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.
~

At Gravesite

At Gravesite

How is it I draw near to you
as I approach this common ground,
yours above and mine beneath
connecting our mortality yet still
symbolic of the separation that took place
as I laid you there apart from everyday.

I know you hover there with me,
our mutuality in tribute to the Adam dust
that formed us, carrys us along
to ride the winds
across the fields and towns forever
while these minutes here
when I look down, resist,
and in our tryst pause to allow
'I love you's' here and now
to bridge the days beyond
when I must turn away.

The visits carry vanity as well.
I choose them to assuage
my feelings of neglect; it never works.
The stone, defiant, strong
in its assault upon my eyes
betrays the irony its vigil promises.
Its song of death alone
is all I hear behind my upraised heel.

But it is not the ash, the dust, the winds,
the stone of taciturn reproach I keep
upon my heart as I drive off.
It is your voice I hear again,
"Dad, I'll always be here, loving you."
You knew I needed that.
~

Port Discovery

Port Discovery

The mind on course is nothing but obtuse,
recalcitrant and leaderless.
Silent particles stream by unnoticed
and a soul doesn't care;
the stopping ports are easier...
until the ones and zeros re-arrange
and an electron jumps
the other way... not much incentive
for another listless hour on shore.

No matter then, the prayers are said,
the songs are sung,
and suddenly there is new joy
upon the threshold of the day.
That which is known
is much too prone to cloy.
The time has come
to celebrate the open door,
and why?...not for the prayers
or songs intoned too readily.
No, there is more.

I am a captain with a visionary crew
who long for the unknown,
along with me are ready for
a midnight rendezvous
when we shall toast the sunrise,
set the sail upon uncharted sea
and drink the wine of love.
~

Reliquary

Reliquary

See? Beyond the hill crest,
there laid down the words,
the tokens of a life as unintended gifts
like gems remaining, precious,
to be gleaned as one more little universe
to save—an ember of a personhood
surviving death.

Then seek them out, for they
are worth the price of the uncovering.
As monks illumining the word of God,
retire to your cell and dip your pen;
the commonality of all the saints—
of you and I is on that page,
encapsulate in time.

Scholars pore upon
words dropping down...
upon a timeless stage,
upon a now that celebrates
each time the mind says yes.

But it is mind that needs no more
for monuments will wear away.
While for an age or two,
mortal clues are everywhere...
these gatherings, however spare,
will prove to be enough

to die for.
~

Santa Fe

Santa Fe

It is the hovering time,
moments made to bear defining.
Someone should declare when it is night;
the dear white ghosts slip down the corridors,
wordless, in and out of rooms
as if the walls did not exist— and commerce
is a strange and other-world imagining
fading quite away, just after eight o'clock.

Sound is sacrilege, gesture frames the hour.
And from the morgue below, the cart is bound
for 722; there is no one to weep.
There was a prayer a little while ago:
"You know, of course, dear lord,
I have the promise of my son...
that he won't let me die alone up here...
and in the dark."
~

A Remote Christmas

A Remote Christmas

It was perfect today. My wife and I were alone, dinner had been
eaten, and the beloved family were hundreds of miles away.
We love them dearly, but today we did not miss them. We
loved the quiet, the finemusic on the DMX, the warmth inside,
the good reading from my recliner chair (I'll tell you the book
if you ask) and the time to reflect that there is love wherever one
is, if one takes time to absorb it. The peace was tangible, the
sense of gratitude, suddenlyprofound. I do not credit my own
spirituality for that, but I do thankfully credit an spirit of
acceptance that says that is what communion with God is all
about...a taking of the moment, breathing it, and finding that
loving all that is, can be a simple thing if it is simply permitted
to be. The God part was not out of meditation, or worship, or
even gratitude, but merely experiential for its own sake. It
required no creed, no sense of duty, no falling upon the knees,
and certainly not any relics of childhood or even faith, to grasp it.

No football games were on at my house. There were no little
ones to discipline (though that too, is lovely), no Christmas
wrap mess to clear away, and not many dishesto wash. But,
yes, for this former Christian who pried God off his throne,
demoted Jesus from his scapegoat sonship, and derided the
nobility of intentional sacrifice, I duly noted that love had
seeped into the room, the path that Jesus illumined still
showed the way, and the God that the centuries were seeking,
still filled my heart. For an iconoclast like me, that was enough
of a miracle, though not unexpected, to overflow the remainder
of my days on planet Earth.
~

The Metamorphic Heart

The Metamorphic Heart

It's Christmas after all.
Of sweetness it may not be wrong,
this chamber of the damned,
with destiny to take the spears of politesse,
break, and give again,
live as if the age were new...
as if there were a healing God within,
not out beyond the stars. It knows
the perfidy of humankind.
It knows itself.

For there is bleeding, here, and cold.
There is crusting on the heart;
a wellness quite apart from charity,
a schism of the soul that never heals at all
but festers and divides
and in its agony succombs to war.

It's Christmas.
There is death upon the field of sweetness;
There is valor dressed in blindness
for the zeal to coverup.
There are carols out there,
loud enough to mask the sighs,
the wrenching, last goodbyes we say.
There is a baby there, to pray to.

Somewhere, lost out there
among the penitents upon their knees
...caught up in all this splendor,
there is peace.
~

Blithe Spirit Company

Blithe Spirit Company

My daily walk for exercise has changed;
for there are souls along the path
I have not seen before. Oh yes,
the regulars are there,
and smile at me, too often share
my miseries from ice and snow
and muscles slow to dance in synch
with my advancing age, but these!...
the shy ones...they who subtly appear
before I am aware, and then are gone.
What can I make of them?

They're at the borderline of sight;
they catch that old third eye
designed for sensing—clusters
of old friends at points along my route,
then family I supped with
while the energy of breath prevailed—
the ones I didn't get to say goodbye.
And there they wait
to see me make my rounds,
and Zounds! I don't know why.

Perhaps it is because
I soon will join them
on their vaprous other side
and want to get me ready, or
more probably it is another way
to let me know that they are there,
to catch me in a time when I
am not preoccupied with pleasures,
pain, or measuring my own
crude mortal quest to reach them
from my sterile room.

