A. S. Kline © 2006 All Rights Reserved
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Contents
of the art of our century
is also visible
in poetry.
Minds are not less
but the Void
is nearer,
the blind reality.
Though the pain of being
can still be opposed
by form, truth,
beauty,
to speak with dead voices
is incomplete,
while our silence
deepens eternity.
everyone is scared,
just as in the city,
the same Void opens
under fragile lives.
Work lasts, why cry
at what passes?
Affection, mutual
recognition – world lasts.
This is not an age
for grand gestures:
suspect
their intentions.
From the heights,
sierra or
skyscraper, feel
the silence, the light.
civilization ends
but Nature’s ceased
beginning.
Sand layers
tarred by destruction,
heart’s erosion,
fouled detritus.
The poem of love
and beauty chokes
refusing
to be written.
Even our children
soured
by imitation
by false repetition.
or a tiny star
in white, rose, green
seen from the Void.
This is the sky.
This is the earth.
Between them,
sit and carve a purpose.
You are the stem-tip,
changing in sun,
mist, rain,
flame in the air’s shift.
This is the tree.
This is the breeze.
between them
confused, we turn.
the end of the island.
I fail to sleep, I
count the shadows.
Moon grasps emptiness
in well-holes of cloud.
Insomnia plucks
its ancient lyre.
There are no more
empty shores, or
easy wastelands,
comfortable Voids.
The old winds
at the headland’s edge,
own the new,
the deeper roar.
The leaves grow, they make form.
Space is not void but form.
Speak to me: that is form.
Memory’s wound is form,
the bed and the sea are form.
Landscape shudders with form,
our lives are unburied form.
The game against death is form,
the harbour, its piles are form.
Inside you, beside you, form.
The tongue, the artery, form.
but not in any
form of religion.
Organised illusion
is still illusion,
but the light
on the hill
brings salvation.
If you dispense with ‘truths’
and begin again,
with Earth and the human,
you arrive at what we made
what made us,
intention-less
in Nature’s light.
Light is redemption,
but not in any
kind of religion.
The silence is silence,
despite your meditation,
metaphysics, endemic confusion,
the light from endless space
is redemption,
mind’s salvation.
beauty passed down to us in the bone,
or mind’s infinity, just as desired,
soothes our ire, venom, spleen,
distrust of the mean, the vile, political.
The soul is in itself critical.
It chooses, this sensitive spirit,
delicate things, pictures, frail rings,
words, forms, memories,
acts of impossible fidelity.
We are the seers of beauty
(It seems) for this reality.
night is falling.
Consider eternity,
night is falling.
An eye, a shoulder,
night is falling.
Island of secrets,
night is falling.
Bitter the knowing,
night is falling,
bewitched of feelings,
night is falling.
Tired the kisses, night
is falling.
Silence, spirit,
night is falling.
there are no scented fields of paradise.
Where we are is where we shall remain,
whether we stay or sail towards the light.
The world though opens in a thousand flowers,
our minds (no souls exist) are free to be.
Where we are is the boundary of space,
the inner form is our humanity.
true, sensitive and kind is our achievement.
In human hearts, and not in any temple,
is all of our reality and knowledge.
Religion holds no ownership of spirit,
the soul-less, god-less, world without intent,
is still as open to the mind and heart,
its love, and truth, and beauty still exist.
fragrance of cones, cut-wood, trees
for a hundred miles,
and mountains no man owns.
World, the un-possessed,
slips from us, Horace says.
This Latin text wiser
than critics, metaphysics.
Blue smoke, white, the fierce
blaze of timber at the core,
red fire that warms the spirit,
beyond the word, the law.
is no longer public.
Inwardly there is no hierarchy,
every spiritual niche is valid.
Outwardly power simply
inheres in the process, beyond our control.
Outwardly wealth, force, notoriety
are vessels without validity.
The truth is the truth of the mind
is private now, of the spirit.
The false gods and priests,
their voices, have no power.
includes you, is it right love
that your space
should include me?
When love alone despite its greatness
depth, is not enough,
when we torment each other
without so wishing?
