Boulders

The lawyers call you to tell you you're doomed.
There's no recourse. You have to start all over again.
But the task is Sisyphean. Why even bother?
Life goes on. Does it? I'm afraid of good days
because they're always followed by soul-killers,
days you look at the knife block in the kitchen
and wonder. I can never seem to have a good day
without being slapped down the very next day.
Some tepid creek of dull everyday shallow streams
would seem preferable. But I don't seem able to take
that route, either. I'm not wired for ordinary.
You end up all alone, because no one wants to hear it anymore.
Can't really blame them, although it's tempting.
Who wants to hang out with a perpetual loser blocked
by gods who want to keep him stuck till he dries up
and blows away. Driving out alone into the desert
and waiting to die seems like a welcoming option.
My life is a Samuel Beckett laugh-riot of prisons.
I can't go on, I must go on, I'll go on.
It would be a lot funnier if you weren't living it.
I'm looking right now. This bleak window opens on
black and white and dismal grey, an apartment backyard
overlooking an industrial backyard and main street
which birds and squirrels don't bother to name.
Names are temporary, and change with the inhabitants.
My life is a hotel room in which I never stay anywhere,
there's nowhere to stay. I lost everything
and that's not enough. Do I even get to tell people?
No, that why lies an endless circle of ridiculous maimings,
none of them more visible than the invisible disability
I can neither manage nor convince anyone is real.
Like there's a point. Push that boulder up the mountain,
it will just roll back down again. Why bother

Here's a thought: since you're going to end up there anyway,
just head for the desert now. You're going to die there,
so why wait. It's just masochistic to stay where the world
has let you know how much it hates you being there. Go.
Don't even bother to wrap up affairs. Just go. Those who are left
can have the dregs that no one wants. Savor freedom.
Part of the samurai's code was, When you know you're going to die,
you can do anything. So go. Let the boulders roll where they will.
Nothing to stop you. Why do you hesitate? Do you so cling
to this hateful existence that you would rather stay and suffer
rather than be free? The bars of the cage hold your eyes
but the cage door is open. You just have to turn your head to see it.
Last time I lived in this place it was just the same.
Here I am back in that same cage, clinging to those same bars.
This time, I'll notice the door. I'll let go of the boulder.
I'll just walk out and disappear into the void.
Like the nothingness before and after the Universe, why wait.

I can't cope with limbo. That's all.
I just need to know something's happening.
I've spent far too much time, this past era,
waiting on other people's agendas who forget mine.
I just need to feel like things are moving forward
at a rate faster than geologic.

It's about feeling like anyone has heard. It's like
a basic need, a mammary need, to feel like you're not shouting
down a well for no reason, not even getting an echo back.
It's like there's a void of silence around your heart.
Nothing can get through, be heard, be present. Time shifts
into its slowest gear when silence replaces sympathy.
Oh we are needy. We are clingy in our need, and fearful.

The entire reason for being is to not be alone.

Floating in Space

I suppose my mood is being affected
by a lot of dying right now. I'm reading death poems
by the saints and angels, the Zen masters
who on their deathbeds would dictate one last poem,
haiku, tanka, Chinese syllabic quatrain, whatever.
The enlightened masters gave one last lesson
when departing. One of the greatest of masters
left us with the haiku: "Now that I'm enlightened,
I'm just as miserable as ever." I suppose that must
be true, or at least hopeful. Meanwhile I read poems
from Jim Harrison, of late life, the darkest things
I've read from him since "Letters to Yesinin," where
he wrote to Sergei as a way of not joining Sergei,
not killing himself and becoming another dead poet.
That whole book, and one other, inspired me to do the same,
not kill myself, when I was dying, or so close to it
that I didn't want to live. I didn't care. Nothing
was less fun than living, just then.
And today the news is full of the last words
from another saint, David Bowie. Someone once asked
John Coltrane what he wanted to do, now that he had changed
the entire face of jazz. He said, "I want to become a saint."
And he did. THere's a church in San Francisco
dedicated to Trane's sainthood, where they wroship
with an all-day free jazz jam. I can't think what's more fitting.
Now Bowie. I'm not sentimental. I never cry when expected.
I reserve my tears for when I cannot prevent them,
which is rarely the usual suspects or times.
Some movies will make me weep consistently, who remains
dry-eyed at most funerals. The truth is, when you're too full
of feeling it stops you up rather than brims over.
When it's too much, you go numb, at least for awhile,
and nothing can come out without explosives.
The tributes that get to me are the ones as weird as
who inspired them: like Chris Hadfield singing
on the International Space Station, a free-fall rendition
of "Ground Control to Major Tom." Hollywood, never the best
at being tasteful or sublime, couldn't pay for a backdrop
or special effects like that. Actual guitars floating in space.
Now this long distracting mournful stretch of a day
is ending. All day I've tried to focus on what must be done,
and never got as far as chores or duties. I was stuck
on the cusp of contemplation, a tired man sitting on a stump
in a desert thunderstorm, weeping.
What else is there to do? I'll tell you:
If you want to make a tribute to the artists who have changed
your life, do something at least as amazing as what they did
that changed yours, or at least inspired you.
DOn't settle for weeping with the herd. Make a fire.
Here's a random guitar. Place it on the funeral bin,
or set it slowly spinning down the length of the tin can
out there in space, with the Earth rotating out the window.
Don't imitate, steal. Be just as good as your gods.
After all, that's the minimum tribute they deserve.

