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.

The world and for the world;
And the light shone in darkness and
Against the Word the unstilled world still whirled
About the centre of the silent Word.

       O my people, what have I done unto thee.

Norman Mailer maintained:
"Paul Bowles opened the world of Hip.
He let in the murder, the drugs, the incest,
The call of the orgy, the end of civilization."

      Might have been an interesting conversation.

V.

If the lost word is lost, if the spent word is spent
If the unheard, unspoken
Word is unspoken, unheard;
Still is the unspoken word, the Word unheard,
The Word without a word, the Word within

I shook his hand saying something inane
Another overtalking our ritual exchange
One Christmas eve in Tangier I met Paul Bowles
Knowing just enough to know I did not know enough
Fearing I could  know too much.

But the fountain sprang up and the bird sang down
Redeem the time, redeem the dream
The token of the word unheard, unspoken

Till the wind shake a thousand whispers from the yew

And after this our exile

And as I enter the naked woman eyes me sharply
Our roles set, she resumes reading
Posing questions of delicate yet deadly violence

Resisting sensual or spiritual answers but selling well enough

It begins to rain.

(Poetry from the Financial Times:

"Painted bronze sculptures of a female figure mounted on plinth...
while a live, nude model wanders in their midst.")

The silent sister veiled in white and blue
Between the yews, behind the garden god, 
Whose flute is breathless, bent her head and signed but spoke 
    no word

I have returned with those I love
To share the subtle sense of subsidence
Spiritual sensual commercial consummation
    succumbing to sentiment and cynicism.

White light folded, sheathing about her, folded.
The new years walk, restoring
Through a bright cloud of tears, the years, restoring
With a new verse the ancient rhyme. Redeem
The time. Redeem
The unread vision in the higher dream
While jewelled unicorns draw by the gilded hearse.

Warm bright light cool clear nights
This bienelle's dialectic of ethics or aesthetics (un)done
One creamy risotto one dry prosecco consumed
Considering how the canal's kaleidoscopic confusion
Concludes abruptly at a purposeful pediment
Standing slightly apart at della Pieta
As a season of Vivaldi closes with Piazzolla.       (libertango)

Here are the years that walk between, bearing
Away the fiddles and the flutes, restoring 
One who moves in the time between sleep and waking, wearing

Perpetually liminal
No clear beginning, no certain end
Impermanence preserved imperfection perfected

Made cool the dry rock and made firm the sand
In blue of larkspur, blue of Mary’s colour,
Sovegna vos

Once upon a time I arrived alone, reading of Tadzio and Aschenbach
Sleeping in their Hotel des Bains walking their Lido and watching
Apollo Dionysus Palladio Ruskin tethered in trembling tension

IV

Who walked between the violet and the violet 
Who walked between 
The various ranks of varied green 
Going in white and blue, in Mary’s colour, 
Talking of trivial things
In ignorance and knowledge of eternal dolour 
Who moved among the others as they walked, 
Who then made strong the fountains and made fresh the springs

We walked between past and present
Aqueous earth and sapphire sky
Memory made of mud and masonry
Reflecting peach to rose to red
Talking of tomorrow
As our failures and future
Fall into turquoise waters
Slowly dissolving one reality to reveal another

Blown hair is sweet, brown hair over the mouth blown,
Lilac and brown hair;
Distraction, music of the flute, stops and steps of the mind over the third stair,
Fading, fading; strength beyond hope and despair
Climbing the third stair.

Lord, I am not worthy
Lord, I am not worthy
                             but speak the word only.

Ten thousand damp hairline cracks
Releasing the avatamsaka sutra
Flowing from height to depth
Merging in one cascading causation
Dainichi deusu deus dharmakaya
Descending in power and might

"Delicate line between heaven and earth...
          To end is to start
          To yield is to know."

At the first turning of the third stair
Was a slotted window bellied like the figs’s fruit
And beyond the hawthorn blossom and a pasture scene
The broadbacked figure drest in blue and green
Enchanted the maytime with an antique flute.

Nantai-san (男体山) recumbent in pleasure
Caresses the clouds surrounding his summit
Autumn morning's mist enveloping all
Without rising he extends
Perpetually phreatic dissolving differences.

