Ecclesiastes Now

Ecclesiastes Now

And with the wind, a lost fixation
almost drawn unto my breast
will dress upon its memory
a self-inflicted pain to cling to--
a shred of life preserved in crystal
as unknown potential, seen
with that unseeing eye
embracing grief as nourishment
and resolute as death.

And with the wind, defining too
will cling to sadness, letting go
of source to cherish an emotion
needed, vague as Renoir's retina
to score humanity. A world set right
is wrong; pursuit of vanity the light
that shines upon another face of God.
~

Stability

Stability

The rippling sun completed its catastasis
upon the earth and spread the sky with denouement,
a pastel commentary on the vesper light to follow
as it sings of rest,
of hope,
of an expectant peace intruding
on a still relentless mind.

It is of such we celebrate
the paradox of life and death,
the orgiastic feast ensuing
as the meek presume
in their own arrogance to claim
supremacy, the centaur's beating hooves
caught stumbling
at the onslaught of the night.

It is a peace eviscerated by romance;
the centaur knows--is helpless
as the vespers close,
when mind and hoof are quartered
in a stall together, shaped to a reflection
of their vanity, their alien heritage
in combat as they dream,
their peace an insane hovering
until the lust of day.
~

Conflict Resolution

Conflict Resolution

The world's compatriots remind me
I may not permit myself too much
of that resource called awe; it relegates them
to the mists that morning just proposes,
never dignifies, though they are of my blood,
my passion, and indeed the clay
between my hands.

Persistent is the vision of the one
who plants her kiss upon the ether of the stars
and will not shrink from all the glory
of the hedonist below.

There is a death involved,
the passing of duality; its requiem
a song of strange redemption I embrace.
Interred, the warring of the apocalypse,
the sprinkling of the earth, the stone,
the liberated sword.

The dew is not of tears
but of the gift of the departing night
that casts refreshment as annointing
to the silence lingering,
It celebrates the birth of truth,
a sacrament to seal the certainty
that all is one.
~

A Perfect Love

That which each of us is, and cannot let go, is our common "I Am"....our common God that binds us as one...that we must share always, conscious or unconscious, as it comes home when we are open to it. It is personal. It is essence. Let it in. Here is all the God we want or need. This is the core of all that we may know, the kernel of awareness, the spark of substance disappearing in an ocean of the void.

A Pefect Love

He looked at her and said,
"I take you as my own, my breath, my blood,
the one that is the incense purifying
all the vessels of desire, the stream
that surges life through channels
dry with birth."

He knew the silence as his God.
He knew the presence of I am within him,
fair impossible beyond--
knew that there was nothing more
than emptiness creating,
nothing to surpass its beauty--
nothing more than now.
~

Now and Evermore

Now and evermore

The final flight is past.
With closing eye the cycle is complete
and heavy on the fair receiving ground
is reconciling, confirmation
of the fall--a quivering wing
to bless us all, to save us
from insouciance, naivete,
unfounded hope
.
Within the weak, the strong,
awareness hovering, -for there
among the dying are the winds of change,
the moment they've been waiting for,
rushing in to lead the dance,
to take that moment, singular,
conjunction of beginning and of end
that slips away from time,
enshrined somewhere corruption may not know.

Yet as our fingers loose their grasp,
there is one truth remaining;
one aphorism still is left behind...
there is no peace upon the earth.
~

Reality Buffet

Reality Buffet

Prepared illusion is the offering;
you are invited to remain, sustain
your pre-ordained existence as you wish.
The cost is just your freedom--
non-negotiable, I fear, but then
our common heritage is that
which sometimes we call God--
something cosmic bouncing
in the foetal twilight of our brains.

It may be envy of an innocence
that some will hold
fast to their breasts, never tasting
the largesse before us,
never wise as we, approaching
spirit delectation sensibly
with appetence forever unresolved.

Perhaps the church is right;
creation acts ex nihilo,
for even chimera presents
its shining mental child
amidst the atoms of the mind
irresolute to celebrate its own.

As for the mind, it too
shrinks from the questions
of its birth. There are no answers
and the feast serves questions of its own--
those as well, illusory. As such
I may be pardoned for my lack of faith in God.
My words are product of an emptiness
conterminous with me.
The good news is
I have some timelessness
to deal with that.
~

Which Was, and Is, and Is to Come

Which Was, and Is, and Is to Come

Timelessness is vague, I'm told
until I press for that specific moment
to express what truth is all about,
to shout back to the rooftops
that their god is centuries too late,
too willing to discriminate, too wise
for the unborn to catch him
in their consciousness without
a crumbling passport scribbled
on their knees.

I call upon those rooftop prophets
to forswear their hubris for a moment;
wear their sackcloth loosely,
binding neither souls nor progeny
for a millenium or two, until
the light is better, all the voices stop,
and out of nothingness emerges
the divine illusion that is ours.

It is the only source--out there
along the fence-rows where
the howling wolves patrol,
the sky is ever blanked by snow
and every sigh sent out is unreturned.