•

Chris Hadfield performing Bowie's song "Space Oddity" on the Space Station

Launch

There's a level of commitment that no one understands who hasn't sacrificed
to make real change. This morning I was rudely awoken by the doorbell only
when I dragged myself up no one was there, still the event left me paranoid
and haunted, which is not helped by today's overcast gloom and cold damp wind,
especially after a summery yesterday bright with light and warm breezes. I want to go back
into some cave. There's nothing here this morning that doesn't create visions
of the metaphorical rope, only of course for me it's never hanging that tempts, it's that launch
into open air off a cliff or highway bypass, wheels whining at high speed
till you leave the road and float flying in silent air till the inevitable pancake
at the end of any ballistic arc. I'd go ballistic for a good death. That I've always seen
my own end involving Death's black car is what makes me a committed driver.
Everybody loves you when you're dead. This ghastly morn not even tea
can wake me from this nightmare of rude daybreak. At some point you stop asking
for help because you don't feel heard. That's all I ever needed, to just feel listened to,
like I've been heard and seen. But how many have given up their jobs and lives
and daily round to pop in the car and drive a state or two away to help a friend?
I have. Most will not. It's a form of acceptable inadequacy to say I wish I could help
but circumstances prevent me. In my worst moments of self-drowning I scathe excuses.
Heaven is a place where everyone does however they can for each other. Hell is where
you have to do it all on your own, which means tasks never end. Although it's true
that doing things alone when the sky is bright makes solitude a balm. It depends
what you're doing. Fly-fishing is better than sorting through the detritus of mildewed family
snapshot albums where half the people are dead and nothing is labeled clearly.
When's the last time I wrote you a letter out of desperation?
It must have been recently, although the days have soaked together. Every day seems
like every other and none of them are tolerable, so it becomes an endless hell
with no relief in the wrong kind of solitude. Does anybody hear? Is anybody there?
Does anybody care? I'm resorting to quotations now. Depression seems callow
when it's yours while in a song or a Russian novel it's profound and universal.
That's because a million people have listened to Yesenin and Doestoevsky and Cohen
while your own less spectacular plaints generate not even an echo. The knock on the door
of a stranger is more meaningful when it's fiction. Your own life will mean more to others
when you're dead. Comparisons are inevitable. That's just the human thirst for lust and memory
again overruling the impulse towards commitment. Few can be bothered.
It feels unfair, which is probably just hubris. When I gave up my own life to care
day to day for my ailing parents till they died it was never quite sensible to most.
In theory it's praiseworthy but bedpans and ostomy bags don't empty themselves.
Life is kept at a distance to make it more seemly and less severe. But life is messy.
Deep waters don't exist till your diving pushes the river bottom away and down.
Or you smack up against the physical laws. Whoever designed this place made no
account for dreams. Responding to nightmare with absurdity is self-defense.
See how I fly. Look, there's the guardrail. It breaks imperceptibly, tissue paper in the wind,
and for awhile all you can see is sky.

Letter to Orphée

Thinking of a lyre of wood and wire and earth,
an earth lyre, I think of an elemental music,
a music made of earth, metals and woods
and stones of earth, played by wind howling
outside the house this dim, blustery day. The clouds
last evening, and pale light this morning, look like snow coming,
not rain. Rushes of sound, wind blowing across
the housetop, reverberate down the chimney.
Orpheus picks up a strangely curved branch of fallen
wood off the forest floor, strings it with copper wires, and plays.
His lyre summons spirits of the air, voices hiding behind
wind and mist, his singing voice, his poetry, becomes the telling
of seasons, days turning the planet under stars.
An elemental voice describing a concerto of ever-changing forces
and spirals in the sky. Spiral wood beams struck by lightning
embrace a pale white stone from anywhere but here.
Perhaps an ancient sea. You cannot be unaware, Orpheus,
that time and change take us all, that these stones eroding
to dust and leaves in this interstellar wind were once
a shallow sea, or that the peak of our tallest mountain
is made of shells of sea creatures that died millions of years gone
to fall to deep ooze and be pressed into rock
by the pressures of what came after. My home
is a temple of standing stones. Red and gold sandstones
form a shelter around whose curves the wind howls. We work
these metal flakes, gold bright and soft copper green, into veins
of the lyre of Orpheus, seams in the wood, ore seams in the earth.
Its copper strings gleam with forged memory. Its curve
is a memory of birds nesting in the crook of an ancient bole,
a tree much older than any bird, once fallen forgotten
by the descendants of sparrows and robins who once it sheltered.
Birds nest in the hair, the ear, of Orpheus, and dictate their songs
to his receptive tongue, his voice which forgets nothing,
not even the oldest groan of the planet giving spontaneous birth to life.
It's tempting to believe that those who refuse to hear these spirits
singing have themselves no souls, but we must not judge, we must
leave room for revelation. Everything connects. Webs and orbs
and lyre-spiders who weave them. Atoms of everything, whirling
in apparent silence within these fossiled stones, glint and spark
in light cast by the voice of the son of dreaming. His torn limbs
cast upon waters and forest floor. Orphée retrieves his own bones
and sinew as he picks up another fallen treelimb to weave
a newer lyre. Look, will you not: gold leaves glow
in the last rays of afternoon, below this hillside meadow,
and behind that is the whirling sparkle of molecules dancing,
and behind that the velocity of a shining planet, an orb
hurling itself into silence. We are the cliffs we jump from.
Our naked flesh breaks the laketop shimmer as we fall,
we disappear forever into that water mirror, then placidity returns.
Low hum of oceans singing in the blood, wind in the copper wires
of a sacred city, a lyre strung above dark streets the moon guards.
A forest of shadows grows within oil slicks reflecting streetlights
and trash bins. But in time, deep time, this forest made of bricks
will be overeaten and digested by new forests, returned and ink-vined
along borders of papyrus leaves woven into sheets of sand
by the lyre's unending song. The lowest string on a harp
of air and ice, the lowest tone that, struck,
can shatter crystal mountains. Wind strokes
the highest strings into humming.
Orpheus takes breath, opens his mouth to sing again.
What comes forth
shapes wind-blown broken sandflakes
back into mirrors full of starlight.

Sealife

Rain on the tin chimney cap, pebbles falling on a black slate seacliff.
Everything is so hard. It all takes longer than it should, longer
than I remember it ever taking before, than i want it to. A wish is not
a promise, not that sudden spring storm that takes breath away.
A mug of tea in hand to light the keeper's soul. These rocks, this island.
Rain on the pebbled path, shattering light in ripples and shards.
The world won't pull itself into shape anymore. I've lost whatever way
I once had. It just falls apart. New paths haven't coalesced. The fog
just sits there, luffing the sails, becalmed. Fog and wind never share.
When my mind fills with fog I make no sail. Even this harbor fills
with ghosts.

        Here I am alone at last. Again and again. Do you see
where the waters meet, surge, blend, change color, finally merge?
Where green and brown become blue, and sink to ancient seabed,
slow limestone forming from the deep rain of falling plankton shell
and skeleton. Limestone is the graves of millions of sea lives.
The same layer and rind of calcium that is the mineral shine
of human teeth. Not mine, which are more than half fake, product
of a childhood spent away from treated water. Lifelong battle till my
minerals flake and fall away, leave gap and gouge in jaw and skull,
holes where pirates put gold, once, when they could.
But I have both eyes.

