A S Kline © 2004 All Rights Reserved
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Contents
Goldcrest, startling flame
swings on the fir-branch,
articulated in the green,
a Taoist on his mountain.
With so many flaws,
yet Nature’s sieve’s
fine chance, a broken symmetry,
and a few billion years.
Delights, the Tao, in randomness.
Deep, genetic time,
this clock beating in us,
counts the pulse of now,
with our eternal atoms,
this sweet, clear flow.
Light thrown down galaxies,
great, and undirected
intention-less fountain
born of itself, is Tao,
fir, goldcrest, mind.
half way down the mountain,
cut spruce and birch,
all this touching, fingering
earth, this restless turning
of hands and eyes.
Let nature make of it
what she will, those birds,
plants, creatures,
the greater species.
You think we can be here,
purer, closer to the guiltless,
still employ our
chemicals, machines?
Desire’s delusion.
Our trucks roll through,
our buildings take the space,
fox gazes on, heron stirs and flies.
You say we have the right to be here,
sinking fence-posts,
cultivating ground,
the ancient garden’s gardeners,
all over singing Earth.
And disused gravel pits return,
and quarries, all return,
eventually, to nature
if they are left (whole sides
of mountains, and another beauty.)
The great and small
webs of colour we disguise
ourselves with don’t hide.
Feelings’ tide picks us up
and throws us on the sand,
to scrabble in the shells,
weed, polyps, bird-prints, stones.
We’re never dressed: we’re naked.
All our confident voices
lift to the gulf of silence,
the great swirl, mindless universe,
without desires, intentions,
pure, unfolding, like the fall
of water from a cliff, drops
for ten billion years, the way
the Earth made seas inland,
and our species saw.
Being naked we walk fearfully
through gates and doors, stop
truly naked ones from going by.
Civilisation wears clothes,
for body, heart or mind.
It’s hard for even the naked to be naked,
with all their mind still dressed.
When the wild passes through
we know, feel, remember.
my mind examines
the fragile flesh, the skeins,
sensitive, yielding being,
the carapace, the imago,
and puzzles at inwardness.
World inside the mind
which is inside the world:
there must be some geometry
that hold us in its equations
and maps our maddened contours,
geometry of consciousness.
Wind goes through the branches,
birch twigs, silhouetted,
blown round a winter sky,
mind likewise moving,
the glove creates the hand
its shape fits sweetly.
Roof open to the air,
door in a standing wall,
the rest is fallen, un-built,
what’s left is a lone wall,
with a doorway, which way is in,
which side is out, this empty house.
they should all be filled
with creatures, wings, cries,
a beauty formed here now
by their cascade,
chatter, flicker shine
of feathers, feelers, fins,
articulate strangeness.
Consider the unfamiliar,
the what no mind
could have created,
the sweet given,
outflow, richness.
Fear the noiseless,
absence,
the speechless, fear negation.
All the empty fields,
the furrowed industry,
lost wealth and vast production.
Fear the creatures’ silence,
air should be filled
with wings, calls, cries,
fluttering, crashing, sighing,
no silent landscapes.
poetry is not the self,
but from beyond the self
in which the thing expressed
that mind may feel,
we cleanse of self,
and wash our faces
in the running stream.
Self’s memory is the lie,
the heart’s construct
of pain, its opposite,
or both combined
or featureless nothing,
but poetry is not self, no
beyond the self
those stars that form
the constellation, Lyra, are not
clustered, but made pattern
of separated distance,
converging in the eye.
Poetry’s constellation
is all the light, those stars
from differing spaces
not the self.
sidle along centuries,
slabbed light,
over earth’s skin
where water oozing
slow off the mountain
under all green mosses,
soaks ferns and glacial litter,
fills stone cleft below.
Pause to breathe
on last granite flight,
and from the eye’s corner
deer in the wood,
stream-straddled
bowed there drinking,
startles, breaks through
under-branches
quiver, still.
Miraculous heart
that suddenly sings
nature, touches
world, forgets
this life
in loving it.
into the emptiness
becoming creature
of the first awareness,
You are so bound up
with the human,
our speech,
is not being
that's all the boundless
unfettered gleaming
returned from things,
and process stirring.
Miracle, this
reality,
always strange
mysterious given.
Throwing self away,
you think self achieves,
but life is this,
the greater inattention.
of that place
you bound up,
as though
with its deep being,
its dimension.