I burn in eternity’s mind-space
for you, is it right love
that you
should burn with me?
with the breath of charm.
The life not the reason for the verse,
the verse the flower of the life.
Exiled, ah, fallen from the sky,
seeing the eternity of earth, no paradise.
Beyond religion, clinging to the incense
of religion, no deist-Satanist, but moralist.
Electrometer of our pain, tremor
of our distress, idealist-realist.
A flare of light, then dark…a flare
against indifference.
Fountain of energy,
falling in the night!
who find religious fantasies consoling.
Who celebrate the rich and famous as they pass,
find charity an answer to the spirit’s keening.
Who love earth’s creatures farmed, and destroyed,
though embarrassed by intensity’s excess.
Who consider life as something designed and not absurd,
who believe in all the rituals of progress.
Their darkness shines beyond the night,
to softly populate the light,
Earth’s Venus, Jupiter, and Mars.
those whose joy’s anxiety ungraspable,
those who try to show the moment’s pace,
those better suited to sobriety,
work, immersion in indifferent Nature,
not humanity, those possessed,
driven by intensity, who stare
too closely at reality, gazed at
curiously by the rest.
I read the Chinese.
Life flowers in
solidity of seeing.
Words can seem solid too
but not like that.
I love the intention-less,
Nature’s indifference,
non-hostile, undemanding,
except of our attention,
a purity of motive and desire.
A wall, an interface, of rock
cleft by tight roots,
half a mountain glitters in the sun
each fold and twist
is stony universe.
And so we find
as we grow older
the space seems larger
we must consider.
Words can seem solid too,
but not like that.
the far reaches of tenderness, child, my child,
beauty of silences, and of caresses, lover, lover,
pulsing of mind’s empathies, friend, my friend.
Everything is there in our hearts, lover, lover,
marvellous spaces filled with light, friend, my friend,
where we shall always be together, sister, sister,
in spirit’s unwavering stillness, child, my child.
navigates poplars, clouds, hills,
illuminates the single stem,
the leaf of grass, the white stone,
everything humble, everything real.
Oh, I understand the unreality
we make to live inside,
our alien-human,
but this is moonlight
flooding over hands,
a blade of peace
and mind’s last outpost,
before the Milky Way
the galaxies, the deep field,
the outer veils of time,
a trembling moon of fire,
the outlier.
your eye in mine eye,
cloud on the hills,
mind among the trees.
This place is penetrated
by the air, set on a verge
of heart and mountain,
a place believed-in.
My hand on your womb,
silent, tender, walls are thin,
this house is fragile,
opening on the stars.
Your lips as cold as ice,
and mine in thine.
We’ll close the door again,
we’ll build our fire.
(The universe expanding, Void grows greater)
Earth will float, by its star, a blue flower,
lonelier, its teardrop of reflected light,
still fiercely bright, no clearer.
Slowly the heart subsides, grows cooler, stiller,
(Mind voyaging, the silence grows deeper)
and, by its memory, beats, blue wave,
with the pulse of ever, vessel of time
still dark with night, its fires.
snow on the hills,
bent-pine, smoke trails,
no way over the pass.
Sky’s ephemeral blue’s
the vague centre, skein of light.
Pine-smoke at dawn
in glittering mist,
what mind sees
of air and rock,
shattered reality,
this is beauty.
Kick off the snow,
trudge downhill,
stilled saws, old trunks
of levelled timber,
the years of growth undone,
the ache of seeing.
This is beauty.
Can I base the self
on a silence of silver,
a mist-like wake in the light,
on seconds like centuries,
the galaxies crowding
to spill their veil-thin milk-glow
on stone’s bare-shouldered gleam?
You I can hold in the shadow
make you a flame of the air,
a shiver of tree-night, horizoned,
you in whom there is
infinite room,
universe, world’s eyes that search
for you present, you there
un-rooted except in air.
of the world’s slippery presence,
Minds, we emerge
from the womb’s
beaten blossom,
torn vulva, sent into the empty
silence of all being,
universal dark and flow.
Daughters out of daughters,
of daughters, from the caves,
and sons, the cul-de-sacs,
all part of the dance,
Mind that delights
in freedom from circumstance.