         And strange cavitation of sea-driven screws vortexing deep waters.
Dark shapes pass close by in the invisible rain and unsilent dark.
In the rain, in another world, I would be warm and naked under
a warming sun. But not yet. Not here. Prophecy is mere
vision that skips across an inner eye like sunlight, starshine,
bad clams. It's as corrosive as it is demanding. Skip ahead,
wild-breasted daughters of sunlit terraces on Mediterranean islets.
Let the wild boys chase you, not knowing you will tame them
once they've caught you. Who owns this trap? Its jaws full of light.

             No,
here I am slunk again in immobility. A broth of lassitude that verges
on desperation. I'm not saying I don't already know. I wish the news
were something that would save me, but it's a perishing blast of ice.
There's a blade of Antarctic iceshelf broken off and floating north,
an island of ice larger than your splayed-out hand from low orbit.
When it grounds and melts, or where, no one can guess, but there will be
hell to pay, a guaranteed disruption and dismay. Prophecy that.
For someone. I'm spinning in polar current circles, as this ice field,
touched down nowhere, frozen and lumbering along. No certainty here,
either.

      It's been awhile since I knew what shape to take to match the world's.
Every certain thing fallen away. Again and again. From first
void-filled vision to slower cracking, a splint on splintered world,
effect preceding cause. We know what caused the plane to fall,
but what caused the plane? What caused falling? It's remote. Iced over now.
Paleolithic.

         Stone axe shattering years between years. Blue red
stone shining when held just so to sun. Slickness of stream-bedded
quartzite sheens like water but doesn't lose shape. Polished sand
that once was river mouth filling the ocean plain below, now
sandstone and glinted mica shale, melted, reforged, made ever harder
beneath the pressure of a world's living, now glass. Still we can see
ripples that lay under river's glint and gleam. Glass-clear trout ghost
across memory of mountain sands that now rise up mid-lake
after being washed and ground to ocean, rippled in waves, crusted,
sealed, frozen, polished, reflecting sun again after long sleep. The memory
of water glistening stone surface as though an ancient river still flowed.
Under time-bent starlight, still, it does. There's no peace in this falling-apart
world, but the long breath of deep time, starlight on wet stone,
at least reminds us how short these few breaths are.

             Your hair
has not spread over my pillow in eons. Will we meet again, in a million years?
Perhaps these atoms, in your bones, in mine, will once again mingle,
making teeth in a future we cannot imagine. Perhaps your stone heart
will indeed be fossilized, preserved between beats as a clenched fist
in concrete sands.

         I cannot wait. Rain on galvanized tin grows louder, steady, still
circling all these eons. Rain wash me away. Rain wash all this to sand.
But the body, breathless, clings, and worries, and wants to go on,
even when we know it never could.

The Narrows

Here's a load of tripe, committed to destiny
rather than memory, a burden of a round
that goes to ground, unsung, unsingable.
No one wants to hear it now. A solo
for late night wineglass and solipsist.
Resources running low, worries running high,
disappearing starts to appeal. Just run away
from everything, become unknown, become
nobody anyone wants to know. Out there's
a desert not only of conception, but fact.
Sunflowers glazed in heat shimmer. Black rocks.
It's worse on darker days with no visible sun.
Heliotropes, confused, don't know who to follow.
Here's an intruding message from the mail,
reminder that no one gets away with anything.
You pack up all your worries with you. No motor
fast enough to outrun shades you don't want
to look at that lurk in the angles of any room.
The dead use a different kind of geometry.
They can ignore most walls, they run in circles,
although the worst of them, become demonic,
can only move in straight lines, and have to back
up, unwieldy tractors, to truck new angles
at the temple door, again and again. It's alright.
The sacred precincts are all out in the wilds,
all god's buildings erect by men are just decoys.
Nothing in there but field recordings. You can't expect
your weaker congregants to climb that mountain
every time. Little revelations come from littler gods.
It takes a real mountain to make a restless soul
into a rooted, deeply sourced well. Eventually
you run out of metaphors, left with just the facts
of change and worry. Don't expect to unpack
those bags too soon. What's learned can be
unlearned, but hangovers outlast a binge.
My scars remember every wound I'd forget,
if I could. Can't run too far on legs that limp,
muscles cramped and clenched on the past.
Time's required to undo each knot, time first
to crawl before you fly. Down in the arroyo,
long narrow passage dark before a waterfall,
shoulders curve under time's old weight, but
the rocks themselves support you, little gods
made of sand and time. The passage is too narrow
to allow for slouch. Stand tall or get stuck.
Even if you want exhaustion's weep,
there's no room. The geometry of surrender
is all upright. Then you're released, on your
knees again, but the air's fresh, wet and bracing,
here's a waterfall, let it do your weeping.
I don't know how to end this round, it's all
a circling intensity, a spiral labyrinth,
light and shade spun in a textured mist.
Go to ground, begin again. Silent song,
secret song, snow and stone, sung around.

