Whatever we make of whatever
Is found elsewhere depends on
What we make of these pieces
Already intimate. Creating what’s
Wondrous or accepting the ponderous.

Here and now, in these atoms
In this moment abides the
Precise potential with which our
Universe began. We each are
Made of them.

Imitation of Thomas a Kempis

“What can be seen elsewhere
That cannot be seen here?
Behold heaven, earth,
All the elements
Of these all things were made.”

Dying in his bed
But we ought not forget
What Willie heard and said

For daring tell barbed wire was readied to bind him too
So Willie made his exodus. Living in perpetual witness to the
Possibility of healing violence and deadly care

Willie spoke soft but he was clear enough if the jury had
Wanted to hear. Instead they adjourned to drink strawberry pop
Then, as expected, quickly voted: acquitting two white men

And Willie told the white judge and jury who he saw leave
The barn where the gore of a young colored boy was splattered
His blood soaking the hard clay floor a deeper blacker red

Willie also told he heard a young voice cry out,
“Mama. Lord have mercy. Lord have mercy”
On that hot August night in middle Mississippi

A prosecutor asked, “And what about those licks
Was it just one lick you heard or was it two…”
“There was a whole lot of them,” Willie replied

“I come by the barn I heard somebody hollering and
I heard some licks like somebody was whipping somebody.”
They was whipping the fourteen year old body of Emmett Till

They gouged out an eye tore off an ear
Cracked his skull bound his body in barbed wire
Dumped him in the Tallahatchie’s muddy flow

An Obituary

Willie Reed has died (I just cried and cried)
When barely eighteen Willie testified
Against the men who did kill Emmett Till

Death is walking with me
Seeing hearing knowing
What I might otherwise miss
A connoisseur’s five senses
Perhaps even a sixth
For goodness truth and beauty

And their opposite

I am striding toward death
Across the meadow
Through the trees
Along the road
Being with my body
Asking about its day

I am reaching toward death
Touching toes
Stretching this torso
One hundred leg lifts
Two hundred sit ups
Stupid looking trunk twists

Daily Exercise

I am unfolding toward death
Taking a deep breath
Body bending
Finally feeling
Hard places open and
Crimped places crack

V

Individual ambition incrementally

Transformed from hope for singular success

Into something very close to holiness

Pride traded for peace
Failure for understanding

Paradox finding fulfillment
As foolishness is wise

IV

Purity unraveling into compassion
Clarity converted by color

Pristine deferring to profound
A place for darkness and light

Mixing means and methods even ends
Toward constructing a space wherein
Individuality unfolds into grace

If ambition matures
Finding opportunities in
Previously unseen possibilities

Resulting in outcomes
Organic rather than ideal
But reflecting context

Discerning what is possible today
Even accepting long delays
Adapting function and form

III

Ambition if it persists is
Unlikely to be stupidly stubborn
Finding virtue in compromise

Achievement and its reverse
Also depending on war and
Peace, poverty or prosperity
How sudden and strong the storm

Leading to stupendous falls
Ambition seldom surviving
Or in wounded recovery
Fundamentals reconceiving

Astride a strong foundation
Ambition tends to soar
Sometimes too soon with
Mortar still too wet to set

Rarely finding ground
Most of these buried
While digging what will be
Ambition’s crypt and grave

Even then fading
Round by round
Into favorite fantasy
Distraction or delusion

II

Beginnings are fragile
Not many make the turn
From tired or typical to
Something close to beautiful

It is crumbling
Succumbing
Transmuting
Transcending
Shimmering in the sun

It can pulsate with
Music
Poetry
Prophecy
Grief unrestrained

It can be quiet
Memory
Mindfulness
Meaning
Being maintained

Emerging into light
Mostly blue
A slightly brighter hue
Than that at Saint Denis
Or Our Lady of Chartres

North transept in ruins
South never started
Crossing betwixt absences
Converging beneath curves
Entering our darkness

Byzantine beginnings
Hyperbolae extending
Gothic perpendiculars
Gently contained
Set midst a purposeful grid

Revelation

It is unfinished
Complicated
Inconsistent
But I would insist
Not incoherent

Amavi
Amavisti
Amavimus

Where is the ego in that?

We hear the past with our ego
Pseudo-scientific for Das Ich
Screams still rising from Teutoburger heath

There (then?) a personal ending
Attached to a verbal stem
Action perfected i subordinate

Here ego separates
Self from action
Time neatly divides

I came I saw I conquered
The I preceding verb
Past is simple self asserting

Pre-Freudian Ego

Veni vidi vici
i following verb in
First person perfect

Most berries peak
With some arid heat
Tart and sweet

Days later blackberries arrive
Big and beautiful seldom best
Taste undone by too easy affluence

By early July wine berries ripen
Spear tips bursting bright red
Yellow stars where already fed

Picking Berries

Snake berries pop in late spring
Close to the dewy ground
Cute but tasteless dots

Hardness softened
Flatness complicated
Resistance absorbed
Applied vigorously
Revealing a spiritual simile

I think it needs another coat.

It took three gallons
Where one had sufficed
For white, but that
Was before covering
Concrete with burlap

Valspar 3003-2C

After buying a gallon of enlightenment
I soon found more was needed

In less than brightest light
Enlightenment cannot be
Distinguished from creamy oats
Champagne or coconut cream
Quite a cuisine

Late Afternoon

From beneath the berries
Twa-twa-twa---twa-twaaal
A turkey calls for its mother

Mighty mayim
Creation’s consort
Still flowing flooding
Reflecting deep and dark
Bring us finally to the sea.

When reality arrived
Personified
A river’s water
Symbolized
Persistent paradox

When unreality reigned
Four jars of water
Poured thrice
Claimed the meaty sacrifice
Power proclaiming

When freedom
Was threatened
Water parted
Past from present
Promise preserving

When corruption
Needed correcting
Heaven did burst
Water prevailing
Cleansing the earth

The Nativity of Saint John the Baptist

Before light
Before wind
Before creating began
There was mayim
What we call water

Slightly sulfurous egg salad
Saffron yellow on crackers
Scant taste of salt
Reminiscent of shore and sweat
Each crusty creamy bite
Conveying another creature’s
Fertility for my possibility.

All of which suggests several
Pseudo-Sibylline stanzas
Comparing that fawn’s frantic
Prancing to Brownian Motion or
Predicting fractal unfolding
From each furious fluttering.
Instead I eat a late lunch.

Becoming Summer

On summer solstice eve
Butterflies mate in mid-air
A lonely cicada vibrates
The days-born fawn dashes
Hither and yon, full moon in
Sunlight bestows a spectral
Silhouette to the last sky of spring

Our worldlines looping
Bending nearly touching
Feeling your static charge

What was behind
Now before
All becoming

That was then
This is now
Safe distance

But our relative velocity
Dilates space(time)
Transforming perspective

Placing borders
Between you and me
Imaginary lines to defend

Here be red
Here be blue
Here be dead

Maps are simplifications
Reducing treacherous ground
To beginning middle destination

Here be mountains
Here be desert
Here be my enemy

Maps show relationships
Flattening sphere to plane
Using hyperbolae and scale

Here be me
Here be you
A curve connecting

Showing in two-dimensions
What we know or have been told
Exists as three and (many) more

Here be my world
Here be its edge
Here be dragons

VII.      2013

We are each cartographers
Crafting symbolic representations
Of perceived and received reality

Here be the road
Here be the river
Here be the ocean

Too much and too little
Knowledge and knowing
Interior and Exterior

Height and depth
Mother and father
Life and death

Christ and his cross
Black snake and white
Elijah and Salome

“The realm of love is light
The realm of forethinking is dark
Forethinking is singleness
Love is togetherness
Both need each other
Yet they kill one another
Since men do not know
That the conflict occurs inside
Themselves, they go mad and
One lays blame on the other.”

