of the waves; a
swish and scour of the tide,
So that I walk without
memory, the sting of regret is
Eased, and even the madness,
for a moment, assuaged,
The madness why the bond is
broken, why relationship
Deeper than every eternity
falters, trembles to earth-shock,
To mind-shock then, and the
clamour of the surf. Peace,
Out of simple beauty, how, no
one knows: a million years
And we grow together, we and
being’s tiniest distillations,
So that among the cliffs,
wind-driven brine in the air, light
Falling on trap-rock, on
boulders, pebbles, shale, the granite
Levels, I find myself within
sight and sound of the sea.
A few more hundred years,
give thanks,
We’re not done yet with
closing in on
How the world is so subtly
structured,
And let’s hope the maths
holds out,
The means of mapping, the
idea that
Every order is susceptible to
our sense
Of order, from quirk to quark
and back.
Strange though how little
difference
The knowing makes to the
beauty,
Except in bringing all things
closer,
All from within, all form
from within,
Nor does it detract from this
hush in
The soul, which is the
deepest mind,
Sighing its way, alight,
through process,
The bird of mind on the
golden bough.
What terror to contemplate
the boredom
Of knowing every how, our
only why.
Let’s hope strangeness
baffles us forever,
And yet hope too that the
maths holds out.
Hard to shake.
Coyotes, kangaroos, possum,
cougar,
Gathering the net of stars
In a song and the dancing,
Barefoot life in the wild.
Moon a woman rising
A girl with light
Through her hair
Or in the light of the lamp
The cave wall glistens
With beasts tame, un-tame.
A dog howls among flowers,
Little birds pipe
And cry alarm in the gorse.
What there is no way back to
Is still inside,
And calling.
All that we know is not so
Still goes on calling,
Rakes the spirit,
All the fifty thousand
Years and more
Of the dream.
Without seeing
Now we see.
In the too-late timeless
Sadness of existence,
Our blue world.
What use our
Fingertip tenderness
Now (we few)?
This face tipped
In our hands,
The dissolving form,
This reality
Streaked with tears,
The mirror crying?
Out of all this
Now small for us,
Will they return,
The serious true
The sweet flow
Ever-achieved?
I have seen beauty
Like a dream,
Heard the songs
Of the intellect
In moonless space
The howling there.
No mind in the stars.
We have made this
Of what we found.
Unseen, like mind;
A tiny scattering:
Immense, its tide,
Like wild chervil
Down the endless lanes
In a white entirety
Qualitatively new,
The unforeseen, another
beauty.
So the piling-up of layered
light,
Or deep pulse of the sea,
Mysteries of accumulation.
Equally by subtraction,
Little by little,
Worlds diminish,
Meanings slip away,
To leave what we have
Ruined, or to expose
What we loved well,
What deeper still remains.
The last peace, and the final
settlement,
Though death is no-thing,
simply space
Echoing softly with electric
passing.
No more sighing, transience
is sweet,
Though time’s disloyal, and
the human
Heart, Ovid said long ago,
was made
With far too little art.
Death is no pain,
Only the long dying. Death’s
a friend,
Whose face we never see
ourselves,
Except by reflection in those
deaths
Of others, our own ache of
invention.
Never our death we fear; it
is the trail
Of loss, the relinquishment,
the not
Being here, where things seem
familiar
Despite the alien strangeness
of being.
Who stand on the void, should
know
Their fall, through the dark
ring of light;
So that new being might
re-arrange
Our atoms; re-live, beyond
our sigh.
Green summer arches,
interlacing light, a sigh
Of those leaves that flow and
wave, never unstill,
Through the darknesses, and
all still the one sigh,
The trees are another order
of being, as valid
As ours; that is the vision
intrinsic; that ours
Is no greater existence, the
tiniest speck,
The insect, pebble, twig,
molecule of dust,
All the same inward flowing
at the shadow-less
Centre, endlessly moving,
always remaining this.
And the grey wood heaves, and
is intricate music,
As amazing form emerges from
simple equation,
And process in the real,
physical world, where we
Are not reason or thought,
but a knowledge of things
Vaguely understood, a
bone-deep, heart-deep knowing,
A fragile, infinitely
tenacious, strange ghostly solidity,
Which is grey-green light above
us filtering slowly
Into the perceiving mind, and
a brightness emergent,
Shivering, dissolving, deeply
coalescing, lost there,
In remoteness, in alteration,
in beauty, in nothing,
Where form’s part-seen, or
rather form and not form,
The cavern in the mind and
something beyond the mind,
The floor of the world,
littered, and the void where
We stand, held in thought, as
in deepest meditation.
Another order of things, the
to and fro, the shaken glory,
Glitter of surface, and
inchoate sweetness of dumb depth,
Where clasped fronds of
space-time flicker and near us,
Shaping then suddenly sinking
back into grasp-less echo
Of form, into the incoherent
shadow of form, no longer
Perceived. Sensible,
sensitive, oh, the vital building
Un-building of earth, of the
globes and whirls of light
Of the universe, pressing in
on us, falling again at our touch,
Immense weight balanced at a
finger’s end, massed power
The simple circling of
mottled immortal atoms swirled
Through the mysteries of
relation and seething presence,
To rest around us, a wall of
being, less tangible than dreams.
All being speaks this
language, in that sense there is no
Fallacy, empathy is real for
the mindless flow inside us
On which mind sits,
information’s integrated flickering,
Our projection, Self, of what
might be into what somehow
Is. Everything voiceless
still sings to us with its voice
Of eternal shifting movement,
its ‘sobs and blasphemies’,
Fills emptiness, blackness,
bareness with green tremors,
Blue-white, citric, rubies of
motionless fire, veils and crowns.
Or the world seem ordered.
Beauty our harmony,
Though bred in the bone, the
gene that predisposes.
As: night by the slow river.
Or: the single rose, the last
Bloom of the garden. Or:
laughter on rain-filled streets.
Memories are lances hurled by
our own two hands.
Even this night the stars and
sea flow away from us,
And there is no voice from
the sea unless we interpret
The non-human voice of the
process making its cry.
Our tiny order made order
spring from our hands,
In the re-arrangement of
things on the surface of day,
In the form of the cloud, in
the shadow on the hill.
And our brief love; where we tried
to make order of being,
Of intractable relation, of
the forms of connection that bud
Like the embryo, coil, as the
snake weaving the sand;
Even our brief love was a
symbol of brighter shadows,
Atmospheres, the enormous
singing hum of air and tide,
Like the dynamo that drives
and is driven by the stars,
Even we, desperate for order,
burning there, clashing
Like wind on gravel, like
smoke on eyes, even we
Uttered: sounded words
against the unflinching dark.
Arise, in the quiet house as
the first stars emerge,
Which takes the world in its
hand and crushes
Everything except the past
spun from its entrails?
Thought the perfection of
time, or its imperfection.
Out of the chaos of feeling,
the thought emerges,
Most often the something
inexorable that changeless
Continues to rotate, a
crystal agony at light’s core,
The folded thing that can
never be unfolded again,
The act that seems to hinge
on a word, and yet
The word was only a symptom of
mind’s expression
A cogent flag unfurled to the
brittle cold of day.
They could have wept and been
happy. The clouds
Glanced off one another,
refusing to merge, made
Faces and forms in the
ice-cream parlour of time,
For each of us makes the
incommunicable space
In which we perform an
endless act of contrition,
Where we regret, as the world
does not regret,
Rolls on as event, persuading
us time is time
Only as memory makes in the
poem of the mind.
The river flowed under the
mirror of pollen,
A yellowish flow, a mixture
of death and life
That is always the world,
immaculate in flow.
The pollen in the air was the
vision of future
Being in the air, viscous,
chaotic, ordered
Infinitely sweet and deep
like a honeyed
Contour of flower sticky with
the unexpected
Expected: the air hummed, the
mind trembled.
The river was frozen within
the river of the mind,
But always flowing, its
infinite variations closed
In a boundary of concept, in
a frenzy of naming,
From which the one name
rises, which is our own.
The pollen in the air
glittered, powdered the day,
Sifted on delicate eyelids
down stalks of silence
Swayed, carrying the irreal
where worlds are made
Into a green shadow under the
leaf, held us there.
The pollen in the air was the
drama of that place,
In which every drama; a
frisson beyond the gold,
Finessed the light, as the
galaxy finesses distance.
The pollen in the air was the
drift half-seen, unseen
Of energy, of momentum, the
far, shaping course,
Unplanned, that still unfolds
to the dance inherent,
And we in time as the pollen
in time unbidden.
Is all that is needed,
That the poem of the mind
Be the image of the mind
In the far imagination.
Only that the mountain space
Was never there
Until in rounding the dark
Bole of fir, and wind-fed
grass,
You found it there.
That the river was mind
running
In cave and shallows
Below the silent fisherman
On his rock, the field
A field in memory.
That the sun was a light
Out of an abyss of darkness
Sprinkled with stars
Of your own creation,
Expressing you.
That the moon was your own
Well of feeling, your own
Pain though known
By the ghostly generations,
Shadowing you.
Only that it speaks, the
self,
The strange half-being,
Capsule of the irreal
That projects this universe
Beyond our knowing
And yet still known.
That it breathes your air,
Veins your skin
Stings like the nettle
Jars your toe.
We are the only imagination
Of what may be,
Here is the glory,
Despite time’s agonies
The affirmation.
As the stalk, with its
cluster of purple flowers,
Is both the after-state of
its withered silence
And the prior space of its
non-existent being.
It is not even as it sways a
thing, an object
In the air; it flickers
through the dimensions,
It sweeps up space and
creates delineation,
Its altering position
spawning time, our time.
Its rhythms are turned to
colour in the eye,
The photons sing in tiny
packets of energy,
Imaginative energy, our
irreal physics.
The bee sips at a well of our
honeyed senses.
Amongst the thing we think we
see, the thing
We see, and the thing in
memory; hovers
The thing projected, its
beautiful resonance
In the shining caves of
delicate imagination.
See now, it waves towards me
its purple flowers,
Discovers itself, despite
myself, in my quivering,
My trembling at the source of
impossible life,
Like the child opening the
lid beneath the glass,
To touch the adult unknown.
