Poem of heaven and Earth
THE STARS:
The dyad of agonal dawn-
Beyond the peace of dusk
Where hang the trellises of
Constellations- there is the
Square motion of lifting flags
The accelerating billow in
The interstellar clouds- as
If the the lifting of wings- the
Sussura of all angelic beings
In crowded assembly- the
World and the “ten thousand
Things” they are all drifting–
They are the world in many
Blossomings of shape- and
They are hanging on an easel,
In a background–
Receding, all strokes
suggesting–
There is another easel
behind it–
And this is the one onto which
All time is bleeding,
Into a single painting
Severed beyond our
Eye's seeing; all of
The moments which were
Lost; they hang
Amidst the cotton fields
And yeast of Stars. Wreathing
And saturating all the
Oort clouds - - oh how
Their volume hangs;
Against the dark–
Annointing them and
Staining them– in hues
Of Stanton Macdonald
Airplane Synchronmy in
Yellow Orange they
Swim across; our
Bluest veil– our sky -
UNDER THE STARS
What are we to do- we who
Cannot see them? Tragedy
Of birth
Beneath all of this we are trapped
On the collapsed
Pillars- foundations OF raptured
And Dying - EARTH, and must
Be trapped here all ways. As in
Cask of Amonticello. And so
On the fissile shaped missile; earth
We scream tragically- across
The sky and in Jejune autumns
Of our universal death
The martyrs advertise- in Halle
Boppe comets- the only easy
Ticket– off this unprime real estate
And for moments we can cross
In the Autumns of Jacob Zoet
Or in the God of Small Things-
Bevy our soul across the veil
Beyond this earth– in text just
For a minute. And for a minute
The soul may seclusively
traipse itself
In the papery taste of
Books, like the papery
Taste of Locusts from
Which John the Baptist
Drew sustenance.
And all this reminds;
That in this dark wood we are
Entering, there must always be
The Crocus of remembering
And ammonia of forgetting.
And all this must be why,
Must be- -
Why, Sophocles must
Make Oedipus blind
Itt must be why
Gilgamesh must die.
It is why, though it is
A Tragedy, for others
To be blind – it a blessing
To the poet. For since Homer's day
We spend our being calling upon the
"Wine-dark sea" making
Efforts not to witness
The sea's shimmering blue
Evaporation of resistance
For us there must be hope in high heavens-
But here upon earth, there is
Only work of
Bedlam
And there is no silver trumpet
Of angels- lovingly arched, there
Is only, to play the tunes-
Of all the aching and
Of all the wistful hearts
The tin whistle- and the
Blues harp
With which can idle
Away– the mystery
Caught here– upon the earth
As the tilting foundation plummets
The fingers of the lovers clutched
At the summit
May share only the mingling
Resistance
Of bitter distant numbness
WE ON THE EARTH:
In spring the heavy weight of all
This tragedy is falling
But with nothing to feel its weight
Either it effects it is lightly as two
Snowflakes upon a tongue.
And reels, and so there is
Nothing to stop us– from seeing
The falling of Helicopter seeds
Dancing like spinning Sufi's,
Apart all our questions –
In helical symmetries.
And so all spring rephrases
The daring question:
Not now, not now-
"Do I dare disturb the
Universe"
But do we dare rehearse-
Our existence,
with bliss
Still with hope–
In a universe too big
To be disturbed by
The human comprehension
Of Warmth
The mountain stream
Mounting in extremis;
Grandeur the pinnacled
Light dappling the pines
The needles crossing through
Each other, each becoming
A new pattern for the light
And the shade to beat through
The pulsatile, invidious, and
Piercing light of these days
The trees are huddling:
Branch throwing friction
Against branch
Wind that whistles through
My trance, through the days
Spent in these high places
Now the warm mug is pressed
To my lips, above the teeming
Wildernesss: it's violence becoming
A patterned peace
What is hard in me begins
Softening and unravelling
To the world outside
All that is dark in me is
Uncoiled into tranquility:
And there is no darkness
At all that is not touched
By lignt
I am not just myself I am
The heights and I am the
Wilderness and
I am the
Wind blowing
Roar of Aurora
Structure, Semblance, Garnet
sonnet. Idyllic
Gamete of form.