You and me
My right and my left
Yes and no

Each is real
Each is plural
Each is all

VI. December 25, Küsnacht Again

Elijah and Salome
Black snake and white
Christ and his cross

Finding myself and you
Knowing our inner selves
Considering our angular momentum
Rotational inertia velocity spin
Individual particles and – especially –

Our axis shared or separate

In our choosing becoming synaxis
For there is always connection
Choosing and acting together
For when subtext is denied
Consequences still abide

Sometimes called syntropy
When turning together in context
We conspire to unleash what is latent
Waiting for decision, lost until
Loosing our choosing.

What is possible
Where there is capacity
When real capability exists, we
Move madly from moment to moment
Criticality deriving from negative entropy

We exist in phase transitions
It is in the midst, in the middle
Between this and that where
Choices make not this nor that
But mysteriously create what’s new

“As day requires night and night requires day, so meaning
 Requires absurdity and absurdity requires meaning.
Day does not exist through itself, night does not exist through itself.
The reality that exists through itself is day and night.
So the reality is meaning and absurdity. Noon is a moment, midnight
Is a moment, morning comes from night, evening turns into night, but
Evening comes from the day and morning turns into day. So meaning
Is a moment and a transition from absurdity to absurdity, and
Absurdity only a moment and a transition from meaning to meaning.”

No, that’s entirely too Freudian
In context he claims ground as earth
Solid stable anchored, also related to humorous

Or even groin
Which Old English
Used as we use arch

Did his groin give way
His libido undone by icy cold feet
Confronting her florid clitoris

Out of context we cannot know if
Our ground is foundation and source or the
Same sound meaning polished sharpened crushed

Is my ground of being noun or verb
Elaboration of grund and grunt or of
Grinden maybe Greek κηραινειν (khrainein)

V.      December 12, 228 Seestrasse, Küsnacht

“I let myself drop
My ground actually gave way
Plunging down into black depths”

“There was an entrance to a dark cave
I waded knee deep through icy water
Before me a glowing red crystal.”

Minkowski’s plane is plotted
Against time and space
Expressed as curves that are
Time-like space-like light-like
Finding past present future and elsewhere.

Euclid’s plane is a set of points
Satisfying certain relationships
Expressed in terms of distance
And angle. Magnitude moving
In a definite direction.

Perception
Conception
Intuition
Comprehension
Apprehension

Frozen flooding
Killing frost
Cosmic cold
Sucking summer white
Eiswein and raisins remaining

The storm was pounding
   Flooding as if warring –
     Struggling within itself as
       A woman writhing
         Birthing lost innocence

IV.        October, On the Train to Schaffhausen

“I was suddenly overcome in broad daylight
By a vision: I saw a terrible flood…
I saw yellow waves, swimming rubble and
The death of countless thousands…
A sea of blood over the northern lands.”

Pythagorean imitation
Platonic participation
Aristotelian integration

Sensing unpredictability
Asynchronicity shock and surprise
Non-scientifically surmised

Coincidentally anticipating
Quantum and relative realities
Through acute replication of light

     “Successful mimesis is of significance…
     Because it fulfills man’s natural potential to
     Understand reality by reconstituting it
     In some of the materials over which he has
     Rational control.”

Still… forsaking object
For ideal form
Surface for superstructure

Stasis for motion
Composition for compassion
Composure for emotion

Color communicating
Not just what is sensed
But that remaining unseen

Seeking the intersection
Of subjective and objective
Cognition and feeling

Here radically new
There
Already succeeded

Sweet Matisse violently condemned
Braque barely beginning to see
Kandinsky’s single improvisation insufficient

Duchamp’s cubist derivative
Attracting acclaim as much
For his title as technique

Perceiving reality
Conceiving fundamental form
Frontier of possibility

Emergent impressions
Starting with point line plane
Constructing perceptual frames

Rejecting mimesis of compounds
Pursuing purity of conception
Unveiling sublimated verities

III.         March 24-April 16, Chicago

Experience
Examine
Express

Experiment
Extract
Expostulate

Exist
Exhale
Exalt

Extrapolate
Exceed
Exterminate or extend?

      “The moment is related to the transition of the
      One to the many, of the many to the one,
      Likeness to unlikeness, and that is the
      Moment in which there is neither one nor many
      Neither a being determined nor a being combined”

Engaging the constancy of angular momentum.

Not being the higher probability
Not choosing the better bet
Non-choosing a version of its opposite
Non-expression of individual
Existence deferring to
Impressions others impose
On reluctant choosers (losers)

Bloody anger                                      or profound love 
               Photosynthesis or                           sea-sickness 
Persistent               sadness              or             bright            sky 
Each and more
               we are choosing
Each being an expression of (potential)
Individual existence

Now and always we make choices
Writing this or turning to prose
Walking or eating or sleeping
You can continue reading or turn to
Talking or taxes or dancing
Each choice absorbing scattering
Flashes of energy: red or green or blue.

It being the centenary of similar vibration
Lower frequency perhaps but resonant
A variation in persistent existential energy
Transposing to equations diapsalmata
Shadowgraphs crop-rotation seduction.
“When it comes to Atoms, language can
Only be used as in poetry.”

“The opposite
Of a fact is falsehood
But the opposite of
One profound truth
May very well be another
Profound truth,”
He offered much later.

A constitution of colors across a
Cosmic spectrum pulsing as
Energy is released as places are
Exchanged as one individual appears
Disappears. Where? – There!
Gone… with strangeness charm
And – always – the opposite.

The first paper was posted
On a blustery beautiful awful day
By fast boat to London
Reappearing in July as the
“Constitution of Atoms and Molecules”
Describing a system conducive to
Illusive (no longer elusive) surprise.

Springtime on the Øresund
Is continuous transformation
From snow to rain to sunshine
So suddenly switching from one
To another that each hour is a
Roll of the dice not more than 12
Nor less than 2, the rest is up to you.

Negative circling positive
Constantly together, yet
Perpetually unpredictable
Shocking shifts in basic
Behavior: attraction dis-
Traction waves collapsing
At their very crest.

II.      April 5, København

H is the loneliest atom
That you never saw
And three-quarters of all
You have ever seen
Wondrously reactive
Promiscuous
Lonely and so rarely alone

Reaching the abyss
Confronting the crowd
Demanding they listen or leave

Poet, composer, conductor
All hearing aggregate harmonies
Maximum maximalities

But many even most
Laughing hissing jeering
Catastrophizing complexity

Unraveling
Beautiful possibility
Leaving creation unfinished

Unfulfilled

Reflexively reflecting
What they hear:
Conflation confusion conflict

The Musikverein audience
 Hears mostly distance
 Disharmony dissonance

But where student and master
Both feel the tug of each other
And many more

Trying to skip into a new orbit
Elliptic to his source
Even a new trajectory

     You gazed pensively over the universal abyss 

     No thought for home or hearth 

     Life and dreams of living, all of sudden gone 

           You still gaze pensively over the universal abyss

By a student of Schoenberg
Seeking to escape his
Strong attraction to Mahler

     Did you see the forest after the thunderstorm?!?!
     Everything is quiet, twinkles, and is more beautiful than before.
     See, woman, you too need thunderstorms!

The second and third
Arriving in time to be scored
For very large orchestra

Inspired

By a friend
Young girl, or
Passing molecule

While waiting to be
      Hier ist Friede
      Here is Peace

From his usual coffee house
       Nichts ist gekommen
       Nothing has come

Sent by the poet to himself
      Über die Grenzen des Alls
      Beyond the boundaries of the universe

Originally five postcard poems
     Sahst du nach dem Gewitterregen den Wald
     Did you see the forest after the thunderstorm

1913

I.      March 31, Wien 

Each song is short
      Seele, wie bist du schöner
      Soul, how much more beautiful are you

Instead, if I paused as a way to being
Becoming more with the meadow
Was this shared being thereby made
Joyful delightful, perhaps good, and
In the same way made not-beautiful?

The cicada are singing again.

This morning the meadow’s
Grass glistened in moonlight
Fireflies danced before dawn.
Did I pause devoid of all interest
With no sense of need, self-
Fulfilled, only taking note of an
Aspect of being that can be
Defined as beautiful, but fills
No absence, prompts no approval?

If Kant is correct
If Tillich is true
God can be good
God can be delightful
But God is not beautiful
For we cannot be
Disinterested in God
Unconcerned with Being-Itself.