Slow, grey-green waters,
slow dark barges,
stone flags
and passageways
where minds meet,
bodyways,
Plunge my hands
in time
the liquid silver,
see thumbs and knuckles,
raise them drowned
with you, with hours.
City your true place
lifted out of space,
some other planet,
and no mind there
to bar communion
of touching forms.
and waiting,
those more spaces
in landscape’s manifold
than I bring you
in our communion.
Light runs like water
out of galaxies,
the end-on rims seen
from this distant star,
and blue lost planet,
floating the bright sea.
This is one species
with one destiny
and little time to live
as we should live,
universal travellers
truth voyagers.
Mind is always
too deep and waiting,
silent in the larger solitude,
in nature’s empty house
but sweetly made
and given to the Mind.
all moves are forward,
time the now-vibration,
scalar count, the number
from event, and to event.
The not-yet and the once
are the same distance
away from us in feeling:
absence unlike presence,
has no scale.
And time is not the river,
the world’s what flows
creating time, this pattern
of event, done, now, next,
an absence, then a presence.
Time change, and litter
of change, never a vector,
and creatures too project
themselves through past
and future,
in imagination. Deepest
construct, time,
mind’s space it draws
with nows
inside eternity.
Lovely sensory description,
feel of people, action, texture,
colour through observant eyes.
There’s the poetry of things.
There is the poetry of self,
psyche sliding against life,
the warring concrete words
the wards of solid memory,
the titanic poems of self.
There are the poems of others,
watching, finding others,
loving, aiding, being, calling
others in sheer voices,
selfless simple poems of others.
There’s a poetry of feeling,
the rage at being here, being this,
the ecstasies of yielding, in
apocalyptic transformation,
the roaring poems of feeling.
And there are poems of mind,
slight and enduring,
watchers of night and trees,
deceptively speaking
voices with no self, outside others,
elusive poems of mind.
these cliffs clothed it,
this grass, this stone,
this stream,
clothed it from the start,
a hundred million years
of being non-being,
falling through the sieve
of elemental adaptation.
The hill-fort later here
is melted down,
its native rock-face
split by shining roots,
bright trunks
with glittering crowns,
three clear rowans,
mother, daughter, child,
the almost human.
And I, the passer-by,
this year, one year,
eating the blue berries
between spine and turf,
stone-thrower among ferns.
I climbed to this place,
but cannot hold it.
Trees hold this place
and streams and stone.
make splintered hedges, mound
the dark fields, flow through
gateways, ditches: change bows
in beauty, bounds spill here
of this, and not our, time.
Flute furrows, purple-soiled canals,
shape-shattered, mauve wind-curls,
and the stressed sky rides
through blue liquidity, grey sweetness,
heart hum almost: straining
life strained bound in form.
White bulks, their hummocked heads
cascade mephitic queerness,
an opaque sleep, life smouldering
moon creatures, great grazing
globes of chalk, thorned clouds
pinned, pegged down the field rows.
All this a lifted beauty, revelation
long neglected, inward awed mind
gazing through a feared wild magic,
forced, panged, but not yet maimed
by all disorder, pain, or transience
of entropy’s gorged passage.
subtle order, how such landscape
grows in eye, clouds, mind,
the inner stress’s interplay,
sculpting energies of surface,
and random world makes
purpose, life of movement,
becomes wave’s fall, bud coil,
beaked flower, charged blue.
Fear then the intention-less
bleak, bare, driven dark it
sometimes falls to, pulsing, shows?
Empty of desire, not void
of beauty, order, rank,
that purposeless made this,
the wildly tender Earth,
the carved, rolled, scored,
cleared, fresh, fine, fretted earth.
Each space, each flow,
each distance, mind and shape
though we un-entering see
gleams with our likeness,
is ours, our empathy re-gathered,
beams from wild lightning’s
strange ringing. This planet rolls
a ball of light, inflamed.
each blue night
of moon-wet leaf-web,
each rain-filled constellation,
all these mad mouths
of echoing, falling time.
until all Earth’s stressed being
strains to the gates of sighing,
leaps the mind, and whirling
breaks on the land.
Original in newness,
folded, tender, delicate
with ancient form, flight, curve
piercing bright strangeness,
so easy to the eye,
all without purpose
all withdrawn, in-curled,
to a deep remoteness,
what fuels our shudder of unknowing,
our alien being here.