Mind to mind we kiss,
thoughts to thought connect,
no idea dies.
blessed by inanimate things.
All of equal validity, we assess.
Creativity, or destructiveness,
nothing external judges, we are blessed.
Out of us the morality.
We are blessed
by root, leaf, cloud, stone,
tree, intention-less.
Beleaguered mind,
they soothe and calm,
all creatures in the light,
torn between silence here
and consciousness.
Creating, we are blessed.
fill time, consume,
moonlight rakes
the mountain’s silent lines,
the whispering rain.
There is a state of mind,
soft as the planet,
waits for stillness,
waiting for the void,
while mountain stands
in cloud and snow,
forest laid wide open.
Such you know when
you find it.
No roots except in air.
there must be a frustration with the body.
Empathy must overcome the pain, ennui,
the mechanism’s sadness and the flesh.
Million to relate to, ah yes, but when you know
the beauty of minds meeting there must be
irritation with the world where vacant forms
jostle, without awareness, in the crowd.
It is not that we are greater, wiser than others,
only that we are as we are, must be,
frustrated forever here with matter,
when we understand how minds meet.
so calm the night,
so soft the roar of sea,
the fading light.
How valuable your heart,
a path that walks
across a wake of stars,
so strong your art,
that in its simplest part
defeats my own,
so still the night, ah, pale the flow,
towards your living heart.
has a touch of silence,
this is the way it flares
lips, blindingly
with the rage of time
beyond shadows.
Its speech is the
alien tribe’s tongue,
the heart-heavy
whiteness of days,
mercy’s fall,
the birth-foam’s tall jet.
And its palate
tastes us mortal,
blind of all meaning,
white as the poplars’
crushed sense
of a blood-wet exile.
night-born heart’s-bed
star, swims
towards me,
bears lamp light,
white gaze,
glance of its farness.
The black candle spent
flames in anguish,
how the beloved
lances from centres
of fire, disrupts
the wax of parting,
collapses the soul.
white snow-blossoms,
break here, sprays and olive wings,
and there, dull-cream cascades
from spears of sharp thick darkness,
but quietest, strangest
are the tiny stars
on pale grey-green,
ice lights, on leaves made globes,
clustering constellations,
(Cygnus, Lyra,
drops from the painter’s brush,
bits of time,
fractured twilight.
articulated insect
climbs Japanese leaf,
is a leaf, strange,
Words are ours,
but this is real,
nothing you made,
nothing I understand.
Unaware, they say,
life though, better,
and we, though grand,
life startles.
Over my hand
climbs mountains,
a multi-limbed Dante
my hell its purgatory.
Species? Like us,
no mind, no name,
climbers,
shocks of life.
now let that go,
let music of meaning
sink into silence.
Licks of fire
scale the driftwood,
but you are not thinking –
peace, giving.
Between self
and the infinite
stretches the thinnest
of membranes.
The grasping, the desire,
only,
observing space,
let it go.
is our integrity.
To be carriers of light, now,
into the void.
The mountain shifts
imperceptibly, slowly,
and packed in our moment
is all this flow.
Relationship is hardest,
do you see,
between us and beyond us,
self, eternity.
To still the heart,
to pass between these hearts.
Not to accept,
to maintain integrity.
appreciates the light?
Who in the dark
frees themselves from darkness?
Between the two
the real work is thought,
though we still have to toil
with things of hands, to be able to begin it.
I would say eternity was there for the taking
if the essence were not in releasing.
Who in the light
understands the light?
considering islands, contemplating Circe,
in magic juggling with uncertainties.
He dreams the dark groves of Persephone.
There, the dead must walk, not quite substantial,
between trees hung with ribbon, pools of light.
Reflecting shadows deeper than a funeral,
the spirits of the underworld are bright.
Other shores of foam break, other skies,
swallow-footed Sirens, fruits that maze,
doubt’s whirlpool: opposite the cave of lies,
Charybdis looms, through the dawning haze.