There is the refuge;
there the realm of God,
where senses fall--where stillness
is the cornucopia, and where
I Am is understood. The voice
grows fainter still, until
it may be heard alone
and wordless
and totality is known.
~

What kind of Paradise

Death is increasingly my friend
as breath subsides; it hides no pretense
of regret or fear, but lets me own it
as a coverlet that I will know
as now is lover of eternity.

It is most gracious. Candles
all around me silently snuff out
and share their peace
in trails of rising smoke
that teach me of their transience,
speak as voice may not
of faithless time--of a reward
confined to castles in the clouds
or barefoot, unwashed gods
with spirit swords.

This body graces me with death enough
to yield eternal joy:
if consciously, no promise need be made,
if not, a dreamless nap devoid
of tangled bedclothes,
thunderstorms outside,
or mattress out of warranty;
insidious alarms will not exist,
nor yet the "I" to stand apart
and wonder,
wonder why.
~

Reductio

Reductio

Beakers ready, gentlemen,
titration calibrated to the critical degree;

unveil the poetry distilled

until reagents strike at all the barriers

that we erect in love, in agony,

in little niches, shadowy within the walls

along the course to home.

The night is warm and lovely,

radiance too harsh for summer's mists;

encomium may palliate the grave

yet leave it heaving with the frosts of truth.

May I not listen to the night?

May I not revel in its sweetness?

There is the lover with a heart congealed;

I would not see the distillate.

I could not care, for I am moved

not by nuance but by the lumbering

advance, the shameless ploy

of glorious beasts too wise

to manifest themselves within

that paradise of art I face,

that soft chagrin emerging, ghostlike,

from around my pen.

~

A pause upon an evening walk

A pause upon on an evening walk

My thoughts are of survival.
The things that were and now forgotten,
seem to claim a patience that the earth imparts—
soft decay to spite the years spent underfoot
and celebrating change with silence,
waiting for the chance to leap
into the memory and chide it for its crass neglect.

What riches lie within the old man's wrinkled skin,
his clouded eye, the phrases almost said
and soon contained
beneath the coffin's lid forever—
their heritage concealed
in that successive line of dying age to come...

and there is earth down there
to hold it all; fecundity awaits the rain
of sorrow when the years come by,
get in the way, and then are brushed aside.

Here is where I wish to die.
This restless earth contains my peace,
my lofted spirit bourne upon the spring
that wells up from a depth
I never knew in life, a heritage
remembered from some gene within me,
or a misbegotten meme.

Such thoughts, contentious as they seem,
become my friends. They let me wander
through the cemetery, listen to the dead
and smile with them. They know me,
feel my passions, sing my songs of hope.
They congregate, there on my walk
to tell me that they understand. They speak
around me, through me, in my passion;
as their stones decay, they lift my moment
to confirm the stream of love I sense
as I walk where they last lay down,
my family in consciousness, my holy blood,
my consecrated rest.
~

The Villain's Song

The Villain's Song

Now there is some sort of truth in flashes,
a challenge to endure,
to let the change within me speak,
the words not mine alone,
but of that mystery that feeds me
from the spring of life,
the axiom of who I am.
However I may fight the god within me—
tear out his heart lodged stubbornly
within my chest, once more.

And yet the end is mine;
the means upon my hands,
the surging life my talisman.
It is the sweetness cloying,
the simpering surrender underneath my feet,
the colloquy of rage that fires my lust
of conquest now before the burning dies.
The skies are tempered now
with some divine forgetfulness enabling
a kingdom's power, a trust left far behind.

That glimmering across a far horizon fades
and truth is relative; the whispers
of an old, worn-out eternity
are now discarded as a dream
of old millenia, now let it go.
There is a triumph waiting over there,
clear, but light upon my mind
like blood beneath the snow.
~

Letting go

Letting go

It is as if one had an instrument
to see the self...a view not seen before,
with contours, depths and insights—
source beyond imagining.

That which will come
is of its own, not mine,
maintains its own integrity
and I am there to watch
and let that inner part of me
(that rules the universe)
decide my course—
to walk along, or go another way.

Breath yields
to breathless awe, aware
as if a life had changed its skin;
there is another heart, another peace
to penetrate and far away another spring
becomes a fountainhead for love.
A soul strikes out upon a virgin path;
a song begins.
~

Listening to the Silence

Listening to the Silence
(a tribute to the thought of Eckhart Tolle)

Unsought and arrow-like,
an instant happiness speeds in upon the virgin mind
when all desire is valueless;
the choice of misery an incandescent now,
burning out without a warning, gasping
as an infant left to wonderwhere the love is...

There is a way,
for there is silence everywhere to hear—
beneath the rocks, beneath technology,
beneath the roaring vanity of lust,
and when the ear will leave a space for consciousness,
there is an unexpected joy, impossibly defined,
a single-mindedness that understands the now.

You are already on the path;
there is no need for time.
You will not find it anywhere,
but there within you is a strange one
that you thought you knew.
Sit down, and look him over.
You have no need for clever thoughts,
for he is God...
and he is You.
~

Intimations of Hell

Intimations of Hell

From out of that preserve one cannot see,
from every soft dimension of the new
that forms itself where ether trembles, parts
and yields, where intellect threw up its hands
and words were not enough...it came.