Here is my life
In the centre, made living by
the bright arc
Of the sun. From truth such
love, from love
The greater beauty, the thing
and not the thing.
Starved frame, the mangy
lion, and the tiger,
Padding slowly through the
remaindered world,
Not catching our eye.
In every way they are denied,
closed in, caged
Even by our compassion. Just
as the dying tribes
Are, their senseless rituals,
wild imaginings,
But with less reason.
A smear of blood on the
gravel, a hole behind
The lab, a half-eaten
plateful of dead cuisine,
Reveals the damaged creature.
How the small
Hide among the large.
Eyes pass through me, the
headlight gaze,
The thousand mile stare, eyes
pass through,
But not the body. Padding
silently
The white bear on the ice,
Dances its complicated dance
of survival,
Lifts its head, over the
Pole. With light our world’s
on fire, with
Pain, with death, with mercy.
To discomfort and to comfort,
To make thought inconsistent
with
The life, the life with
imagination.
Poetry is the tempest, space
the calm
In which we are in danger of
being
Becalmed, were it not for
poetry,
The poetry of the word or of
the thing,
The song of the artefact, or
the cry
Of music, or even the
star-wet sighing
Of the sea between
un-illuminated shores,
In the mind freed by the
wind, savagely.
The poetry of the mind is the
storm
Of the mind, the self its
vessel. Sail
White on a horizon, shipwreck
dark
On a shoaling deep, bright
portholes
Too of the disaster. We set
out form,
Poetry comes to bring it to
the question,
To deny the social web we
have to work
To live a life, to foster our
confusions,
Until we blow into the bay of
palm-trees,
Tossing their mad shapeliness
to the sky,
As out of place at the core
of our urbanity
As the sombre ‘natives’ in
old photographs.
Hear the hurricane blow
forever, and destroy.
Feel the white force of every
utterable word
Batter the bell of language,
the bright tocsin,
Summon us naked to reality’s
pale space.
Were the pages untouched
pages like nights
Without stars, the unwrinkled
delicate shade
Of earth-lit white that
canopies the trees?
But the words wrote
themselves on a page
Of mind, the words are from
the stars beyond
That still appear in mind
through the sombre
Reach of cloud, as your body
through the cloth,
Or the child through memory,
or the places
Burning with light where we
ravaged ourselves
Beating our hearts against
the walls of being
And murmuring the music of
the galaxies.
Silent before the irreal,
consider the book,
Beside the glass of water,
the shelf, the eye
Of night grown deeper outside
the window,
The tapping branch on the
pane, the summer.
The page fills over and over
with words of flame,
See how the metaphor
determines itself, not ice,
Words of ice fade, the poet
has other business,
To speak more fiercely, to
burn in deeper fires.
That’s not bamboo
But its pointed slender leaf
Has the same beauty.
Blue distance always saddens
Makes the heart ache
Long misted bright-lit spaces
Everything tiny, real.
The Buddha’s a deceit
Like all the others,
And therefore a fine
Symbol of the truth:
In razing names and forms
We get nearer to things,
By singing without self
We create identity.
The lion roar is for
Things as they are,
Which are no-things
All forms, all flow.
The taste of leaves
And dust, the taste
Of ice and light,
The cold of dawn.
Thank nature for the breeze
Of uncivilised pain
That blows through
The late soiled world
And engenders mercy.
Does logic make you cry?
Has power a face?
Is beauty a transaction?
There is a simplicity
That is the finer truth,
And summons the mind
From all entanglements
To the breeze on the lake,
And the hands touching
Of the shadows who roam
Quiet as imagined people.
The closer you look
The greater the order
The sweeter the chaos
The finer the detail.
The creatures live and sigh,
In the purity we envy.
Dispel the ghosts, for now,
The Way is never the way.
An apple tree
Displayed its green fruit
To the thundercloud.
The tables were only
Able to be tables.
Lovers declared war, truce,
Light burned and died.
The world was somehow
There without feelings
And then
Revealed a feeling.
Gave out a dark compassion,
A tentative liking,
Or then a deep confusion,
A mist-like anxiety.
The sky passed over
Forms: things we had made,
Were overshadowed slowly
By those given.
The wilderness we thought
We had negated
Gathered to diminish us
In other ways.
The light was old.
Green apples shone,
Beyond the rain,
Outside the red café.
The truly alien
Not the far stars
And the mist of seething.
All energy, force
Momentum, gravity
We understand that
That’s not alien.
The voice of the universe
Without human meaning
Has for that reason
Every human meaning.
We understand the cold
That is in us
That also
Makes us shiver.
The cry of nothingness
We know that cry
Deepest inside us
That world cannot know.
World only is.
In us it comes to be.
Every absence, vacuum,
Silence, is a word
In our language;
Every chill of leaves,
Every far off stir
Imagination’s grist.
Is dark winter alien,
Or blood-heated summer?
The waterfall of light,
Or the black holes,
Holes in what?
Our hearts
Filled with holes
Of the dead departed?
Even the cicadas’ saws,
Even the lizard’s eye,
Even the stare through us
Of the creature,
Even that is not alien;
Nor evil, nor the cruel
Without human feeling,
Without creation;
Even the dull banal
The sad destruction,
The way the mind dies inside
Burdened by pain.
What in the universe
Is alien?
When they come
Or we go to them
Will both not carry
Wounds of the light-years
Burnished in the twilight,
The bleeding of bright stars?
Warmer than anything
Warmer than the heart
If that could fill a poem.
Its indiscreet outpouring
Like your beauty
Not here for the making
Here for the richness.
If self could be subsumed
If time could matter
Not as a permanence
Or an endurance
But as a truly passing
Un-regretted thing
A flow of our shape
Among the shapes of light.
We might be glad,
And gladden the universe
With what we made,
Love truth and beauty
And not bring sadness
To the abysses
With what we made
Hate ugliness and lies.
For their essence is not
In fact, the world itself
Is - what it seems to be,
Even in cold, even if it
deceives.
Their essence is in choice.
Values are ours,
Even truth, even the chosen
Reality.
If the light glowing in grass
Warmer than everything
Warmer than us
Warmer than your beauty
Could fill a poem, or two,
And make our time
Remembered as one
That gave without thinking
As the light gives,
And shines for a time
In us, have us convey
The ripened swelter
The outpouring seed-flights
The bee-ridden deep cell
Of the profligate flower
That leaves in wildness
And we be glad to have been
To have done this thing
To have sung the moments
Careless of all survival.
Some deep in us aspires
Always to be that light
Shining through grass
Beyond ourselves,
If that were not true
How would we know
Each other in the darkness
Nearer than worlds?
Bright arcs revert
Smiles perhaps
Or moons
Or wild segments.
The painter here
Making a conscious choice
To paint
With the unconscious,
Why the green is green
The colours juxtapose
In the way the Zen brush
Sings through space
And lands
In the novice’s eye.
Considering the folds
Small waves impose
On sheets of scared
Red while blues retreat
Towards an angled silence.
There is nothing to describe
Except everything
An image of the world –
Which has no need
For further elaboration.
Yet the superfluous word
Thought in the mind
Does flicker onwards
Without content
Over the canvas space.
Considering the forms
Which with the mind
Make a new whole
Which neither sought
And neither can deny
Now memory.
There is a secret
To the secret of the world,
It is irreal,
It comes to be
Singing and crying
Because we
Sing and cry
Otherwise real
But of no moment.
Until we see
That we must make
The universe always
Though universe
Is given
What shall we be?
Slaves to the formless
Un-considering form
Ears that hear only
The un-transcendent cry:
We must resist
The siren-call
Of a reality unshaped
By our contingency
This maker’s hand.
The universe, but the
universe I see, shades of the ghostlier
Ones, the absent ones, hidden
behind the surface of the screen.
This two-dimensional sheet
pin-pricked with orbs and glows,
Gives stars not there as they
are but the stars as they once were
We infer: and here are the
layers of time, the leaves of time.
Behind them what moves in
slow rhythm of energies,
Or hurtling silence? The
shadowy movements that will
Come to be, the young stars
dead, the invisible newborn?
Tonight the scattered pollen
in wheels and veils sifts
Fine dust of time over the
hanging shapes of the trees,
Their dark coherence in this
world of ice-etched azure.
This is the map of time
unrolled in the makings of the eye,
This is ten billion, a
billion years, a thousand, mingled here
Each in its point of fire,
and ever a slice of past, never a now.
The only now is Earth, the
only present your face a hand’s
Breadth away, not even then,
even then even you only
A mixture of paths, a mixture
of beams of light until
I touch you. Not even then,
as the voltage tiny flickers
Through the cells, and
thought begins each new reality,
Each attempt to find you in
the finding of hand and eye.
Tonight the scattered pollen
of strange lamps sighs
With the sighing of the wind,
with its low sweeping,
And beings me the universe,
back to its first beginnings,
Signs, marks, cries from the
universe under the surface,
Of which we are part, where
we seem to have no part,
Except as spectators gazing,
except as poet-voyeurs,
For whom the act itself must
be reconstructed as an act
Taking place in a distance
hidden in non-existence,
Of which we nevertheless must
guess the inhering,
In the absence of any kind of
divinity, in this night,
Brilliant with all the dance
and tremor of what seems
To be itself without knowing
self, eschewing meaning.
Every time falls here one
time over your hands, and mine.
Every deep sings in its
traces here invisible immanence,
Here all the universe
collapses into the retina’s shimmer,
The oldest light, never old,
ever renewing, the newest
Flames, the twice-born
galaxies caressing our souls,
Those dimensions of mind
called spirit, body’s lair,
Tonight, though we weep,
everything falls here with us,
From birth to the ultimate
death falls to the void,
In which we ride, silver
masks of the irreal flesh.
No more than the shiver of
form on the
Perfect surface, which is
also its depth,
Something under the stars
that mirrors
The stars. Waiting to be
reclaimed, ready
And longing. But craving more
for life,
For the pouring rain, the
brilliant leaves,
The concert grand’s soft and
nocturnal sigh,
In the hushed hall, on a
summer night,
Where the listening mind
stares through
The frame of silence between
the notes
Into the empty glass of the
green dark.