Earth is floating in the blue abyss,
but here all things are bright,
all the harbour light,
where mind and spirit pure
heart-heavy true azure
reflect the glowing centuries
long-lost wars, veil-less mysteries.
Mind we are, inside this tiny space,
time-voyagers, drifting in this place,
but transparent trees, the hills, are light,
here for a moment, floating in the night,
where we have lived before,
creatures of fragile law,
among the dead antiquities,
among human iniquities.
the times are unpropitious.
The flute, the dumb glance
echo worlds beyond us.
Bow to nothing, mock all powers,
watch the Achaeans come, the Romans go.
The mind’s dawn light’s a colder flow,
the night increases, the times are ours.
Earth’s still earth: stones under our feet.
Pay no dues, avoid the market-squares.
Keep the painter’s hand, the artist’s moves,
Pythagoras: mark sand in the open street.
Swear no allegiance, the times are unpropitious.
Let the blue fox shine: the dolphin glistens,
notes compel the air, and dark soil listens.
Bow to nothing: cherish what’s beyond us.
of the dark kingdom. Feet
on threads of bark, sand, twigs,
the grey girl returns from the depths.
Dream, bird-calls, chatter of passage,
then the word opening, clarifying,
do you know it? Language, bright
salient, luminous, brine-filled, bitter.
Fruit in her teeth, seeds, pine-glow,
blood-dark, the strange garden,
what has been seen, where
it has been, is not forgotten.
Grains lodged in the mind,
and heart. A dark walking.
Deer pass through at night.
This is our planet.
at street-corners, those are the
early-dead. Broken glass, cans,
and the rubble of un-creation.
Children sold at the crossways,
ghost-shadows, here, quiver,
the innocent-maimed
the detritus of un-civilisation.
Children play games with the fractured
pieces of adult worlds,
fallen through the sieve of meaning,
they give them their names.
Children mimic life, space,
stand on infinity, crawl
the surface of futures, fragile as insects,
footed, winged, straying here, alight.
the stone, without thinking.
Bending the bow of un-thought,
in no mind, then, release it.
In the air it moved, how?
Did it move in seeing?
Nothing passed through the rock,
no electron pierced the holes.
Sudden the dancing feathers,
the heron’s wings over water.
Loosed like light, flung like thought,
fired straight through the mind.
the dancer flow as the dance.
The rose is intention-less,
beauty’s in circumstance.
Do it for us: create, move, flower,
only for us, once, then never,
be the way meaning towers,
winds unfurl, petals quiver.
Only the Earth, nothing less,
the poem’s leaf-fall in the night,
where you are where you are forever,
though days seem heavy, they are light.
music harder, chime of different bells,
as tone is cast of mind, scent of thought,
what hue stains the mouth eating berries,
particular soft shadings through the leaves,
in a garden filled with silent shadows,
and the unique bird, the hidden voice
singing in the night from ten till two,
one imitative of a dozen others.
Images are sweet, and the tradition.
All poets share a common tongue.
makes the simple difficult to see,
like the presence of a tree in starlight,
obvious, and then too obvious.
Chasing it is a sign of craving,
unhelpful as following ‘the master’,
not how the master became master,
something he never desired to be.
It’s obvious the obvious is not easy.
Speaking, seeing, feeling, that’s a gift.
like snow
petals slide
on the stream.
The grey-branch
flows white-fire,
mind layers
of glassy leaves.
So we as we fade.
Go there,
be right,
purify the heart.
makes us forget,
the tallest tree
points at the stars,
a finger post in time,
we pass.
Yet time is free
and form connects
through past
and future minds’
and world’s
configurations.
I brush your lips,
I hold your face
between my hands
a clearer pool
a greener force
of time.
puts nothing in our hands,
yet sharing
speaks through distance.
Mind calls to mind
though nothing’s in our hands.
Beyond all power
is trust and understanding.
To break the power of distance,
fill our hands,
is our first step,
lose power and never grant it,
least of all to those who seek it.
Power is nothing,
all our sharing,
all our empathy is in our hands.
something we will never fathom,
since our life is all effect,
since our meaning posits cause,
then randomness must be the heart
of the deeper stillness, its potential.