We strange inside this strangeness,
sweep of mind without meaning cry,
call, quiver of light off furthest shoulder
of land, dark dense of stone opaqueness,
root’s yield-less grasp, wave’s thunder
through the fierce throat of the bay,
night-glow off distant water,
our space that is not place,
but charged, but starred.
Shadows through rain and light,
angled by roof and door,
summit-dark, winged,
a smoke from the night-stars,
Draco, and Cassiopeia,
boom, burst in the sea’s jaws
the roaring of leaves, the hill’s voice,
wild aspen, birch and poplar,
brushes waved at darkness,
skirting the edge of white.
Deep there, and with no speech,
no tongue, singing world.
You, alone, you touch it,
close with its communion,
what energy does in silence,
time-locked, mindless moving,
and cleanses, shames, appals,
depth outside all knowing,
and an inner shaping,
that strain, that churning, we too feel.
draw plough
the deep soil
cultivate an
ancient sweetness,
in long tradition,
carve the earth’s skin
blade scoured silver,
furrow, fill, and rear,
enrich.
Each touch
so light as meadow-down,
so slight as leaf still
mars the given, burns,
beats, rakes, and axes through
the un-spared beauty,
destroys its selves, its beings,
the fine, non-human
purely thrown, and
gathered again.
Let nature, let alone,
swallow, take itself,
breed, bear, flow,
a new
fling, from
an eternal fire.
everyone’s memory
is anyone’s memory,
language horizon,
I he am you.
In the mind
everyone’s memory
is its own memory
the self its limit,
silence too.
What communicates
itself, is species.
What keeps the inner core,
is lonely life.
and the mind-ness
of this world.
Whose clouds spin down
the sky,
whose ash-leaves rise,
The voice, the face,
the eyes
of what is loved.
Life’s buried beauty
all chance play
intention-less,
arousing form, and force,
the inwardness
rare of what’s outside,
never corrupted by
our varied purpose
though we destroy
what burns in splendour
so and grieve the mind
locked into silence.
whole mountains down,
the green chain gone
between the earth and cloud.
Buzzard in an empty sky
passes by.
Fog clearing pine-trees
but remember now
the mind like mist,
like dust, blown high.
Fox on an empty trail,
slips by.
Learn your own language,
your own thoughts, forget
complexities that corrupt:
the simple world’s in-wound,
it stays intention-less,
keep pure the eye.
Trees and hills go down,
whole seas run dry,
the whole mind lost
between the earth and cloud.
Hawk in an empty sky,
flickering by.
And owl cries
the frozen earth
slides into silence.
Human, we destroy:
no one is free
of guilt
no mind denies.
Dog barks in the dark,
territorial cries,
an instancy we cannot match
owl-call, dog-cry.
We know too much,
allegories of paradise,
its dark degree
of resonance, and why
mind with the owl cries,
beats on the bell of light,
goes on. We would be free,
and slowly recognise.
and out of the silence,
smaller than Capella,
or the furthest boulder,
out of the grass and stone,
voice going by like dust,
half-heard, half human.
A clear call, voice, of woman,
a child, a girl, or the voice
of creatures, tiny as a flower,
tormentil or bird’s foot trefoil,
fragile as a winter leaf-veil,
a floating pebble, a sand-grain,
or a tree, there, on the mountain.
That voice, always, powdery
shrunken, like a withered stem,
pale as a soft seed-head blowing,
elusive sunlight, hear, hear it?
Listen to the thousand years now
of this grassland breathing
these woods talking, sighing,
with a voice, light spine of thistle,
pure as floating cloud.
tracing the mind,
we are tracing time,
so, counting the species,
describing, describe
what’s there in the silence
after the wake has gone,
it’s here, it’s given,
all from nothing,
and randomness
deep at its core.
When will we humans
forget superstition,
follow the true, and live
in the natural world
for its own sweet sake?
When will beauty take root
in the eye of the watcher,
and speech in the mouth
say the mind’s dancing?
Mapping it all, describing it here,
may carry us clear.
there’s no way there,
into unknowing or the land,
gentle or innocent,
no trail back.
I climb these quiet slopes,
walk down the woodland track,
but I am still human,
there’s no route back.
Fall on the mountain side,
far pyramid of light,
split by the boulders,
falls to the green pool,
I see in the mind’s eye
stream-bed and valley
thirty years gone,
hearing its roaring,
scenting its grass and trees.