God is being-itself.
After this has been said
Nothing else can be said
About God as God
Which is not symbolic.
God as being-itself
Is the ground of the ontological
Structure of being
Without being
Subject to this structure
God is the structure;
Having the power to
Determine the structure
Of everything
That has being
Therefore
If anything beyond this
Bare assertion
Is said about God
It is no longer a direct and proper
Statement, no longer a concept.
It is indirect pointing to something
Beyond itself: Symbolic.”

“What is being itself?
What is that which is not a special being
Or group of beings, not something concrete or
Abstract but rather something which is always
Thought implicitly and sometimes explicitly
If something is said to be?”

“It is impossible to speak of being
Without also speaking of becoming
Becoming is as genuine in the structure
Of being as that which remains
Unchanged in the process of becoming”

“What is the content of our ultimate concern?
What does concern us unconditionally?
Our ultimate concern is that which determines
Our being or not-being
Nothing can be of ultimate concern for us
Which does not have the power of
Threatening and saving our being.”

To which we belong
In which we become
On which we depend as
Our ultimate ground of
Being

“Cognitive eros is born out of
Poverty and abundance
Driving us toward reunion with that
To which we belong and which
Belongs to us.”

V. Tillich’s Take

“Knowing is a form of union
In every act of knowledge
Knower and that which is known are
United; the gap between subject and
Object overcome”

I need not approve of beauty
Nor agree with beauty
I ought not – cannot – need the
Truly beautiful; But it is right to
Needlessly heedlessly like it.

When disinterested the beautiful descends?

“Taste is the ability to judge an
Object, or a way of presenting it,
By means of a liking or disliking
Devoid of all interest. The object of
Such a liking is called beautiful.”

“All interest either presupposes a
Need or gives rise to one; and
Because interest is the basis for
Approval it makes the judgment
About the object unfree.”

“Only the liking involved in
Taste for the beautiful is
Disinterested and free, since
We are not compelled to give
Our approval by any interest.”

What is this emotion
Mere sentimentality
Aflame with birth aging death
Or an unveiling of reality
Realized and regnant

Not so impressed I turn left and am still moving from
One room to the next when I stand breathless
Tears welling before three men by Rembrandt
A young man (is it him?) the artist as an old man and
The Rabbi proud penetrating self-possessed.

Downstairs we come face to face with ourselves
Young couples courting, old couples eating by
Van Mieris, Metsu and Steen. Flirting singing
Conspiring desiring far from Olympus or Zion
Happily building polder Haarlem to the Hague.

Upstairs ancient ideals restrain revelation
Deciding what is known or to be shown
Botticelli is chaste even with Aphrodite
Caravaggio’s catamites – child prophets or
Young gods exuding ruddy innocence.

Given to artisti stranieri (foreign and
I Hear strange or strained) it is a sudden
Shift from spring to autumn – south to
North– light to dark – spiritual to
Something much more personal.

IV. Geschmacksurteile

It is a small room with no windows
One floor below the sun wrapped corridor
Where confronted by a dense swarm of
Yellow t-shirts we took the stairs
Escaping more than exploring.

Not for lack of opportunity
We fail to escape the banal
Ignoring the invitation accepting
Expectations that others decide
Should mark our start and stop.

Ending before truly beginning.

But mostly I don’t and won’t
Because I am too busy to notice
Too distracted to hear or see
Too anxious to even RSVP
Too busy to become or be

These are our out-of-the-ordinary commons
Wonder full if we will but notice but pause
But put away the distractions but embrace
Today’s invitation but join in the joy of knowing
Intimate connections this with that you with me.

Beauty surrounds in the raucous sound of a
Saxophone with clarinet duet coming from a
Groaning subway escalator, or the rising
Chorus on 92nd Street pulsating to a patois of
Gossip laughter accusation exaltation.

Beauty abounds in moonlight meadow and the
Reaching tendrils of a spiny vine, in a cicada’s
Golden birth mask clinging to the tree trunk
In intricate lines on an inch-wide rock formed
From clay sand and shell of a long lost sea.

Banality deadens communal experience
Pretending there are orders (sacred or secular)
Superseding the ordinary distribution of skill
Strength insight creativity beauty opportunity
Best and worst widely disseminated

III.      Back Home

If banal is bad, can common be good?
Both lean into what’s ordinary
But banal begins as compulsory
While common is free for all
Banal conforms: common informs.

Then sugary sentiment becomes
Hard cold sharp steel ready to
Sacrifice innocence especially their own
On a baroque altar of self-righteousness
Bloody bathos brutal banality

Bless me please with uncertainty.

The banal are deaf to dialogue
Blind to beauty but generally
Harmless except to themselves
Unless their delusions are
Nationalized, worse sacralized

The banal build barns and fill them
Construct houses on sandbars
Do not consider the birds of the air
Cherish the log in their eye and the
Speck in the eye of their neighbor

The banal prefer repeating
Half-heard petty pieties
Unchanging litanies of self-
Congratulation and complaint
Elaborate confections of conceit

Creating involves doing
Failing learning – thinking
 Observing complications
Considering contradictions
Traipsing the light fantastic

The banal find comfort in
Any orthodoxy that claims to
Contain the perpetual paradox
Emerging from our experience
Of constant creative change

The banal prefer clarity
Impatient with ambiguity
Insisting on bald binaries
Purchased by investing in
Disdain denial delusion

II.      Back to Boston

Banality breeds barbarity
Beginning with brittle self-regard
Combining with vague resentment
Finding in a convenient other
Sufficient blame for fatal infection

A twig cracks and only then
Do I see the darker shadow
Gliding beneath the trees
Pausing to lick a dewy sheaf
To taste a resurrected body

Sound precedes sight despite the speed of light
Last year’s crispy leaves each scratching each
When entirely unexpected twenty-two thousand
Bodily arise from as many self-made tombs
Grounded wingless crawling yet intended to fly

I did not expect much of the cheap
Pouilly-Fuisse several years too old
Surely soured I safely assumed, yet
The still soft cork pulled with a pop
Chilly viscous creamy buttery delicious

Five first figs hard and green
Might well be perceived a
Paltry season. Yet patience please
There is more than one harvest
Still a chance for purple plentitude.

On the bright afternoon of May’s full moon
Two glistening Black Snakes emerge from
Mint and lemon balm in tight embrace
Writhing urgently through cool verdency
Ecstatically involved in renewing their race

A stiff breeze blows from the southeast
Blue black grey clouds darken the
Midday sun white caps spray across the
Bay as a trough moves against the tide
Sails full a skipjack trawls its bed

The Septendecim Symphony
Accompanied by honeysuckle scent
Millions of castanets cacophonate as a
Theremin oscillates woofs and roars
Crescendo ascending with the sun

Cicadas have returned
Marmorated Stink Bugs propagate
Bag-worms metamorphize
A surprising salmon-red frog
Same color as cicada eyes

Ordinary Timre

         I.    Today

Fireflies dancing in tall grass
Heavenly Ganges straight above
Moon below western mountains
Sun still crossing an eastern sea
Another day unfolds.

Three Aspects

Struggling
Suffering
Submitting

Struggling is different than flight or fight
It is a wrestling of wrong-with-right
Seeking shared purpose

Suffering shared is different than despair
Excavating a grace to persevere
Love sufficient, even to self-sacrifice

Submitting is different than subjecting
Choosing freely crafting carefully
Confirming all we share in common

Informed
Knowing
Wise

What was done still needs doing
And greater works than these
Shall we do

 “The present moment now,
What does it ask? I have no way to see:
It has many good and lovely things to show,
But they’re only burdens I must cast from me.
I’m driven by an unyielding yearning:
No counsel left, but only tears unending.”

What shall we do?