If the endless forms of the world,
are always subject to the formless,
something we will never fathom,
since our life is form and purpose,
the formless is endlessly an aspect
of the deeper silence, its potential.
Energies, deeper than the root.
pokes silent from a hole
between old paving stones
observes, is free, considers me,
who put out food to reach
to creature and be warmed
by slight relationship.
The small brown long-tailed form
runs between light and shadow,
appears, retreats, pursues
an inner urge, we converge
on intention-less truth,
are fine, find grace,
have purpose in the sun.
were made light, were conquered.
In the ashes of the fire
my tribe found a meaning in the eye,
their place in mind, arrows flying
into final spaces beyond here.
All things precious were destroyed,
no thought was destroyed,
no emotion, all intensified,
the barb within the eye,
the heart within the tongue.
Troy-defeating flames, lift
between us, love is
between us.
Who said time dies, walls break:
nothing dies, the black sun slides
out of the skies
between us.
We wade through silences, bitter
as fire, we flog the horse of wood
with memory’s wire:
it looms above us.
are mindless stars,
the protons, neutrons
in us, there, forever.
No one went to this
making, why does that
trouble you with fear?
Those infinite spaces
have no design on us.
Be serious, un-fearing,
our sweet transience
is painful, but a blessing.
Signs of eternity
clouds, lights, worlds,
ephemeral, changing,
something there, forever.
through the snow:
‘Through what should
kill us, slow.’
Ice on the silent lips
ice on a bitter stair,
but shadow dances still,
the poem is there.
Light from the black cloud,
striking its fire from stone,
but a rain-filled stream
spreads the silt below.
Green leaves on the lips,
light-less sight for the blind
we see what thought creates,
we are by pain refined.
1.
Flower-Myth
Trees on its precipices are also firs by pools.
The background is a woman, the leaves are leaves,
but open, pointing to eternally-lit spaces
in the interior of any planet, mind, eye.
A sideways mountain stretches to mouth-arc,
bitter lips carve through the flesh. The bird
flies back to the egg, fertile moons sing
of health, forgiveness, the bird is a plane,
the moon-trees are sperm, something is coded,
triangles potent, curves sing, see this is cut
from the ground of words, they creep
beneath borders, over the silver sand,
this is the tapestry of flesh, there are white
stitches in the fabric of a one-winged age.
The egg is offered, the leaves of the tree.
There are margins, entrances, hills, shores.
2.
‘But still not close enough’
they go running, the shapes of our fears,
objects with legs and with meaning,
they are the names of our intensity.
The drummer beats out red on the canvas
of time. Oh elsewhere, blues and greens
are there, the lines that grasp at the heart,
spheres are there with eyes, our humanity,
and beyond all, colour and touch, the sense
of something, amazed, wholly individual,
there are golden fish, there’s the Prince
of the Underworld, musings of the musician,
and the helmeted self with the barbed lance
who calls to monsters to surface, out of
the deep, shadow-squares, light-bringer!
Ah but here there is red, here there is grey.
3.
Beyond You
Out of the M
How does it get there?
Out of the World.
There are signs pointing
but the way is not
where we thought,
forces appear from clouds
and trees, and go past you.
The puppets, the faces,
the heads, where do they
come from? Out of
the Mind. How do they
get there? Out of
the World. But the eyes,
the tongue, the heart
are not what you expected.
They go beyond.
4.
Cool of life.
sky and tree, columns of air
are columns of time, moments
of time, one moment of time.
Symbols flicker over the ground
of mind, eyes, starbursts, hands, arrows,
in every direction, smoke from a roof,
the king of darkness is once more ordering blue.
Blue churns, and something emerges
a red road, green lettering, white towers,
a kind of sun, and vegetable stirrings
point at black. In the centre, blue.
5.
Crossing.
flecked with white
but the boat is black.
Over a blue wave
the oar circles,
the oar too is black.
There is a shore
with a jetty, a wharf,
the timbers are black.
The water is blue,
pale and pure,
but the boat is black.
6.
Machine.
that turns our hearts
in the immense
silence, blue-green.