For on this mobius circle of my walk
I have the luxury of silence plus
the absence of demand, and they are free
to stand beside my route
and unassailed, stretch forth
the lavish purity of love.
~
["Poor Dean", you say; "he's cracking; we'll be gentle
with him, let him keep his imaginary friends. They
are harmless, as is he, so long as we don't get too close."
Ah, fare thee well, my friends, I promise not to drool
on you. And I don't really see them...just 'almost'...and
that was enough to bring on this crazy poem. Yeah,
I think they're there, all right, but I don't stop my
circuitous rounds long enough to talk to them. It's just
that I never knew ghosts could be quite so much fun. :-) ]

In Full Humanity

In Full Humanity

They were naked and were not ashamed,
pristine, unknowing of the world—
unknowing of themselves, the undertow
to draw them down,
beneath their surface paradise.

For that is what it was,
a crust to hide the deep, the mystery,
the richness of a feast
set forth in royal David's city,
hidden still beneath the tree,
the man and woman unaware,
the linden in the garden
apart from innocence.

A woman and a man,
a crust of ignorance, a tree...
there was a sensitivity to good and evil
waiting for a fall.
There was a hunger for the festive board,
an overlooking of the cost, a restless urging
...and a stable rest.

There was a Galilee—
an infant god, they say,
who would not have them call him good.
Was there a tree, for his undoing?
The wood of faithless fruit?
The wood that touched his blood...
would it be death that sired a homo sapiens?

No, it was life that taught them.
It was the tree from which was plucked
the consciousness of good,
the love which is reality,
the gracious gift of knowing
we may be
all that awareness will allow
in full humanity.
~

The Question Man

The Question Man

There goes the question man.
See how he walks?
Deliberate, and not like others
...not at all.
His lust, unlike our own,
is for the shadows right and sinister;
they play a different melody
for him. They seem
to sing of soft excursion,
tasting of an eastern shore
already redolent of Asian mystery.

He is the question man...he seeks,
not struts, for wealth is not ahead of him,
but dancing by his side.
How singular his pride of heritage
laid down by books, not blood,
an overwhelming flood of curiosity
that sends him off to islands
where the tradewinds call,
and he may answer with a spirit song.

His prize is in the quest,
his being filled not with desire,
but with the fullness of Matisse,
black hair down to the waist,
bare footprints on the beach,
the crinkled pages placed most carefully
beside the mythic bed, and left there
for a maiden fond of dreaming,
longing for a different strand
another midnight might disclose.

So much for the question man
who walks his magical domain
within the crystal globe upon his desk.
So much for nostrums
in the wake of shipping lanes
that cloud its clarity.
It is the questionning that drives romance,
and not its appetite.
It is the dance unending that will breathe
the tropic splendor of the night
~

From the Third Eye

From the third eye

These are the words that write themselves,
phrases struck in steel
and driven into me,
borne of tablature and burning,
speaking only of their silence
as Atlantis, lost in dark constancy,
might re-appear out of the sea
knowing, still unknown,
yet known to be unseen.

There is a cloud upon my brow,
a doubt embracing certainty,
a synthesis of thought and draught
quite rich enough to taste. It augurs death;
it augurs why; it smiles and spins away.

I smile as well.
This unknown knowing
leaves a trace to follow...the ellipisis
saying this is not the end. It augurs breath
a little while, the mind upon
an open path, the pristine gift
suspended somewhere
just beyond our eyes.
~

Thoughts at Bedtime

Thoughts at Bedtime

What may be said
of the phenomenon
perceived just once,
and almost not at all,
that were it known
across the galaxy,
would shake the stars?

Might it be likened
to the faded signal of distress
picked up one time
out of the ocean wilderness,
the lonely listener himself unsure
of what he heard?

Invasion of the lost upon
a single consciousness let go,
or tumbling in the mind forever
is creation, helpless in its stormy power,
a spark that may have glowed there
for a moment off in space,
ignited by an infant god.

It is too much.
That which is there, or was,
is never not,
will not release its hold,
most certainly may never be dismissed,
for it will streak across the inner skies
with all the force
of an intrepid infant universe
to claim a destiny as faithful as our own,
to life
or to another certainty
the bald impertinence of death.
~

Inside Out

Inside Out

The face is still,
the personhood a mask
and from outside, there is no door.

The world slows down,
its voice as if a worn down tape
devoid of presence, drifting,
lost in its pursuit of time;
it is a galaxy of strangeness
where a breath of lonesome melancholy
would relieve, but still the wind forgets.

How taciturn, outside,
how churning is the turmoil from within.
How resolute, the longing of the sperm
to tear into the heart
and liberate its glory or its agony,
its oratorio to God, its plaintive hope for love.

How curious indeed, upon its evanescent throne
is love, still innocent of thrusting light,
still hopelessly naive
before the pounding hooves that heroes ride;
how frangible its shell.

Millenia preserve their heroes very well,
although their colors bleed
upon the pages that we read,
upon our inner souls when we allow them,
though the face,
yes most certainly the face
is cold and still.
~

To seek the "I"

To Seek the "I"

Amoeba swims...
unconscious consciousness and then
a growling in the earth...
divide, and multiply and co-create
and life encounters life;
the ganglia reach out...and touch!

Now there is one again, comprised of two
and as I trace the "I," I think I know
right up to the edge of my awareness;
there's a dangling thread
that reaches in between the dark,
still causing me to wonder at the little boy
who stood there in his coveralls
content to watch the world,
and not inclined to undertake a trip
back to the womb for insight.

That is my beginning?
An egg and an intrepid tad
out on the town? No blinding light,
no "ta da" from the band?
...and my hotel without a single star?
No, thanks.

There must be more
than just a one-celled shiver with a friend
to make an end to nothingness.
Just who pronounces me an "I"
a nano moment following the void?
...for I did not.

Aha, break out your best champagne,
for if there is no death of consciousness
there is no birth; around the sifted solid
where we just presume to play, the kindly guides
prepare our downy beds again for astral flight
as they have done each night, a scant eternity
without the slightest, "Thank you,
I shall have another glass." Perhaps

it's best that we not speculate
on origins of knowing who we are, and why.
Perhaps, indeed, discovery of what it is to be
is cosmic study quite enough
for this our tiny corner of infinity.
~

Beauty and the Beast

Beauty and the Beast

There swims in each of us, a catalyst for dreams,
an urgency that calls from shores that never were,
a twinge of terror, lining distant paradise,
uniquely all one's own.