One hundred thousand glances down, and then
belief suspends and breaks away;
it is as if there is no path back home,
the self departed,
sent a stranger in,
the body is an empty drum
regarded warily.
Identity awaits an infant now
alas, too late arriving
and the niche anticipates,
anticipates...
~

I think

I think

and righteous indignation flares...
the essence of defining is prestige.
So may I learn to love.
So may I cease to predicate
my wisdom on cliche,
my fatherland, my god.

So may my pride swell valiantly
when I may see
a beauty only, not a fault
in every soul who breathes upon the earth.
May I be blind,
may I be weak
and drop the gavel from my hand
as everyman walks by...
for there is grace in front of me
and all the lack of it is mine.

My love must flow from deep inside
my heart and not my mind,
and if I make of it, a product
of my intellect I want to feel
the heat of shame upon my cheek,
the rising scourge of judgement
I alone may throw
upon my sorry flesh; I need accept
no less than fire upon my head.

Were I the less humane
and lack a god to thunder at me,
I should be a bootless cinder
wandering within the cold embrace
of some divine contemptuous space.

In point of fact,
I am.
~

Awakening

Awakening

The inner I looks out, disinterested.
It is the same, the spirit realm in color—
a reality that I may know, no more
than those sweet mists of silence I adore...
keeping them intangible and rare,
yet absolutely there with each successive breath.

I am illusion, yes, incapable
of charting that which even brain
may not define. Yet I may be aware,
may listen, watch and share,
then store it all somewhere
that I may find within a mind
that somehow manages
to flout the blood, the ganglia,
the whirling cells
within this transient body—
fly awayto some transcendent realm
and play among the stars...and for how long?
The spiritwill not say
.
And here am I,
a hopeless little galaxy
with unknown tricks awaiting me
somewhere inside myself,
the peril and salvation my own laughter
at my infant consciousness,
my chunk of the divine
that whirls with all the rest
quite lost though quite deliciously
bemused.

Awake? Enlightened? I?
Join hands with me
in search of just ourselves. I sense
that it's the only choice that we can make
with all that mystery.
~

In the Name of God

In the Name of God

A fire was burning at the city's edge.
It seeped into the underground
and fed the twisted strandsof passion,
forthright in its zeal at first
and then like starving roots content
to feed upon the warmth of pabulum,
of mindless glory in patria,
even as the fatherland grew strong,
consumed all insight held secure.

A leader came that night
(for day was too intense, too bright
to bless the sleep of practiced dream)
and priestlike, signed upon their heads
the cross of victory and conquest—
as the sheep he led heard him proclaim
that war will not forsake the nations of the earth
but gather them together in its flaming arms,
and in the name of God.
~

En Garde

En Garde
There in the ghetto,rising with the pain,
it is as if the one deprived of consciousness—
targeted by ignorance, ego at the helm,
was born to anger—there, where raw emotion rules,
there the roots are suddenly exposed,
the unctuous light prevails, sardonic
in contempt of an intruding day.

The night is queen,
her reign upon the sodden street perpetual;
the housetops' failure to release it, slumbers,
drones through the torpid hours tenacious
as the sponge-like air of summer.

There are no choices here, no one
to single out the breath as savior,
to tender just the moment as a space
to set apart...no one, save the self.

Below persona,
buried as a blanket earth keeps faith,
the fever rests and bores into the soul.
The Trojans march and tears are burning.
It is night.
It is ever night.
~

The Mystery of Love

The Mystery of Love

Within the space of nothingness
there lies totality...dimensions
that the sailing ships will never find,
the lurking presence of the self
within the guise of consciousness
and yet unseen, unknown,
among the whirling wisps of every "I"
that stopped to trace its alpha
and in pretense face omega's fire.

There is no mystery in looking back
or building for the holocaust; the distant rumbling
celebrates the watch, the now in formless splendor
that the longing heart has waited for,
that still-creating tug upon complacency,
as if to draft a paradise forever new,
a mystical embrace to place imagining
too far beneath the stars. There is
a light bedazzling our fondest hopes,
devotion past desire that enters
like the dawn, makes saints to blush
at burning, the selfless rush to sacrifice
mundane.

It is enough to know, and not to understand
the stuff of all that is within creation's hands.
It is enough to burn in the refiner's fire,
consumed or no by a reality
that holds within its womb, itself,
its passion for the light, a birth of God
upon its bed, and ready with a bursting breast
to nurture with unprecedented awe,
the progeny of home.
~

To Gramps

To Gramps

An is, is there forever
where there is no fear, and like a fountain
joy is always bubbling up...from underneath.
The more is always still to come,
not summoned but released from unknown hands;
the light suggested only, stretched across the land,
cast in its power of gray, pervades
its heritage unto the day
...unto the day

and from the lost upon the lea
the cry of home regained,
the plow cut deeply in the ground again,
the patient men who found their glory
in the ones who rode along,
who loved and buried them—
these, enamored of the earth,
would speak forever, may
for those few listeners
who will not turn away.