The vanes of thought
on a dead wind
rock to and fro
enchanted by
gold, and a little red.
The tongued heads
chant, puppet-like,
from the isle
of women,
bird-claws cling.
The mechanism
so delicate
turning us over,
lifting us skywards,
no one turns.
7.
The Hosts of Fragility.
to a mouth.
The ladder (of tears)
is pinned
to a frame
of perspectives.
The sea is grey.
The sky is grey.
The tower is white.
Notes, springs, wire
coils, tenuous fine
between strands, lines.
A foot, a head,
a hand, a heart,
are stitched together.
The hosts of fragility
walk, a thousand
feet above us.
8.
Coded.
The circle’s symbols, keys, twigs,
forks, combs, in which we find
faces, forms (human), trees, ankhs?
They smile, they become wells,
trunks, mouths, sexes, not mocking
sharing foolish existence,
the strangeness of being a construct.
They smile, we also reach down
to protons, gluons, quarks,
fingers slip into the glove
into veils of what equations,
symbols, coded, keys, twigs, forks,
combs, where we find forces, forms, ankhs.
9.
Theatre.
art, is the art of the rainbow,
the art of the puppet theatre,
face stuffed with sun and stars,
the cleft of the brow,
the breasts of the heart,
the triangle, lower, of fate.
The simplest art, the profoundest
art, is the art of the rainbow,
the creatures, those dolls,
the flowers of cloth and felt,
the fish of the feet,
the grid of the chair,
the stair and the curtain.
We go there together,
in colour return,
in white of desire
and purity’s red,
in gold of arrival,
in emerald ending.
to what churns, slower,
slower, till eye goes on
through stillness, same
action, variant change,
motion round a centre.
In the ink the fisherman
by the rock, rod idling, feet
in the stream, face hidden,
spine relaxed, views water,
stone, eyes the flow of form,
all that’s pouring from the Tao.
a world, its arms push
clear through grass. Each
coarse stem an infinite
rod of this universe, it
holds up time, under
which all beetles crawl.
Undaunted, pure, this
armoured knight crashes
through undergrowth
and thorn, one arm a sword,
the other a knife, blunders,
toils towards its destiny,
the green, unseen eternity.
before you find value,
I must lose you forever
for you to know me.
The leaves we have opened
must settle on water,
cast a brave shadow,
be sunlit in silence.
You must go, far off,
to come to your homeland.
I must send you to mercy
before you can find me.
The face that shines,
eternity struck there,
must extinguish all things,
before things exist.
it sang, it sang, in the depths of the fire,
now beyond
it rises up in the dark blue sky.
Softly out of the dead of night,
once more dear than love of the heart,
now washed azure by evening’s art,
blown through air in a gust of light.
nearer the heart of creation.
Breathed through eyes
turned dumb, love
gave itself a name.
There was written,
a star on a leaf,
night’s opinion,
time’s ruling, ash
on our mute hands.
Out of grey night,
the line floated
in heavy meadows
of spring stone,
held off autumn fires.
Eyes, arms we were hands,
sepals we were flowers,
words and windows broke
fell like the doves
in heart-pieces.
you come here, why I came here,
for what troubles, all our anxieties,
for the walking on transience.
For that feeling, not time or space,
you are here, why I stay here,
for the what we cannot grasp
for what we must live through.
For knowledge of what cannot
be knowledge, why we speak here,
listen, through symbols made
of light, for mind unseen by mind.
scarred by sand,
the first fierce
tug of the horses.
Hands on helmet,
breastplate, spear
already translucent
vague as ancestors.
To be without hope
the gravest destiny,
no cities to found,
no magical consort.
Dust tiring the mouth,
eyes in silence now,
the departure terrifies
nostrils quiver with foam,
ice, and the wheels turn,
and the walls wooden,
and splintered, lucent,
ah, and shuddering.
Feels grit under the teeth,
the flame in the eyes,
a meaningless future name
echoed by centuries.
oh you can’t explain
that organic feel,
Leonardo’s line,
how mind drops
feet first through
space and finds
meat of the object
whatever leaf is,
an open mystery,
Mozart’s phrase,
light on the leaf,
not how it’s done,
natural intricacy,
must be easy,
simple, there
it goes, light
leaf, note, line,
grace of being.