Such delight there in nature,
but don’t ever believe
the voices that say,
go back there, go back.
There is no way back.
Flicker of ions now,
lens of the universe,
knowledge and mind:
there’s no route back.
each, individual.
Watch how as selves they spill,
plumes, waves, seeds,
all these things.
We attend to them,
and they attend us:
gaze at the coiled branch
that reflects
our gazing.
What we enter into
enters into us,
becomes itself,
becomes the individual
world in focus.
From the eyes’ movement
from the casual scan,
one thing in silence
enters deep awareness,
and becomes.
All as selves they come,
the living, these things,
each one a landscape, a world-flow,
every one contoured, enfolded,
fulfilling reality.
thistles and grasses,
deep juice of light.
Earth is dark with
the insect flicker
millions under our feet.
Showers of seed-hairs,
cover the low breeze,
then hedge-tangle, heath,
the talons of fruit, the dark
corners of herb, the galleries
leafed and thorned.
Knowledge is sky,
is sight, the deep folds
shedding into the blue,
bright hairs from barbed stalks,
tufts, whorls, tresses, rays, air
filling slow with the shredding hordes.
summer plenty is summer dust
clothing a landscape, bodies and faces,
is all time’s renewal,
of mind and being
in the heart of nature’s
unseeing river,
flow now of flame.
how we live,
confessional words,
the heart-intense speculation,
the flow of time
and passes the time
things, things.
But mind intense
goes out beyond this
through summer trees
along horizons,
over carved hills, beyond
the silence
beyond things.
From there
what’s worth re-calling?
Only to stay there’s best,
be unknown,
still the words
that here
keep on falling.
Where thought stops,
there are things.
fixed on minute life,
the things themselves
the deeper being there,
from roll of fields,
from shattered grit-stone walls,
to the dark corner
and the winter light.
Grounded the heart
lost in minute life
our varied kinship’s
movement, rustling,
leaf, eye, there, or limb,
by pine tree roots
and half-broken boulders,
we too pass by.
Grounded the mind.
This Earth is all,
its scaled existence,
that we pass on,
the more and less,
of what was given.
these Things are best.
Our search will end
when they come to rest.
The Way is not a trail,
there is no path.
Be where you are
and know what we have passed.
To lift the stone,
to leave the stone’s all one.
Mind is process,
Self is what is done.
Determined through our being,
not despite,
we make the choice that makes us:
Selves ignite.
Forget: begin again
with joy, erase.
The word is never
only what it says.
Revisit emptiness,
no prison’s best.
The heart is naked
when the mind’s undressed.
an act of love
and no truth traded.
That we should see
by means of empathy:
accept what we have no perception of.
That shared and given multiply,
that things are emptied,
and every richness only in the heart.
That superstition die and science
this science of ours
be servant to the empathetic will.
That life and all things living
take up the sacred space
in which we can move like mind-dancers.
That knowledge grows
with intellect, and violence ceases
that freedom be mind’s individual freedom,
no nations and one species,
that the garden
is planted, and allowed to every child.
Nature’s intense
deep stressed tremor
of energies the human
struggles to possess:
we, surface always,
its hidden inwardness.
All depth we open,
surface, we constrained,
dumb, limited and transient
mortal feeling.
Landscapes are mind long,
cloud-ranges Earth long,
the billion fold leaf and stem
selfless and self less, mist hung,
sweet being going unseen,
the riches, heart beauty,
feature and face and feel
of an endless moving,
and we, for all, changing
energies outplaying
Being’s waves’ caress.
all these pounded lost species,
lives bred for death,
swift lives,
the faces in their silence
not encircling
the shudder of the hells
we make for them.
Under Blake’s oak-tree
the sheep in sacred light,
and mindful shepherds
face a slender moon.
Breath steams all night,
they tear the grass of time,
the penned and caged,
the chased and persecuted.
And we, de-sensitised
by sentiment pass by,
fine in the farness,
in an unstained watching,
pass the spiritual life
of inner Nature,
the given world
beyond our making.
We live among the species,
hidden beings,
and we deny their pain,
their minds, and consciousness.
in individual fire
the wind of winter silence,
turns in the wind,
flares now in being,
a flutter of mind,
against the eternal stream,
cries now, falls now away,
and flickers between clouds,
eye-lost, heart-lost.
