Slipping
By
A. S. Kline © 2008 All Rights Reserved
This work may be freely reproduced, stored, and transmitted, electronically or otherwise, for any non-commercial purpose.
Contents
One
Universe, Shining Empty Meaning
Energy,
Moment and the Individual
talk casually,
spirit is depth,
the body profound.
Five years love
to four days being,
all things charged,
the earth electric.
This species has
no destiny, accept it.
It’s vanishing is
of no account,
but in ourselves
we surround
the whole universe
of stars and silence.
Talk softly,
talk sweetly.
Love is depth,
empathy profound.
clinging mist in the grass,
somewhere there I saw a creature passing.
Flicker of brown or grey, a life,
a meaning, deep as ours, deep,
valid as our seeming.
Respect the creatures,
they too feel, always their depth
is our depth, their past is ours.
And learn a little about consciousness,
what feels is aware,
mind is projection,
of self onto all things.
the edge of Scorpio rise, one jewelled claw,
the head a ruby, dark clouds on a dark horizon,
slow breeze from the bay, wild memories,
the heart’s shamed bitterness, stones and sand.
Memory not of night, nor summer, nor the sea.
Your face pale in silence, prelude to forgetting,
mask of the fine unreason that lies in relationship.
Love’s not desire, desire’s not love, and the blessed
co-existence of the two a gift, of light, of mind.
Waking at night to the slow milk of the waves,
the radiance of shells, the dark of driftwood,
hearts gripped by tense fingers, ice-cold, burning.
Say it, say what we were, an immense fire,
that exhausts this life, this world, this being.
We have to speak more quietly, we need,
this species, to say less, to talk more gently,
to learn the universe, you and I, far beyond
the commerce and the wars, blent, curled alight,
like these bright twigs now, curling in the fire.
all those fossils buried deeper
in space-time, hard to focus,
on our littleness, on theirs.
Your eyes far-off, buried gleaming
under closed lids, shine of all the eyes
of all the centuries, in another time
the other space, that of mind.
How far back under the galaxies
we go, feet mark time in the sand,
the footprints here, like gull trails,
through ash and lava, no people.
In some poems the reality hardens,
language sets down a spine of stone
in ridge of rock under miles of ocean,
to be raised one day, angled to the eye.
How small, like leaves pressed together.
Your warmth is the fire from all those lives,
heat against the dark, against the cold, what
un-mans, our transience, our amazing beauty.
that absence of the spirit, mute mind,
bricking its own walls in, this is not
this is not what we are, this ‘civilisation’.
You know it. Under every face,
in every eye, the burning, the spirit.
Don’t be fooled by all that reason,
whereby we tell ourselves the mad is sane,
the crazed is sensible, that dark is light.
You are not you, but always something other,
history’s a flame, no more than that,
a shower of incandescent sparks across the night.
Don’t be less than you can imagine,
or believe in more than mind’s transience,
spirit is not owned by religion, nor does
the universe arise from what we think.
We have not even begun to understand,
inventing gods and demons, not ourselves.
Free yourself with the creatures, the sacred,
the pain we cause defines what we are,
and what we create, our aspiration,
made of the dust of every star, we form
the temple, life is meaning, beauty, truth
and love, are the mind’s gift to the dark.
so read, write,
what eases spirit,
and not what
disturbs –
the heart disturbs,
be quiet,
put your hands
in the earth.
Feel the soil cling,
remember what we are,
the darkest creatures,
among the claws, scales,
feathers of the light,
remember who was first
who will be last,
feel the black soil
sing.
like the oak-tree’s coils of steel in moonlight,
the mass of plants, leaves dark on the field,
and dark-light crying of the water-birds,
across the lake’s metallic, rippled, silence.
Things learned, the things now forgotten,
things gone, things found, things known,
the savage endless mysteries of the spirit
what can be felt, what never can be told,
the universe beyond, and a stiller music.
In evening depth, here, all along the wood,
there’s one clear break of sky, no sign of rain,
owl and fox calls, light down through branches,
pale stains of curious silver, patches, iced
no fine detail, and each shadow a surprise.
And Mars, down-wind between rags of cloud,
bright, russet, ochre, fixed and flowing fragment,
over intricate earth, pure complex piece there
of all the net, organic glittering, the mass,
all the order, all the chaos, this life, this being.
walking with shadows, beating bounds,
placing one word on another, until
the opaque mind grows luminous.
Dipping the dark heart in the pool,
and writing in fire on the wall,
tracing it in gold on the screen,
where the silent figures run and bow,
Conjuring, spirit like a wand to draw
meaning, always, from the fading edge,
out of the other, sweeter language,
forging the lovely bitterness of this.
grass.
On an edge of rock
fluttering with the birds.