No one knows where all this comes from.
Oh, perhaps it is innate desire
to temper every fortune
with a modicum of pain, a hint
that if we know that all is not quite well,
we simply shrug it off
and chase the angst away.

First sight became
a theatre of absolute deliciousness,
a goddess with the right excess
of pulchritude to send
my conscious spirit spinning off
on errands of delight, my body
journeying a fantasy of flight with her,
for no one else created in a smile
such sinister conspiracy of mirth.

It was not she who cowered
at the brutish mien
so tactfully unroared,
but I, the ingenue, who saw
the beast had not consumed her; no,
he lurked there in her carnal confidence,
his quivering claws impatient
for contumely, catastasis
and my condign consent.
~

Of Loss and Victory, of Poverty and Wealth

Of Loss and Victory, of Poverty and Wealth

It is a curious tree of paths
we take to justify the place we are,
the bold and sacrificial leap to insecurity--
one step to left or right to override
our common quest for righteousness,
for unknown breathless wonder far ahead.

Higher on the climb, the codicils
to all the monuments of history,
bravura songs of loyalty that we were taught
amid the hands on hearts,
the festive manifests we sang
before the home team
flashed upon the scene.

Looking down, we never knew
that we were lost before the game began...
that we were fed upon decay,
the victors' bounty measured in its septic glory
only at the birth of consciousness...too late,
too late to claim the prize
beyond a price called love.

At the height, the branches will dissemble,
tremble at the tentative alighting
of the dove. They are tender infants,
prone to alarm beneath the laurels of success.
And it is not for us to know
their sheer audacity to grow
beyond the riches of the earth
into the skies of peace.
~

Of Prophet Stuff

Of Prophet Stuff

They made the wilderness their womb,
the lairs of beasts their motherland,
and in their eyes, the fire their god
had kindled from a spark of spirit flint
embedded in their souls...faced the terror
of an irony millenia would never understand.

What was it, spurred their zealous hearts
to speak the voice of the Invisible Divine?
What stony pre-Damascus pathway
led their bloody feet out of the mire
of history and to the portals of the king?

It seems to be the beasts
we may not send away.
These hairy men knew them too well,
and lay beside them,
heard their pounding blood,
their breath,
their agonies of birth;
they knew the bond of consciousness' embrace,
the seeds of love emerging from a common weal
and spreading as a tree unites the earth and sky.

They felt the flow of passion
that could only grow within a silent intellect,
a peace,
and a creative sigh.

And then they preached and stormed complacency.
To every wasteland they were bound
in stubborn zeal until the chariots came down
to bear them to our dreams,
a corridor of voices streams them on to us,
scarce listening, scarce reaching back.

For now the voice is ours, the messengers
within our flesh, still ready to proclaim
their thunder birthed out in the wilderness,
a feral peace, still burning in our hearts
a strange, compelling legacy of love.
~

Tell

Tell

We speak the language of the dead.
That which we describe
is only echo in the empty hall of history,
a ghost of memory, imperfect,
whispering against the walls
to make its point, and lost, forgotten,
dry before the wind of change.

It is the change itself that lives,
that vibrates, sings the Gloria;
It is the power of creation,
bearing life undreamed and hopes
that never knew to be expressed,
an ecstasy quite reachable
inside the stillness of a time
just set apart.

Somewhere the sounding of a bell proclaims
an angelus the heart alone recites,
a hymn to the divinity of joy poured out
in that pure sacrament of love.
Soft and far away.
I heard its echo somewhere

...ringing.
~

Another Vantage Point

Another Vantage Point

I visited the shadow world,
preoccupied with shadowed thoughts
that smoke across the page,
and vanish in the light of reason.

That is to say, it is the proper way
to deal with thoughts like these,
the ones with worrisome exteriors,
fuzzing up the mind...to visit, sift them
through the lens of the unknown.

Is it not pure sacrifice of light
that sculpts an evanescent joy?
Send the night upon my heart
and let the shadows dance
their pure, seductive art
that streaming day would cloy.

Something else occurs beyond
the simple blockage of the sun.
Something past humanity
tears at romance, makes possibility
of pathos and of festival; it speaks
of rest and restiveness. and sends
its waning light on pilgrimage to truth.

Shout down the stealth
of gods who blaze across the sky
upon their firery chariots; their myth
is wearisome, their legacies of death
are past design. The time is ripe
for children's games at twilight
when the shadows play, and tease
and disappear into their history,
yet there in immortality
for still another day.
~

The Scent of God

This poem is dedicated to Beryl Singleton Bissell, whose book of this name
reveals her love affair and sometime contretemps with God. I thank her for
graciously consenting to a poetic adoption of her wonderful book title.
The poet makes no claim of representing her thoughts; these are his own.

The Scent of God

To speak of deity
is automatic blasphemy
inside the gallery of man.
Here pontificates
the power beyond the stars,
who listens in when his
creation cries and sighs
and tactfully reminds him
of the plight of poor benighted
creatures on that speck of dust
that floats upon the milky way...

the grand old man between
the galaxies who loves and hates
according to the chirps
on planet earth...the triune spirit
who with cosmic skill unleashes
lightning on his enemies,
salvation on his friends,
and tomblike mystery to shroud
his everlasting court.

He is thought to come some day,
but in the interim, a sometime friend
who dwells quite far away for most of us.

...until...

our eyes turn far off from the skies,
our cup is emptied of his blood,
and we consent to do the listening.

Thereupon, the tongue is bound,
the breath will bear Jerusalem
unbreathed, the senses yield but for
a single vapor on the air,
the everlasting mystery ineffable,
that is the scent of God.
~

November falls asleep

November falls asleep

Outside, a world of grey...
no one there to share the bravery
of weakness, only those few ragged leaves
that fight the wind before
they resurrect, low flying
in their feeble lust to seek
a winter niche within the wood.