It is a sacrament, this presence
half-remembered on a cloudy day
when now comes back with fresh,
refreshing grief, a smile returned again.
The light, the soft gray light
that filters through the grove
is harbinger of a reality
that makes of time, illusion,
scattering its rays across the field
of old regret, and leaving
only love behind.
~

Halfway to a Dream

Halfway to a dream

It lurks there, fitfully
around the corner of my mind
and will not show its face
like an April thunderfront, and
scarce aware that winter slipped away
a week ago behind a cloud of consciousness,
reluctantly occludes the air with nebulosity,
a shy Olympus in denial.

It isn't fair. Unknown, invisible,
it tests my patience, challenges
my paradise and leaves my equanimity
in shreds; reserves are meaningless—
my plaint as well.

It moves within my chest, a void
creating sleep, denying it
as some sardonic phantom torture
just outside the room...the stillness
its ally, not mine...the calm
a faithless sanctuary, death delayed
as if my very breath were there
to test a faith that I no longer own.

What kind of ghost reality
will mock its own existence...
claim its victim with an objectivity
in doubt...a phantom court
without a charge to read,
a plaintiff unidentified?

Indeed, what kind of God
could graciously endow
his Adam in a garden home
so redolent of unseen sin
diffused before his unborn eyes?

I do not know. For though millenia
have passed, I'm only of hominidae,
my blueprint is not finished and
my paradisal masterwork
amorphous , still.
~

Journey Apart

Journey Apart

The travelers had disappeared,
the trail obscured by choice,
the pale romance
of greed, of lust, and of the dancing flame
upon the hearth that always must distract.

If somewhere there were hidden tears,
there were the years to crowd into the way.
And in that cruel finality that settled in
between the glances when he saw her that last time,
wonderment
that it was right.

A body melts beneath the fire—
not so, desire.
~

As charged

As charged

For I am free.
Two stood upon a hill to watch the stars.
Will he who sees a lesser light create
a rhapsody? Indeed, will compromise
to glory sing of supernality?

The weapon of the liberator is his sword,
dividing thought. The one who questions
may not be the swallower of status quo;
the watcher on the hill will not become
the wallower in pain.Each one receives the gift
to stand aside, to celebrate his liberty
and not apologize. To join the flow of life, not death
and sing there in his heart
of flowering, and not decay,
to flout the politic with MLK
and see in compromise a death
to tolerate, and then to mourn.

I am free
to sing a thousand songs of love kept close
and bursting to adorn my tribute
to the marchers off to war. I would spread
the barrier of peace before them—
would display my tears without regret

and I would plead
my weakness, my hypocrisy,
my mindless hope.
For I am free.
~

Back in the Old Hometown

Back in the old hometown

You never think what is to come.
The little kid you smiled at
is a well-known author now, a thousand miles away.
The trash-filled lot you didn't want to see
is now a church—the nicest one around.
The old stockyards are gone.
Your young best friend is dead.

You think: that was the life I built,
my very own behind my third-grade eyes.
And Is the village park still there?
You'd settle for a journey back
across those 70 years—with jackknife probe,
dig up a marble, still intact,
and now three inches down. You lost it once;
it was a shooter (big one) and
you couldn't understand just how it got away.
Poorer when you went to bed that night—
You'd traded off six glassies for it...
Yes. The blue and white.
It's got to be the one.

You knew the grown-ups wouldn't care—
no miracles for them,
just irony; a kid's old rusty knife
could never be the tool
to resurrect their life.

The little park may still survive
upon a ghostly plain, you thought.
And not the marble, but a part of you
have lain there underneath the years
not quite forgotten,
yet with some bewilderment
to see the sun again
~

The Imponderable

The Imponderable

The thinker
stares into the space inside himself
with some ignoble wonder,
"Who am I...and why?

"To found some mindless form of life
and blame it on my sculptor...
ah I see the timid wraith
who runs away from my presumption;
no they say it is awareness
that I would not face head on.
I simply stare at him, and he will flee,
Now could it be it is not life I see
but farther back into the swamp
with some finality to focus on its germ
that writhes and agonizes to prevail.

"I am a stranger in this shell,
a lark without a song,
an infant arrow with a consciousness unborn;
I am an instrument that tripped,
became a God upon a grain of sand,
that tumbled in a bowl
of some primordial soup
unable to decay.


"I do not like it very well...
that I alone must roar out to the edges
of my mushy little universe, just what is fair
and what is merely salty air
to birth in, breathe, and die.

"Or just...perhaps...there is another path
that leads to the discovery of me
back down the line, for at the basic level
I do not know myself; the past I had
did not rub off—it moved me just this far—
the night is very dark as if to smother me.

"Or at the very least,
my curiosity."
~

His Bequest

His Bequest

It's back...
unsought...
that cold, wet lump within the mind,
that Frost had known so well.
It bids me close my eyes
look at my hands--
then open them, repelled;
they do not sculpt as his,
nor dare to hold the clay.
His day enlightened yet
by suns still burning down
upon the coverlet of sod
that will not seal the eloquence
of his poetic grace.