This pine is red, this
is black,
the breeze sings
in a jar of glass.
You think you know
who you are,
the beauty of mind,
can’t be sure,
When the earth shakes,
this valley shakes,
these cliffs, the body,
all our law.
Black winds and hills,
can’t see the stars,
all the heart though
is light,
burns like a furnace,
no more ties,
no more nets,
the brilliant eye.
Cross the light-years, find it there.
On the solid circuit of new planets
Behold, an age-old recognition.
Beauty of light in its given form,
not what we could make, as boughs’
complexity, the small twigs interlaced,
the bright, the overlapping levels,
or a galaxy, for some human ship
sliding sail-less through the silence.
Cross the light-years and find it there,
Han Shan’s mountain in the mind.
that tiny bird a wren,
the hedge sparrows dark
new moon, white sickle
cuts down the grass
with silver cry.
no mind, stop the
thinking,
a process, not a process,
no matter, for a moment
(eternal light) be free.
pigeon on roof, tree, sky,
long glide down through
evening blue,
all the forms burning
in your eye.
salt in the eyes, and ice on the skin.
We can dive down through this planet,
come out transparent on the other side.
Pools, caves, cliffs, sand, the mica glints
seal rocks, stone, a hand-turned shell,
turns to bone and light, This blue planet
in us orbits chaos, twines through black.
What’s solid isn’t solid, flickers though,
oh, something there, can’t show you what.
Is knowing what it does good enough,
which is the gist of all we see and do?
Oceans under everything, bonfires too
of an electric gleaming, long ridges
of unseen higher mountains, in the night,
sometimes words glow, hosts of meaning.
The waves are good, the shore is sweet,
the sand-wet thighs.
then empty the mind,
then fill it with emptiness,
seeing world.
The shining Now,
the roar of trees,
so much emptiness,
so much beauty.
So much detail,
and no meaning.
Earth, your starlight,
free of purpose.
All is energy,
energy’s tranquil,
energy’s emptiness
silent seeing.
Fill the mind,
empty the mind,
then fill it with emptiness,
seeing world.
rock, stream, tree,
the fire of dawn sun.
On foot, dark rock,
silence is the crystal.
Moving forever on hills
and mountains,
hearing the pine-trees sing
the worlds shiver
stars in a hermit’s eye.
Matter is the place,
no names, no forms,
one continuous being.
Sit, watch boundaries dissolve.
Hear the white roar of energy.
endless being, with no purpose,
meditate, awake, and laugh.
Swift, responsive, beyond truth,
mindless being, without ceasing,
through the void hands must pass.
Earth ephemeral, Earth the flower,
mind ethereal, late this hour,
white the dawn-wind lights the grass.
climb the mountain.
Spruce, larch, fir,
dark seas of pine,
that sigh, that roaring,
all the night-winds crying.
Going past history, past nations,
walking on the free trail,
black creek, white stone,
fall of icy water,
to the slopes of grass
and all seeds sighing.
Going past all our
assumptions,
recognise our freedom,
clear the mind.
Reject all this
denial of the spirit.
Past history, past nations,
past religion.
Nature does not serve human oppression,
All great gifts are born from empathy,
Love, compassion, beauty, emptiness.
Dream, dreamer, dream the transient world.
No one said we have to live like this.
Forget history, learn the new freedom,
truth, joy, kindness, emptiness.
this moon-slope,
shining silence,
the field of grass.
Stone, stream, tree,
the far star, bold
blue, vibrant,
the mind singing
through the air.
Let the Universe burn,
the great Wheel turn,
intention-less through
meaningless time.
Here earth-second
is eternity,
here infinity goes by,
stop thinking, watch
the dancers of the world.
I heard the stars sighing, I heard
the silence roaring, lion’s call of being,
Shining Now, all energy, all energy
is calm, that empty flow,
all tranquil Earth, ephemeral flower.
I felt far-off your moonlit blood moving,
so deep you became our greater self,
the mirror still, the star the source.
Oh, loose responsive empty night,
Oh, love’s cool breast.
watch the leaf tick, see its random movement,
and all we are could vanish if not for love.
Nature, non-human, but we were here before,
our species made this trail, watch the leaf tick,
small creek, shallow water, all gone but for love.
Children are forced to live in adult worlds,
but beyond the words, with charity, watch
the universe, its random movements, and we
all emptiness if not for love.
no direction,
but in the end
to run for the stars,
the space-time road.
Civilisation shuddering,
and no meaning,
but in the end
to go past wars and nations,
the sweet-love road.
East and West dying,
and imprisoned,
but in the end,
to see beauty flowering
the free-spirit road.
so still we can’t see the burning,
your heart burning in my heart,
your m