It is a time to celebrate regret,
to think of tears that wet the cheek
in spring, and dried in summer's heat—
of grief postponed until the seasons sighed
and left their challenge incomplete.
It's time to set out thoughts
and make them work, not just drift
into another winter unredeemed.
The leaves do that.

Desire forsakes itself.
There is too much sterility
to cold, forboding ground
that may not whisper of the spring...
too much to leave behind,
abandoning the prize of breath,
of dream,
of warm creative light that bursts out
from compassion's womb.

It takes departure
from a foetal berm,
impetuous to join the sojourners
who dare approach the city
where the pilgrims stay. It is there
around the sacrament of peace
they break the bread of unity
and drink the wine of love.

Beyond the gate are monstrous things
I have not known before,
and from the core of me
is sung the antiphon,
Thanks be to God!
~

Mind, reaching into the void

Mind, reaching into the void

The forest path pretends a voice
of purpose through distraction,
birds sound their curious intent, and then
the voices all around will cease to be,
time slows down, the lake
too far away to break the spell.

There when the leaves were down,
I bought the measure of an ending
that would crush a saint, a wild cry
inside me, resonating in a memory
engraved in pain that only I could know.

Late autumn is the time for gathering
not only of the harvest, but the fruits
of loss, the tearing, grinding
resignation of the sundered heart,
ever too obtuse to understand

Then it is one may perceive
the place within, the soft retreat
that speaks a stranger tongue—
a flight from mindlessness
to that familiar silent hovering.
A restless peace it is, but on another plain,
with still another kind of joy
that glows behind the sunset clouds.

There is a promise there
that one may count upon—
to be sure, as yet unknown.
The flight is past.
The mind is home.
~

Surprise

Surprise

Equanimity is like that—
great for day by day.
Triceratops comes out to play
among the smilers, scoffing
at his claimed reality;
the screams are left there,
hanging for a time,
when creativity refuses
to be stuffed back in the box.

The poor old fellow, horns and all,
will not be taken seriously,
no matter how he mugs
before the camera; believers yawn
until the soldiers join the march
behind the flags and pretty girls,
their pretty legs--and then the band!

Our ugly, born again,
intrepid hero with his plated armor
never had a chance;
it is his destiny to be unloved
and munch his vegetables,
and sink into the pit
that feeds the armed machine

far past the Pleistocene
that hovers on his dream.
~

But, is it true...

But, is it true...

A mind may settle in a groove
of circumstance suspended,
unaware of all the deep beneath,
all the sweet bouquets tossed out
by early travelers taking pity
on the darkness that they saw ahead;
they gave the best of theirs to give,
the little spurs of light , the baubles
that would never lead them forward,
only penetrate and stay,
waiting for their call.

And there they wait, the sperm
of new philosophy amid the flowers,
patronal in release, and bearing
thunder in their genes, a tracing
that will probe the silent ages
for the helpless now, and flashing,
flashing an integrity that says, "Go back
still more to celebrate
the birth of consciousness."

"Go back, into the womb of God,
the true mother of your soul.
You bear in your own body
all the scars of sacrifice,
all the seeds of wisdom,
all the triumph of eternity."

There is the litmus of belief,
the greatest postulate of faith,
and it is you.
~

Mission Statement

Mission Statement

My empire is the wind of change,
that blowing field of gift and seizure
out away from sanctuary,
out in wilderness domain, where
signs of hope are spare, redemption
may not intercede to foul the air,
and there is purity within.

There is the wisdom of intent,
the love that is not summoned forth,
but overflows when gain is sacrificed...
when nothing but dry grass is seen
upon the meadowland.
There is where creation soars;
there my sons are born.

I dream of fields like this.
My craving is for conquest
where the self gives way,
for there is tempest far beneath
my consciousness, where I may yield
and feel the morning on my face,
the deep desire of all the race
for home.
~

Ghost Ship

Ghost Ship

It is quiet on the bay
and boisterous on the shore;
the ship awaits its destiny,
romance awaits its foil and soon
departure claims its troth
above the lovers' agony,
beyond adventure's lore.

The sails are turned again to open sea,
the mast is high, all hands on deck,
and through the mist is scanned
the pathos on their faces,
eyes upon the land, and hearts
upon the lea they'll never cross again.

The Hollander is resolute,
the capstan locked, the deep possessed
for yet another seven years
of still horizon, salt upon the lips
and tales once more down in the hold
of tragic irony,
of love forever left behind.

Now in the night off foreign shores
when that dark hull appears
within the fog, or just above the clouds,
the captain might be seen alone
behind the wheel, and silent
as he listens for a distant bell
to sound the dawning
of his wedding day.
~

Campaign

Campaign

Poor truth will bear the blame for lies
and live in costume, in disguise.
It is for use, not sought for its pure self
but rather in polemics, overlooked,
profaned and booked on flights
of rhetoric and inexactitude.
It whores its beauty, sells its soul
adorned in profaned innocence
to die unnoticed and unmourned.

It is victory we must lament;
beware the buyer, dangling
that dessicated prize
before a January crowd,
for in its final moments
it had not the strength to weep.
~

Zooming In

Zooming In

Shall I take a single word along,
upon my morning walk?
The scars it left upon my mind
some days ago do not heal easily;
my pace is slower
as three unassuming letters
rake across it, once again
demanding more than I can give.
My step is ponderous
beneath the weight of just
'how long is now?'

When is the point that it begins?
When does it end, and why?
Is every 'now' in truth a 'then?'
and every need already in the past?
I stumble then. Oh dear.
Precisely when is that?
~

Encounter

Encounter

There we were, my coffee cup and I
secluded in the corner booth
where flights of new realities,
my own created children, rose and soared
and readily transmogrified, touched down
and died according to my will.

I loved them all.
They were my fleet of consciousness
and altogether temporal,
yet in their frailty could darken houselights,
raise their stage to hide the universe
and for the nonce assume totality.

A single wisp of thought came through
and it was no surprise to be aware
that the professor with his pipe,
tweed coat and frowzy hair
now sat across and looking at me
quizically, but not disposed
to answer any questions

I was eager to propose, though I
had read his latest book, and knew
his vast research could lead me
down the path I wished to go.