It is I
who ill affords the privilege
of suffering--the light beneath my stone,
the brightness of a legend in my youth,
the triumph of the one who found in loss
poetic deity, who flashed
the image of his mind to me
behind the rostrum
on that day with JFK.

It is the gnarled earth he leaves
upon our pedestal,
to grope and turn,
and turn away, remembering
the wall, the woods, the whiteness
of the birches—the man who loved the clay,
installed it in our consciousness
as one who used remembering
to guide his hands, his pen, and ours,
and then to close our eyes
and see.
~

Theatre of the Universe

"Perhaps," he said.
"It was like this..."
--void--
--a beam of light--
--a speck of consciousness--
--implosion--
--dark--

"Or rather, we perceive..."
--eternal God--
--explosion--
--a creeping on the earth--
--decay--
--paradise--

He shuddered, sputtered, "No..."
--I choose outrage--
--as my own creed--
--to gaze within--
--this floating cluster--
--of my body-- -
--borrowed for an instant-
--just to see--

"...that I am spirit here
within a micro, numberless eternity."
~

Reading the Obits

Reading the Obits

Hmmm.
I remember him.
Strange fellow.
Loner.
Used to see him on street corners.
Always wondered what he was thinking.

Ah, well.
He was a fixture here.
He'll be missed, although I hardly knew him.
One thing I can't get over—
I always thought he looked like me.
~

The Citizen of Heaven

The Citizen of Heaven

Patria...sacred to the one who walks upon it.
Hallowed...from the sacrifice that passed it on.
Home...from infant life that still reposes in the body.
There, it will entreat with that fair eloquence
the body politic employs--all torn from old nobility
that blood bears in its stream,
enriched from fragments that the heart
has stored away--the jagged memories,
the tears of those we loved,
the bells that sang from towers
still remembered as the years sink down.

It resurrects the dead, this fatherland
that cries for loyalty; its cunning tries the patient,
trips up the ingenue
who sees what is supposed to be and not what is.
It fosters bravery and blindness,
soars upon the winds of rhetoric,
and casts its stones with khaki kindness
at a world that interferes.

God bless the citizen
who follows on the highway where the marchers
said goodbye, took up their arms,
and faded in the far-off sky.
God bless his vision of returning...
bless the faith he musters for the heroes nigh
at that far turn ahead,
still washed in that pale emptiness
disclosed across the evening sun.

He is the watcher, still,
who hears the bells,
and hums along expectantly

...the blessed one.
~

Distilled Purity

Distilled Purity

One has to like the price,
which never fluctuates.
It floats,
like some suspended orb
imparted from another heaven, perhaps...
itself a consciousness unknown
and undefiled.
It is the good the ages seek,
still there before our eyes.

Were there a formula,
a prize to touch or taste,
it would not occupy the metaphor
of grace nor scorn its worshipers.
There's time to let the rain sweep down
the valley, time to revel
in the harvest when the fullness comes.
It's time to yield a little, come alive
to listen while the piper plays;
the air is sweet,
the song is of the eminence of day.

If there is any paradise
let us make room for it
within our precious now
though set upon with every fond device
of intellect to struggle to our feet;
the highest good not ours alone,
persists in that strange crystalline precipitate
when all is done—old Paul knew what it was
and called it love.
~

Which Way

Which Way

It is beyond closed eyes I see
that alien precipitant
of trembling in my heart,
a partner of my soul I never knew,
whose constancy is certain
as that looming space that throbs
before my consciousness, demanding
that the song be heard, impossible
the song, the song inviolate
and there upon a waiting breath.

Words make court
around the beauty I may not contain.
The goal is given not defined,
intoned, and thrown upon the board.
I take
I break
I share the body and the blood,
and there within the courtyard
is the prize millenia have dreamed to touch.

There...
within our outstretched hands
this very moment and
We shall not pass it by.

This is one you will find difficult. I do, too, but I had to write it. It is multi-layered and mystical but at the same time celebrates inevitability, a purpose to the universe not yet understood...but, nevertheless inevitability that is just beginning to dawn on me after so much reading of late. Make of the poem what you will, or nothing at all if you choose, but I hope you will take something from it. Yes, it has faults, and I think needs further polishing. But it is a fixation I am in love with.

Off Starboard

Off Starboard

Horizon is illusory.
White sails appear across the morning watch,
are lost at noon,
and sighted once again at vespers
when the antiphon is sung.

Beneath them at the rail
another sailor over there
may share the vision,
half of fantasy that I exist
and half in brotherhood of faith
in mythic splendor of mirage.

and there am I
when sails and sky
reflect the blooded sun
as I linger on the deck, yet blest,
my restive fingers touch
the talisman around my neck
while he in supplication to a headless God
beneath the little guillotine
suspended on his chest,
would be content to marvel
that a savior such as mine
could stretch his body on a yoke of wood
and die like that.
~

Perigee

Perigee

Time floods my consciousness
with pretense of reality that like a mist
is faithless, vanishing,
exchanging slavery with me.
That which I know, I am;
that which I see
is just an object over there,
apart from unity.