At the second turning of the second stair
I left them twisting, turning below;
There were no more faces and the stair was dark,
Damp, jaggèd, like an old man’s mouth drivelling, beyond repair,
Or the toothed gullet of an agèd shark.

Fujisan (富士山) rises above suburban sprawl
Seeming entirely serene in a snowy white sugegasa
But he is token and portent of power pouring over us
Two flanks grinding thrusting surging releasing life and death
"Everything I touch with tenderness, alas, pricks like a bramble."

III

At the first turning of the second stair
I turned and saw below
The same shape twisted on the banister
Under the vapour in the fetid air
Struggling with the devil of the stairs who wears
The deceitful face of hope and of despair.

Genjiyama (源氏山) lounges behind the Buddha
Where windows open to the Daibutsu's soul
Which seems to be hollow
While within the lush canopy of this steamy hill
We find a sandy place of sun and shadow
Where her moist mound swallows every seed.

Under a juniper-tree the bones sang, scattered and shining
We are glad to be scattered, we did little good to each other, 
Under a tree in the cool of day, with the blessing of sand, 
Forgetting themselves and each other, united 
In the quiet of the desert. This is the land which ye
Shall divide by lot. And neither division nor unity 
Matters. This is the land. We have our inheritance.

Out in the woods follow the stream that falls from the lake
Down to the marsh surrounded by hills where turtles
Sun on dry stalks of last season's tall grass
Beside the bleached white bones of a dozen cows
Claimed by mud while bellowing weakening wasting
Providing fox ravens beetles maggots a fine feast
And young boys swords from ribs and femurs as clubs

Terminate torment
Of love unsatisfied
The greater torment
Of love satisfied
End of the endless
Journey to no end 
Conclusion of all that
Is inconclusible 
Speech without word and 
Word of no speech 
Grace to the Mother 
For the Garden 
Where all love ends.

With malice toward none
and low prices for all
There is a tide
four-a-day, out and in
Boldness be my friend
a text please send
In the beginning
I played my cards tight
Neti neti
Neither wrong nor right
Death is not the worst
but then again
Il faut cultiver notre jardin

Lady of silences
Calm and distressed
Torn and most whole
Rose of memory
Rose of forgetfulness
Exhausted and life-giving
Worried reposeful
The single Rose
Is now the Garden
Where all loves end

We hold these truths
in sweaty palms
Dubium sapientiae initium
and its end
I sing myself
wanting you to applaud
To be or not
Mostly I merely nod
Thou shalt love
when the moon is bright

There is no life in them. As I am forgotten
And would be forgotten, so I would forget
Thus devoted, concentrated in purpose. And God said
Prophesy to the wind, to the wind only for only
The wind will listen. And the bones sang chirping
With the burden of the grasshopper, saying

Removing barriers reclaiming bedrock
Mountains blazing rivers unbending oceans upswelling
Opportunity opens to receive and ripen
Chromosomes of chaos exploding with possibility
If we can discern from within the cacophony
A persistent cadence of creeping coalescense

It is this which recovers
My guts the strings of my eyes and the indigestible portions
Which the leopards reject.The Lady is withdrawn
In a white gown, to contemplation, in a white gown. 
Let the whiteness of bones atone to forgetfulness.

Other days as hurricane or flood
Each occasions for recognizing reality
Which we generally reject, preferring
Prediction, control, and various shalt nots
To verdant emergent vivacious fecundity

Because of the goodness of this Lady
And because of her loveliness, and because
She honours the Virgin in meditation,
We shine with brightness. And I who am here dissembled
Proffer my deeds to oblivion, and my love
To the posterity of the desert and the fruit of the gourd.

I sweat and the whole earth with me
Our perspiration climbing into cool immensity
Where each minute molecule accumulates
Our aspirations concatenate in clouds
Gathering higher until too heavy our shared affluence
Is released as rain or ice or, tonight at this rotenburo, as snow.

II

Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper-tree
In the cool of the day, having fed to sateity
On my legs my heart my liver and that which had been contained
In the hollow round of my skull. And God said
Shall these bones live? shall these
Bones live? And that which had been contained
In the bones (which were already dry) said chirping:

Steam rising snow falling saki warming
Mountain's deep heat meets
Sky's crystal cold
Somewhere just about my nose
Two antinomies embracing
Each adding to each what neither could hold
Wide difference transcended, a synthesis unwound.