For the moment I could merely know
he was my august puppet, not my key
to magic chests of insight... that he shared
the wisdom of the academes
that I once listened to,
and who would only point the way.

My cup was empty; I snapped back
and saw the room return, and it was time
to kill him off in tenderness. "You know"
he said, as he began to fade,
"I cannot help but go out wondering,
what kind of God are you?"
~

Crossing

Crossing

It is time.
My forehead brushed with kisses,
I am blessed with knowing
in a moment they will close my eyes
and cover me...send their prayers
across that soft grey wall I see now,
drifting in...I try
to form my lips into
the love words...
try...
~

The Revelers

"Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail."
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

The Revelers

A tilt of the head
and there's a universe
never seen before in time and space,
and passing strange—it's boiling hot,
contemptuous in its familiarity,
for though the slate is new,
it mocks the mind and speaks
of high adventure, Mondrian upon the wall,
the queen of age enlightening...
that fresh page a ship at anchor,
tugging at the post to sail
before the morning's past.

Do you feel it?
Can you breathe the air
Arcturus saw when you were born,
and passes on afresh— stirred anew
this time around with one
forgotten eyelash?
And, do the changes
thunder in your heart?

We are the revelers,
the chasers of the dawn,
who from our beds may joyfully
engage Leviathan, or rage
upon black flowers of the night
that dare to cast their shadow
on the day.
~

The Lighthouse

The Lighthouse

Its singularity is insular
until it stirs itself
and throws its restless particles away,
out to the blackened, hungry sea,
the heaving grace of irony
whose understanding is but to receive
and never to return.

Now in the steady beam of sacrifice
there is disclosed the synthesis of fire,
that essential spirit stuff
which place is only to destroy
yet on its saving mission
borne along on minute quanta,
substance of the universe.

I cherish that cold vision
of a lonely cynosure upon the coast
that draws me from the world
and speaks of vigil to the night...
speaks of faith where none is asked...
speaks where time enfolds
an unknown plain
in its embrace of light.

The lighthouse, that last ghost
of mother shore and set apart
like some evasive anchorite
enchained in vows of silence,
demonstrates its wisdom
in th' immaculate restraint
of modesty that we who write,
audacious in petensiousness,
will never understand.
~

For All That

For all that*

A man assembles in his mind
that which he knows,
then listens to the colors
of oncoming thoughts,
tempered in the fire
of passion and of love.

It is the knowing that he fears,
the messages that trail across the years,
creating "I" within his mind
and tremulous that he might cast aside
a piece of soul that nestled in him,
his alone, or worse the germ of everyman.

He pauses by the stream
to dip his fingers,
wonder at the incompleteness he has wrought,
and suddenly impatient
with the rippling image looking back,
he clings to the identity that is
his permanent sarcophagus,
a sacrosanct mortality
no one may ever share.
~
*(with gratitude to the spirit of Robert Burns )

Ezekiel Reborn

Ezekiel Reborn

There are hazards there.
To board imagination of another soul,
to probe behind the rocks along the way
and find too much, converting chill into reality—
there is the romance!

There too is desert, the wandering for years,
knowing that the self alone will dessicate
until there is another sacrifice,
another mingling of the blood there at the wrist,
forsworn to die as breath is dry upon the skin.

It is as much a ship's departure
blessed of the wind upon the back,
blessed to see the stars above the prow
and still detect the beating of a second heart
as passionate as mine to cease
its feckless thundering.

There is the time to seize the glory
of the second wind from out the east,
the second rising of the power of God
that lurked behind the cloud of innocence
to interpose its frailty
upon device, its patient magic
on the dryness of despair, the bones
of a forgotten day, connected still again
by two...and by that still outrageous gambit
forged of love.
~

C'est Moi

C'est moi

In my childhood
they
impressed on me
not to galumph,
lest I be typed
in stereo
as my eternal twin,

but now somehow
it pleases me
to see you are
constrained to know
that I will go
galumphing on
into the nevermore.
~

I shall not come home again

I Shall Not Come Home Again
(reflections on a college reunion)

Too much of loveliness enfolds the ground
I walked in youth, again in age,
and I shall soon lie down beneath it
as my spirit wafts above its art
in clear salute to mind's eternal joy.

Too much, I stand upon the edge of a regret
I do not wish to re-explore,
though I did not succomb.
Old flowers would sigh with me,
and speak of gravamen
that memory could not restore to light,
of crusted wounds I had ignored for years,
then strange in their emergence
would leave their ghostly shouting in my ears.

Yet I had smiled politely as I watched
the curious melange of student mirth
among the pretense of a mellowed age
which walked beside them
for that shred of while last weekend...
and that inside a host of smiles
that flashed around in vain denial
of a fiercer truth.

The time was beautiful
inside that frail transparent shell
of grace that comes with blessed rarity,
and I departed with a heart and mind
in dialogue upon dualities
that never should appear, but drum
upon the tympanum of my perspective
on a world I caused to change
two generations past, and now impart
a flavor in diminuendo, a seasoning
refreshed, more newly wise
and in finality, more spacious in its love.
~

Chimera

Chimera

I saw a titan trembling in the wood,
a little deity who once devoured
the power I gave him, stormed at me
for my naivete, and left me on
my knees to pray, not for today,
but some chimeric garden spot away.

It is the fall of leaves and titans
as I pass the wood again,
divested of its mystery
to make its pathways plain—
that I may look within
upon another twilight of the gods,
a new apocalypse to write
and yet another new Jerusalem
to settle in.

It is a transient Eden
we would give away,
to celebrate the monstrous in ourselves,
to recreate within a forest plain
the holiness of fear—

and an Olympic irony
that we as gods would tremble too
beholding all our gnomic children
scampering to seek a paradise
or an oblivion.
~

Statue

Statue

A whisper of his life within the stone
emerges from the cold of retrospect,
that he behind the figure's vacant stare
could know that other hands saw history
within the reach his fingers stretched, could throw
his burning soul across millenia
and we are there attuned, somehow, to catch
a shred of wisdom, borne upon a gray
and crumbling art.

And do not look apart just yet, for there
is mystery within the telegraph
of ages left to us that may not foil
romance, but prey upon the dying age
that we, ourselves encapsulate in time
to shun mortality.