Who is creating what 
What is being created (by who)
What are you creating

Specific subject still in action
An independent clause, perhaps
A complete thought (mirabile dictu)

Creation unfinished still unfolding
Creating continually exponentially
Creating is becoming – to be

Too often prayer is not praying
Song is not singing
Life is not living

So our synthesis may be a sentence
Noun (subject) and gerund
Even a split infinitive

Accepted – projected – this noun
Subverts – perverts – its lively origin
Transforming enthusiastic to inert

Is growth then the antithesis of to-grow
The suffix transforming verbal into nominal
Converting our action into thing, doing into done

Constant growth deepening the chasm
Between each and every created thing
Gradual dimness growing into darkness

As the scale of the universe doubles
Matter’s density is reduced by a factor of 8
While density of dark energy perpetuates

Cosmic acceleration (at its start)
Might well be a quick twist of his wrist, or…
Extemporaneous random coincidence

While quintessence was quiet
Did dark energy exist
Sistere is not exsistere

Not earth air wind
Certainly not fire
Not generation nor corruption

No motion nor momentum
No dimension no push or pull
No measure no name no thing

Nullity perhaps nothingness
Not just absence but
Fundamental non-existence

What then is our antithesis?
Neither death nor destruction
For these pre-suppose creating

V.

Creating is our thesis
Creare to make
Crescere to grow

We are on fire
Laughing singing dancing
Running into the wind
Tending our roses and strawberries
Kissing our tiny baby’s wrinkled feet
Weaving one bright strand with another
We know the consequences of creation.

And ripping the cloth in two

We are on fire
Conceiving designing
Constructing entire new cities
Moving mountains capturing rivers
Making gardens in deepest desert
Flying to Paris the moon and Mars
We are adept at the praxis of creation.

And its undoing

IV.

We are on fire
We dissect the sub-atomic
Calculate cosmic scope and scale
Count our nucleotides
Map the sequence of adenine
Guanine, cytosine and thymine
We are fluent in the languages of creation.

And desecration

In undertaking
Physical purgation
We look for
Intellectual illumination
Hoping for
Spiritual unification

III

“Fasting cleanses the soul,
Raises the mind,
Subjects one’s flesh to the spirit,
Renders the heart contrite and humble,
Scatters the clouds of self-conceit,
Quenches the fire of lust, and
Kindles the true light of chastity.
Enter again into yourself.”

In midst of screaming a man drops dead
Fire’s vertical vortex lifting the oxygen out from his lungs
She stumbles, tripping over corpses beginning to burn
Falling again she imagines resting until reduced to cinder
But she says to no one, “’I don’t want to burn to death –
No, no burning – I don’t want to burn!’ Crawling...
I do not know how many people I fell over.”

"Wieviele starben? Wer kennt die Zahl?”
(How many died? Who knows the count?)

Eight square miles of a great city suddenly aflame
Palace cathedral gallery warehouse factory home
Reaping a whirlwind reaching miles into the sky
At night a pillar of fire next day a pillar of smoke
To guide them on their way, those who had been
Sent forth from so very far away. Making a fiery
Ladder between heaven and earth.

Emerging she could see nothing but rubble
Stones craters blizzard of fire, fountains of
Orange-white sparks spilling into streets
Blinding burning ascent into an inferno
Stumbling toward any shadow any dark patch
Free of fire, but one blaze had joined another
Each adding to each in unfolding conflagration.

In the Gemäldegalerie cellars
There remained a very crowded
Crucifixion by Cranach, good to the
Left, bad to the right, Christ bleeding
Between the thief who believes
And he who does not. Just about
Midnight Christ is burnt on his cross.

And with what are these on fire?

The Zwinger was originally a wall
A fort to defend the Wettins but
Became by Goethe’s time a
Citadel of culture temple of
Prestige and subtle power
Intended to narrate and
Validate being self-sovereign.

And with what are these on fire?

The prophecy poured through
Rooftops flooding narrow streets
Breaking asunder centuries of
Accumulation opening widening
Where walls had been erected
Monuments built and gilded
Places to worship ourselves
Consecrated.

And with what are these on fire?

Starting at the Ostragehege
Fanning across the railway tracks
Encompassing all the Old City
Those who had been sent forth
Poured out on all flesh and more
A message of flaming prophecy
Blood and fire and vapor of smoke.

And with what are these on fire?

But beginning about ten on the night
Of February 13th there came a sound from
Heaven as of a rushing mighty wind when
Two-hundred two-ton plumduffs and
Two-hundred thousand fire werks
Are released from just about 8000 feet
Bringing an early end to carnival.

Fire requires air ignition fuel
All three abiding with one accord
In one place creates a possibility
But no certainty of sustained
Combustion. Sometimes stuff
Is dry air is pure and there is a
Spark – yet fire is averted.

Bright white magnesium light
Casting shadows through the night
Rockets' red glare, bombs bursting in air
Reflected in the Elbe’s dark flow
Hundreds of planes 4000 tons of bombs
Three days of destruction and death
Descend on Dresden.

II.

Christmas trees flying on Fat Tuesday
Swinging swaying toward the towers
Frauenkirche, Hofkirche, and Kreuzkirche

In conceiving this aversion, he becomes divested of passion
And by the absence of passion he becomes free
And when he is free he becomes aware that he is free
Knowing rebirth is exhausted, that he has lived a sacred life
That he has done what he was made to do
That he is no more for this world.

Conceives an aversion for mind-consciousness
Conceives an aversion for the impressions
Received by the mind and whatever sensation
Pleasant, unpleasant, or indifferent
Originates in dependence on impressions
Received by the mind, for this also he conceives an aversion.

Conceives an aversion for the ear
Conceives an aversion for sounds
Conceives an aversion for the nose
Conceives an aversion for scent
Conceives an aversion for the tongue,
Conceives an aversion for tastes
Conceives an aversion for the body
Conceives an aversion for things tangible
Conceives an aversion for the mind
Conceives an aversion for ideas

The worst picture can speak to our perception and imagination,

Set them in motion, make them free, leave them to themselves.

The best also speaks to our perceptions, but with a higher language,

Which we are bound to hear. It chains the feelings and the Imagination,

It holds us fast in spite of ourselves

We cannot act our will with the perfect

We are compelled to give ourselves up to it

To receive ourselves back.

Perceiving this, the learned and noble disciple
Conceives an aversion for the eye,
Conceives an aversion for forms,
Conceives an aversion for eye-consciousness,
Conceives an aversion for the impressions
Received by the eye; and whatever sensation
Pleasant, unpleasant, or indifferent
Originates in dependence on impressions
Received by the eye, he also conceives an aversion.

Deepest stillness dazzling frames

Floors shining with bees'-wax

Imparting solemnity, unique of its kind

Much more resembling the sensation

With which one enters a church

Consecrated fixtures of a capacious temple

Objects of such adoration, seem

Set only for the sacred purposes of art.

Here, in my comfort, I feel really at home.

I enter into this sanctuary

My astonishment surpassing

Every prior conception of form

This room – returning into itself –

Wherein splendor and order reign

With the fire of passion
With the fire of hatred
With the fire of infatuation
With birth aging death,
Sorrow sighs misery grief and
Deep despair are they on fire.

Impressions received by the mind are on fire
Whatever sensation – pleasant, unpleasant
Or indifferent, originates in dependence on
Impressions received by the mind –
That also is on fire.

And with what are these on fire?

The ear is on fire; sounds are on fire
The nose is on fire; scent is on fire
The tongue is on fire; tastes are on fire
The body is on fire; things tangible are on fire
The mind is on fire; ideas are on fire
Mindfulness aflame.

As conception and perception mutually require each other,

I could not long work up these new thoughts

Without an infinite desire arising within me to see

Important works of art, once and away, in great number.

I therefore determined to visit Dresden without delay.

With the fire of passion
With the fire of hatred
With the fire of infatuation
With birth aging death
Sorrow sighs misery grief and
Deep despair are they on fire.

Tongues of Fire

“All things, O priests, are on fire. And what, O priests, are all these things which are on fire?”

                                                                             Aditta-pariyaya Sutta

I.

The eye is on fire
Forms are on fire
Awareness of seeing is on fire
Impressions received by the eye are on fire
All sensations pleasant unpleasant indifferent
Aflame. With what are these on fire?