No, deeper, deeper at heart,
thrown inward distant,
un-fallen, far, farther, ah farer,
known now by mind-tokens,
not diminished,
flown there, dark mote
in the storm rays,
light broken, soul-spilt,
flare out of loss, out of fall,
soared through the skeins of sky.
Deep, and the sole fire, unique one,
founded, and held here, and unforgotten.
where down the fields of light, mind
goes furrowed and dark-fold
beneath your ever-ascent.
in women, body and mind,
walking silently by
their individual stirring,
their deeper than pain prompting,
of what is not I, rich, strange,
fiercer in marvellous beauty,
all in a curious journey,
life-cradled, ages taught.
Then to reach out to all
shock of self-knowing,
self-making web of seeing
of the flayed heart laid bare,
aching with self and its going,
person and that resolution,
break on the bastion of other,
beat over stones and shore,
or breeze on the grass, shiver.
Precious, a flickering light passes,
shaken in storm-wind, hail-flight,
swoops on the mind, falls right
as a force from outside, given,
flames in our silences,
till flesh burns and the spirit
crosses dark abyss, sighs
through the city cries
its relentless tremor of parting.
we people, then,
have found one more
measure of nature
conserved, one more
law.
Blue is still blue,
pain is pain,
love elusive,
the mind a rag
caught in a storm wind,
blown to eternity.
To know is not
to feel.
Through ash
the embers glow,
brighter through ash:
a blue world
in the dark
turns alone: unseen
a flight of birds
drags mind through the sky.
the past are here,
the mayed brightness,
deep cloying sweetness
of have and given,
tremors and pity-ache,
and darker self-pity
of what now cannot be
touched, known, clung to.
What rod in the heart,
what flame of ice, patience,
hand over hand, over the rock-face,
hour on hour, over the floes,
the wait worse, without doing,
the silent, the waiting
but not in nature’s
deep flowing silence
creation’s furtive womb.
This prison, patience,
whose deep tenderness,
whose beauty circles
the space of the dark,
and a slight courage beats
against the inner-wall,
against the mind-strangeness, wonder,
we the so much, the so far.
at the heart of the fire
a gash of crimson
crumbles and falls,
and I no longer see
what this world is.
At the heart of the wave
in the grass-green curve,
where the barrel rotates
and a white spray boils,
I try to see
all its reality.
The dark soil heaves,
root, stone, and leaf,
its crystalline deep,
its viscous un-weaving:
can I see to its being
in all its revealing?
The wind on my face
from the glittering star
speaks of Altair’s ascendance,
and here where we are
of the planet’s pure tremor,
the blood in my heart.
the wax spill
over the dish.
There is memory: it stays
in the fingers
a touch to a thought,
an inch of charred cotton ash
and a flake of white wax,
solidifying moments.
Flame has a still blue heart,
walls flicker, are soft,
and time past is mute.
I can breathe and can move
the lineaments of your face,
your hands, your flesh,
wings of the butterfly,
craters of light,
as a thought in the dark,
then flutter of storm-tossed blind,
dark rain on wet glass,
and in the dish, hard wax.
And hold
the difficult thing
in your hands,
love, death,
hold it as if,
the transmitted part
of yourself
turned outward
was before light,
its planes upturned.
Can you transform?
The words are insufficient,
they are not that process
by which mind’s pain
confronts infinity,
though some will never,
they are not that
going on, beyond the word,
trajectory out-flung
from which we fall
back into ourselves, changed,
reborn.
Can you transform?
in this corner
of eternity.
The universe
slides through the stars,
and penetrates
the spirit.
We are here,
in time,
which is the Moment
altering to
each Moment.
We are here.
Each says itself
each must proclaim
in time its being
one alone,
we are here.
I touch you
in this corner
of eternity.
I touch you,
we are here.
in a dying love,
a winter sun,
whose light modulates
towards the trees,
in echo of the past.
What mind concedes
a dying love?
Severing that yearns
for transformation,
for springtime
out of exile,
in the heart.
Where no beauty seems
where pain is,
beauty is, the tender
halo of the leaf
its planes of sheens,
that tilt towards
the soft tiles of cloud.
Past beauty shines
and futures past knowing
also gleam
slow towards the east,
not in this west
where beauty lights
a last and dying love.
wave crash, juice fall,
this psyche’s power.