It is a voice we may not like so much,
unable to attain vitality
that seizes the imagination as
a Praxiteles did, a voice for us
that we may not let go, though photos fall
aside, for this was life incarnate in
the stuff of earth, a transient man come down
to breathe upon us as before.

How still he is! How firm his stubborn grasp
of all we are—how lost are we outside
this quarried slab to meet a personage
that we already knew within ourselves
and fear to know again, lest life and death
in harmony may speak aloud before
we run away.
~

Touche

Touche

At the end,
there is the silent field alone
to offer up its peace , and then
his eyes upon the rising smoke
Pyrrhus smiles,
not for his hollow victory
but for the twisted, blessed men
who do not have to see.
~

And then, and then

And then, and then

Quite apart
from anything to touch,
more is an increment
that lies behind the consciousness,
to swell the mind with new imagining,
inexhaustible—thriving in its sacrifice
just as a fountain
throws its treasure to the sky.

Still as a vision never seen before
and nevermore returning,
haste to burn it into mind and then
away, away across the clover fields
to seek the wooded edge aglow
with inspiration's light.

It is just such fantasy as that
to feed a passion where reality
emerges from a thought created,
just as God ex nihilo sought out the earth,
the dew upon the ground,
the misty heaven, the distant haze
of peace.

In dulci jubilo,
the endless questions
form the ziggurat
of humankind's delight—
the endless answering
a sacred palindrome
of an eternal life.
~

Wisdom's Tree

Wisdom's tree

I meant to set aside the self
and follow that clear beam of knowing
on its journey to the earth. It shone
on Aristotle, Plato, Kant, and William James
and pulls the rest of us along,
a breathless following, half-mired
in transient, vain contempt.

And now we have the future
reigning down on us
to shatter that bright column
into further dissolution. Universities
parade their colors in processionals
of PhD's, regaling us with red and gold
and dissertating academic truth
amid the shards of light.

It's time to seek the self again,
to probe beneath the skin,
for there is just one brightness there
to shine upon posterity.
It is the gleam of Everyman
as his own prism,
gathering Old Greeks and infant toy
philosphers, and with a smile
to filter them between transparencies
of insight, probing every flash of light
emerging from within.

It's time to put down roots
from wisdom's tree. It's time
to introspect, to tap the mind
and set aside the noisy boxes
with their strange hypnotic ghosts
who only play to win.

It's time to dine with Thoreau
by the pond,
to revel in its quiet depth
and in our own,
where wisdom saturates the ground
and nourishes the soul.
~

A

A

that I may be
attuned
to the requiting
at the edge
of my existence
where I meet
another soul
attuned
to mine
~

It's Always Morning

It's Always Morning

There is a sliver of the dawn
upon the earth and sky,
as escort to the sun that speeds the day
and will not let it die....that rushes forth
aggressively upon the penitence of night.

So is the love that travels on that constancy,
in haste to flood the nether earth
with light arriving as a grace,
that perquisite inborn in all humanity,
and dusty with neglect.

It falls upon us, sweepers of
this cosmic bridal path, to celebrate
a permanent retreat of shadow,
consecrate the razored liberation
of surrender to the dark.

It falls to morning as the benison of day.
Its racing touch upon the sluggish earth
is the pursuer, not the fugitive.
It is the fabled hound of heaven,
its brilliance a progenitor,
an aid to understand
the raging nebulosity of man.
~

What time is it?

What time is it?

The time is always now;
then come invent with me
a treasure we shall never lose,
for if there is no future time at all
then it may never force itself
upon us...how?
How may it ever cease to be
if it may not become?
And if there is no ending
fear itself is hollow, empty,
airless in its hovering,
so let it waft away,
less than a dream,
less than a now in memory's retreat.

We are amazing, are we not,
creating our eternity?
Here is your now, and here is mine,
and I shall have a God today
while you, preoccupied with yours
may not come out to play
although you may within our fancied
planetary course, yet share with me
a common-birthed bewilderment
at such a wondrous cutting edge
on which we ride.
~

Closing In

Closing In

The distillation of a thought,
how like the science of a touch—
to brush aside the pretense,
scope within the lake of memory
and know that still intact
is all the passion there submerged,
genuine, for all the years unknown.

How rare! That light may penetrate
the depths of false despair, that history
may reappear and flash its insight
once again upon the yellowed obfuscation
of a consciousness worn clear of hope,
a blindness self-imposed and born
of ennui and pride.

Then from the waves, Excalibur,
and from concentric heritage
a triumph—to the lady evermore,
a mystery surrounding her,
past the eternity of men
who then must yield it back again,
drawn underneath the surface
of the mind of God.
~

Of Red

Of Red

Red flames its connotations at me
in machine gun style as I stand apart,
gazing down upon a viscous blood
that gathers on the ground.

It darkens, as to pour on
an offending brown of quasi innocence,
defiance of its claim to urgency,
though crimson petticoated ladies
scream, and stream away.

A color holds for me too much of sway
to siphon off mere brightness
from a twilight evil
just to make a point; it screams and rages,
throws romance upon a dalliance,
excites a passion far too colorless alone
to sweep a lady of the night
into the morning.

It takes its purplish and golden hues along
reluctantly. It is a prima donna
unassuaged upon its fearsome quest
to rule the sky at sunset when
those mocking soft pastels would rather
whisper their reflection of the day.
~

A Thing to Prize

A Thing to Prize

The sense of loss
transcends accounting,
hovering instead as that one gift
itself uncountable, to rank
with heaven's stars as candles
for a cosmosphere that blesses
with its questions, wrenches anguish
from its cursed calm, and dies perpetually
before the face of sins undreamed.

No savior in his mortal frame
might fair eclipse of that, indeed
personify a paradox so terrible
that for the curvature of time
all other entity may fall away
before the might of such pure frailty.

Presumption fails, and it remains
that loss alone is genuine
among the treasures of the mine.
Its power is infinite to wring the heart,
swing back the gate of pride
and open wider still another door
once spurned, a fool's magnificence
called love.
~

Veni Creator

Veni Creator

In traverse of the cave of my desire,
the next is fashioned from an ember
keeping faith within, silent, simply there
as called upon to glow between my palms—
to sing with borrowed voice
a song not heard before.