Καιρός του ποίησις
Kairos tou poiesai
Now is the time to act
Now is the time to do
Now is the right time
Propitious, pregnant with possibility
Space continuing to expand with time
Opening unfolding perpetually new

Old men ought to be explorers
Here or there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.

May I be reconciled with Father Time and our Mother
(of Necessity) and my Cousin Chaos and may I know
How sweet Aether spawns such wonders while nary
Lifting a finger. Asking your introduction and, if needed,
Intercession to be more with fair-haired Kairos. May he
Teach me his eye ear touch and exquisite sense of time.

There is a time for the evening under starlight,
A time for the evening under lamplight
(The evening with the photograph album).
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.

May I be reconciled with Father Time and our Mother
(of Necessity) and my Cousin Chaos and may I know
How sweet Aether spawns such wonders while nary
Lifting a finger. Asking your introduction and, if needed,
Intercession to be more with fair-haired Kairos. May he
Teach me his eye ear touch and exquisite sense of time.

Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.

Arriving from this bloody and broken world bringing my
Bruised and battered body hungry thirsty gradually dying
Asking to be fed despite my betrayal banality venality
Asking to join the others at your table and partake of
Beauty, bounty, love. Asking to be in right relationship
With you through you with all beginning with my self.

By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate - but there is no competition -
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

Turning to Thomas Stearns Eliot another Midwestern
Boy with aspirations and, let us say, complications to
Provoke and permission finding and using my own voice
Claiming my own vision making my own choice.

And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate,
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer

So here I am, in the final stage, having had fifty years –
Fifty years of exploration experimentation and fruitful
Failures trying to use words to describe explain consider
Create calculate conceive cook-up a recipe for being.

So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years-
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres
Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholy new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. 

Moments ago walking up the hill from home to studio
Birdsong in pre-dawn darkness pulled me to pause
One sharp sound answered softly, each seeking each
Standing still on the stony path peering beyond tree tops
A meteor sweeping across the black, prophet of the sun
Still to come, first taste on this Feast of the Ascension.

The dripping blood our only drink,
The bloody flesh our only food:
In spite of which we like to think
That we are sound, substantial flesh and blood-
Again, in spite of that, we call this Friday good.

We talk of art important others jobs fears old memories emerging hope
And more, but even more we listen for what is unsaid cannot be said
But can be heard with long silences forgiving smiles and knowing nods
There remains a separation but there is also, for now, shared becoming
A beginning to be. It takes time, we finish with brandy older than me.

The chill ascends from feet to knees,
The fever sings in mental wires.
If to be warmed, then I must freeze
And quake in frigid purgatorial fires
Of which the flame is roses, and the smoke is briars.

They clear the table, leaving us to finish our wine. There were reasons
Things I wanted thought I needed that caused me to invite you here
But none of that really matters, what I am now seeking is to truly be
With you without artifice or worry or want or even need… And as my hand
Reaches for yours he brings a French-press coffee and two rhubarb tarts.

The whole earth is our hospital
Endowed by the ruined millionaire,
Wherein, if we do well, we shall
Die of the absolute paternal care
That will not leave us, but prevents us everywhere.

Why are we here, you ask as they pour the Pinot Noir and plate the duck
To which I respond by closely examining the steaming Brussels sprouts
Sparkling with bacon fat, finally raising my glass and eyes to yours:
“To the whisper of running streams, and winter lightning. The wild thyme unseen
And the wild strawberry, the laughter in the garden, and echoed ecstasy.”

Our only health is the disease
If we obey the dying nurse
Whose constant care is not to please
But to remind us of our, and Adam's curse,
And that, to be restored, our sickness must grow worse.

A cold crab bisque dusted with paprika paired with an aromatic Moselle
Recalling our last lunch celebrating the view you commend the bread
Am I dribbling the bisque is something caught in my teeth is the Riesling too sweet
A beautiful scene scent of wisteria waves washing ashore wonderful food
And you – yet still I am separate divided in space and time and even self.

IV.

The wounded surgeon plies the steel
That quesions the distempered part;
Beneath ,he bleeding hands we feel
The sharp compassion of the healer's art
Resolving the enigma of the fever chart.

A ménage à trois of still-sizzling oysters in bed with vinegar-tossed frisee
A very dry champagne, sitting in the sun surfers sliding over sand
Both of us a bit numb at the edge of our head from flying too far too fast
Thank you for coming, I say. Thanks for asking, you smile
I am dazzled you’re here and suddenly feel utterly hopelessly dumb.

In order to possess what you do not possess
     You must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
     You must go through the way in which you are not.
And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not.

What is to be done with beauty…
Opportunity… love…
These cannot be had, but
Inspire conspire or tempt
Entering again into our selves
Finding bliss or burden
Claiming cause or outcome
Choosing life or death
Whatever our choosing
Finding all is ours always
Desire a prelude to despair
Or overture to joy
Depending on how
Subject and object coincide
Desire empowering and deflecting
Our each and every motion
“To every action there is
Always opposed an equal
Reaction: Or the mutual actions of
Two bodies upon each other are
Always equal, and directed
To contrary parts.”

You say I am repeating
Something I have said before. I shall say it again.
Shall I say it again? In order to arrive there,
To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
     You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstacy.
In order to arrive at what you do not know
     You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.

Hunger opens to absence
Desire is different
Aroused by proximity
More and more prompting
Deeper yet deeper yearning
Bread is eaten
Water swallowed

Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning.
The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry,
The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy
Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony
Of death and birth.

(I have departed purposefully from Eliot's architecture)

Or as, when an underground train, in the tube, stops too long between stations
And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence
And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen
Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about;
Or when, under ether, the mind is conscious but conscious of nothing-
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.

Dressing each in a silver gown
Sliding each into a pre-warmed
Three hundred- twenty degree oven
Where they slowly roasted
While I was baptized in a metal tub
Behind the altar where that afternoon
I would be married
Making time to baste the birds
Then remove the gown and
Allow the flesh to gently brown.

I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you
Which shall be the darkness of God. As, in a theatre,
The lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed
With a hollow rumble of wings, with a movement of darkness on darkness,
And we know that the hills and the trees, the distant panorama
And the bold imposing facade are all being rolled away-

Anointing each with olive oil
Massaging their loose white flesh
Feeling frosty crystals break
Breasts and thighs warming to my touch
Adding pepper garlic and plenty of thyme
Placing each in a buttered basting pan

Industrial lords and petty contractors, all go into the dark,
And dark the Sun and Moon, and the Almanach de Gotha
And the Stock Exchange Gazette, the Directory of Directors,
And cold the sense and lost the motive of action.
And we all go with them, into the silent funeral,
Nobody's funeral, for there is no one to bury.

Covering each turkey
In a warm saltwater bath
Then fixed myself a coffee
Listening to birds begin the day
With their turf-protecting concertante
About 7:40 patting each dry

O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark,
The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant,
The captains, merchant bankers, eminent men of letters,
The generous patrons of art, the statesmen and the rulers,
Distinguished civil servants, chairmen of many committees,

The morning of our wedding
Just past dawn I removed one
Carcass then another
Pouring off the blood
Claiming from the insides
Liver, gizzards, neck and kidneys

Three scallops
A crisp chardonnay
Pacific breaking below
Sitting alone
Sun slowly setting
Resolving self with other selves
Sea and sky become as one
Καιρός του ποίησις

Their fear of fear and frenzy, their fear of possession,
Of belonging to another, or to others, or to God.
The only wisdom we can hope to acquire
Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.

The houses are all gone under the sea.

The dancers are all gone under the hill.

About 1 o’clock we docked
The crew telling Emmanuelle
They would return with lunch
Endive crispy calamari and Roditis
Anchored off Salamis in the sun
With a slight breeze when we were young
Emmanuelle meaning
God, She, is with us
Καιρός του ποίησις

In the middle, not only in the middle of the way
but all the way, in a dark wood, in a bramble,
On the edge of a grimpen, where is no secure foothold,
And menaced by monsters, fancy lights,
Risking enchantment. Do not let me hear
Of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly,

Jeannie Emmanuelle and me
My wife and Mr. Sabbagh’s Italian translator
On his yacht sailing where
We would have seen a Persian fleet
Assembling before defeat
While the Acropolis burned
Clearing way for the Parthenon

The knowledge inposes a pattern, and falsifies,
For the pattern is new in every moment
And every moment is a new and shocking
Valuation of all we have been. We are only undeceived
Of that which, deceiving, could no longer harm.