Yearning, what moves
the heart with its call
greater than we are.
Flood within, that
seems beyond us,
dances us, puppets.
Yearning, lasting fire
burning sap-free
at being’s root.
Our unrequited self,
hurled at the star fields,
brightening them there
falls back to silence,
sadness, frustrated knowing
coils in its arch.
from all possessiveness
not struggle with the mind
but let love flow
until all jealousies are lost
beyond repression.
Give, to give the heart away,
losing self, so self might be
the guardian of the boundary of being
that holds not merely
memory of the body’s opened gate
but enters spirit.
In you, unrealised energies,
to set those free, to conquer self
from objectifying mental prisons
from the limit, that the sill
might be a threshold
of new being.
To be one, among the many,
beyond morality, and superstition,
where ‘true, sensitive and kind’
measures all meaning,
in selfless creation:
to love until all mind is love.
I create you: you create me.
Beyond the bricks of law and state,
Integrity, rebuild our fate.
The traveller of mind goes by,
the world renewing in the eye.
From all of matter’s darkened stress,
the spirit rises, more not less.
What is given’s multiplied,
What is shared is death denied.
In the world of spirit, see,
I create you: you create me.
Vision of our infinite life
is the one true paradise.
Streets of love are always sweet,
where the true in knowing meet.
What we do with love, is pleasure,
Mind and being’s deepest measure.
Search for joy without a pain
Mingles joy and hurt again.
Free of sexual enmity,
I create you: you create me.
Time gives all the heart away,
In this brightness where we play.
drifting tribes
criss-crossed these deserts,
made their silence.
The loss of the vision
of eternity
makes the people
of dreams.
Spirit fell from their hands,
into rocks, and streams,
deep into soil
where being rooted.
Sank into dust,
was carried by water,
sings now if you listen,
if you hear, there.
This terrain, these field-rows,
these places of trees,
these mountains belong
to no one, to people of dreams,
who gave, who gave
and lived without keeping,
and shared without seeing,
embodied this silence.
damaged heart, sweet trier at life’s game,
one of those born without a shell,
naked spirit born to look for love,
to make the pure relationship, of you.
Spirit to spirit defenceless in the silence
with delicate hands I reach, with eyes of light,
to find a care enough to touch you with.
Mental traveller in the gates of time,
have I the city of art where all is found
open and more open, where the heart
has every act of you, the never-lost?
Deeper I find you in the seeing eye,
where all are different and all are rare,
and none rejected, who with life
search out the silent centre of delight.
Deeper I find you.
life is spirit, sacred creatures,
spurts of existence, the ever-varied,
not time or space or gust of winds.
Energy, moment and the individual.
All things different to the different eye.
Create the given, sacred and the free,
and not the universe of hopeless powers.
Life is sacred, seeks joy and its own imaginings,
creation in the sweetness of the dark,
the gift of ages, and a hidden cosmos,
out of whose centre is the sweetness.
Give, share, love, touch with kindness, touch
with truth, what sees itself is self to whom
it seems, born in the body, crowned in the mind.
You think life is time? Life is spirit.
takes his way
on the ethereal road
between minds, and he
is Eros for a moment, sighing.
In one hand he brings us
the rod, with joy and pain,
the twining snakes:
they writhe between his fingers:
he has winged hands and feet,
the feathers beat at his ankles,
brush his heart,
but he flies naked
with the truth of words,
and snakes that coil,
the truth behind the words,
whatever it may be,
hidden like those gods he travels from
or the silence
that he moves towards,
a slender, anxious,
fine, pale, mind-made god,
passing dark
as Eros,
among lovers.
there, your face shines,
in the never-known.
You, body that flames,
will you see mind,
will you see?
Who can? Truth
inside you there,
inside you hidden.
Fingered, the three
that climb the wall
your unknown dark.
In this the swallow seed
planted cloud flight
wing-beat, throb, tremor.
The sacred house.
We pour it from jar
to jar,
white as an eye, mooned
over you
through you,
over the worn lip, used sill,
seeing, the table there
its bread, its silence.
leave tangles
deeper, deeper
torn threads of a life.
Celebrate or evade,
you destroy or create,
kindness its own enemy
grace fighting intensity,
mind warring with body,
pass through to the new
until there is no more:
better to calm and stay.