Perfume of the Desert

A staring at the wall kind of day. Across this grassy field
the tops of riverside trees are winding fast in a hazy
humid late morning sky. I got here as soon as I could.
Now it's a matter of recovery, of absorbing silence.
I just discovered someone I used to have a crush on
is dating again. I know I don't stand a chance, not now,
probably never, so I don't imagine I'll even try. That steam
is fished out. But you can't help thinking. Roving rivers
of blind memory. In Arabic there's a word for the kind
of memory that comes over you sudden, a full bodied
kind of memory, and you relive a moment you'd forgotten,
or tried to. It's called the demanding memory. It demands
of you what self you are able to give. This morning is like
a sough in the thicket alongside a northern summer
gravel road. I can smell dirt dust in the air. I have no hope
of ever unraveling these ties that blind. People you like
seem to linger at the edges of your life, while people you
love seem either at the center of the radar scan, or completely
absent. An either/or of magnificent endurance. People
I don't like very much gather like a traffic jam where
one should never happen, small streets by a small lake in
a small town. Usually it's just about rubbernecking the latest
disaster, not because anything durable has happened.
We're all mayflies in the wind, after all. It's the end
of wisdom, at the end of life, that leaves you gasping,
a fish out of water, on the steps of a rickety wooden porch
somewhere no one knows who you are, I could die here,
and no one would know. That last thought before you do.
What we hate lingers so long because it's just pickled love
gone sour. Given an inkling of hopeful chance, we'd love it
again, and walk placid as wild turkeys towards doom.
A yearning for that shirt hike from desert to oblivion.
The slow motion violence of those cloudless trees
becomes this backdrop for self-flagellating melancholy.
How can I move forward when everyone wants to drag
me back down into the mud. Solace comes from ignoring
people and talking with redbirds. Even though it rained
hard these last few days, I sniff a tang of alkali dust
in air blown all the way from Nevada to Lake Michigan.
No wind strong enough to scrub it loose. Tang of dead cities,
eroded metals pooled in temporary lakes that lead to no ocean.
I've lost all ability to tell potential lovers what they do to me.
I'll settle for these crumbs from the sidelines. You lose the desire
to risk when rejection is inevitable. Small consolations of
higher forms of love, spiritual, intellectual, distant, worshipful,
the perfume of the desert, either tang or memory of tang, a cup
long drunk, long hungover, long regrets in echoes of a breeze
combing its fingers through hair of trees. Such hard work to resist
this sudden pathetic wail that comes over you with its
demanding memory. I haven't got much left to offer anyway.
The safest muse is the distant one, the muse you watch from afar,
the one that doesn't threaten immolation, moth wing to candle
bright as fusion, soaring in too close. I'll keep my distance,
lessons burned. Let's rename all these birds, give those green
tall stands which brush the wind a new name, a heartwood name.
In my distraction I ignore how solitude becomes a habit,
you have to work up the courage to say hello. People go
to church and nightclubs less for the worship than to meet
each other. If they took their shirts off to dance in church,
that's a religion I could follow. Sweat and wine flung
everywhere. I don't have any conclusions, I just watch
from the sidelines as usual. Once earlier in life I fell
into an abyss, not only of despair, so these latest rituals
of affiliation and desire seem pale to my roving jurist eye.
I'm told you're supposed to feel more alive when you're
near the flame of love, but my wings keep getting burned.
I plummet. I can't afford to fall back in worship with one
who never noticed the first time around. I have no fear
of immolation, I've been a phoenix here before. No,
what I fear is so much more red. When I get on the dance
floor it tends to summon darkness. Memories demanding
sharp as knives remind me how blunt instruments rise
from corner shadows whenever I let loose. Once again
I'm a wallflower at the dance, sore feet notwithstanding,
not because I fear the flame. I'm immunized by being burned.
Once again what I most fear lies in myself. That power
that smolders, deep within, that makes them all
turn pale and flee. A brooding volcano nothing can erode,
fire in the mountain's throat. It's when they realize
I'm not the moth, they're not the fire, that they retreat.
I've tried to civilize this inner mounting flame, to no avail.
I guess I'll always be in shadow, not in the spotlights.
I'll leave behind a stink of burning stone, dust
in the wind. I'll leave a mark along a trail, a maze
to master if you can. An ugly milkweed where there should
be cactus. Stand on the ridgeline, take in blue air
hazed with wind and distance, its scent of dry lake dust.
Bitter grit on tongue, nose full of rocks. Sweet memory
of cornflower. No, I won't try to follow you again. I'll live
alone and learn to like it. I'll never go back to that
village, not where the long boys gather in gloom
of dusk to preen their feathers and firedance. I'll let
my lungs be satisfied with gypsum, salt, and terror.
I'll salve your fear of wildness with such easy lies.
I'll make a bonfire with my heart, and dance alone
beneath such alien stars. My home's this heaven
haven where the sparks fly loose as wind in trees,
where none can hear me sing.

Brother of Clouds

Knives in the eyes of the dark. These hapless watchers
ask you to tell them about it, but don't really want
to hear. Darkness frightens them. Flail and whip of
wanderer to them is but a horse long lost and foundered.
They you ask how you are but don't really want
your answer. To know is to make too real. Politeness' sake
is a ramp down to strata where ears have fossilized,
hardened of hearing, filled with cemented sand.

Silent snow falling on darkest green pine boughs
along the foot of cloudhidden mountains.
Cloud-hidden, whereabouts unknown. The old mountain
sage evaporates into mountain mist, leaves behind
a ceremony of blossoms whitening the trailside meadow.
Nowhere to go but up, unless it's out and suddenly
down. Down by way of being rejected by even land's law.
Grains of petals at the foot of his sandals. He waits
a long time for you to find yourself and return.
Stories the world is made of. Story the elements.
Single candle flame becomes a silver vase, hanging
in the darkness. Where's that lantern when it's hopeless?
What sign? A tarantula-dance of shadows shot with lightning.
Nothing hear but the last echo of hooves. Sinew
makes a bond that only bone can break. Rolling in
whitened fields of dry old bones, a single wild rose.
Where did he disappear to, the ancient one? Snow,
belling elk, alder branches, the fall of light
on a frozen water cascade. Spark and glint. Now winter.

We all fall down. All fall. Down into everything
that falls. Under what's fallen is compost and cinders.
Moss into rock-crumble, lichen into rusted bowl.
Nothing left of this battlefield once deemed so
important but empty eye-sockets of caved-in armor
where crickets live. Long thrum of rarest of locust.

If you say it enough perhaps you'll come to believe.
Convincing yourself comes after. Believing before saying
is tongues of gypsum crusting into still small sands.
No meaningful residency. Why this mountain? Why this sky?
This long road. This dusty trail. Marks of a walking stick
left behind even after the wind washes all else
to another valley, another desert lake. Walking stick
pocks in tempest sand. Ancient marks of a lost path.

Flailing at the walls of the conventional. Pull back
from that cliff-edge, heart hammered into silver leaf. What
non-mystics never understand is gods-seeker's necessary
solitude. Whether mountain sage or respected diplomat,
apparently lost to the world or apparently lost in it,
each quiet solitary iconoclastic mystic needs to
to hear that still small voice. That voice drowned
in worlds of convention and rite. You almost lose
any ability to hear it when you spend too much time
in the marketplace of the mundane. There are no substitutes,
accept only the real thing, and we'll tell you what that is.
Even when you sink and fall again into cool relief of
silence.

      Always a risk to believe that words can save you. Always
tempted to record your journey in words, as though words
could contain any journey. You know they don't. You know
the unsaid, unknown, unspeakable, is more real, more true.
Mountain sage can go four months without saying a word.
When he comes down for a few days of gathering and harvest,
out of his lips comes an unstoppable wind, a raspy clear voice
with no words shaped, but meanings clear and graspable
as painted icons on stone cave walls. Nothing could be plainer.
Literally: nothing.

Get back up, from where you've fallen. So they shot off
your leg, so what. Bind the blood and walk anyway.
If you have to pull yourself along even when will fails,
bleeding a trail behind you from that belly wound,
you've found the right track. Nowhere near what
you think you're owed. Nowhere near inherited guides or maps.
Far off to the side of hard times and bitter fruit.
Pull yourself together even when each atom flies apart.