What are we? Chance
accumulations,
Transient exemplars of the
second law,
Almost too precarious to
dissolve from
The realm of speech to eternal
dumbness,
But beautiful, oh yes,
occasionally, fine
In an afternoon, and
beautifully present,
In a moment of process
between those
Moments of process, that
chaos breeds.
Expecting what? More than the
slow folds
Unfolding, more than void of the
emptiness,
More than the white screen,
that gold glass
Where a Chinese dragon
writhes and coils?
Affirmation is what we need,
now we make,
The so-hard acclamation of
the acid veins,
The frames to be filled, the
pages inscribed,
Our audience breathing softly
in the gloom,
Though nothing of that wholly
satisfies, as
Nature does, which is the
immense present
Simply being, the knotted
wood, the gleam
On the holly twig, the
persistence of waves,
The flicker of light over the
upturned face,
The steady flow of the black
rain-fed river.
What are you, my patterned
love, my fierce
Frisson, or I the darker
ghost of your hour?
Is where the mind can also
play,
Delicate as life, the irrational
image,
Floating on the surface of
the world.
The gentle rise and fall of
pollen, dust
In the air, between the
window glass
And the table with the vase
and frames,
That systolic, diastolic
pulse of moment
Resonates with the being no
word to say
Out of the universe, the
nothing to reply,
Hush and you hear it now,
between my
Speech, the white spaces that
intervene
As the falling light from the
clouded sky
Intervenes amongst the
scattered motes
And stills the heart with
archaic wisdom,
Metronomes of process far
outside this,
Tick of the world despite
this watching,
Progress of repetitions
endlessly coiled
Towards a boundary that’s
never reached,
A point never attained,
sprung mystery,
Waves they are, trajectories
they are,
Marking out the laws we never
made,
In a temporal frame that
holds no hope
For us, but love, beauty,
truth, it holds.
Slowly the pollen gravitates
in the air,
The mind grows calmer like
the day,
And consciousness is almost
outside
Part of the outer landscape
gazing in,
Until thoughts are things, as
words
Are thoughts, and the text
unopened
Is a mind lurking there,
waiting to begin
Always beyond the small cry
of the body,
Always familiar, always the
memory
The child was amazed by as
the pollen
Floated through the summer air
where
The garden sang, beyond the
green pool,
Imagination, power of the
mind, poem
Of the mind, burning, itself,
in the breeze,
Conjuring spirits, because
such is our forte,
Our destiny had we one, and
fate for sure,
We particles, floating,
likewise in the air.
Glitter, and flicker, and
dance of the grains,
Long shafts of eye-specks
suddenly there,
As the sun violently leans
across our space.
Flowing more weakly sometimes,
often in furious spate.
Its depths and shallows were
the coolness over his mind.
Sometimes it slept, and a
glassy dumbness rotated east.
Sometimes it railed, and a
murmuring beat the stones.
Here was his source and here
his reclamation of time.
Dark at night, flowing
mysterious under the rare stars:
Winding like a woman the
threads of calm possession,
Or glittering swiftly,
submerging the long-trailed leaves.
It was his second self, his
own and unique performance.
It was the blueness of crystal
sky, the motion of cloud.
Deep in its drowsiness ran
the music he half-attempted.
Its day was his freedom, its
evening his confessional.
Nothing inevitable sang in
its siren bonds of pure form,
But its chains of light were
the strands of his bound being.
The current was itself the
absence of its own imagination,
The presentation with no
intention, the unwilled reflection,
Into which the stars entered,
from which the arc withdrew.
Nothing in it ever succeeded,
nothing failed. The river came
And went between shores of
grass, and splinters of stone,
And subsided by bends, rose
above sills, greeted the dawn.
The light of the river was
always there in his mind when he
Wished. Its creatures were
gifts of the unbound tremors
That glitter on the wheel of
the galaxy, spirits of delight.
He would come to the river by
a hundred different ways.
Which were all one in the
end, were his conceiving.
He would come to the river by
the one way of his being.
From the darkness it flowed,
beautiful if not to itself.
Into the darkness it flowed,
unknowing in its blessing,
A piece of the nameless:
resisting all the attempted names.
The urban wanderer, looking
For what, the crier in the
wood,
In the vast white eye of the
wind?
Down below these cars and
people,
The houses, the lawns, the
light
Blocked by the human
darkness,
Shimmering with our waste
heat.
Slowly power circles under
cloud.
There are hidden talons in
time,
There are eyes clearer than
ours,
There is a fall and a call
sliding,
Swift as the downed moon gone
Over the silvered rim of the
Earth,
Over the horizon of our
flesh,
Leaving only the poem behind.
Only the single energy
focused
For a moment, in the thing of
mind
That goes beyond the things
of mind,
Like the woman laughing, or a
dance
Of impossible action, or
perfect words,
The tones that are never said
in the fierce
Fires of an unseeing mirror-less
being.
It is art: it’s the act of
mind in the process
Of making, the fantasy of
what the human
Might be if the human were
free to exist
Not bound by its frailties,
or its failings.
A man crossing the street and
no witnesses
Seeing his dying. A child,
constructing
Its play in the ruins of time
with a knowing,
More continuous than this,
more truly real.
Often we can only give parts
of a life, iota
Of experience condensed for
an instant
Or a precipitate, shocked
white in the glass,
Something we saw, felt arced
up above us,
Or buried deeper below, where
the ship
Of poetry sighs in
discontent’s harbour
Waiting to sail, dying,
living to sail,
Over the dark waves of
delicate tongues.
Though we are inadequate
nevertheless
The marvel is there. Mind is
free forever
In stone, the grass, the
diamond is light
Within, and there are no
ultimate prisons,
Always pebble by pebble we
can place
Our thoughts in the line, and
create
The babbling machine high in
the air,
Made of the artist’s
slenderest strokes
Of a brush that delivers pure
colour,
Of a network of
half-believable wires
Worked by the secret wheels
of pain.
Un-watchable agony too may be
beautiful,
Is that our shame? If the
agony’s infused
With the human, half-redeemed
by love,
Even though the agony is in
the end not
Worth the knowing, not the
art we need?
Sometime we can’t give a
whole life, here
With its embarrassments of
awkwardness,
Its flawed portrait, the
features blurring,
Since we never truly look at
another, when
We engage, we never look into
the other:
Some that stare look only
into themselves,
Others looking into
themselves see nothing
Of the other, but the dimly
apprehended eye.
Sometimes we can’t describe a
whole life
Truly, only conjure a life
for the mind, out
There, where the other
exists, a stage, a set,
A flame of the moving image,
a substitute,
Warmer, truer, the inner
turned inside out
The careless image of what we
had hoped
To be, once, the speech that
might console:
The illusions are valid. The
irreal is home.
When the world flares in you
in glory;
Or in light. How things are
currently
Arranged is of no major
importance,
You realise. Every pebble
contains
A diamond, it only needs
awareness,
De-focusing from immediate
survival,
From the pains and pleasures,
for
This, the fine delight,
hidden inside
The sleeping world, or the
fermenting,
Your conscious mind knowingly
alive,
Or your unconscious strangely
working,
The thoughts that are
invisible, the cells
Connecting silently in dumb
electricals
Singing your whole being,
emotions,
Memories, wildness,
loyalties, your self
Seething in the pool of
silent glories,
With all the universe.
Thought is the
Strangest thing, the
greenness of your
Grass, the throbbing of your
veins,
The tremor. No blank depleted
lines,
No weary sadness of the
endings,
No recognition here of the
erosion,
Or the stillness of the muddy
pond.
Listen to the distant
chatter, sleeper,
To the laughter and the
dancing, to
Creation, human creation,
mystery
Of mind along the channels of
the air.
Love the glittering,
half-seen in the eye,
Of what we made. You only
think you
See what we are, as we are,
that things
Are less. Maybe things are
more, maybe
A tired response makes a
tired response?
You can be walking along in
darkness
When the world flares in you
in glory;
Time after time, in spaces
after space.
On an October morning,
All the pollen silent,
implicit
In the root, and stem,
Though even the stem
Carries blown husks,
And the fields subsiding
We sat and dreamed
About the first snowfall
Or the last glacier,
World in a mess and
Talked of the small wars
Last till the end of time.
You can make this a Chinese
Poem of meeting and
Parting, or a reverie
On a truth lost and found,
Or a meditation on how
We slip from the present
Into other worlds like the
child:
I wish I could do that
As I did it then, lost in the
green
Depth of the multiple
mirrors,
Or seeing the mountain
And the sky, hushed
In a magic place
Of mind’s own conceiving.
We did it then with words
And not our bodies,
With love and not sex,
Time and not space,
You smiling, both weeping
Inside. That’s life.
The far wells are always
farewells.
In the space at the edge of
the road,
On an October morning,
All the pollen silent,
implicit
In the root, and stem,
Though even the stem
Carries blown husks,
And the fields subsiding.
That fills us with fear.
Though you touch my dry
Mouth, can you make it sing?
Headless Orpheus
Lies by the Thracian shore,
his head’s at
The waves are flowing, the
earth, the dead flow
Darkly through our world, how
would we escape
Them, were it not for the
body, not for the mind
Free forever in imagination’s
sacred far spaces?
The singing, the singing! But
one stone is enough,
One leaf of grass, a true
memory, one thing loved,
Is enough. Though the dead
and the living darken
You so with their crying, the
island fills with light.
Out of the limpid sky,
delight, and fear.
The lark ascends, and the
dove descends.
Beyond metaphor, our science
grows clear,
And meaning gathers where
illusion ends.
The lark ascends, and the
dove descends,
Bringing you beauty in the
rising year,
Beyond metaphor, our science
grows clear.
The peace of understanding
subtly near,
The lark ascends and the dove
descends.
Our meaning gathers where
illusion ends.
There were the green shadows
of the silvered
Blackness, the stars of
silence on your body,
Which was the flesh the keen
sight followed,
Intrinsic of constellations,
deeply transient.