Yet all is one,
the one I cannot fathom--
one I surely cannot know.
As empty as it thus appears
one question looms essentially:
will it ever be
that I am not?
~

The Secret of the Void

The Secret of the Void

What is it? One may venture only
that it is the fullness of non-entity,
to call and wait for my response—
gravamen hovering, always there
and not to be content;

yet patient in its timelessness alone,
suspends infinity above my head
to render words a useless toy,
and bring about in me
a tumult that I could not do without.

For in that vortex of the undefined
is all the vast unknown, undreamed,
unfathomed truth transcending peace,
dissolving thrones, ceding eminence
to just one evening that a helpless God
let slip away.

Sic transit gloria.
~

Lacuna

Lacuna

It is another calibration of my journey,
pre-ordained but shrouded
in the belly I perceived in childhood,
distant signals, stuttering,
of flight a soul could make
beyond the apogee of earth
when home was much too lush,
the girl who spoke with velvet lips
too pretty to ignore,
the state of appetite too unrefined,
the lust within asserting its own arrogance
before the face of God.

And now in age, it smiles
in irony...it whispers,
"Do you know me?
Do you see?"

I do. And with a heart
half full, I seek
and smile at my own frailty...
and stumble
as the storehouse of the earth
still whirls beneath my feet,
albeit not so steadily.

Decay
and loss
and luscious fruit
are at my side,
and curiosity
about that former nemesis called death
may now contend together
in a strange equality I sense
but may not understand.

I have the watch.
It's midnight, and I shall not sleep.
~

Condensed Eternity

Condensed Eternity

The ripples
on the lake preserve
a history that is not yet
until the surface calms—
oh please, I see them still.
Look there, they have not broken
off upon the shore; we may not speak
of death nor in this breath
is license to forget.
~

Of Being

Of Being

A world must have its moment even as
the river and the lava flow.
The blood, an echo from the seething womb of earth—
the wind, defying origin and death,
are alien to footsteps which must cease
when wisdom speaks.

Then only humankind can hear.
Then it is that listening and stillness
find their wedding bliss...when
awareness of another plain drifts in.
Frisson within the heart arises; there
in that dimension made where time is set aside,
flesh and spirit chant the hours

and this transcendent consciousness
that you and I who walk below the stars
have dubbed humanity, must marvel
as it pushes back its intellect
and learns again
that love is all there is.
~

Illumine our Time

Illumine our Time

Escape with me.

Go forth from all your glorious hold
upon the hollow earth, that churning
vessel filled with pliant clay you seize
to build a higher day, a paragraph
of history your own, an immortality
that someone else may understand.

Your power exists as well
to throw it all away,
to celebrate the light alone
out there beyond penumbra,
waiting for the grinding hours
to have an end.

You need not put your shoulder down,
or prove your worth, for midnight
wears away, the dancers wake;
the sea is crystalline out there
beyond the shore. There is
a bacchanal of joy that waits
for tired sins to dry their tears
of reticence; hope is for creating—
love is for forgetting sometimes.

These are the years for gathering.
Escape with me.
Move down the road a little farther
...where the light is better.
There is healing in the air,
and just a little time to breathe.
The dance begins again,
the unknown set aside awhile.
For us, the sunlight sings.
~

Postulate

Postulate

Some time
before the biped thought
of history, he carved out image
of himself, and in the murky dawn
of consciousness, began to look around
to see just how he fit, and how it was
that he had come to be; he wiped the drool
from off his chin and then exclaimed prophetically,
"My God! I am alone, out here. How can it be?"

And thus, his magnum opus, "Genesis"
(his first, obviously) appeared
beneath his stubby fist upon the stone,
a quasi-answer from his mallet
and the thought-begat Divinity,
and all the brethren cried, "Amen."

But they were faithless fellows
and a few millenia beyond,
Big Bang appeared, extruded from
the pangs of yet another womb—
happily dubbed intellect by some,
and leaving others
with their wounded vanities
to wonder what had taken place
before old Father Time
had set the fuse afire.

It could not have been desire;
a lonely God who needed
toys and subjects, will not wash,
and leaves us at the helm
without a helmsman...poor Adam
sputters, cries, and from his fire
before the cave removes a blackened stick
to mark his nascent words upon the wall,
enjoins his deity to silence
while he writes, "In nomine Patri...."
as the spirit and the son look on,
content awhile, to wait.
~

Recreating Gods

Recreating Gods

Let us sit down together now
to form reality. It isn't hard.
We do it every day
without a conscious push,
and there it is, staring back,
a joyous, often fearsome monster toy
that never goes away.

What kind of wisdom may apply—
furrowed, relic of the wars?
Perfection, then, is not an option;
for there are too many tears.
Aha! To make a point,
that surely is the sense
and sensibility, the magic power
between our palms, and vanity
the joy to fill the cornucopia of time.