You have to come to stillness to see his trail-markers.
They are subtle, almost silent. Markers known
more by absence, by what is not there, what has been
removed. Look for the void in things. A single milkweed stalk
in a field of yellow daisies. An angled stone removed
from a pile of shingle beside a switchback. Fallen horses
could not be half so serene as this eaten grass. Look on
those days when closest to the edge of despair and self-death
for a marker towards which the wind is drawn, nature
abhorrent of vacuum, magnetic field in place of mineral.
Look. Here's where a stone once rested. Only an outline now.
So someone has been here, and left a sign.
Find it's absent shape in the dark damp stillness
where the wind replaces sense in the desperate night heart.

Lose your mind, just leave it by the trail.
Where you sat down to eat just forget to pick it up
and carry it any further. It will get along just fine alone.
Gradually quieting. Just forgotten. Why it ever mattered
no one anymore knows. Be absent-minded by intent.
Here's a gap in a row of aspen quaking with absence.
Higher up, a crag you can't see, veiled with unfallen rain.
Thunder's distant rumble almost as though clearing his throat.
Nothing could be plainer.

Brother of Clouds

Knives in the eyes of the dark. These hapless watchers
ask you to tell them about it, but don't really want
to hear. Darkness frightens them. Flail and whip of
wanderer to them is but a horse long lost and foundered.
They you ask how you are but don't really want
your answer. To know is to make too real. Politeness' sake
is a ramp down to strata where ears have fossilized,
hardened of hearing, filled with cemented sand.

Silent snow falling on darkest green pine boughs
along the foot of cloudhidden mountains.
Cloud-hidden, whereabouts unknown. The old mountain
sage evaporates into mountain mist, leaves behind
a ceremony of blossoms whitening the trailside meadow.
Nowhere to go but up, unless it's out and suddenly
down. Down by way of being rejected by even land's law.
Grains of petals at the foot of his sandals. He waits
a long time for you to find yourself and return.
Stories the world is made of. Story the elements.
Single candle flame becomes a silver vase, hanging
in the darkness. Where's that lantern when it's hopeless?
What sign? A tarantula-dance of shadows shot with lightning.
Nothing hear but the last echo of hooves. Sinew
makes a bond that only bone can break. Rolling in
whitened fields of dry old bones, a single wild rose.
Where did he disappear to, the ancient one? Snow,
belling elk, alder branches, the fall of light
on a frozen water cascade. Spark and glint. Now winter.

We all fall down. All fall. Down into everything
that falls. Under what's fallen is compost and cinders.
Moss into rock-crumble, lichen into rusted bowl.
Nothing left of this battlefield once deemed so
important but empty eye-sockets of caved-in armor
where crickets live. Long thrum of rarest of locust.

If you say it enough perhaps you'll come to believe.
Convincing yourself comes after. Believing before saying
is tongues of gypsum crusting into still small sands.
No meaningful residency. Why this mountain? Why this sky?
This long road. This dusty trail. Marks of a walking stick
left behind even after the wind washes all else
to another valley, another desert lake. Walking stick
pocks in tempest sand. Ancient marks of a lost path.

Flailing at the walls of the conventional. Pull back
from that cliff-edge, heart hammered into silver leaf. What
non-mystics never understand is gods-seeker's necessary
solitude. Whether mountain sage or respected diplomat,
apparently lost to the world or apparently lost in it,
each quiet solitary iconoclastic mystic needs to
to hear that still small voice. That voice drowned
in worlds of convention and rite. You almost lose
any ability to hear it when you spend too much time
in the marketplace of the mundane. There are no substitutes,
accept only the real thing, and we'll tell you what that is.
Even when you sink and fall again into cool relief of
silence.

          Always a risk to believe that words can save you. Always
tempted to record your journey in words, as though words
could contain any journey. You know they don't. You know
the unsaid, unknown, unspeakable, is more real, more true.
Mountain sage can go four months without saying a word.
When he comes down for a few days of gathering and harvest,
out of his lips comes an unstoppable wind, a raspy clear voice
with no words shaped, but meanings clear and graspable
as painted icons on stone cave walls. Nothing could be plainer.
Literally: nothing.

Get back up, from where you've fallen. So they shot off
your leg, so what. Bind the blood and walk anyway.
If you have to pull yourself along even when will fails,
bleeding a trail behind you from that belly wound,
you've found the right track. Nowhere near what
you think you're owed. Nowhere near inherited guides or maps.
Far off to the side of hard times and bitter fruit.
Pull yourself together even when each atom flies apart.

You have to come to stillness to see his trail-markers.
They are subtle, almost silent. Markers known
more by absence, by what is not there, what has been
removed. Look for the void in things. A single milkweed stalk
in a field of yellow daisies. An angled stone removed
from a pile of shingle beside a switchback. Fallen horses
could not be half so serene as this eaten grass. Look on
those days when closest to the edge of despair and self-death
for a marker towards which the wind is drawn, nature
abhorrent of vacuum, magnetic field in place of mineral.
Look. Here's where a stone once rested. Only an outline now.
So someone has been here, and left a sign.
Find it's absent shape in the dark damp stillness
where the wind replaces sense in the desperate night heart.

Lose your mind, just leave it by the trail.
Where you sat down to eat just forget to pick it up
and carry it any further. It will get along just fine alone.
Gradually quieting. Just forgotten. Why it ever mattered
no one anymore knows. Be absent-minded by intent.
Here's a gap in a row of aspen quaking with absence.
Higher up, a crag you can't see, veiled with unfallen rain.
Thunder's distant rumble almost as though clearing his throat.
Nothing could be plainer.