The next is that which calls
when there is life in unknown packages,
a little hill beyond plateau, and suddenly
for us to know, to leap upon,
proclaiming, "It is good."

Stay fast upon the embers warming
that vast interchange of spirit enterprise
upon us—manifesting where it will,
testing a reality that only sings within.

It is a mystery to covet, that rare fire
that flashes only on consent,
on love's conjunction with desire,
on restlessness preceding
holy intercourse when soul
may enter universal mind
and next is born.

A birth alone, no answer
from the churning black outside.
The question burning,
"Muss es sein?"
"Es muss sein."
~

The Educated Man

The Educated Man

"He can sit in a room, and not perish" *
Or might he stand upon the deck,
release the dove, and weep for years,
not for its loss,
nor for the triumph of its flight
above the waters; they are not of God,
they are the backwash of our fears.

There in his room alone,
imprisoned by his conscience
he may let his mind fly free
while fears beneath his wings
may no more flood the ground.
But we are not alone;
we have the educated man fulfilled...
and weeping. He has not such irony
for comfort.

It is a flood to cling to.
Fears, we understand;
they are our bulwark
when an educated man could speak—
could sweep us all away with wonder,
separate us from such grand pretensions.


We are not free to weep with him.
We may not seek the refuge of the mind,
eyes not for insight, not for closing,
senses bound upon another time
away, another circus of distraction,
yes, another box of little men
to dance upon the screen.

It is a dance to take away our fears,
a dance beguiling death,
suspending it awhile with candied tears
and frosted dreams protecting us from envy,
nodding to the educated man apart,

who sits there in his room alone
and weeping for us,
just as we who may not see
across the arch of his reality,
cannot.
~
*quotation from Jacques Barzun

A Capital Farewell

A Capital Farewell

"Will someone love me, please?
You see that I am naked now,
without a rag of pretense;
my province is an alpha lost,
a phoenix dessicated
in omega's ash."

We may look down at him;
in reaching out, he exercised
imperial domain
to choose his destiny.

Then pass him by
with but a modicum of pity.
See? ...an emperor indeed
of infinite resource,
who never touched
the soft infinity of power
to reach within.
~

Never alone

From his promontory,
space divides the emptiness beyond,
permits a blinded soul
to look upon the void within
and view eternity. It matters not; there is a mind to touch,
a spirit revelry within
that cannot be the same
for sighted ones who miss the feast.

Plato shakes his head
emerging from the cave,
fire stick in hand—
It is the dread of knowing,
not the chains,
that binds his prisoners.

Their eyes may slowly close
and yet the sight is ever closer
as a haze drifts down,
a cloud of soft enlightening
as on an afternoon Seurat knew well
when all is peace
and there is dread no more.

With isolation gone,
no rising from a tomb is good enough.
There is a higher resurrection to proclaim,
a cosmic sweep for us, into the rush of dawn—
Never alone.
~

Alive, Alive O

Alive, Alive, O

To look around the corner of a time, a hovering,
and know that there is more, a gathered mist
of portent stealing comfort, roiling waters
calmed amid the dust trails of a heritage
that didn't want to be disturbed—
there's incentive for another breath,
another setback for the march of death
along the pathway of a life
that only stopped to wonder
just a while ago.

It is Molly Malone who calls us
past the curtain of the years, imploring
with a voice heard only as an echo,
as a haunting fantasy, perhaps
encrusted sentiment that moment
in the Dublin fog where we thought
we saw her there again.
How curious the parallel
that we would long to bring her back,

for it is history in all its darkness
that congeals into a strange nostalgia,
speaks in distant cries that it is we
who vivify the murky ghosts—
who see ourselves alive in Molly's shade!

It is the gentle earth that feeds us.
Consuming and consumed we share
an immortality we do not understand;
we are gifted, rising from the sea
no more confined, and still we hear
across the ages, Molly's cry
assuring us we do not die,
her voice across the square we know,
"Cockles...and mussels alive, alive O..."
~

And what is this?

(Two companion poems based on an inquiry into the meaning of love)

And what is this?

I

Right away I saw the power of it,
knowing that the loan I made
would never be repaid;
that made me smile—
that secret, quite delicious irony
was mine to keep within my heart.
My sacrifice had just become a gift of love
I didn't even understand.

No loving person would return
remembering, or able to requite;
she acted out of need alone,
a pure divestment of her pride,
and out of need I gave—
not from a love inside,
nor from a hope of heaven,
that pain embraced. It simply
was replaced by mirth.

There is a spring
within the desert's bleak array
that flows with power
to beautify that mendicant
from whom I readily recoil,
and how I thirst!

Love is a sorcerer,
a charmer quite devoid of intellect.
Emotions may be far away,
the strings within a heart untuned
and every day the wind blows cold
across the stony ground—
yet still I smile, a lesser man complete,
beguiled that such a thing as love
has twisted sensibility, and from a tiny throne
far off in space has brought about
a new and wondrous world.

II

I spoke to you of pleasant irony,
of desert springs that burble forth surprises
past refreshment, past all hope of change.
They lurk there, just as patience would,
a gift inside an unexpected dawn.
It just won't do to try to cultivate it;
gifts are like that,
bursting from the flower of love,
and teaching us as water splashes
laughingly upon our faces,
then retreating underneath the sand
as if it never were.

I like that subtle self-removal,
finally to preach without a voice
of all the pure delight when I
am taken from my own
mysterious pathway, cleared
from crevices of latent will
without a struggle from my childish id.
Nothing virtuous in that!

The sand grows dry again,
but still exuberance is there—
a reservoir beneath my feet,
unearned, and like a geyser
driven from creation's power
and its own joyous will.
And we?
We shall not chase it down.
We may not toil
to write it on our hearts.

This thing called love
is but to feast upon
as honored guests, properly oblvious
to any shroud of night.
~

Who stands out?

Dennis Kucinch has been accused of not "standing out." Be fair to yourself,
and spend one hour listening to Dennis at his best: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4896502618661208503&hl=en
Then you will KNOW if he is presidential--above all the others. Do it. Do it now.
Be fair to your country. Be informed!