My eye danced with you on a
sward of time,
Following the contours of
your earthly
Substance, the blade of mind
cutting the soil
Of mind. See how I remember,
the stars
Of silence shedding tears on your
body,
The green shadows etching
your beauty deeper,
In haunted meaning in the
ghostly evening,
Which we have become, which
is in us,
Hallucination of immemorial
stillness,
The weeping of night dew on
your flesh.
You danced at dawn on a lawn
of shadows,
Lit by the unseen sun behind
all horizon,
Not by the morning star that
was your image,
Blades of ice in the air,
winds of becoming,
Which cried to us of our
unknown future,
That is here now, re-lighting
me with that
Brightness of night and dawn,
the darker I,
The developed spirit wrapping
round itself
The silvery words blown from
the shadows,
As though to invoke you, now,
to declare you.
Oh, you danced at night on a
lawn of light,
In the greater darkness
beyond mind’s moon,
That climbs the sky with steps
not of sadness
But a strange desire without
regret, the desire
For time, of this creature
immersed in time.
Or a trick of light. The sea
bowed down to it.
Your eyes were twin doves, falling
blue
From a yellow sky, into
mindless shade.
Sea-creatures flickered at
the statue’s feet,
It represented Order, in a
field of Chaos.
You were fractally beautiful
at the level
Of skin, surface over your
true harmonics.
The statue on the sand reigned
over silica,
Porphyry, serpentine, ragged
rocks, murmur.
The surf, the phosphorescent
surf, foamed
In darkness, to caress your
alabaster ankles.
A stone sat snugly, being,
beyond the limbs,
The stone was round, or an
ellipse of seeing.
Your legs were twin columns
carved in flame,
Which was the dawn sun coming
out of the sea.
The statue, faceless, was a
sheet of the water
Green and bare as the wind
caressing your hair.
Night and day were under the
statue’s power,
Light was its tides, silence its
endless howling.
Your thighs and breasts were
the melting of air,
The cooing of breakers, the
tremor of the shore.
The statue on the sand
touched the white clouds,
It gave nothing to the
continents of the hours.
Not even the barefoot San
with delicate bows
And their dark presence at
the sip wells keening,
It won’t be the dark-faced
fore-runners spreading
Out through the wind-swept
grass in sudden light,
But after the hurricanes and
the random tremors
The soils will grow rich
again and silently fertile.
The creatures will look each
other deep in the eye.
Nor mine, fragile as grass.
Poetry is of no final
consequence,
Nor war, trade, nations
Prayer or power,
Illusions of sex or race,
It is freedom of mind,
Of spirit, desire for love
And truth,
Cherishing beauty
Of nature and form,
Cherishing being,
Creating in the irreal,
That is our heart’s future.
Make the machine serve,
And not the human,
And be wary that every system
We ever invented
Resulted in our enslavement.
Who told you reality is
solid,
It’s fragile as grass,
And what we created
We can un-create.
Universe, nature is given,
But not our place in it,
There are no places,
There is no time,
Here and Now.
That sadness in the heart
Is a form of our chains,
The coldness of winter
In the heart
Is a form of our dying,
Seductive and sweet
Dressed in the words
Of the singer.
Beware the sadness at heart,
The island of bird-footed
ones,
And the wasteland
Replete with the imagery
Of the un-transcendent
Transcendence.
Universe is not meaningless,
Only without intention,
The meaning is ours
And made,
The universe given,
Cries in its movement
With the un-particular
Waving of form,
The caress like the wind
In the leaves
Neither divine nor
Human,
Of what we are shaped
And not us.
Who said Reality was solid?
Nor is
Your world.
Oh but you must be subtle
To break the unsubtle,
Be minded
To shift the un-mind.
The final cry is the call,
The cry to create,
Which is not a cry
Of nothingness, our cry
Is not the universe’s cry,
Our world is on fire
With a deeper liberty
With the shaper’s oraison.
The mountain is never a
mountain. The word is never the word
He thought he wrote, or he
the one who touched the ancient key.
His sanctuary was open to the
wind, strange birds alighted there.
The direction he thought to
take was not the one where he ended.
The way is never the way he
thought, in the mind never the mind
He imagined he possessed.
Identity proves more elusive than his
Pile of rocks and pines, or
even the clouds vanishing above them.
The landscape was never
complete in the manner he expected its
Pure completion, the heron
kept lifting and landing on some new
Like the generations. The
tablets of stone: tablets of blancmange.
The root was a perishable,
gnaw-able thing. The precise placement
Of the cliff gave him the
true angle of landscape, but not the eye
Unchanging. The man was never
the view, the sky never the sky,
But only a backcloth to mind:
making, always a new relinquishing.
Foggy hills,
A misted seascape,
Bright stands of firs
The forest remnants,
Extraordinary
That elsewhere
In the world
There are wars,
Mad humans.
I could think of bears
And trees,
That weird hum
In the woods
Hawks rising,
Ancient peoples,
The allurements
Of our histories
That never
Leave us.
Instead I consider
The symmetries
Of physics,
The lack of intent
In nature,
The beautiful chaos
In order, and order
In chaos,
I contemplate planets
Palettes of stars.
Instead I remember
Your features
Far down summer,
Beauty of light,
Truth of light,
Love of the light,
Follow thought west
To the sea,
Dive with it
Into the waves.
The black rock pool silent.
Tin can slides on stone
With a rattle of being.
All the swallows
Swoop low and click
Their beaks with timing,
Nature in beauty,
And the heart still.
Sift of pollen in the deep
Grasses. Honeyed summer
Sings in the veins
With the tremor of being.
All the swallows
Rise high and turn
In the air, veering.
Ice-cold water,
And the mind still.
The space of moonlight is
only a space of moonlight,
And not the silvered gate
into the grass. We never
Reach the phantom on the
path. That depth, profound
That complexity of thought
and feeling, further, beyond,
Approachable only in the
work, not past the work, there
At the core of mind; in the
mark, the note, the word, not
In the flesh: which is only a
substitute, a tool for being,
And not the edge of the mind
itself, eternally flickering.
No, we never pass through the
work to the creator.
Though we yearn to be close
to whatever engaged us,
There is only a sigh in the
darkness of leaves and turf,
A shadow across the stream,
the ghost of a passing,
And when we meet we meet only
in illusions, while
The sovereign mind goes
dancing in stranger places,
Spaces of intricate feeling,
inexpressible; thought alive
Only in the construct, in the
furrow of intellect; fields
Of unknowing, in the
substrate beneath the overt idea.
No, I can never hold you as I
wished to hold you, beyond
The failures and frustrations
of hand and heart. The light
Is haunted, by emanations of
those we know, and love;
By their hallucinatory
presence within our own fantasy
Of delighted finding. And the
longing is anguish, to merge,
To be as one, with the only
mind that might know us, now,
The mind that might see us,
naked, as we are, the shining
Spirit. For we are all equal
in spirit, in feeling, all ghosts
Of our ground, all outer
husks in which a universe burns.
It is pollen-filled dust-grey
grass
That waves at the back of
your eye.
It is the form of the pine being
pine.
The pebble under your hand,
is white,
With the whiteness of
non-intention,
Six hundred million years
being stone.
The pebble in your mind is a
diamond.
Rarefied air breathes itself
in your body,
In this final space where you
may seem
Complete, though without
understanding
How you came here, to this
strange view,
How you examined the back of
the leaf,
Composed the silence,
smoothed the soil
And felt the needles sift
under your palm,
As the stream finally sank
itself in hearing,
How you recognized the sound
of your
One and unique existence,
from within,
Became the tree, became the
far horizon,
Drew them across the inner
space of sky.
Pollen of light scatters, the
motes in air,
Until the clouds of your
inner landscape
Illuminate with the done
tracks of time,
And what suffices is what the
heart loved,
Transubstantiated into a
texture of scene,
A kind of homeland and a
native region,
Though self-created, cut and
solidly hewn
Out of the vagueness of the
once lived life.
It is your abstraction. What,
in you, gleamed;
What, in you, shaped itself
in inerasable form,
Mist in which you dissolved,
water where you
Moved; quivered; threw back
that winter moon.
It is imagination conceiving
the thing that is
As a metaphor for the thing
that comes to be
Out of the deep attractor,
limiting itself, then
Suddenly flying away on the
cloud-wet air.
It is nothing bounded, though
it has territory,
Though its fences, walls,
wires sing in silence
To the strum and hum of wind
on these heights,
To the dark boulders that are
one with this place,
Pure as the bent-backed
thorn, the curved yew,
The paths rutted by
rainfalls, the pale slabs,
Grit and mill of the
weathering fall of beauty
In pillars of vapour, in
white gods of the eye.
It’s a space of light that
delights the heart,
Line by line. It’s the text
of the dust turned
Inside-out, the pollen that
spells your name,
The truth, the biddable truth
of what you are,
Where so much is un-biddable.
The precision
Of the imprecise, merging and
melting in all;
Vanished in distance,
absorbed in the whirl
Of the vast wheel of the
power of the stars;
The certainty at the heart of
your uncertainty;
The lost terrain, found; the
space disposed;
The vision set firm, in no
particular season,
As pebble, under your limpid
hand, is white.
Sings its particular mystery;
A silent breeze informs the
bay.
Wasp and hover-fly progress
Through the herbs, the dark
caress,
That propagates eternity.
A cloud is dreaming of the
sea.
We know the reason for the
song,
The realm to which its notes
belong,
But not the meaning: that’s
the sense
Of being in the bird intense.
The reason for the song is
plain,
Part of our own discrete
terrain,
Where our covert feathers
gleam,
And we are other than we
seem.
Spirit’s a bird of bronze,
alight
On the branch of purple
night,
And in the morning leaves
green,
Where we move, unheard,
unseen.
That would presuppose an
attitude.
The Universe is not
purposeless, simply
Beyond and before any sense
of purpose.
The Universe is not hostile
towards us,
The tsunamis, the volcanoes, the
typhoons,
The hurricanes, tornados, all
the quakes,
Are not directed; not divine
mistakes.
The Universe is not without a
meaning,
Since only with us does
meaning come to be.
The Universe is
intentionless, then. Delight:
Ordering nothing, claiming nothing,
owning
Not a thing. When did the
Universe last ask
A single act of you? So why
seek orders,
Why make claims, why long to
possess?