We were not yet thirty
All others over forty
So we were sent sailing
In the Saronic Gulf
Less wine dark than green-blue
A cloudy Pinot Blanc

The serenity only a deliberate hebetude,
The wisdom only the knowledge of dead secrets
Useless in the darkness into which they peered
Or from which they turned their eyes. There is, it seems to us,
At best, only a limited value
In the knowledge derived from experience.

“Go ahead,” said Fred
And Bill gently laid the whole mess
Of catfish tail to snout into the oil
While Rita, Laura, Ruthie, Mae, Shirley, and Aunt Onley
Cleaned the corn, frosted cakes, brought out plates
While cousins played in the shallows watching for snakes
Wearing water lilies as hats squishing their toes
In the Mississippi’s mud (not) waiting for the meal
Καιρός του ποίησις

What was to be the value of the long looked forward to,
Long hoped for calm, the autumnal serenity
And the wisdom of age? Had they deceived us,
Or deceived themselves, the quiet-voiced elders,
Bequeathing us merely a receipt for deceit?

Testing the temperature by tossing
Dabs of cream and cornmeal into the vat
Looking for tan or brown or black
“It’s time,” said Bill
“Just right,” Bob nodded

That was a way of putting it - not very satisfactory:
A periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion,
Leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle
With words and meanings. The poetry does not matter.
It was not (to start again) what one had expected.

The oil did not boil but did bubble a bit
Seven inches deep in a pan 2x4 feet
Liquid gold in August’s midday sun
Briquettes burning bright beneath
Uncle Bob Uncle Bill and Grandpa Fred

Scorpion fights against the Sun
Until the Sun and Moon go down
Comets weep and Leonids fly
Hunt the heavens and the plains
Whirled in a vortex that shall bring
The world to that destructive fire
Which burns before the ice-cap reigns.

And wades again to shore.
Where he had set a small fire
Well before his guests arrived
Compacted now to bright burning coals
Just right for a crispy exterior flaky interior
Καιρός του ποίησις

Red into grey and tumble down
Late roses filled with early snow?
Thunder rolled by the rolling stars
Simulates triumphal cars
Deployed in constellated wars

What were waves pulled taut at each end
Struggle exploding across cascading calm
Lifting this catch beside his blonde head
The boy turns toward those watching
His smile enough to say, “That’s how it’s done”

II

What is the late November doing
With the disturbance of the spring
And creatures of the summer heat,
And snowdrops writhing under feet
And hollyhocks that aim too high

Retrieving his cast the boy’s wrist twists again
String pulsating looping unleashing waves
Sweeping over the watery flux
There now just now leaps the trout
Here now just how a tug sets the hook

     Dawn points, and another day
Prepares for heat and silence. Out at sea the dawn wind
Wrinkles and slides. I am here
Or there, or elsewhere. In my beginning.

    “Climbing up to a place
Where stone is dark under froth,
And the down turn of his wrist
When the flies drop in the stream”

As in their living in the living seasons
The time of the seasons and the constellations
The time of milking and the time of harvest
The time of the coupling of man and woman
And that of beasts. Feet rising and falling.
Eating and drinking. Dung and death.

Authoring their own destiny
Beyond genetic legacies.
One spring evening beside a flowing stream
The siblings meet a fisher boy knotting his string
Smiling welcome gesturing for quiet
He slips smoothly into the knee-high current.

Lifting heavy feet in clumsy shoes,
Earth feet, loam feet, lifted in country mirth
Mirth of those long since under earth
Nourishing the corn. Keeping time,
Keeping the rhythm in their dancing

Necessity imposing limitations
Often ignored, occasionally exceeded
Each trying to transcend
Parental authority, Time’s tyranny
Necessity’s incessant claims

Two and two, necessarye coniunction,
Holding eche other by the hand or the arm
Whiche betokeneth concorde. Round and round the fire
Leaping through the flames, or joined in circles,
Rustically solemn or in rustic laughter

Desiring more than
Necessity’s austere affection
Constantly restless Chaos
Passive but persistent Aether
Time setting goals

                In that open field
If you do not come too close, if you do not come too close,
On a summer midnight, you can hear the music
Of the weak pipe and the little drum
And see them dancing around the bonfire
the association of man and woman
In daunsinge, signifying matrimonie˜
A dignified and commodious sacrament.

              Chaotic conception and concoction
Ethereal absorption and reflection
Each twin shares the dark eyes
Of their peripatetic father
But resist temporal discipline
Chaos rebellious
Aether languorous
Each jealous for their mother’s attention

Where you lean against a bank while a van passes,
And the deep lane insists on the direction
Into the village, in the elctric heat
Hypnotised. In a warm haze the sultry light
Is absorbed, not refracted, by grey stone.
The dahlias sleep in the empty silence.
Wait for the early owl.

Undulating orgasms
Precisely combined
Culminating in
Chaos and Aether
Precocious offspring
One troubled but productive
The other serenely indolent

        In my beginning is my end. Now the light falls
Across the open field,, leaving the deep lane
Shuttered with branches, dark in the afternoon,

        Kronos comes
Coupling with Ananke
Primordial coitus

Houses live and die: there is a time for building
And a time for living and for generation
And a time for the wind to break the loosened pane
And to shake the wainscot where the field-mouse trots
And to shake the tattered arras woven with a silent motto.

Time is one measure
Among many
With which we seek to
Define infinity
Convert eternity

Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires,
Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth
Which is already flesh, fur and faeces,
Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf.

To tame chaos
To drink its milk
To taste its honey
To claim its potent power

Convivio

       I.    Time

In my beginning is my end. In succession
Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,
Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place
Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass.

Time depends on place
In space
Speed direction and perception
Time is one tool

Sudden in a shaft of sunlight
Even while the dust moves
There rises the hidden laughter
Of children in the foliage
Quick now, here, now, always-
Ridiculous the waste sad time
Stretching before and after.

Can I recognize
Patterns repeated
Are they received
Or do I stand weeping
On the empty edge
Unable to escape reasonable expectations
μη μου απτου

Love is itself unmoving,
Only the cause and end of movement,
Timeless, and undesiring
Except in the aspect of time
Caught in the form of limitation
Between un-being and being.

Fragrance of lilac riding the breeze
Perennial predictable a repeating pattern
Celestial and ecliptic intersect
Approaching the vernal what do I
See hear smell taste feel, what evidence
Confirms this cosmic movement

The detail of the pattern is movement,
As in the figure of the ten stairs.
Desire itself is movement
Not in itself desirable;

Three days hence bursts the redbud
As bees and butterflies drink of periwinkle
Creamy white dogwoods glistening
In the light dappled wood

Will not stay still. Shrieking voices
Scolding, mocking, or merely chattering,
Always assail them. The Word in the desert
Is most attacked by voices of temptation,
The crying shadow in the funeral dance,
The loud lament of the disconsolate chimera.

Three days ago the peach tree
Was a skeleton of bare branches
Bark bumpy with woody welts
Today pink blossoms
Emerge as tiny brush tips
Ready to render unexpected beauty

And all is always now. Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,

Everyday expectations
That make or more often subrogate
Life’s meaning

Or say that the end precedes the beginning,
And the end and the beginning were always there
Before the beginning and after the end.

Each of us claiming this day
Undertaking transactions
Deliberations complications and

The stillness, as a Chinese jar still
Moves perpetually in its stillness.
Not the stillness of the violin, while the note lasts,
Not that only, but the co-existence,

The planet still turns
Laughter greeting the sunrise
Strong coffee stirring our senses
Children leaving for school

     V

Words move, music moves
Only in time; but that which is only living
Can only die. Words, after speech, reach
Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern,
Can words or music reach

There was turmoil torture death
And the sun rose
Turmoil is long fermenting
Torture a tool of state
Death friendly as ever

Down on us? After the kingfisher's wing
Has answered light to light, and is silent, the light is still
At the still point of the turning world.