These things are hard to say,
how we use, use up loyalties,
give to the unworthy, unknown,
deny those whom we owe,
for freedom’s illusions,
deeper, deeper,
the heart lost, entangled,
given and long-given,
silks of the spiders webs
caught on the open briars,
glittering with dawn-dew, rain,
nets of our summers.
it ends unsure.
It begins with flames
of the body, it ends
with fires of the mind.
It begins with the glitter
of words, it ends with trees,
and in complex nakedness,
that began in naked simplicity.
It begins with intoxicated seeing,
ends in intricacies of time.
It begins with waters, cries,
it ends with necessities.
It begins with freedom,
imprisonments not seen.
It ends with freedom
in prisons of the dream,
not knowing how to care.
It begins with the founding
of loyalties, learning faith.
It ends with another truth,
in a stranger place.
the years we think we understand,
White-veined boulder sits
on a ledge of slate,
how many generations,
these years are borrowed years,
energy taken, the second law,
then released slowly
to fences, cut-logs, trails,
and somewhere cities,
whose years are few,
and civilisation, meaning
the learning how to be
true, sensitive, and kind,
the miracle.
On a rock in the sun
these years are not years,
butterfly, yellow-winged
settles there, regards pebbles,
displays its intricate being
give up beauty to be considered,
objective poetry, while moment
flies in hairy-seeded ranks,
glows in berries, amber-leafed.
The mind is few,
its thought is non-thought,
these fires are borrowed fires,
in light above the grass,
a hundred million years,
of sunlit blades.
the rock-pooled sea
winds in its trailing leaves
its watery lights,
brine smells, and fills
unbridled pools,
then dries to the sun,
sprawls headlands, ribs of reef,
through tangled shoals
and sighs for night.
Weary of lovers, waits for lovers,
laps stone, silicate barrens,
weed, winds and shells,
taken and undertaken:
bring me, bring you to me,
from the never-ending
to the dark contained,
in flow of abnegation,
susurration, reach of worlds,
and tides, the heart laid down.
forever. We cannot make
the free turn to us,
there is desire,
tricky as light, as fire’s uncertainty.
Can we return to where we were
in fire? Say.
What we know. To pity
is not to heal, forgive not
to undo,
there is the pain,
returning like the light
or dark’s uncertainty,
to where we are, in fire.
What’s hidden from us.
All the universe, ages’ gift,
centre sweet of all-being,
in beech nut’s core, leaf’s vein,
where is all the world,
strange as light or mind’s
fragmentary glitter, all that fire.
you carry the fire of my heart,
to other’s hands.
What was mine
wakes in the lip
that tracks the thigh-way,
becomes the tower,
through which we swam
to the place where
others’ light pours for you.
Between others’ hands
you watch the mirror of time
the rocking of stars
in others’ hands,
taste the moon’s pearl
in its oyster bed,
lick the brine of my wound
in others’ hands,
stand to the entering wave,
as the eternal opens.
To others’ hands
you carry the stone of my heart,
the stone day buried
again and again,
in the place that no-more names
a weeping of light,
over pale wet sand.
a silence and a storm
what spoils us
for the ordinary life,
and strips us bare,
and sets us face to face
with all the universe,
species, and a planet,
and those stars.
But I to you,
a meaning and a tide,
that silvered thought,
makes all it glitter so,
stripped us alive
and set us face to face
with each all universe
in self and self,
an inner curve of stars.
the light of the eye
of your mind.
Beauty is spirit,
to be carelessly seen
to be splendour,
to be light of your eyes
over your eyelids.
Under your heart
glows the swell of your breasts,
bright nipples of fire.
Meaning is spirit,
a dance, the unrest
a glory, the light
of your breasts
shines under your heart.
Heat, touch, you wait for.
In me, too, a silent heart.
All the continuum, then
from mind, a chrysalis
to spirit’s winged colours.
Down all the dark leaves
opening in the sun,
and in this silent heart.
your limbs gleam
through your torn dress.
You stare, you question,
examining the man
(you are no older,
the same virginal face,
the only one of us still pure)
pale girl, pale cold skin,
the hair, long, dark,
that fringes your eyes,
anxious, imperious though
when challenged,
following the turn of page,
lifting your glance to watch,
then look away
towards the real window,
the leaves, those trees.