There is a beauty of the
simply given,
There is a magic of the
wholly mindless,
To which we may grant our
gift of mind.
The universe is not without a
purpose,
Since only with us does
purpose come to be.
And its path through space,
too, if space
Is anything in which
electrons move?
Like us confined in unreachable
limit,
Boundless inside the
eternally bound.
Time is a scalar, it has no
direction?
To travel backwards in time
would be
Simply to travel nowhere
differently?
We are only partly confined
in time,
If time is anything in which
we move.
Mind is a shunt of processes,
a hum
Of cells unaware of their
activity?
And yet it’s the shift of
concepts too,
Spirit in me, and spirit also
in you:
If form is purpose, form in
entirety.
A horn of moon hangs on a
rock cliff.
Wherever I live, I live here,
watching
Pines in the wind, listening
to grass.
What do I know of the heart?
My heart,
Lost long ago, floats high
among clouds,
Still dreaming what it might
be, to be.
White streams tremble in
green pools.
The silence here can make you
shiver.
Climbing, though the body
feels afraid,
Will take you to places
beyond knowing.
Life goes, the mind endures;
moonlight
Fades, the darkness hums. If
pine trees
Could speak what they would
be saying
Is how the wind blows, how
stars burn.
When sound of the mind
becomes the sound
Of the fall, its seething
inwardness the clusters
Of bubbles forming that bright
foam, endlessly.
No one can describe the
landscape of the heart,
Its granite rocks, its stony
shallows, cliffs where
Trees hang; peaks rise;
rivers slide over shale,
The slow green depths, the
cold, the darker flow.
And yet the mind distils the
mind in flight, sound
Becomes cry and cry becomes
phantom music,
And everything involves us,
who are the anxiety
Of the whirling universe,
dancing in ice and fire,
Still the mind distils the
mind in flight, a borrowed
Day, along white-water
stream, the phantom music
Underlines the cry – among
the stars we’ll find,
Among the stars, the
landscape of the heart.
The figure half-obscured
At the edge of tapestry is
The one we want.
The tiny speck of paint,
Signifying woman or
Man at window, at the tip
Of the artist’s brush.
The distant point, at which
The receding shadow
Fades from recognition,
And heart turns.
Whatever resists the mind,
Maths without physical
Concept, the line between
Being and knowing.
The no man’s land all ours,
Beautiful twilight hiding
The worst of us, chaotic
Motion never ending,
Fractal depths, far flung
Distances of the universe
Beyond us in that space,
Which is always time.
We ought to know by now,
We long for the shadowy
Depths of the running river,
Mind mystified,
And not the clarity of truth,
The burning fire of love,
Or the final solidity
Of the painful real;
More, sound on the verge
Of music, half-meaning,
Vague rustles of touch,
Taste’s promise,
The landscape in light,
Rain-veiled, white with snow,
The something looming,
Far hill or near person,
The remote uncertain place
At the rim of silence,
Full of its whispering,
Is our native land.
That have no feeling for the
ice and snow
Under which their frozen
branches bend,
And lighter. Mind dances like
the star
A few degrees below the
crescent moon
Encased in only metaphors of
frost,
That gleam in veils of far
galactic hues
Containing no misery that concerns
us,
Devoid of every form of
consciousness.
Our words for feelings cannot
clothe the dark,
Which has no place for
sentiment or dream,
Being the form that is, and
not its image.
The winter mind flows in a
deep clear space:
Imagination is the poem that
is, in which
The whole universe is
populated; its moan
Of leaves is not the scream
of pain, though
It may serve as a correlative
of wretchedness,
Nor even the cry of
indifference, un-purpose.
It is simply the sound of
those forces at play,
The stir of the everything
that contains us,
In which is the mirror of our
final selves.
This landscape we feel is not
the landscape,
More than the mental elements
that make it,
Is not the larch and spruce,
their shrouds of light,
Nor the solid fall, the sheeted
pool, the creek
Glittering with whitened
boulders in the dawn,
The veined rock, nor the
shadow of the moon,
More than the cold idea, the
idea of cold,
Congealing in the substance
of the mind,
Beyond the February
afternoon, the wind
That free of meaning blows
intentionless,
Outside all values, unless we
set them there,
At the burnished centre of
the nothingness.
Every creation, every
knowing,
Extends the virtual space
Inside-outside us.
Slowly mind will migrate
From cell to circuit,
Till the human
Is eternal beyond body.
Slowly the values deepen,
Slowly the beauty,
As age finds significance
In youth’s background.
Slowly we leave behind
The old corrosions,
Nation, race, religion,
Slowly truth conquers.
Slowly we open ourselves
To the galaxies,
To the far radiance,
Already in ourselves.
But only in mind is universe
aware,
Though both asleep seem
darkly identical,
Mind and world dumb of their
eloquence.
The inner world contains the
outer world,
Threads of perception,
processes of thought,
Your loves, your faiths, your
necessary being,
Here the tremulous flicker of
universe aware.
And outer world contains the
inner world,
Energies bound, unbound,
forces shifting,
The form, the flow, the
silence and the fire;
The dark within burning in
shadowy light.
Now these two meet: the Moon
is not that mass
Circuiting Earth, nor the
flare in your eye,
As the leaves are more than leaves,
that quiver
There, symbols of other
place, in memory’s air.
And taste my breath,
Life to life
And death to death.
Nothing of us
But shall be
A tremor
In eternity.
Write our names
In water, air:
Transient, love
Without despair.
We, the miracle,
Are light,
Shining
In the depths of night.
Dreaming in light over a
loved landscape,
These folds, and creases,
ribs and slopes,
That calm the flickering eye
to set it free.
Can we ever stare fixedly at
a single thing?
Beauty seems still a movement
over form,
Not yet the form itself; the
vision, a touch,
Straying in deep affection
over its object.
Soft rain falls on the hills,
the water springs
From every crevice, washes
every dry gully,
Becomes that trickle,
torrent, rush to river,
Fills with white flow the
darkness of the heart.
Its music sings beyond the
ghost, this phantom,
All its anxiety, its pain of
being; music of water
Sighing in the eaves, shining
on slate, on granite,
Flooding each cobble with
bright intricate detail,
As form sings, and flows. You
must look again,
A moment, to see the branch
sway in the eye,
All unstable, all that you
thought was solid,
The self, the other, the
world, its substance,
Beautiful, the slopes in the
gusting rain, green
And violet and that pale grey
of the wet scree.
Fine the delight in trees,
fine pleasure in stone,
Following the delicate, far,
anonymous lines,
Climbing the peak, falling
fast to the valleys,
Gathering a farm in their
tangle, throwing off
A wall, clotting to a patch
of fir in a stony bay,
Rimming the lake, then,
carving a clouded shore.
You who know pain of being,
the existential
Pain of feeling lost in the vast
universe, go
Feel the quiet lines; that
order of disorder;
The flesh of this planet, its
bones and limbs,
We echo. A secret joy, a
stern joy unfolds,
Heart beats in the rain, a
shiver of vision
Illuminates a fell, pale
light reveals the rigg,
Those lines of love, in the
body of the world.
Or was it the quest,
The dragons over the hill,
the unicorn,
The beautiful girl
transformed to a bird,
Bardic vision of a cave on a
cold shore,
Labyrinth or tunnel to other
worlds,
Whatever the heart conceived:
All that now over,
The possibility of myth is
not equation,
But a fancy of archetypes
To fill the unknown,
A shimmer of transformations,
And the mind’s longings.
We cannot toy with our
origins forever,
Mingling the moon and sun,
Making music of feeling, the
honeycomb
Or the temple, the dancing
floor
Shining with the veiled ones
who hum, the bees
Of devotion, bare feet on
stone:
The fairytales are done, the
old religions,
But not our spirituality, myth
falls away
Or becomes the deeper myth of
humanity,
Its changing form: since myth
Is metaphor, there remains
A glitter of language,
A realm beyond belief.
The smell of pine-bark,
The soft breeze through the
grasses,
The sift of pollen in the
August air.
And good of you to come, to
trek
A hundred miles and sit
With me in the mountains,
Two Taoist sages – scarcely.
Can we see each other at all,
in all
This flow and form? As we
are?
Can we fix ourselves,
At this juncture of stone and
sky?
The kestrel is skimming the
field.
Outcrops shine dark in the
sun.
The eye is drawn to beauty
As the mind to affection.
And gentle hearts are the
same
In every century,
Soft turf, and leaves, and
running
Water, against the rock.
What use are the heart’s
regrets?
Well, to sweeten us,
To make our farewells depths
In memory’s pool.
A landing on Mars too
intricate
An illusion even for the god
Of all illusion, even for the
self.
Yes, we know we exist in the
irreal,
Neither the world nor its
inventors,
Process of thought, shift of
idea
Through silent cells that
scream
Our blueness, in our peculiar
sky;
Silent pathways that
articulate
The gates of the body and end
In words, from infancy
upwards.
Yes, we know when delusion is
Delusion – mostly. Prone to
adopt
Un-provable entities though
To bolster us, bridge the
vacuum,
Which is a curious anomaly of
reason,
Or rather the blind heart’s
longing
In sublime disguise. Prone to
consider
The unseen earth, the
invisible others
Known only by speech, sight,
sense
And the miraculous
un-miraculous
Empathy of the coincident
species,
Exemplified in our jot of
spirit,
As real, though surely the
finest
Construct of all, what problem
To extend that to golden
mountains,
Invisible spirits,
un-evidenced powers?
Prone to consider values
relative,
Though fools for beauty,
truth
And love in essence, while
prone
Too to consider values
absolute,
Imposed by mad inside-out
deity
Conceived in the poet’s womb;
And foisted through pyramidal
Powers onto conscious
creatures,
But not on the vulture in the
sand,
Not on the cougar, or the
antelope,
The rabbit, or the ape. A
puzzledom
The irreal, a ragbag of
consequences.