If meaning implodes to less than its radius
Can we still claim it as meaningful
"At the still point of the turning world."

Stray down, bend to us; tendril and spray
Clutch and cling?
Chill
Fingers of yew be curled

Can its radius be calculated
What is its density
rs
Is meaning constant

       IV

Time and the bell have buried the day,
the black cloud carries the sun away.
Will the sunflower turn to us, will the clematis

Meaning is made in time and space
Meaning clearly has energy
Does it have mass

This is the one way, and the other
Is the same, not in movement
But abstention from movement; while the world moves
In appetency, on its metalled ways
Of time past and time future.

Leaning toward you
I fall farther from you
Or is it deeper into
A place where time and
Space sweep swirl and whorl

Dessication of the world of sense,
Evacuation of the world of fancy, 
Inoperancy of the world of spirit; 

That any externality
Will discern a singularity
Requiem sempiternam

Descend lower, descend only
Into the world of perpetual solitude,
World not world, but that which is not world,
Internal darkness, deprivation
And destitution of all property,

Where all that is was can be
Again becomes as one
As at a certain intensity
Energy and matter
Collapse into such density

Eructation of unhealthy souls
Into the faded air, the torpid
Driven on the wind that sweeps the gloomy hills of London,
Hampstead and Clerkenwell, Campden and Putney,
Highgate, Primrose and Ludgate. Not here
Not here the darkness, in this twittering world.

Between sea and sky
One second before sunrise
Or moonrise at twilight
And certainly not that
Horizon of deep darkness
Where time stands still

Tumid apathy with no concentration
Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind
That blows before and after time,
Wind in and out of unwholesome lungs
Time before and time after.

Trembling through sand
Feeling waves and wind
But not hearing or seeing
Not quite conceiving
The sliver of silver

Neither plentitude nor vacancy. Only a flicker
Over the strained time-ridden faces
Distracted from distraction by distraction
Filled with fancies and empty of meaning

Salt on the tongue
Toes in the tide
Scent of sea grass
Irregular rhythms

With slow rotation suggesting permanence
Nor darkness to purify the soul
Emptying the sensual with deprivation
Cleansing affection from the temporal.

Leaving us deaf
And mostly blind
On the verge of
Reality’s ocean

III

Here is a place of disaffection
Time before and time after
In a dim light: neither daylight
Investing form with lucid stillness
Turning shadow into transient beauty

White reflects
Black absorbs
Light persists
But we do not perceive
Highest or lowest lambda

The moment in the arbour where the rain beat,
The moment in the draughty church at smokefall
Be remembered; involved with past and future.
Only through time time is conquered.

Between then and now when we were not with each other how
Did our beings bend: symmetrically commensurately was there rough parity
Or do you merely continue in the same way before now and forever
My fullest self failing to affect even the slightest oblique?

Allow but a little consciousness.
To be conscious is not to be in time
But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden,

My being is in relationship with you now then perhaps again
Here and now I am as I am in part as you engage me even make me
Is your being likewise shaped by my becoming shifting in my wake

Yet the enchainment of past and future
Woven in the weakness of the changing body,
Protects mankind from heaven and damnation
Which flesh cannot endure.
                                                                Time past and time future

Where mere inches from their opposite warmth and wealth abound
Where with hot tea and amber whisky we remember
A hot humid summer when our disagreements bound us
Found us returning to argue finally to listen even occasionally hear
                                                                Patterns received and repeated

By a grace of sense, a white light still and moving,
Erhebung without motion, concentration
Without elimination, both a new world
And the old made explicit, understood
In the completion of its partial ecstasy,
The resolution of its partial horror.

“… not from the world of truthfulness but from the babble of literary gossip –
there is no truth in it at all.”
But they rejected his clarification preferring citation to creation.
It begins to snow: a fine dust swift becoming a white wet whirling shower
We lean into the squall shouting some but finally silenced by the storm
Until soaked and nearly numb you lead me into the Four Seasons

I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where.
And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time.
The inner freedom from the practical desire,
The release from action and suffering, release from the inner
And the outer compulsion, yet surrounded

Affirms their current contention oblivious to an alternate proposition
And while permutation is welcome perverse confiscation is not.
Did you read Philip Roth’s open letter to Wikipedia I ask
(You were out of town) He wanted to correct an entry claiming
For a story he had authored a context which he explained, emerged

Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.

Happily expanding on how and why gently you bring us back to me
Asking how it is I see and can say what others do not
For regardless of your form or function most find whatever

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,

Shifting the subject to your art I say what I see
                           Exactly
                           You agree

In light upon the figured leaf
And hear upon the sodden floor
Below, the boarhound and the boar
Pursue their pattern as before
But reconciled among the stars.

Our talk as empty as the tree
Though there is I suppose opportunity
You ask about me but I am not
Ready to say may not even know
Where I am today

The dance along the artery
The circulation of the lymph
Are figured in the drift of stars
Ascend to summer in the tree
We move above the moving tree

Of an abundant season shared
Not so long ago.
You are troubled I am tired
It is bone-chilling cold
Daffodils bend in obeisance

II

Garlic and sapphires in the mud
Clot the bedded axle-tree.
The thrilling wire in the blood
Sings below inveterate scars
Appeasing long forgotten wars.

We meet at our tree
On the highest hill
(But far below the citadels)
Empty on these first days of spring
Yet a token still

Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.

Set silent subtle: as a rhizome
Whatever your etymology of being
The derivations are deeply rooted
Exotic cognates strange semantics
Inviting others – me – to a new vocabulary.

Then a cloud passed, and the pool was empty.
Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children,
Hidden excitedly, containing laughter.

Original insights incisive attack and my favorite:
Humility asserting power.
Recumbent grounded utterly calm

Dry the pool, dry concrete, brown edged,
And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight,
And the lotos rose, quietly, quietly,
The surface glittered out of heart of light,
And they were behind us, reflected in the pool.

The acclaim for you (or their claims on you)
Your flashmobs delight disgust disquiet
Triumphant touts the Times
Empty provocation proclaims the Post
Radical exhilarating an unmitigated disaster

So we moved, and they, in a formal pattern, 
Along the empty alley, into the box circle, 
To look down into the drained pool.

Asking where you are staying
What you are saying what it might mean
I share their enthusiasm but resent

And the unseen eyebeam crossed, for the roses
Had the look of flowers that are looked at.
There they were as our guests, accepted and accepting.

Your return to the city was sudden
Entirely unexpected and not just by me
Seems everyone is tweeting texting talking

There they were, dignified, invisible,
Moving without pressure, over the dead leaves,
In the autumn heat, through the vibrant air,
And the bird called, in response to
The unheard music hidden in the shrubbery,

Or a ticket to transcendence
Typically it begins in consternation
My expectation imposed on you
Yours on me quite innocently
When you ask why I hear who

Quick, said the bird, find them, find them,
Round the corner. Through the first gate,
Into our first world, shall we follow
The deception of the thrush? Into our first world.

What is your passion
Does it derive from pei pati passio
Or powerful sexual attraction
Is suffering synonymous with desire

                                    But to what purpose
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves
I do not know.
                                    Other echoes
Inhabit the garden. Shall we follow?

                                    Yet there is also
"Every body persists in its state of being at rest
or of moving..."
                                    Which is the more replete
State of being (statu suo)
I do not know.

Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.

Our reality is movement measured
Bending squeezing our paths together
Accelerated for intentional collision
To discern if explosive freedom
Interacts and decays in all the expected ways.

What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.

Knowing has become predicting
The when where how of
Motion (motus motare movir movere)
As in kama-muta: moved by love
Or mivati, when we push away

Pesah

ἐὰν μὴ ἔλπηται ἀνέλπιστον οὐκ ἐξευρήσει...

“If you do not expect the unexpected, you will not find it…” 

                                                                   Heraclitus

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.

Patterns perceived and repeated
Frame our expectations
Spawning hypotheses and proofs
Predictions independently confirmed
Become our scientific truths.