Nothing Spring

Not rushing to start the day because
it promises nothing of absent joy I crave,
I sit as usual naked before the keys
shawl-wrapped and blinking
through the usual steam from a mug of tea.
Last night I woke at 4am to rumbles
of thunder miles southwest, occasional strobe
of nearer lightning, got up in the chill
to shut down and unplug computers,
wandered the house dark and silent,
fell back asleep in my chair.
Some blankets need washing, others
are finally warm enough to forget.
Cold dim dark outside this morning still
although the pear tree blooms white,
remarking on the early tulips, their glare,
profligate willingness to expire in color.
Maybe that's the source of love, in the garden.
I don't love what promises to be another noon
not of my own bidding, which would prefer to laze.
Now that people think I'm well, they've begun
their incessant asking of favors. In this world
no one wants to pay the piper anymore.
If your kid could can do it just as well, they ask,
why pay someone whose experience
whose acquired skills means they charge. So I am
tasked to do free favors that sit on my plate till
I damn well feel like it. This morning I don't.
Urgencies and urgencies, which more compelling,
that deadline you dawdled, or this tree
deciding to explode in pink and white?
You choose. I need my tea to clear my eyes.
It's so easy to distract yourself by taking care
of everyone else. Actually that's almost rewarding,
in a way. Although you still end up needing
to finish your own list of chores, rebuilding that wall
that fell over in the winter, spring planting,
a book to read, a book to write. Electric life
has made my days all the more compelled to juggle.
Objects bite back when devices designed to save labor
end up demanding more. Where's the efficiency
in obsession? I resist my own weak ends,
still they force me to a slower calmer pace.
I don't know when I'll ever get home. It seems
to recede infinitely. Did the Taoist sage have
an aphorism about this? Just go with the flow.
Normal speech for unusual unspoken occasions.
There's a paradox where I can moor my raft.
A cool pond reflects mist and willow sentinels.
It does seem silly, when you bend over then fall
because your center of gravity is gone. Tying shoes
has become a task I want to do before
putting pants on. Naked in my sneakers if
I had a choice for constitutions. I mean everything.
Water spheres droop from the edges of spruce.
It's too gloomy to get dressed. Fire maples are
leafing out, buds still nearly the color of young rice.
I suppose it's spring. i didn't have enough of winter.

Glass Walls

Formless, incoherent, like seeing at a distance
through a glass wall the world ticks on, tides in, tides out,
flowing between ocean and lens, never at rest,
never tranquil, never ceasing. So go the waves.

A month of driving, travel, seeing new places,
seeing old faces, seeing the dead walking through
the living, all of it seen through a glass wall.
You hoped for enlightenment, that fizzy detachment
in which the opened heart engages with suffering
by neither causing nor rejecting. Instead, so obvious,
it's depression, the remembered glass wall of uncaring,
not unknowing. Neither an embrace of mystery nor
a carapace of dejected self-analysis, it's just blah.
Where's the fizz of life? That snowstorm seems to have it,
gathering and drifting in high riverine canyon winds,
till they bite the road and block it, but you don't care.
Is a depression a distraction from worry? Is it a gift?
I don't know. I embrace the few moments where
the world embraced me. And they were few. Only now
realizing how distanced from the foam I've been,
another bleak morning, snowless, cold, bitter winded,
only now knowing what you hoped was satori was only sorrow.

There's a small buoy inside my inner sea, holding on
to anchorage while storm waves surge around.
There's a small boy inside whose horror resurges
unabating, groundswelled by the belly scar he doesn't
understand. A repeating chorus of what the hell happened
to me. A line of scar on his perfect belly, glowing white
where the angel slit him open with the burning fiery sword.
All these sensations surrounding surgical terror, shunted aside
for later; now later has become now. Horror, terror, grief, death,
loss, confusion, a welter of wounds flying thick into memory,
feelings you didn't have time for when all your effort went into
just daily survival, bubble around your feet, stinking of sea-wrack.
Perhaps these glass walls help you from feeling too much, too fast.

So the world howls when I cannot. Winds blow across
the headlands; one night in Nevada they howled like the dead
around the edges of my hotel room door, alkali, dessicant.
The dry bones of the tormented dead sifted ash
dry lake dust seeping in. That night sleep was on vacation.
Another hellride down the Sierras, road twisting away
from the headlights, you'd stop and sleep if it wasn't so cold,
but the two-lane winds away till late, leaving you vibrating
once again on valley floor. In the Basin and Range
there are no oases, just desert sojourns. Normally
that's welcome, a place to stop and listen to silence.
The glass wall between me and world, that I took for transparent,
was a parfait of silence, screams, and silence, layered between
my eyes and desert silence. Now I've nothing to show for it.

What a waste. Did I return refreshed, vacationed, relaxed,
recharged? I feel hollowed, edged far too close to the wind howl,
well aware that if I could only summon the caring I'd dissolve
into puddles of grief. But the glass wall. No shouting
in either cathedral or cemetery gloom, it's unseemly.
In Taos and Albuquerque we wandered through cathedral
gift shops, feeling for once at home. I bought some portable
saints to travel with, alongside the Ganesha statue with his club,
the bronze Buddha found at a new Mexico thrift store.
I'm not particular about my saints. I'll call eclectically on every
source of solace and protection, the thousand little gods,
those interfacial masks between us and silent godhead.
I'm a pragmatic witch, going with whatever works. No loyalty
to any path but the one I find my feet on. Glass walls keep me
from knowing what I was feeling till, spelunking, I write it all down.
Now shudders ripple through me, I cough for the first time all winter.

Lucite, perspex, indifferent vitrine, inches of plexiglass
holding out the sea from waterclap. This was no vacation,
despite desire, or desert silence, despite the wind at ocean's boom.
Instead, archaeology. The recovery of artifacts of dying,
implements of torture, a grid of bones amidst fossilized grain.
If I plant those archaic seeds, I'll fly apart. Is depression so bad,
if it keeps you from incessant weeping? If I had the will I'd break
these walls apart. Perhaps you excavate these petroglyphic bones
by starting with the sills, chipping away till the glass loosens.
Tilts out of its frame the way a painting falls at any museum,
shocked silence after whisper of archaic canvas reaches floor tiles.

Whatever. I need to come back to life. There were moments.
Afternoon light on canyon walls at Zion, dappled by clouds.
The hour around sunset at Pescadero, where waves swirled
around pelagic outcrops ancient in ancient light and incoming tide.
There was a lot of wind. End of the snowbound road at jackson Lake,
whitewalled by the plows, white snow mists cloaking the mountains,
lake frozen and drifted, white on white, every white, even these pines.
Tea and snacks by the adobe fireplace and heavy beams at the Taos Inn,
an hour after brushing by bighorn sheep running across the canyon rim.
Somewhere on a snowbound Wyoming fenceline, bald eagles and ravens
perched side by side, getting along. Sunlight converted into wine.
Frozen wild berries under naked aspen boughs. Scent of juniper and pine.
After all, despite dense inner weeds, I have come through, I have survived.

