sonnets & vignettes…the ghosts of gnosis…collateral damage…prose, prozetry & leftover poems on love, nature, the passing scene…sometimes mystical, sometimes philosophical, largely agnostic.
When darkness falls
and day’s dimension
shrinks and crawls away
.
When shadows lick the road
and climb the hill
when crowds disperse
and all is still
.
He comes unto himself
becomes himself again
a man, alone
with sense imbued
and then it is not Night
he fears but solitude
.
§
.
oted in the marhins: what fragile creatures we are.
There are no rules –
no modifiers for the quanta
no meaningful loops – nothing
is fair, much less balanced.
The mindless cosmos is
totally skewed; the dead rot;
the good get punished;
the bad do not.
Every tribe and kind
numbers men able
to bayonette infants.
Every civilization
ultimately sucks.
.
And then there’s Nature –
ah, behold the hosts of golden posies –
where roots of titan trees conspire
to splice and strangle hapless worms,
where bugs hide their myriad eggs
in other bugs, so darling progeny
may feast on the host bug alive –
vivesection or pablum?
God’s creation?
You betchya.
.
There are no rules. None.
And how much courage
does it take one lunatic
just to face it. And
how many lunatics
would it take to give
sanity a reprieve?
And how many lunatics
are loose on the planet ?
And how many lunatics
can dance on the head of a pin?
?
And so …unable to be just crazy
we shrink away and invent
.
SOME SEMBLANCE OF ORDER
.
Grace notes, key signatures
yin/yang balances, heavens, hells,
reincarnations, limbos (the mind
is such an agile accident) when
life is just the thump of a drum.
.
Maybe that is the worst –
Ice cream cone telescopes
finding nothing but exploding
suns and who really cares – no,
who really gives a fuck
about exploding suns
.
The only reprieve – the sole
stinking sustainable solace
to be found anywhere –
must be scratched
out of the binding
of one soul with another,
the sweaty fusion of one body
with another – and if you are
just ace fucking lucky
the scratching and the fusing
aren’t merely repeatedly
tangential or sequential
and there aren’t always
half a dozen mismatched
shrieking fractions – misbegotten
litter – on the lover’s bed.
.
That’s all there is, the luck
of the draw, the living and the dead.
The thump of a drum – that’s all.
.
!
.
Noted in the margins? Let me caycj my breath first/
Sometimes when you line things up
on the pale pine counter, it’s poetry
and someties when you disturb
the symetry – that’s poetry too
.
and sometimes there’s even poetry
when the big light isn’t on in the kitchen
and you’re feeling for a tea bag
in the blackwire thing where you keep
what you don’t know where to put
[including souvenir spoons and
great looking stones, nuts and burrs]
and your hand takes the silky-wrapped
gauze-pouched infusion de camomile
from the four star hotel by mistake –
.
and that whole autumn vacation
plays for you like a movie –
the cathedrales and chateaux museums –
and they’re all so inviting again
and not touristy
and that’s poetry.
.
§
.
Noted in the margins: hard to lasso what poetry is. Sometimes it’s more than the right words in the right order, or emotion recalled in tranquility. Sometimes it resides in my kitchen.
Driving on a four-laner – rather not
say where – In a little rented red car
.
Hardly any traffic
and I was enjoying accelerating –
feeling like a racecar driver
.
Then the car just conked out
almost stradling the white divide –
and I could see in the rear-view
two humongous trucks
bearing down at breakneck
.
In near-perfect calm
I rested my head on my arm
propped on the steering wheel
almost laughing: well, this is it!
.
Don’t know how long later
woke up at the wheel on a pebbly shoulder
Not a car or human in sight.
Still haven’t figured it out.
.
§
.
Noted in the margins: nope. DECADES later
anf I STILL haven’t figured it out. It(s a true
story btw.
the greatest story ever told
beneath my sternum lies
beside it, all the laws of physics
seem so patently less wise
the breadth and depth of this one
TRUTH, lies dormant in the hearts of men
the love they share yet do not know
until they’re truly born again
no, do not wince – no reference here
to politics of any stripe
[the rubbish that is spewed in church
is truly so much awful tripe]
I speak of that which rules the earth
the planets – all that is – of LOVE –
the force that holds the stars in place
much as a hand fits in a glove
.
It’s not romance or wedding rings
this quantum glue that is concealed
within all seeming separate things –
Know that, and every wound is healed!
.
It’s weird to know, yet not to know
that we are one – though kingdoms fall
There never was a rising sun
that did not set on one and all.
.
The closest that men come to TRUTH
does seem to be a union blessed –
but that is just a clue to more!
[I do wish man would seek the rest!]
.
§
Noted in the margins: **from a poem by e.e.cummings
I would have pity
for the ignorant
.
who mistake their
ancient candle
for a sun
.
who hold their spiritual
harvest to be the only one
.
who take
their personal lake
for an ocean
.
who misread subserviance
as heartfelt devotion
.
I would have pity
if their chosen creeds
.
were not source
of endless suffering,
distortion of human needs.
.
dogme pierces like a knofe
and the innocent heart bleeds.
.
§
.
Noted in the margins: I would not even try to do aay
with spirituality/mysticism as such. It appears to be a human needBUT I remain emphatcally anti-clerical, opposed to
dogmatism of every stripe.
with calves like tree trunks
she occupies half the bench –
not so much fat or overweight
as well-upholstered – an impression
reinforced by the loud print of her
polished chintz dress – a type
you would have sworn
no longer existed.
.
on a string around her neck
her sun glasses dangle, open,
just above the head of her tiny dog –
who is so immobile he looks like
a photo – a blowup of a prototype toy
made of toothpicks and pocket lint.
.
They have but one love between them
and that is to watch the pigeons
in the warm light of late afternoon.
.
§
.
Noted in the margins: I write out of love for what I see. Writing seals things in my memory.
with the whited-featheref seed
that dandilions feed to the wind.
On really good days on my prancing steed,
I’m Aliénor, bare-breasted in Palestine
.
[When I’m not just an oafish panda.
some days I’m even Alexander!]
.
My maternal great grandmother
was a full-blooded Blackfoot
My paternal grandma was a Jew.
For crying out loud,
I’m a one-woman crowd
tell me: what is a poor girl to do?
.
Write stories, it seems
that fulfill others’ dreams
for laughs or perhaps a moan
write poems and plays
’til the end of my days
but leave my genitals alone.
my happiness is made of dew drops gleaming –
a slant of light – a glow that falls just so –
of fruit, near spilling out a bowl, or seeming,
so high and full – like laughter in the snow
and children all amazed to see and touch
its speciallness – forgotten since last year –
my happiness is really nothing much –
and thinner than the thinest thin veneer –
yet like the slender dose of some strange drug
it saves me from the web that would ensnare,
that common tragic coil which, like some thug,
besets us late and makes things hard to bear –
my happiness is you my precious dear
who – right on time – says what I need to hear.
.
§
.
Noted in the margins: Happiness = Loving someone who lovs
.
.
what if this system
of joints and reservoirs,
this assailable, machine –
jackbuilt construction
of pinions and bladders –
were merely the means
to supply the energy
for the corps de ballet
that performs every day
en pointe, as they say
in the synapses
.
what if the aboriginal
dream time were,
let’s say, more accurate
than the AMA.
.
§
.
Noted in the margins: We truly ARE the stuff that dreams are made on, Prospero
(I saw th typo in the title…but decided I liked it.)
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