For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

Tempt us
Not
And lead us

To turn, turn
In dark and in light
Till by turning, turning
We hold less tight

Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow

              For Thine is the Kingdom

Between steep stony cliffs
and tumbling stream
Between landslide
and occasional flood
Between this moment
and our next
There is a fertile fold

            yea, the work of our hands establish thou it.

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow

                      Life is very long

Between her expressive life
and extended death
Between her songs
and living too long
There is a fertile fold

                     and establish thou the work of our hands upon us;

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow

                   For Thine is the Kingdom

Between the idea of my mother
and her reality
Between my memory
and the actuality
There is a fertile fold

                  And let the beauty of the Lord our God be upon us:

V.

Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o’clock in the morning.

Ring-a-round the seasons
A pocket full of reasons
Ashes! Ashes!
We all fall down

Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death’s twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.

Friends walking
Dancing hands talking
Bright May day
Action, reaction
Momentum's sudden shift
Chrysalis cracked between
Life and death: she went left.

In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river

She claimed me with tongue and touch
Going where I had not gone
Showing how ignoring why
Then left me there in worried wonder

IV.

The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

She induced more than seduced
Starting where I stopped
Knowing what she wanted
While I wondered waited
Worried and asked why

Is it like this
In death’s other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.

"For every action there is always
An equal and opposite reaction: Or
The forces of two bodies on each other
Are always equal and directed
In opposite directions."
Coming to the crossroad
Of life and death, look each way.

III.

This is the dead land
This is cactus land 
Here the stone images 
Are raised, here they receive 
The supplication of a dead man’s hand 
Under the twinkle of a fading star.

Propelled from the car
Ascending then descending
In a graceful arc onto the
Hard, hot pavement
The body bounced
Just as Newton had pronounced.

In a field
Behaving as the wind behaves
No nearer—

Not that final meeting
In the twilight kingdom

Her left hand in mine I whisper in Laura's ear
"Jesus is waiting, arms open wide
He loves you and wants you, go to his side."

That evening catching a last breath
Her body left to meet her mind.

Let me be no nearer
In death’s dream kingdom
Let me also wear
Such deliberate disguises
Rat’s coat, crowskin, crossed staves

Both coasts, Grand Canyon
Even once to England
Now she seems divided
Stay or go?
One part here, another departed

There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind’s singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.

Her mind had left her body behind
Wherever she thought she was
Was not where I thought I saw her
Unless her space extends beyond this place
She had always loved to travel

II

Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death’s dream kingdom
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column

She seemed to be sleeping
Breathing softly out and in
But was non-responsive
Unconscious the nurses said
See: Sci- (stem of scīre: to know)

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom
Remember us—if at all—not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.

In these last days
Dignity draining
From the hole in his head
Delirious and nearly blind
Right hand lame, left hand weak
Fred helped to tuck the sheets

As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar 

Shape without form, shade without colour, 
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

He had lived, he often said
More than threescore years and ten
In wrath and gladness, as written

And establish thou the work of our hands upon us
Yea, the work of our hands establish thou it

Headpiece filled with straw. Alas! 
Our dried voices, when 
We whisper together 
Are quiet and meaningless

The first to go was grandpa Fred
Killed by a tumor in that head
Really by the surgery instead
Mortality's first claim on those I love

The Hallow Men

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together 

He tried to help make the bed
Bandages covering half his head
Three days later he was dead

Our peace in His will
And even among these rocks
Sister, mother
And spirit of the river, spirit of the sea,
Suffer me not to be separated

And let my cry come unto Thee.

Past present and prospect coagulating
Encrusting old wounds with a hard scabrous edge
Salved and softened if our convivium can continue
Opening realities beyond prior prohibitions
Conversing consoling conciliating

Consider please my questions

Blessèd sister, holy mother, spirit of the fountain, spirit of
      the garden,
Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still
Even among these rocks,

In conversation the ashes of my experience are mixed with yours
Dust with dust woody remnants bits of pumice desiccated seeds
Turned together transformed from yours and mine to ours
Then mulched with moist bits of meaty and leafy now
To which the ashes cling

This is the time of tension between dying and birth
The place of solitude where three dreams cross
Between blue rocks
But when the voices shaken from the yew-tree drift away
Let the other yew be shaken and reply.

Conversation begins with an authentic question
Born of unknowing vulnerability and yearning
Courageously expressing
Absence separation loss betrayal need
Confusion with discomforting connections

And the lost heart stiffens and rejoices
In the lost lilac and the lost sea voices
And the weak spirit quickens to rebel
For the bent golden-rod and the lost sea smell
Quickens to recover
The cry of quail and the whirling plover
And the blind eye creates 
The empty forms between the ivory gates 
And smell renews the salt savour of the sandy earth

"All questioning and
Desire to know
Presupposes a knowledge that
One does not know;
So much so, indeed, that
A particular lack of knowledge
Leads to a particular question"
Particularity impregnating possibility
Not just unknown but previously inconceivable.

Wavering between the profit and the loss
In this brief transit where the dreams cross
The dreamcrossed twilight between birth and dying
(Bless me father) though I do not wish to wish these things
From the wide window towards the granite shore
The white sails still fly seaward, seaward flying
Unbroken wings

I prefer questions to answers
Unfolding unknowns to well known solutions
Transitions twilight and early dawn
To darkest night or brightest noon
In expressing a relationship between x and a
Finding the root is most of the fun
Free variables more playful than bound

VI

Although I do not hope to turn again
Although I do not hope
Although I do not hope to turn

Although I am stubborn
Although I am proud
Although I am separate

El Foolk (The Ark) by Marguerite McBey

In the last desert before the last blue rocks
The desert in the garden the garden in the desert
Of drouth, spitting from the mouth the withered apple-seed.

     O my people.

Sharing a bare wagon-lit with four strangers
Who unwrapped fragrant lamb and spicy hummus
     while we chewed our day-old bread
Who as darkness descended before Seville
      knelt to pray beginning, Allahu Akbar

Resuming a long conversation.

Will the veiled sister between the slender
Yew trees pray for those who offend her
And are terrified and cannot surrender
And affirm before the world and deny between the rocks

Christmas morning we drank champagne
Beside the fireplace at el Foolk
Then embarked on the blue and white ferry to Spain
Connecting to Paris on the night train

Will the veiled sister pray for
Those who walk in darkness, who chose thee and oppose thee,
Those who are torn on the horn between season and season, 
      time and time, between
Hour and hour, word and word, power and power, those
     who wait
In darkness? Will the veiled sister pray
For children at the gate
Who will not go away and cannot pray:
Pray for those who chose and oppose

     O my people, what have I done unto thee.

All of which and more I know now, but then
It was well beyond my knowing how
The Saharan sun could be so wide
Mornings so luminous at el Minzah
Afternoon shadows so cold on the Rue de la Berte
Or how lavender can explode above the straits of Hercules
Even on the next day, even on Christmas Day
The gift of being born was elusive, seeing hearing tasting touching
     knowing the scent of sweat, sex, and sea at Point Sur...
Meeting Paul Bowles I had not yet conceived the question.

     Still, might have been an interesting conversation.

Tangier 1961, left to right: Peter Orlovsky, W.S. Burroughs,Allen Ginsberg, Alan Ansen, Gregory Corso, Ian Sommerville, and Paul Bowles (seated on ground)

Where shall the word be found, where will the word
Resound? Not here, there is not enough silence
Not on the sea or on the islands, not
On the mainland, in the desert or the rain land,
For those who walk in darkness
Both in the day time and in the night time
The right time and the right place are not here
No place of grace for those who avoid the face
No time to rejoice for those who walk among noise and
     deny the voice

He had dined with Gertrude Stein
Composed with Copeland
Merce danced Bernstein directed his zarzuela
Hearing light seeing dark comfortable with quiet
A dream took him to Tangier
Tennessee Williams traveled with him
Trading aural contexts for intimate interiors
Bill Burroughs came to lunch and others as well
"Angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection"
Which he coolly dissected with a sharp surrealist scalpel.