Desert Inside

Hardness has become a way of life. A test of metals.
People think I'm all better but I'm not
even halfway home, and it gets worse before
it gets better. Now I'm in a small desert hotel room
again, feeling sorry for myself, again. The whirl turns.
The body struggles on with living, determined, always
optimistic. But I can't seem to locate any terrain
remotely near to happiness. Too many impossible
worries about futures both far off and near.
What reason do I have to start the day? I've learned
late in life that mornings are for writing, the rest
of the day for less verbal arts. A walk clears the thicket
of words. Just another drive through amazing landscapes
that dwarf everything human, having been around so long
that every pebble has perspective and worries not.
It's an offense to carve your name into sandstone
cliffs, a soft act of hubris equivalent only to
a glacier's fond erosion of everything that supports it.
I'm back to petroglyphs, beautiful mostly because
they've endured, mysterious in content, unfathomably aged
little icons carved into living rock's patina or crust.
What have I ever left that could endure so long?
Airy nothings. I dreamed last night that my wallet
and passport had been taken away, and not returned,
everyone feigning ignorance. For some reason I ended up
at a garage sale the size of a city block, arguing
with incompetents. I don't know what that means. Perhaps
I feel trapped amidst civilization's garbage heaps.
It's true I don't like feeling caged. A blacktopped road
is an icon for me as fond as any Beat's, as any petroglyph.
I feel trapped when I cannot travel. Cabin fever of the soul.
Not everything has a given name. Or needs one.
You hope for good weather, a clear day, nevertheless you go on.
The dream ended in fields of frustration, everyone jeering me
as I jumped into the sky and flew off the way I can in dreams,
flying above the street, evading telephone wires and other low obstacles.
The people below in the city's canyons began to look like black crabs
trying to pull me back down into their bucket of ordinary
aggravations. But I was flying above their heads,
and they could not follow.

Chalice of Revelation

Afternoon, an omelette and lemonade. Here I sit
at the gates of heaven's light, watched over by
a mural forecasting mutated natural wild doom,
a mire and blood of funky apocalypse. Everywhere abounds
the pornography of despair, turning wheels, hazmat sigils,
barking epiphanies of desolation. Here I sit, failing
at Zen, lost to my epiphanies, nothing to do with the zeitgeist.
Rejection is a kind of affirmation. Humming wires,
a line of chihuahuan crows pecking at white sand grubs.
Even the lizards are lost to blindness. White light, white land.
Shoes off, white sand in whorls of toes pressed dry to dessicated
earth. Long walk up dune and down. Where's my shirt? Evaporated.
Telephone spine power poles line in retreat along the roadside
to infinity. Classic Western iconic highway. Open sky, two crumbled
black lanes, fading paint yellow line down center, bright hot dirt
on either side, line of telephone poles converging at infinity
with the road edge itself. All things converge beyond view,
in longer distances. That merciless light. Watched over doomed
by dead Indians. That long glance. As laconic as a fence line,
barbed wire keeping you out of malpais where you never
wanted to go anyway. Fence lines insignificant
under an infinity of sky, heaven, cloud, glare.
Black land, black glare. Butt sore from hours of driving,
sneezing at powdered road dust, thoughts turning at dusk
towards lonely forevers, it's hard not to get existential.
As if there was any point to this road anyway.
Zen of driving a long humming highway is a pillow of soil.
Don't try to figure it out. Just go. White light, black road.
Why this chalice of revelations, broken across sand lap of light.

Colder Moons

Outside the blood moon of popping trees.
Snow at last. Blur of surprised antlers,
past the morning window where I sit to write:
An eight-point stag leaps away from the glass,
snow pawed beside the house, across white drapery past
pines towards the river. At dusk, yearling deer
gavotte circles around the naked maple. Last week
a round moon caught itself in a net of oak branches,
white pearl in a weave of strands ambered in sunset.
Three days later the sun, white-balled by heavy clouds
is caught in a similar net of tree stalks, burned
before dusk. Now all my crackling trees are afire.

Somewhere there's a desert where I want to go,
unfettered by frost's weave or winter's sulk, where
a known quality of silence, more encompassing
than the muffled quilting made by heavy snowfall,
rings off rocks, tastes like brass on the tongue.
Gypsum dust, actinic glare, alkali kiss and sneeze.
Ache for distances so private you can gambol unclothed,
naked to the sky blaze, soaking up boulder-borne heat
as tongue-flicking lizards digest a feast of cacti bees.
Till your ribs runnel with sweat, streaming tan dust away.
Some smug stillness in such indolent glow. Not only a vibrant
basking in shimmer heat of isometric lust.

Colder moons under a blank desert eye. Not a lot to do
when your hands get this cold. Not a lot to say. Ankles crack
like icicles. I hear there's a shortcut across the arroyo,
where wiser angels do not tread. Words spill over the canyon,
all fireweed and fragrance.

Random ideograms of dislocation. Last time outbound,
sunsets to take your breath away, orange translucent purple
green-edged blue teal peach, landscape with a dollop of
desert light. Disconnect, dislocate, decenter. A thread
runs through memory, links every ground you ever camped on.
A surfeit of tent, an excess of fresh air. Brewing sweet tea
over wood coals some cold blue pre-dawn, embrace
a kind of solace. Some things don't need
to be forgiven.

New Songs for an Afterlife

Interrupted sleep is still sleep. At least nine hours,
broken into stems, this long weekend. Each night
recovering a lost sense of self. Restless, unnerved,
woken from intense dreams about gathering crystals
from a business going out. Crystals of color, electronics,
a microphone stand with bizarre gear attached,
stack of high-end video cameras might still work.
Afterlife of quartz and silicon.

Last night, poet, a small god's song lyric.
Not a shock, once immersed in songwriting,
the obvious poem come out as lyrics. Words dreamt.
Three new lyrics this past month, poet, steady
trickle if not flood. Only half-rhymed, structurally
loose, looking for a new word to say what's familiar,
feeling forward into the unknown. Three new songs
sit by the hearth of dreaming. The more you dream,
the more you write. Gradually gathers into new sets,
a new book. A scattering of words. Some connection
to leaves fallen across grass and flesh alike.

Chain links between paint and film, conflagrations
of carpet fiber, ash, gravel, lost keychains.
Charms for an afterlife of trash and dead symbols.
An angry dying painter makes collage, painting words
into the swirling vibrancy of his last large paintings.
Paintings about dying, paradoxically full of life.
Serenity and rage beside each other, holding hands.
Two saints of agony and ecstasy, roped barbed-wire
cattle dragged to the dullest seaside ledges.
Journals of paint and alchemical magic. Dancers
waltzing the skulls of their gone lovers
in the apocalyptic sundown. Make me a ribbon to wear
from the sinew of your broken thighs.
Write poem lyrics with withered skeletal hands.
An afterlife for songs, long past the singer's
expiring exhalation.