No, someone chose instead
the only gift that could emerge
from ghostly hands, that longing look
that history is always dredging up—
the one that tears horizons down
to feast on bread and wine
it never saw before, nor entertained
upon the slate of its fond paradise.
~

At the End of the Day

At the End of the Day

It is as if there were a pall
upon my little universe, intruding
since I had gathered it so comfortably,
insisting on the sense of it,
extruded as a past gives way
and hardly anything is lost.

But yet not so,
it glowers at me sometimes;
its familiarity contrived in myth,
in lessons that I learned too late
to save my pride—
its smiles misunderstood,
its irony forgotten on the steps outside.

I have become too old
to barter lassitude for zeal, to trace again
that twisted trail of hope and chance;
I moved on down it, trusting
on a crusty, yet farsighted God
to meet me halfway out.
And there he was, always out of reach.

It's misty on the land out there—
not like it was, and what I gather in
is not the harvest; it is much too strange.
Dying will, I think, turn out to be
not all that much of peace or plenitude,
but puzzlement.
Where did they put away my world?
~

Consolation

Consolation

Look down to gaze upon the hours
moving through the void of unconcern,
forgetfulness on every side
and isolation dear
because it is the only thing
to cling to.

Stop...where birdsong knows another plain,
where peace is blended with the rain
of sorrows entertained, and touched,
and smiled upon because they still sustain
the present in all time—
the childhood kissed,
the love that slipped away,
the youth that bowed
and stretched forth aging arms
to hold the sun.

Then turn with me;
it is not done, and when
the turning is at rest
there is the rainbow
to reflect what it does best,
the final memory of light.
~

Greater Things than These

Greater Things than These

There was uncommon breath
in that wild wind that swept across the sky...
a surging barely understood, and there
to claim the reason we believe.

Did you see it there, creating? Leaving us
a time before the night comes on
to be ourselves, to shout against the storm
that in the knowing there is power
all the more for being undefined.

How far beyond our fantasy
is such contentment bred
from missing echoes
tearing at the flood of consciousness,
roaring at desire, demanding fire
upon the tinder of a dry and hopeless heart!

Then is the wellspring fresh and nourishing
out of the ground abandoned in despair.
Then is the wondrous moment we may see
emerging from our hands, a genesis undreamed,
the very instant of a prophecy that two millenia
upon the promise of a ragged Hebrew Lord
awaited, trembling, that day.
~

Strange Oracle

Strange Oracle

A boy who spoke as an aged man
sat on a stump in the woods
to ponder North and its deliciousness.
"If I were youth alone" he said,
"you would not listen, or
if I were age, you would defer
a moment just to be polite, and then
swing wide your soul ship's helm,
your captaincy nirvana bound."

Few undertook the forest voyage;
fewer still saw mountain tops
behind the trees, nor wisdom
in the moment of eternity.
They merely rested there upon the stump,
for any consciousness of unity
will cast out time
and bounds,
and destinations in exchange
for glimpses of the truth.

Then it is to seize exuberance
of youth. the open patience
of the aged visitor.
Then one may detect beyond the mists
a new reality unborn, undying,
always there within,
without a prayer,
bedecked in joy--unseen, untouched,
unqualifiable, the light of light
eternally begotten, God from God
and most would think it
very, very odd.

I hear you, on your isolated stump,
your mountaintop disguised...
you are right, of course.
There is no age entitlement
for wisdom, and
there is no journey,
no arrival, nor decay.
In truth, there is no "no"
at all, to set apart
the paradise of now.

But there's a quantum jumping orbits
quite without permission,
quite without, indeed, a cause.
And yet sometimes
if we should look the other way,
he does not leap at all. It's time
to celebrate the little fellow,
for he opens up our minds,
our Bachs, our Michalangeli,
before we ever even wonder why.
~

The Vanishing God

The Vanishing God

Go home, old man, turn to your bed
and draw the covers to your eyes;
there is no papa in the skies
to hear your prayers,
were you to dare to frame them.

No spirit hovering?...to flood your mind
with golden streets? No harps
employed by pretty messengers
with sunbeam hair?...no enemies
to tread beneath your feet?

Go home.
Our censers do not swing for you;
our choristers sing out of tune,
our crowns, bereft of stars,
are tawdry bibelot
to weigh you down. Ironically,
your heaven just passed you by
and left your saving Lord to die
alone.

All you have left is the unknown,
a bit of awe, perhaps,
a sense of mystery
and cries to an eternity of silence
unaware that you are even there.

Your peace, your rest
is not in sacrifice or penitence
but listening, never mindful
of reply.

Old fellow, what have you to say?
"My children, how I wish
that you might understand
that I am merely blessed--
my only loss, impossibility
to speak of the ineffable
around my head...confounded
only by its pious adversary,
love."
~

Uncommon prayer

Uncommon prayer

it is for me to watch...
to stand in where the shadows were,
absorb the light
and fill my heart
with those vignettes of knowing,
skittering before my inner eyes
like diamond dust.

Here is my chance to age
with wisdom not my own
but wander here between the stones,
their relative array, perhaps,
a sage's gift in chiaroscuro
stone, to stone, to stone.