Waiting for humankind to be
reborn,
Is this tedious process. But
reborn it
Shall be, man and woman and
every
Other sex, under the empty
sky;
Reborn beyond the phantom
existence
Of the transitory real, the
falsely solid,
Beyond the lonesome heart,
the dumb
Machine, the errors we have
made;
Reborn in irreality, in the
sacred
Imagination, and not my poor
light
But the flame of feeling
transformed
In the new endless fires of
the future.
Half the world’s energy is
wasted
On the violent and un-sane,
who call
Themselves the only ones who
know,
Yet vanish identically into
history.
While the sage knows nothing,
sits
By the rock-wall gazing at
frosted
Veins of glittering dawn
diamond:
All the free being greater,
deeper.
At the end of war there’ll be
quietness,
A long sigh over steppes and
prairies,
Down all the rivers, above
the forests,
And even in space, in the
un-hearable,
The materialistic will
subside in love,
The mechanistic will be
imbued with life:
That’s the dream, pursued
four thousand
Years, and from savagery to
savagery:
Tenderness in time, and
ourselves in
Eternity, which is every
person rising
To walk in the silence of
existence,
Sad joyful bodies in the mind
to come.
Which we thought we had come
to, nor
The forest’s dark, nor the
glitter of space,
Nor the echoing chambers of
the ocean.
The snow was not the blank of
our thought,
Nor the creature cold under
the ice, no beat
Of final wings in an absent
sky, no white
Of cloud from the plane, or
the green leaf.
The metaphor for our sadness
was external
But not the wretchedness
itself (the moan
Of the abandoned rock-dove in
the tree,
The howl of the coyote on the
dead trail
Were beyond us, never the
scream inside):
What was diminished in one way,
opened
Portals for us in others, the
writers of words
Prone to consider language
ultimate being,
While perhaps simply relation
is the true,
Above the supreme fiction,
perhaps love,
The affection of the animate
heart after
The wind has fallen, not domes
on domes,
Or the distant spires, or a
rhetoric rolling
Irrelevant, beside the pool,
whose phantom
Shadows are such, merely
phantoms, parched
Ghosts of its yesteryears,
the dry sources.
Perhaps what we proved
ourselves proves not
The standard for all others,
merely a variant
On what some human effort
might construct,
Amongst the scattered
remnants of the stars.
Perhaps there is no failure,
or always failure,
Indistinguishable, in the
transient, from success,
And the repetitious echo, the
long-seen image,
Only a silence which is
always done and dusty,
And not the future of the
mind. Perhaps we
Should guard against the
negativity of ghosts,
And comprehend the repetition
of children,
Lovers, dancers, singers,
speakers of lines,
The performance and not the
deep analysis
Which is often superficial,
and rarely lasts,
For this altering creature,
about to flee
Into the meld of tissue and
machine.
Are we poets the legislators
of the world,
Or its lost followers on the
beaten track,
The voyeurs and observers,
mimicking
The real, our sadnesses
without cause?
Oh, language ripens: the
tongue’s a bud,
And distance flowers, the
mind exceeds
All things in our grasp. New
ripples
Cross the great pond’s
silence there.
Here the great carcase lies,
in ribbed silence,
A trunk that weighs a ton,
dead but unburied.
This is the ghost tree, dove
tree, downed
By rot and wind, by both, by
the disease inside,
By the outer force sweeping the
world clean.
Barked like a birch, ribbed,
leafed like a lime
Once: now naked timber
grounded, weathering,
To the darkness of mould, and
the whiteness
Of the shrew’s skull bleached
by the brightness,
On a carpet of pine-needles,
oak leaves, beech.
The poem of occasion is the
poem of the mind
Seeking empathy in the space
around it; echo or
Resonance, from a universe
dumb and undying;
Beyond the buzzard’s shriek,
the rook’s dark cry;
In the leaves’ stir; in the
form of the fallen giant
And its lingering name. See
how the sun flickers
Like life, how the rain sighs
like life, persistently.
News of a satellite falling
to Earth, or rather to ocean
Hopefully. We glance up nervously
at a sky still the same,
Pale with September cloud,
lighting tall trees, their leaves.
Today, dilatory justice,
blind injustice, inhuman savagery;
Pure indifference in all its
thousand disguises: one mask.
An experiment showing
neutrinos travelling faster than
The speed of light,
apparently. Shadows stirring the grass,
Which are creatures possibly,
or gusts of time and space,
Passing softly. Limits are
not the only things violated here
On this planet (the
blue-green one whose alter ego we seek
Among the stars: not nice to
be alone: uniquely conscious.)
Today, we age, dreaming of
anti-ageing, fearing mortality,
But immortality too, when you
think about it, merciless
Implications. Today we are
richer, poorer, sure, un-surer.
The sky is marbled; the
evening light is gracious, blessed.
Today, the dying fall: the
living rise. A starlet, bare arms,
Smiles and sighs. A star,
naked light, explodes and dies.
We wait for the neutrinos,
then the brightness. The satellite
Descends, the leaves wave
high over the western whiteness.
Today, the networked world
flickered; we moved a little
Closer to the realm of
artificial consciousness, sweet
Cyborgs playing; human
freedoms were silently sold.
An invisible breeze is
lifting the pale backs of the leaves.
Tonight, the satellite is
falling more slowly than expected.
We imagine the ponderous
fall, the intense heat of its ruin,
We consider the sky. Tonight,
there is beauty in the trees,
And the clouds are gathering
slow, the pale flocks of night.
Under your bright sky, in the
promised land?
Oh where are you I still see
receding,
Before I turned and
retreated, howling?
Oh where are you, beside
rivers flowing,
On the hills, the plain, in
the jewelled silence.
Oh, where are you, at the
lonely crossroads,
By the echo-less prairies of
ghostly future?
Oh where are you now under
immense light,
Like all the wraiths, the
phantoms, haunting
The drowned stillness of
birth and death,
The meaningless repetition filled
by meaning?
Oh where are you now, and
why? Beyond value
We make in meeting, in real
and virtual space,
In the uncertain end flowing
out of this life
To sleep in an elsewhere, far
from the aching.
Oh where are you now, in the
void of silence,
As you bend to your life, the
form dispersing
In memory, your voice
retreating, in the far
Deeps of the great continent,
under bare stars?
Oh where are you now, and
how? Imprisoned
By freedoms, shining,
sorrowful mind, sad
And beloved still in day-lit
streets, by night-lit
Waters, illuminated between
past and present?
Oh where are you now? Where
are you breathing,
Crying, singing, laughing,
sighing and dying,
Where are you sleeping? In
what blazing deeps,
In what abyssal voids of the
turning globe?
We turn with the Earth, we
make the circuit of sun,
We flee with that sun round
the galaxy that flees
Into the web of the darkness,
into the gaseous veils;
You and I fleeing from each
other into survival,
Emotional survival,
remembering the energy
Of our season, the long-lost
power of sight,
The seeing, the knowing, the
recognition.
Oh, where are you now? How
are you being?
Tired of destruction the
trucks
And the lumbermen gone,
Out of this stillness,
In which there is only
A delicate sigh,
Of the dry grass after snow.
The warm earth winter mild.
The seasons shifting whether
Or not the icecap’s melting,
Still beauty will
Be here (potentially)
After the minds have gone.
The wastelands will re-seed.
After the wars in heaven,
And on earth, the ground
Absorbs the dead. Our sad
Truths glow in history,
Which is vanishing memory
Of a previous state of being
Of this one planet.
The past is no more or less
Than the burden we carry
forward
Over the soil, the weight we
Hold in the nerves, cells,
synapses,
The balance of the ledger
Of the strangest species.
Uplands in dry air, frost on
the cliff,
The wind blowing us all away,
The pines shaking under the
stars,
The surfaces of the world
shaking,
And its body too, down to the
smallest,
Down to the unimaginably tiny
Tremor of deepest real.
That ever-unsatisfactory
refracted surface
In which he saw himself in
fractured form,
Sad instrument mirroring the
music badly.
Yours was not the sound
half-heard in his ear,
Echoing from the cliff across
the lake, or soft,
Stirring the undergrowth, the
rustle of deeper
Being, finding itself in the
bitter realms of this.
You were not what touched his
hollow flesh,
(Dimension of grace, not
stress of performance)
Space into which he entered,
time that he knew,
The private country where
every hill’s unnamed.
No, it was his own image he
imagined, shape
Of a second self, a kindred
form, a replica
Of his own discreet
existence, that might see
As he saw, hear as he heard,
melding bodies.
It was a dream he had, of his
own double, come
Towards him slowly over the
real grass, as he
Walked in the autumn silence,
over real ground,
One who would feel as he
felt, in every instant,
One who would duplicate
himself in essence,
And yet be strange and not
identical, conceived
From the one experience,
intuiting all: his fears,
His hopes, anxieties,
affections, loathing; all his
Tenderness; all his yearning to
be loved, and love,
But in some deeper way of
identity, not the fire
Of two distinct bright blades
flickering; two selves
Meeting but never-meeting;
silently, brushing by;
In a dream to embrace the
dream, and the familiar;
Be no more lonely in the immense
horizon, speck
Of nothingness crushed by the
magnificent outside,
That over-arching weight of
Earth and Star, huge
Universe squeezing in from
every side, or out
In diastole to suck from mind
all its substance,
Leave humanity blind; crawling
over the planet;
Locked in transience; chasing
the shallow minutiae.
It was a second self in self,
a form of man or woman,
A double-sex, an infinite
resonance inside, rendered
External to him, but his own
self dumbly magnified,
He sought. A semblance that
might slowly approach,
Pressing, like him, real
soil, green turf, breathing pure
Gusts of the real air blowing
from the clouded west,
Until it faced him; spoke to
him; called his name,
As he might cry to himself;
and in ghostlier tongue.
Seedling after seedling,
Dumb first, and then the
whispering
In moonlight, or light
breezes,
The delicate shimmering
Light undergrowth seeping
Over heath-grass, heather,
and bracken,
To consolidate dominion, and
grow free.
The path of such wide
horizons,
With view after view rising,
Bright to the far distances
in silence,
Now closes in, and the
shadows
Deepen, far down dark in the
trees.
How to explain the sunlight
On the floor of the wood
after rain,
The beauty of the narrower
profound.