Tender flesh, but mind of fire,
an ice of time of silence,
confidante to the dead,
child of light,
you are no different,
it is I, I changed,
here, now, with another’s eye,
another’s hand,
another’s mind moving.
it is snow silence,
and the spume
flowers on you
falls in you,
shown like stars.
You take its sudden
stillness, the white flower,
set it again
inside with your hands,
offer it pale shores,
and nameless space,
give it the last quiet
where all is true
all is known,
the place between your hands,
that no one sees,
but this mouth
you believe
whose lips will weep
with your name.
that shadows over you, no names,
that passes between us
covers you, failing.
I climb the pale steps
we are the shades, two
we swim the hollows
of liquid truth,
the spent drops shine
on an edge of light,
and the flower drinks its night.
Between. The dampness of tear
no eye shed, all eyes,
across the burial stone,
its weeping.
Lay in the fingered silence,
the nest of dark, eternity
ending there at the way fork,
at the cross road,
where the ditch-rose
white over black
falls, petals, on
mortars of stone,
chalices of air,
whose weight is time,
and the grail
an ear of peace
a word, refuge,
failing.
hard to be silent, all inaction,
hard not to intermingle, fix,
and tip the sliding beam.
To be, to love, to see, to tangle
mouth to the other mouth slipped,
seed-eaters, leaf openers, pushing through,
agents of tenderness, agents of change.
To be, to know the sensitivities,
how to keep it all from falling,
we too slipping through the stars,
suns aimed, planets unfurling.
To be to be loyal, to be
true to whatever is the spirit,
loyal to what we must let go of,
loving what leaves us in flying.
To be, to be kind, kind,
hard not to be destroyers, choosers,
leaving that one road deep in dust,
spurning the one heart, unknowing.
You must be the word
and not by trying
turned inside out on the page.
Word is awareness, the poem
its eye. Its trembling eyelid
your five senses, free of gods
and demons. Poetry
is what you are, reveals you,
naked, nude at the window,
in the mirror, and unlovely,
your lack of humanity, truth.
Poetry is not free, its pain is
shared, and is not other than
your integrity, your loyalty,
your kindness, empathy,
with and to the thing, of the spirit.
It punishes with hard empty hours,
when the hands cannot grasp
or even touch, rewards with knowing,
after the need, the hurt, the fact.
Never imagine the poet does not know
what happens when we conjure,
nor what if we miss, regret.
For those who give the spirit
with the body, it is true, and said,
where there is most feeling is most pain.
Yet on this un-navigable ocean
where we own nothing forever,
and cannot force the free to turn to us,
our unfulfilled desires must not be sadness.
We must learn the lesson: free the other,
make as is known, and as was said,
the movement of infinite resignation,
acknowledging the rights of those we love.
The ocean of the human imagination,
ocean of night and the sacred creatures,
forgiveness and freedom are still a joy,
where the heart can free and forgive.
Give, share, wish truth, wish empathy,
celebrate the mind’s extreme intensity,
those places where it still can lead the body,
until we go beyond, and there is love.
In the house of the spirit, inspiration,
ideas, not matter, drive the world.
Love is from beyond the starry pole,
is the power of the stars, the living sun.
Did I lose you in the silence?
There are no depths beyond which
we cannot see. The question
the poplar asks the sky is not
answered in the water,
and you, you are beyond,
fragrance of mint and bay.
There is a green world where
the mind goes in green spring
down the leaf to its cleft,
down the tree to its root,
there are no depths beyond which
we cannot see, the question the poplar
asks is not answered in the water.
Did I lose you in the silence,
Fragrance of mint and bay?
they come from beyond.
The values that echo inside
all start from beyond,
out of the natural world,
and the history of our
one species, the absurd one,
blessed with delicate sight.
Values are fire,
they light the earth and the water,
they are the loved and the lover,
the power, the prime mover.
Sing the values of light,
that are mirrored within,
and come from beyond
out of the natural world.
illegible space of untenable silence,
oh, but free the other,
into unrealised energies,
into world possibilities,
mind, spirit and emotion.
Inscrutable trees do not
communicate their branches,
clouds randomised are form,
all form’s Individual presence,
and every presence is form,
you, form, I, form.
Rebel against what limits
violence, power’s dead hands,
the abusers, the destroyers:
vision is where the symbol purifies,
in the loving heart’s integrity,
and time’s eternity’s shadow,
and eternity is Energy, the Moment,
the godless universe, being there.