The Mediation of mind
Machination of time
Crystal as solid as anyone other.
In the turning of these spheres
In the turning of Saturn
Music of your spheres
Chrysalis, crystallus
You are a pattern
Perfect since the
Dawn of time
Telescoping,
Never before caught
In the mind of
Any distant astronomer.
What epicycle do you trace away from us
Quintessence, obstruction. Dark second
Moon of time. Beautiful and still sublime
What epicycle did you take, when
You hint your essence at me
In the echo of lakes. Galileo am I
What secret music are you tuning
In feathers of the Cosmic Swan?
In aa you hide. And the
The dawn-annihilated eyes
In which I sigh and watch.
There are feathers also
Your fire burns,
The hybrid of the Phoenix
And the Lyrebird.
You are
Forged in distant
meridians of light
Cosmic fire, what distance do
You ford from us? What is
This loneliness upon all
The earth.
Stilted in drops of dew
I heard the cosmos's refrain
I felt your secret as a child
And would feel you
In the petrichor
Crescent birth-
The quiet chord of earth.
Even the earth's hardest
Core- must in some way,
Have been in tune with
You
You are the
Mystery of the life-giving
Rain of earth, announcing
Itself in your resolute
Dawn-banners
You must have been grass,
You must have been all
Jupiter, you must have
Been voice that spoke
The first Vedas, quicksilver
Demeter, how quick
You slip and fade.
My sedate wit, did
Not encompass the
Fall.
Reverberative.
And I am afraid
I have fallen apart;
Since this.
Why do you return?
To me you were
Pools of
Dying Ichor
I thought I watched you
Sprawled dying. In the death
Of every minnow, in every minute.
Raving I thought I watched
Each minute of your life
Pattern patent Finish.
Why do you return again?
What heart could there be,
To dart in grace of, then to mend?
What gravity did you claim
That space you bend?
Your mystery
Existing in magnetic
Compasses.
Vernal, diurnal
Eternal
Yes- Liquid Autumn of my childhood
How quickly, I watched it slip
Through the cracks.
Magellan could not
Circumference it: flowing Quicksilver -
How can I encompass it?
Secret finder of paths
In timeworn compasses.
Roar of your Auroras in icicles
These starborn boreal castle
Steppes, my soul races
Through with every circular
Step
And now you return,
Secret saccade of the
Flakes of your silent
Flame turn galaxies
To brilliant burning
Bushes
Of Warmth
The mountain stream
Mounting in extremis;
And in extremest
Grandeur
The pinnacled
Light dappling the pines
The needles crossing through
Each other, each becoming
A new pattern for the light
And the shade to beat through
The pulsatile, individous, and
Piercing light of these days
The trees are huddling:
Branch throwing friction
Against branch
Wind that whistles through
My trance, through the days
Spent in these high places
Now the warm mug is pressed
To my lips, above the teeming
Wilderness: it's violence becoming
A patterned peace
What is hard in me begins
Softening and unravelling
To the world outside
All that is dark in me is
Uncoiled into tranquility:
And there is no darkness
At all that is not touched
By light
I am not just myself I am
The heights and I am the
Wilderness and
I am the
Wind blowing
Hush the pinnacle!
Dark Fall
Trammeled in this horn— is the secret sound of existence.
Jailed in the metal of this silver pipe that is longing
And to nothing in the universe there is–
Belonging, the blowing of the pearlesque– trumpet
The centerless angels thronging and descending
En masse— the secrets of gold, that the Lead and
Cinnabar have hidden mercurial– it shifts away with
Heat– emptied the metallic which sings, belated
Tunes which are empty–
Do not exist, never fall to the enemy’s slanted
Encounter with envy. Keep secret when there is the hurting of the
Heart- and hurt even in memory. What is atlantic is the soul– the
Blue blue of it holds all resonances falling into it, and many are the fathoms
Full of it– the painful truth of it, troubadour of every minute of the truants hearts
Ticking. That was supposed to be silenced in the beginning– but keeps on
Moving
I want the metal shadow of a Modigliani. I want the metal shadow of the Modigliani, Moving over me, the shadows wake– oh pray at dawn against the strict lutenancy over
Being– praying at dawn for the dusk that scrapes above like a descending curtain of the dusk, like a curtain of iron, the charged charred dusk of it– the shadows flit.