Within the supreme fiction
(That paradox)
Only the ones mad with
passion
I love: present tense; death
Does not matter,
The best of us
As Ovid said, remains,
If only for a moment,
Considering the immense hoary
Old age of the Universe,
Considering its youth:
We’re somewhere in the middle
Of all time,
And hopelessly lost and gone
On eternity.
Afloat on the waves of
immensity
Hopelessly, movers and
shakers,
(Laughter)
Phantom cities echoing
In our eyes, traffic lights
Flickering over our empty
roads
Of outer silence,
The deeps for robots.
But oh what we have made,
Despite the destroyers,
Beyond the corrupters,
What we have made
Of each other and this world:
Fragments of grace,
Divine godlessness,
Bright roar from emptiness.
Of life, I grow anxious,
Repelled by its fleshy,
scaly,
Otherness, its dark intensity
Against which I push
Like Sisyphus at his stone.
I drown in its seas.
I smother in its envelope
Of not-self, diminished.
The way other poets grasp
The world and describe it
Can’t work for me. Beyond,
I still ache with eternal
spaces,
A flow and vibration electric
Beyond the stars.
Who knew that life was ever
Enough for the living?
The shaper shapes itself,
And the earth in its image.
That heavy dappled weight,
That dense fleshly curtain I
fear,
The matter of it all, the
Winding loathsome roots
Sartre saw
Nauseous in their being.
Fire, air and water I ache
for,
The flow and the flame,
All this at last consumed in
light.
That’s the pollen I longed
for,
The bee loaded with its
little yellow sacs
Weaving its six-footed
circuit,
Among the crumpled, wrinkled
aftermath
Of the summer light, the
secret burden,
Private in its world, without
expectation
Of anything but nectary,
petal, anther;
Free of our heaviness, light
with its own,
The progeny of flowers,
incipient sweetness,
The future generations of
scent, the palette
Hidden inside, doomed and
transmuted.
Pollen at the core, and
sublime guiltlessness,
That’s the pollen I longed
for,
The humming at
The delicate patience, the
sudden flight.
Neatness, grace, the
half-closed eyes,
Not bound on the Wheel,
Lost in the flow.
Lao-Tze on his bullock
heading West,
Into the Taklamakan,
Beneath the
Amused silence.
Kids playing in the mountain
stream,
Build their miniature dam
To break it,
Let all go.
Swift life: and granite walls
Seem less solid.
Bright tinkling laughter
Scattering in the trees:
I gave too much,
This morning, in the bright
September air,
I exist again inside myself.
Last night I was the mask of
space and time,
Bled into the universe,
This morning, under blue sky,
in the stillness,
I contract once more to the
centre.
I gave to you and you gave to
me,
Did we betray,
In dark of night, what the
morning promised,
Yearned away long beauty
In desire, watching our true
ghosts dissipate?
Cried too much,
Laughed too much, uttered too
many things:
The unrecalled?
Last night too, I lost myself
among phantoms,
The Lesser Selves:
This day in the heat of a
spent summer,
I am autumn, reconciled with
leaves.
Smile, it’s the artefact, all
chaos hidden,
Not only outside time but
inside art.
How quiet, certain writers in
their poems,
Emotion, redirected in
tranquility.
The level eye conceals the
tangled heart.
Unforgettable lines of the
Pharaoh’s mask,
Akhenaten in the cool hall of
the museum,
Gazes across all that marbled
floor:
Not burning, as no doubt he
gazed in life
Over the wastelands towards
the sun,
Like us, penetrated and
undone by space,
Dissolved by universal time,
time relative,
Beaten and destroyed:
The shell survives, gives
pleasure:
Like the weathered white
skull of the mouse,
The bare ice-cased structure
of the birch,
Framed history, our frozen
gaping mouths.
Glows green, injected
perhaps,
Its genes manipulated, or the
lens,
The lighting, or the reality.
All those glowing glaucous
appendages,
Grass, apples, leaves and seas
outdone.
Curl, coil, claw my lovely
symbol,
Stab at the universe, embrace
the worlds,
Scamper delicately over
voids,
Survive, in the stillness,
after the bombs.
Wet rock gleams, a breeze
rises,
At pine-tree heart a resin
scent;
One million insects is it, a
square mile,
Shining alien wings, bright
clatter?
All I’ve read eludes the
mind,
My learning only made for
prisons.
Cold creek satisfies the
heart,
White water,
Down hill slopes: in clear
air.
Is the one
We would escape.
Shakespeare,
In his sonnets
‘Ever the same’
The incantation
Holds then
Wearies me.
There’s always,
Fortunately,
What’s outside.
Small farms in the silence,
White stone walls,
A good place to rest.
You can walk the hills,
Grass trails by ancient
caverns,
A mountain top where
The blue sky glows.
If I were not like cloud,
The wind, the water,
If my mind was peaceful
I’d be there,
In that country
Wrapped in calm,
Crossing the fields,
Walking under trees,
The valley hush
From end to end
A true reflection
Of the human heart.
To catch the pollen in the
grass,
Like pollen in the air,
Before it falls forever
Back into black soil
On the edge of the field.
Swirling patterns
Over the surface of the lake,
Fall in a yellow rain
Like a Chinese scatter
Of eyelids, petals,
butterflies,
Falling forever,
Through the spaces
Of the heart, all those lost
Empires, spinning beauty
Despite themselves
Out of themselves:
Iron vessels full of flowers.
All their pollen falling,
Surely there must be a way
To catch it, sifting through
The grass, the air,
Before it falls back
To the Earth forever?
And the Mind’s a fog,
The Taoist smile
Itself lost in the flow.
Watching the great wheel
Of the stars, the planet
Turn, to which we’re bound,
Blue flower in the dimness,
Chance form.
Blown like the dust,
Drifting like the weeds,
Like pollen falling
Over the floating world.
Nothing to think of, to think
Of nothing, blown
From affection to affection,
Powerless in the dimness,
This bright form.
Buddha said Maya,
Samsara emptiness,
But what price
Passionless being?
Sun-glare, snow,
Wet peaks and ice-fields,
Mountain freedom
Shining mist-grey in the
dimness,
Mindless form.
Dive to the flow of Tao,
Deep in the vortex,
Let thought hum
Inside the mighty roar.
Rise in the silence,
Smile, exercise
Your skill,
Spontaneous in the dimness,
Create form.
Birch, yew and heather in the
gullies,
Green, gold, purple,
The buzzard rising, the rooks
skimming
Over the sloping meadow on to
stone.
A high ridge, a steep ridge,
dark, eroded,
In forty years no change I
can see,
Gleaming, lowering,
Harmless in sun, benign;
fierce in rain;
The place the spirit loves
the most.
Far off dumb cities, far
Samsara,
This too illusion but a form
Of everything
That makes the mind solid;
soothes the heart;
The dust below, and nearer
the universe.
We need to free this
log-jammed world,
Break through the ice-cover,
plough the
Bones, naked of civilisation
for a while.
Old poets in bandanas rock on
the porch,
But it’s the first fire we
need, first scream,
First sex, first plunge into
the deep other,
For each thing taught new
sceptical denial.
Old poets complacent,
spiritual, at coffee,
Bless like old priests the
young at whom
They smile, but already with
them dreams
The destroyer, among the
bright green wings.
Little disturbed the surface
of my life:
I lived in depths, unseen by
others:
It would bore them, to hear
of my days.
Truly beautiful your arc of
motion,
Traveller, seeker, maker,
builder,
Part of the new movement, now
The old. I never join, I
watch the view.
No, I can’t imitate you,
still I know
That we are only forms in the
void,
Chance coagulation, fleeting structure:
I’ll mourn your passing, your
affections,
Because you truly loved,
people, Earth,
The scents and sounds, the
passing by,
A sort of Kim of your age,
childlike, true,
Cunningly wandering the dusty
Way.
The internal mythology of the
irreal,
A shadow of a shadow of the
wheel
Great, gleaming, turning in
blind sky.
Red as our blood, white as
our mercy,
Blue-green with our brooding
thought
The shower of frosted stars:
cold, cold.
A wintry silence may best
express time,
Which is the not the thing we
utter in
The tongue, not the wild
fierce season,
Or the inner fire, which are
timeless.
Activity is eternity, dance
of shadows,
And mind too a shadow, like
the world,
A shadow of the shade without
creator
Creating in the shadow of the
mountain,
Within the mind and outside
the mind.
We are all shadows seeking
our escape,
Into the light that flowers
between minds,
Into the stillness perfect
between lovers,
Into the bright reflection of
ourselves.
What is abstract is
abstracted from pure
Shadow, distilled, congealed;
material
In the solidity of deepest
thought; held,
Fine suspension, in the
stream of being.
Mind too is shadow, like the
world.
Through the tall archways of
the wood,
And the buzzard coils on
upturned wings,
Again the pigeons scatter
mind through
The leaves, dark-gold,
burned, of the wood,
And the buzzard mews on
dark-tipped wings,
Circling and spiring,
circling beyond dying.
Again the pigeons moan and
howl; howl
And scream; in the leafy
caves of the wood,
And the buzzard plummets
downwards wild
On dove-tailed wings, out of
the white sky.
Again the pigeons congregate in
the shadows,
Scouring the mute glowing
floor of the wood,
The buzzard crashes overhead
in the branches,
Fierce with hunger; fierce
with living-through.
Tawny eye flickering against
the hillside.
Flapping coat the winged
youth’s angel
Presence, ephemeral as fog.
Intellect unfocussed but a
bared knife.
Wild explosions of
opinionated will,
That might change worlds, or
spin
Disengaged above our silence.
The never-to-be-again energy of
unknowns.
All unreasoning passion,
passionate reason,
Embodied, electric in the
deeper darkness
Of our black subterranean
seas.
Was not a thing,
But a state of shining
emptiness,
Shunyata.
Ah the beauty of his
analysis:
Irreality
In the irreal mind,
Its net of process!
How to escape the Wheel,
Which is every moment
The moment’s
Unrepeated repetition,
The reiteration in the
mirror,
The echo we detect
From time’s distance,
In our every sound?
How to escape the Wheel?