I breathed the light of recalcitrant stars,
the barriers of fate, the heaps
of ash that we call Then.
‘How can tenderness be weight?’
I thought, not understanding,
‘How can love be harsh,
the galaxies shine in the night?’
Durance of beauty, rock of distance,
even to think your name is fire.
What is left is the reed that roots,
the poplar, still, under the mountain.
Earth and the rose are stardust both,
lightest of flames, and heavy burning,
turned dark, solid, a fertile nurturing,
seeding memory’s stones through time.
cool out of dark sub-structure,
where silvered roots gleam,
from the eye, the stream
of ebony, darkness, clings,
until it uncurls, becomes,
sillion, silence, leaved.
The past lives on in furrows.
Fields of presence, urns of clay
uncover the mortal kingdoms.
How, from this soil, display,
Muse singing, women gathering?
You must plunge your spirit into
what shows under the blade.
The extra-ordinary lives inside
the sacs of flesh, mirrors of eyes
From animal utterance who can hear
the creature’s dumb inward voice,
rivers of pain, and plains of feeling?
How did the face create the poem?
Mind travels places on other faces,
camps, eats, beyond this common place.
From hidden body and time’s illusions
comes the thin rill that feeds the flow,
another visage, and deeper than this.
watch the creature pulled from the rock
thrash in a cloud of sand and ink,
subside by suckers, foot by foot.
Separation’s where ache goes on,
asks the question, fails an answer,
speaks its lines, without reply,
on stages empty of light-fall, footfall.
Separation’s island, there are others,
archipelagos, sunlit, idle,
ship-less, smoking, glassy hillsides,
where trees wave and silence deepens.
becoming leaves, stones,
forgetting roadways,
becoming bird’s far cry
or the rose.
There is no truth
in all those faiths,
reality is much simpler,
though it’s not of our
energies or our greatness.
It’s name and silence,
beyond and here,
the hush of ice, and star,
and rain, soaking the earth
the tension unresolved.
or a meaning I don’t wish to hear.
Your silence is denial of what was
value to me, you, who knows what?
Your silence is pain, baffled spirit,
thwarted mind-hurt, no redemption.
Your silence has no meaning, truth
has bled away, doors closed once open.
Your silence speaks, more loud the phrases
than love declared or beauty altered.
Your silence surprised the mind, still
giving, heart, lips, hands, ears burning.
How small we are on the heart-slopes here!
Slighter even than leaves or flowers,
they return in eternal innocence:
we will sink with the weight of stars.
Things seek to be without consciousness,
while we are lost in the thoughts of self,
reader-less pages turned underground,
they, things grown towards the light,
we, loving stones, stars, rains that fell.
Annihilated by world, and smothered,
the wounded snake, the grounded fly,
return in perpetual innocence,
they are forever the products of sense,
while we drown deep in the tangled sky.
the new voices,
the heron’s breast-bone
bright in the sky.
Stars in the grass,
alder, rowan,
the white flower
of the watching eye.
Rooks, crows
on the winds of evening,
these the makers,
their forms on high.
show in
apple, pear, poplar
that shroud the stars.
Deeper we plant now,
deeper we follow,
these roots, the heart-roots
of the spirit.
only fly summers, autumn’s their winter,
but you, your spirit, the houses of light,
are beauty, are truth, woman of dream.
Dragonflies skim on the sunlit pools,
only glitter through warmth of evening,
blue-green mica followed by stars,
but you, your glitter, their pole of fire,
are silence, and grace, woman of dream.
until the shadowy dead
have presence,
by such small things
captured and remembered.
Fine detail makes us live,
generic creatures
a movement
or a gesture resurrects,
a window-face watching winter fields.
Events are, by their nature,
meaningless, the fire’s
a fire within, Coleridge saw,
world turns on our fulcrum,
great on small, and earth on a knife-edge.
A sweetness fills us, there is no resistance.
What pours from us is ours, within, reversing,
the gifts we’re given, barely