Going summiting stubbornly over things. The
The auburn beings’ of Naiades, that exist to sing the soul of moss to being
Everything that moves is the seagrass and the sweetgrass and the wavy moss is wreathed to life by the waves
Wrought to being as life– the sea moves the bodys like a straight straw
Truancy– these are the empty weaves of sea which spins to vortexes-
I want to cast the sun ahead as a thick stone– then follow it. And my heart will see it skip. To see what it is to shadow it as momentum following fallowly onto dawn –fallowly onto dawn, the strict motion of simplicity. To hear the motion as it moves the soul
The soul becomes as the whole sea rippling. The black holes like iridescent oil in pent up dais of black black sky are trickling– a pond in single fluid movement.
A stadium of applause. The apples of Hades. The comments echo the profound symphony
Appall the chalk chert of the roots pushing themselves into the ground.
The pert peat timpani— the aspersion of shadows shadowing shadows that move like
Stalks of the elms, when at night their ashy legs rearrange in single movement
A symphonic extrusion of shadow hands.
And I am everywhere the shadow lands, and am its movement. And I at a moment of the entrance of all influent
Why in all red is there the sweet ring of the purple plum dawn,
The turnstile of the dilating movement of the days the shadow waylays. How many times have the mountains of slate rippled with light. Tell me not how many ways have the mountains of these felt the glance of the light against all remnants of the
Slight-leaned obsidian that holds the mirror of mottled purple dawn. The plump ash-tree’s yawn long-hair.
Tell nobody to keep count of the days I have watched the rainbows saccades in obsidian. I always feel secrets in the count of the days that I have and have not seen them. And tell nobody of the secret of all the days on which my mind is split in ways between the two perspectives.
I wish for silver of all the Atlantic that traveling prow ramming cuts.
Call to being call to being the darn of those silky sails in secret traveling of circumferences!
And so many days,
I wish for all the light in the world to percuss against all the mountains in the world. And to melt all the shadows in the world and to fuse one last
Image
In the world
Of them– and burn
Them away
A cinder unmoving across the ground is all that remains— it is a trace. At the passing of it. And all I see is the light entering and calming them.
Ask that I will not fall again– the dappled light that enters into all the shadows to warm them. They will not fall again.
They will not leave a trace of weight when they fall again. They cannot have it. And I wish that the shadows could disappear for everybody.
Terra Nova
Audio:
https://youtu.be/Da3OwcSzSAQ
In birth there is nothing
But the sieve of it
In earth it holds it's
Mystery
The rainbow bending
Over it–
The rainbow leading
To it also – ever
Retreating horizon
Fulcrum of the
Breaking
Partition of the
Balancing
Peace within the
Galaxy
We are ballast of
The big bang imploding
Now see the sorrow
But also the jettisoning
Away of tragedy
As plectrums run across strings...
As plectrums run across strings
A heart dying bleeds-
Does one to the other communicate?
Oh Oyster sorrow- could thou
Dissolve solvent in this
Alcohol, part now and melt
So I could see thy form as
Ultimate Imago
Yes, misery-
Though you may be hollow
Nothingness- even you have
Your thick convolutions
How my existence
Has gotten trammeled by you-
An ant in the conch of Daedalus!
As plectrums run across strings
A heart now dying bleeds- can
One to the other communicate?
The numbed fingers of the
Artist could make it speak
Its shame in all of it's Grotto
Twang? There is no parting
And no melting- for- Oyster
Self! I was the thing that held
That misery- what has been
Held so long cannot melt
And there is no parting-
I held so long it has
Become simply a part of me.