The night is for the cherishing,
the silent requiem,
the first and last 'Shalom'
to fade without regret.

This is where the shadows were...
Shalom to feast upon and to forget
but for the watchers,
emulators of the Holy Ones,
the breathless worshipers at Stonehenge
echoing the chant of God
across ten thousand years

and you may hear the whisper of it
now, within...death is a dream
you saw at Easter Island, and
upon a mountain in Peru.
Watch
along the deathless hours
before the sun appears.
~

Shadow Grace

Shadow Grace

How is it
that I know
that not to know at all
is gift of the divine?

How is that
no thing at all
is all the riches of infinity?

How is it that
no God, no friend
to walk beside me
leaves me
still in awe,
devoid of insight of my own
but for the absolute in ecstasy to know
that nothingness may not depart
and I am not alone?
~

Mind to Mind

Mind to mind

The door is closed. Behind it are
the congregation of the saints
and as the silence churns, each listens.
From each tower flows dharmata's peace,
the sum of emptiness, the breath of the divine.

From fantasy as this, the lore of hope—
a flood, bare of design, emerging,
feeding its perfection, bursting
as a flower to share a precious frailty
in its uniting. Now the welkin has its sway;
come rein the horses with me,
for the mystic skies are full of thunder
and the day is ours.

Come quickly. Who will pass?
You know.
You are the keeper of the door.
~

My Own, my Native Land

My Own, my Native Land

The golden grain stretched out like sheets
upon the Kansas plain, like birthright, innocent
behind the festered sun and unaware
of upstarts in the rolling Minnesota countryside,
defiant to the blistering avalanche of corn.

There were the sidewise glances,
prudent in their reticence, worn pencils
tucked behind their bibs, the markets'
vagaries aswim, Chicago far the east of home.

In Iowa as well,
the warriors of the plough,
the timeless men of bread,
the conquerors of earth and sinew,
beast and baronet,
to thread the cloth of motherland
before our birth.

Thereto in Illinois, my cradle sanctuary
nested from the mountains
and the alien sea; I am the listener
within this deep midwestern ground.

It is not still where I have been;
the voices and the footfalls
make their print in time
and may not be erased.

And though my ashes fly in space
my breath, my bliss, my bower
rests forever in the heartland of the earth.
~

Never in Pursuit

Never in pursuit

The stumbler thought of happiness
and how it crept upon him
as a spectre, extracting from the mist
without a dare, to resurrect
the Buddha's absolute delight.

There was a precedent, of course—
a self accepted ecstasy, then set aside,
forgotten as a surge of joy
may never know reprise,
will lose itself as motherhood
may bare her breast, each sacrifice
an act of love.

It is today I stumble, giddily, with him.
It is my moment to rejoice,
to celebrate no cause
but all this universe may tender,
sculpting men from mists,
molding its beatitudes
upon the desert sands,
departing with its kiss.

Ourselves are not for burial,
nobility not for the seeking,
terror not an overture to run away.
There is a fertile ground
for tears to dwell in, to enrich
the harvest tree of mirth.
It stands.
It stands, you daughters of the earth.
Cantabimus et psallemus, Alleluya
~

Strangers on the Bus

Strangers on the Bus

Your world is just about
to branch away from mine
just as the two of them converged
moments ago, and settled in;
out of thousands that I see each day
what makes me look at you
and trace your gaze into infinity?

A commonality is far away.
Did you once share a baby's wooden blocks
and build a tower for his delight,
to shatter down? ...and build again
for yours?
Did you forget?

I look across the chasm
of the consciousness that we might share,
and see it widening.
I see the numbers ranked like soldiers
in your mind, your schedule crowding in,
the memory of scent you know so well
upon the girl you'll meet in the hotel
at five.

Our lives are not commodities
we would exchange, yet still they sear
the moment with their nonchalance,
their downward glance, their inner lights
of mutuality that filter down like dust,
the likes of common friend, of taste,
of faith—all silent hasting to their rest.

There is no greeting, no goodbye,
and no acknowledgement
that either of us make.
But there is thunder
rushing in to our vacuity,
resounding still, the cry of the pursuit
in vain that you and I,
the thoughtless hosts of mystery,
will never entertain.
~

A Pre-Primary Resolve

A Pre-Primary Resolve

Allow this day
to fill with ivory-tower dreams
and carry to the booth
the paradise of hope...
one candidate
whose passionate desire
would place strong arms
upon the pilot wheel,
enabled by the miracle
of peace.

~

In Cenotaph

In Cenotaph

One may not name them, for they died
as faceless as they lived, their monument
unseen, its peak above the clouds,
remembering, as they could not forget,
projecting on their beds at midnight,
acts of faceless love.

Theirs was the courage just to be,
for that is what love is, that hate is not—
can never be, for it does not exist.
Love's incompleteness is our gift,
our stuff of dreaming, and
the mortar of our soaring cenotaph.

Love is the song of faceless ones
and ours, for it is all of us,
the countless sands of Abram's sea
who hear the call to be.
~