Of Good and Evil

Of good and evil

Life is a fabric, isn't it?
a crazy-quilt melange
repelling and attracting
fantasy and myth.

So pain and pleasure claim reality,
never sure of which ascends.
But evil is the foil for understanding good,
and may become the soil of happiness,
nourishing by virtue of its dark
and close embrace.

Now you and I may look...examine pointedly
this new perspective, leaping up
to spark creation...set apart the gladness
into islands bursting with the fruit of joy.

We want to see what makes us.
We want to tap that urging far within the center
that invites us to the feast,
that speaks in tongues of revelry unheard before.
We want to dance through that thick mystery
into a radiance unseen.

It is that diverse unity that drives a mind
into the swirl of consciousness,
of just and unjust brotherhood,
that common blood of greed and graciousness
on a continuum without an end.

It's where magnificence prevails,
where light comes rushing in upon a shadowed stage;
the denouement, the prize song, all the roses
waken sense and sight,
the night outside an introit
to the splendor of the day.
~

A Christian Odyssey

A Christian Odyssey

The waters of the earth are rising,
capturing the little boats we left upon the shore,
capturing the islands where we took our hopes
of paradise, the trees that sank their roots
to freshness deeper than th'invading sea.

Most of us forget the rarity of England days,
the girl whose hair falls to her knees,
the secret lips upon the cheek.
Prisoners of time no more, the lust of green,
the falconer, the joust recede;
time is what we say it is...and it is ours
to press into us as we will.

For we are lost, would press unto us
all the praise of lesser visonaries
England left behind, the ones bequeathed
to forest lands, to forest farms,
possessing only dreams to feed their lust,
the call of sacrifice, a brother's blood
avenged to codify the law

...would press into our hearts, the ones
of powdered hair who saw us faithful
to a sacred honor that we never understood,
for there before us something
in the mist and clay took form,
bequeathed us enemies
that neither land nor forest had revealed—
only ocean waters brought them home
to love and to destroy.
~

We are

We are

We are the sweep of majesty
that all the stars impart
to the responding earth;
no greenmade glory shines
beyond the music that a mind
creates upon a page,
liberates the sons of art
and marches to the tomb,
embracing the unborn.

We carry history upon our backs,
create pellucid legend
when our heroes fall behind,
and with the fire
of mighty men beyond the clouds,
assemble freshly-martyred saints
to bear our cause.

We are the fallen ones
with tears enough
to cleanse that counterpoint
of victory and loss,
for there are fears enough
to purify our altars
with the censors of regret.

We are the engineers of greed and glory
and the wind, indeed blows colder
'round the corner where the children
may not play again...

It was the mystery of things we cannot see,
the evanescence of a breath, the Hebrew lord
chose first, empowering his friends
to change the world,

chose us, survivors
blessed of spirit wind
that dies like candle flame
within a moment we may not control.

We are the Godtouch
breathing sacrament upon the land
and properly along the path
choose every step with awe.
~

Scenic View Ahead

Scenic View Ahead

I stopped my life a moment,
knowng that, unmarked by an event,
there was a curious wedge,
a watershed of history,
a crest without connection,
meaningless and rare.
I saw it as a precious time
that never could return.

Then there it was,
a precipice no man could see;
its hazard was itself, unmarked in time,
unsafe, no single quest defined.
There would be consequence,
a changed reality, a breath upon a butterfly
to set the courses of the stars.

Of such, to speed the heart and whirl the mind.
Of such, an agony unchronicled—
It is of choice like this from which a soul
may race away in fear.
Beware. It is too much.
Don't stop to understand.
~

Slipping through Time

Slipping through Time

We were naive
to predicate believing
on a body, dipping through the ether
to another day; it changes, doesn't it?
Within a moment, not the one
to enter fantasy, indeed it is imposter
to a creed of self-identity, of microseconds
vanishing and re-appearing
as it thought it was, for it is new
and also nevermore.

The traveler may simply take
his presto-chango body as a set
of luggage, purchased on the way,
and like a spirit, set it down
within an instant on a different floor
of miles and centuries.
Spirit is the teacher,
thought, the faithful friend.
And, yes,
There is that dogged body,
stranger though it be, to tag along.

You smile.
This is for anyone,
at any time he may create. Go see.
And then return, though it is possible
I will not recognize the one who left me.
Who is he?
~

Creation's Irony

Creation's Irony

A man begins the search outside his head
with wondering, what kind of God would make
a wind-up primate, hot to rule his world,
endowed with nothing more than jealousy
to motivate his simian success.

But no, there simply must be something more
in peering out upon the field to see
an ass's jawbone crush a brazen skull
or drown with liquid words, an enemy.

Of what divine intent is the enfant terrible
who calls upon the prince to gasp above
the nails for his own sin? What triumphing
is that? There is the seed apostasy
has dipped in blood and planted in the soil
of apostolic greed.

Ho, everyone that thirsteth, come and buy!
There is a heaven here, a boon, a sigh
for every paradise pursued in vain,
for yellow cobblestones, and mansions in the sky.

A singular dimension waits beyond
the taking of a dream to consciousness,
for that becomes the moment when the God
of Abraham falls silent, angels need

to chant no more to shepherds on the hill.
The new Jerusalem has open gates
for every traveler; the wine is soft
upon the lees, the song is lush upon
the ear, the night perfumed forevermore
with love.
~

Ein Heldenleben

Ein Heldenleben

The element was sacrifice,
the set aside of commerce; what remains
is just that browned reminder of a yesterday,
the crowded theatre of retrospection
one could not let go.

What remains are all the questions...
Hopes were high, now there is none...
only the present, eking out existence,
just a crumb of joy to keep him going—
yet those questions are his magic:
that shade of dawn behind the crescent moon
that asks...expects no answer,
basks in adulation for a breath or two,
and then would readily exchange it
for a death entirely his own.

And so the final days
of lost celebrity
are worn away within
the West Virginia hills,
shouting at the thunderclouds
to make their peace and co-create with him
a requiem for vanity,
a mountain echo for the voices
singing in his heart; his heroism
rests within that place
and there it celebrates not pride
or strife, but profound mystery,
agent provocateur in everyman
and every solitary life.
~