By catching the moon,
In the water,
By impossible non-action.
Down the pool of causation
Goes my ripple,
Unable to stop clinging
Reach shining Void.
Through African bush.
They pull down what they
meet,
Swift slinking shadows.
Dingoes, coyotes,
Good as us
Go hunting too
Through the diminishing
silence.
Will they ever come back?
Their gaze should break
The camera in your hand,
The powerless gaze.
The creatures are all hiding
In the darknesses behind us,
In the grass and leaves
Inside us.
Can you hear the wild dogs
Running in the night?
Is humankind
Ascending or descending?
Why is every dream
A dream of the past?
Even the dreams
Of the future,
Shiny in space
Summoning Odysseys
The Hero quests,
Wandering by desolate shores?
The creatures hide
In everything not sold
Under every stone
Deep down the wasteland.
Inside wherever
We’ve not declared war,
Beyond the virtual flicker
In the ‘real’ world,
The wild dogs race,
Surround the antelope
On three legs,
In the pool of water:
When we have left
They’ll pull her down.
We know
Where the creatures hide,
Whose side we’re on.
The side
Of all the pain
In the world.
Back behind the screen,
Lifting my hand from the
keyboard
With the worn N,
Saving a little process
Of life by an act
Which is causation’s tremor
In the action-less room.
I am wondering why
Sitting here
The ambitious noises
Of great lines
Seem so much less
As a result;
So much less of a way
Forward in the dark;
Why language resonates
And is still idle;
Why nothing we do
Is right except the mind
Sanctions a value
By its rightness;
And so the great
Are still the small,
And certain ways
Of being preclude
Honesty, humility,
Though their aim
Was simple truth.
Fame is the slur.
The moth is equal life
And total anonymity,
So, greater than us.
Total in its humility,
Which is merely being
Without trying.
If Buddha had no name
He might be Buddha,
And awake,
And gone beyond.
I vanish into the moth;
Into the silence
Writers love;
Mind’s sweet silence
They say little of;
Where all they are enacts
The all they are,
Moths on leaves.
The room was playing Brahms,
Opus 117,
The deeply-human shimmering
in darkness
And on to light, the
tenderness that is never
The voice of the dharma,
instead a musing,
A little singing of the
spirit, the gentleness
Of its creator, a bloom, like
smoke or cloud
Drifting, strange form, over
the inner hush,
Lilting its melody to itself,
in pure openness.
There were leaves beyond the
window-glass
Swaying in silence, there
were leaves alive
Breathing, tumbling,
gathering, alight in air:
Under it all there was a yearning,
there was
A wistfulness, the mind
without reference
To the body, as a child’s
mind in the adult,
Or an adult understanding in
the child; that
Foresees all we become, the
later unfolding,
Everything already known as
it will be known.
There was a wind blowing in
the outer evening,
Empires fall, wars end, still
we have the music,
Delicate emotion dreaming,
moving in memory,
Over the darkening chaos,
down ensuing calms,
Without boundary, without
country, landscapes
Of feeling, in deep physicality
of such utterance,
Beyond the outer form, a
feature of the inward.
It is the passionless passion
for all we are here:
The room was playing Brahms,
time’s epitome.
Is likewise Keats dying in
Not to come again in space,
the universe ended
Is the metaphysics of
transience, an impossibility
Of being realising non-being,
or mind not-mind.
Lonely in existence, the
stones and trees seem
Kinder, to be a part of what
persists unknowing;
Luminous true identity always
unaware of self;
The diamond silence of the
open fields all rapt
With the bare sky, though
rapt implies sentient,
And the loveliest metaphor is
profound illusion,
Which includes the metaphors
of fond religion,
Gods dying or undying, or the
undifferentiated
One, or even the self-help
solution of Nirvana,
Tacit withdrawal into
passionless bliss un-bliss.
Mortality is poignant, that
is our truth. Form and
Stillness now the sole
defence, citadels of twigs,
Built from the fragmentary
detritus, the plain bed
Of the wood, and gleaming
oddly under the stars;
Pure communication
unconcerned with audience.
Here it comes with a delicate
Deliberate scuffle of leaf-shade
In the bright zone of
autumn.’
That’s the poem I might
write,
But I leave the words unsaid,
To linger here in the head,
And go out and walk in the
sun.
Though the news hasn’t
reached the many,
As Nietzsche said,
Truth is Science; Love, Human
Relationship;
And Beauty, ah Beauty,
The forms that accompany the
trip.
You can choose the ones that
appeal,
We may disagree,
But those in conflict with
Nature, Science,
Or our Genetics, we’ll see
Wither away in the air,
Dry leaves on a temporal
tree,
While we go back to the start
Where the human mind was
free,
To invent and obey what it knew.
We’ve exhausted illusory
paths:
We ate of the tree, and we
find
Ourselves surprised by the
view.
Slowly potentialities stir
like veiled leaves.
At a distance the figure is
indistinguishable
From the secondary, from its
background,
Merges uncertainly into vague
non-identity.
The particles are not
particles, the particular
Is a matter of approach,
undefined we exist,
As shadows of our
imaginations, shapers,
And fractions of others’
imaginations, other,
Floating things, drifting
over peculiar oceans.
Carving the air the
snowflakes gather wings.
Being is an endurance;
beautiful as the crystal
Boughs bending down to
embrace the ground
In an apotheosis of
anthropomorphized feeling.
The boughs are beyond
feeling, inside feeling.
So much that seems given is
not really given.
The outlines of trees might
be offered otherwise.
A clatter of wood might raise
different echoes
In a mind still not
solidified, in what’s awake
In wild awareness in the
depths of ice-fall.
The man would be inexact, as
would the woman,
Nothing of what they understood
of one another
Would be understanding: hands
would be vapour.
Eyes would contain glacial
silences, cataracts
Of whiteness, in a landscape
still formulating them.
Like poetry, ambiguous and
elusive, the mind slides.
Winter twilight though hard and
cold is soft and deep,
And the darkness between the
leaves is a form of light,
The mountain slips, the star
blurs, heart and mind erode
As all relationship, nor are
those equations definitions.
Art is not only content, but
the cry of content: the maker
Is bound there too in the
stone; the metal; the pure ochre.
The word is not simply its
meaning, but also its presence,
And the meaning depends on
the presence, what signifies
Is always shifting its
ground, always a scurry of leaf-fall.
Existence is no longer
implicit on this winter evening.
The solitary walker may be a
trick of the eye, that white
May be sky, or land, so
little is real, a shade on a sheet
Of blankness in which comes
to be a writhing of forms.
Nothing is final, none touch
forever, no meaning is lost.
Tonight life lives in this
exterior inexactness, and not in
The fine equations. The space
to the moon, unmeasured,
Is an aspect here of my
heart. The indigent slopes are your
Mind, dwelling on silence,
who knows what stirs beneath?
I no longer wish to be stone,
to sit mindlessly beyond flow,
Tonight, I no longer wish to
be the frozen lake, the symbol
Encased below in the mirror,
a perfection of icy branches.
Tonight the imperfect
gathers, the stars are in movement,
The aurora mixes its palette,
awaiting all transformation.
Time’s glittering surface is
alight with the diamond Future.
Bright birch-tree in snow-barked spring:
Gazing down through white light,
On the wall of the Chauvet cave,
The Apache said. PAGEREF
_Toc305746698 \h 13
I was gone there in the silent field,
Birds and fishes soar between sky and water,
In the dust, there are stones shaped by the sea.
Out of order, the beautiful randomness,
I delighted in the beauty of Inis Samer,
What you don’t write: as important
I cannot recall (Rilke said) the smile
In the hot sun, hotly, the cars drive
I love you, behind the iron walls
Shakespeare sings about the broken bond.
White flowers layer the cliffs, on stones and walls,
Understanding Mind should take us,
Fifty thousand years of the dream,
No more sighing, death is on our side,
Here, dazed by silence in the shadow-filled wood,
Our tiny order made order in the world around us,
Thoughts are real, otherwise how would the pain
The pollen in the air dusted the river surface.
Only that it speaks your self,
The thing we see then is never the thing we see,
Padding softly through shadows the polar bear,
Poetry blows through, that is its role,
Was the book the poet wrote in empty of words?
What would it be. PAGEREF
_Toc305746729 \h 49
Tonight and far ancient light falling over my hands: is
not
What are we? Patterns, ghosts, tremors,
The soft rotation of pollen in the air,
The river was always there in his mind when he wished.
Buzzard swirls over the house,
Sometimes no way to give a whole life,
You may be walking along in darkness
In the space at the edge of the road,
It’s a ride on the tiger of time, this void, this light,
The lark ascends, and the dove descends,
You danced at night on a lawn of light,
The statue on the sand was out of Dali,
And it won’t be our dancing feet in the new dust,
Who said Reality was solid? Nor is your World,
The place he built he had thought to stay shifted under
his feet.
No, we can never possess what we wish of the other.
A space of light delights the heart.
The bronze bird in the morning tree
The Universe is not indifferent to us,
The electron orbit is a strange attractor?
The light on Cold Mountain is clear.
Along white-water stream, a borrowed day,
The winter mind is cooler than the trees,
The outer world; the inner world are awake,
Soft rain falls on the hills, and eye follows,
Four thousand years of the dream,
It’s good to get back to simple things,
Yes, we know the world is real,
The desert was not the end of imagination
Mellow light of late September in the trees.
Today, photos of the electron flexing its quantum states.
Oh, where are you now, under my dark sky,
Uplands pale as dry grass, after snow.
It was not you, the Other, that he looked for,
When I stare at the strangeness
Pollen at the core of the late flower of the season,
Gilded Buddha on a plinth of stone,
Last night I was erased by others,
In the photos how calm we seem:
That image of the Scorpion on my wall
On the empty ridge above the far valley,
Old poets relax but it’s young intensity
I am impressed: you’ve been a doer.
Mind too is shadow, like the world,
Again the pigeons flock upwards, beat
Your keen profile slicing into the future.
The void the Buddha talked about
In the half-light of the summer evening
Now mortality is poignant. The valued life lost
Now the gods and the false solutions are dead,
Existence is not precise this winter evening.