Seeing the Bones

Legs aching, falling asleep, last pause for breath before
the actual plummet, middle-of-the-night tired,
I see the bones within my own flesh, lingering,
x-rayed in mind's vision, skeleton moving
as I adjust sprawl to spare hips that night
given usual agony. Now I see the bones of hands
and arms as well. Some awakening to see the skull
behind the skin. What's this for? A presentiment
of eventual ends? A warning more local, personal?
There's no sense to it, just vision. In the morning,
though, it's still there, this sense of bones of hand
and forearm and thigh shining through the flesh.

Argument with basic self that armor is unnecessary.
Release those batting layers no longer needed to pad
against the world's black-blooded suffering. Enlivened
to see the ribs of skinny boys show through, attractive
to tickle as well as scan. A young man's armor
of brush, pencil, sketch pad. Long-lined torsos
hatched with fish-bone shadows. Another acting-out
by basic self to try to harden into steel, but one thing
the younger self never wants to learn is the immiscible.
Open that heart, break through those glowing ribs,
fire within something like the sun. Heartburst and live.

Losing armor is not dying. There are gaps between bones.
These fingers held together by nothing so much as will.
Once or twice, maybe more, i've seen the cold dissolving
into atoms, division of the flesh into atomic clouds.
Seen flesh made galaxy, self spun into void.
Lost arms to aspen, thighs to red mesa sandstone.
Once or twice, at least, an emptying of self into self
into void. It leaves its marks. I'm not afraid to see
my own bones, I say. There they are. Is that blue halo
radioactive particle spin? Maybe it's just the x-ray light
from a long billion light-months powering its way
through gas cloud and flesh alike. Some things just
seem more solid, just seem dense.

Cold memory of dying and living again. Hot breath
of vast beasts snuffling your hair to wake you. Make a
fist in a night full of burning horses. Still, they run.
What is left here but the recordings? Shut them off,
they are as useless as memoirs no one dictated,
no one wants to recite. A semblance of ceremony
to want these bone-bound books at all. What have I ever
lost by dying? Just those scars I needed no more.
There isn't much to be said with missing throats.
Just that jaws will clack, teeth will rattle,
and the pound of flesh taken has lost itself
in a memory of marrow bone.

That sunlight feels bountiful good on skin. Pressure
of heat. Thigh-bones sheath themselves back in
muscle holsters. Back and shoulders where the sun kisses.
There used to be less hair around that scar. It trembles
in the freshet. Have we awoken yet? Nearly. Nearly.
Still forearm bones seem revealed, indirect sunlight,
blue beneath the skin. Long there, long passing.

Theokritikos: poem series

I've been writing an occasional series of poems for about four years. They are poems rather different from my usual style and forms. They have been rather controversial at times. And now, I have found a name for the overall series. Not that it needed a title, but it does help give the series coherence, and a handle to hold onto. Also, it seemed appropriate to find an overall series title in the same spirit in which the individual poems are named.

I cycle back around to poet and novelist Nikos Kazantzakis' strange little book, The Saviors of God: Spiritual Exercises (translated by Kimon Friar). This book is a poetic statement of the author's inner mystical vision, written at white heat during an unexplained and disfiguring illness that vanished as soon as the book was completed. It is one of the least known of Kazantzakis' several books—he is best known for having written the existential novel Zorba the Greek and a modern sequel of The Odyssey—yet Saviors contains in summation his entire cosmology, his motivations as a poet and mystic, the ideas that lie behind his entire corpus. Kazantzakis titled his little book, askitiki, or ascesis, connoting both "asceticism" and "aesthetics," given in translation as "spiritual exercises," which further evokes other series of spiritual exercises composed by other mystics. The spiritual and the artistic are one, a truth the poet lived as well as believed. It appears in one aspect or another in all of his writings. The Prologue states:

WE COME from a dark abyss, we end in a dark abyss, and we call the luminous interval life. As soon as we are born the return begins, at once the setting forth and the coming back; we die in every moment. Because of this many have cried out: The goal of life is death! But as soon as we are born we begin the struggle to create, to compose, to turn matter into life; we are born in every moment. Because of this many have cried out: The goal of ephemeral life is immortality! In the temporary living organism these two streams collide: (a) the ascent toward composition, toward life, toward immortality; (b) the descent toward decomposition, toward matter, toward death. Both streams well up from the depths of primordial essence. Life startles us at first; it seems somewhat beyond the law, somewhat contrary to nature, somewhat like a transitory counteraction to the dark eternal fountains; but deeper down we feel that Life is itself without beginning, an indestructible force of the Universe. Otherwise, from where did that superhuman strength come which hurls us from the unborn to the born and gives us - plants, animals, men - courage for the struggle? But both opposing forces are holy. It is our duty, therefore, to grasp that vision which can embrace and harmonize these two enormous, timeless, and indestructible forces, and with this vision to modulate our thinking and our action.

I think about Kazantsakis because it bears directly on this poem series I've been writing since 2007. I wrote the first poem in the series (before I knew it would become a series) when I was the live-in caregiver for my father, who was dying of colon cancer. I drove him to his medical appointments, I cared for him at home, I did all the errands and shopping when he wasn't able to, and more. I did much the same for my mother, who had Alzheimer's; although my mother didn't live at home, but in a care facility, I still needed to make decisions for her care, and more. About the same time that they died, I was diagnosed with my own chronic illness, which got worse, then I had surgery this past summer, and now I am in a state of ongoing recovery.

The poems in this series have titles in classical Greek, words that serve as titles and themes for each poem: specifically, ancient Greek terms used in both classical and contemporary theological writing. These Greek words are complex, nuanced, and layered in meaning; they all have long histories and many subtleties. There are associations of meaning that have accrued over centuries or millennia of theological writing, but there are also the original meanings of the words in their original ancient Greek contexts. I tend to weight my own interpretations towards the latter, but meaning is not dictated in a poem, and the reader is free to find meanings in my poetry that even I did not know were there. (I occasionally make such discoveries myself, implying that on a conscious level I didn't deliberately insert such meanings, but, on some super-conscious archetypal level, some greater part of me perhaps did.)

I admit that it does help to know what the titles mean, when reading the poems in this series. I've encouraged people to go look the words up, and discover for themselves. If I ever publish these poems as a group, I may have to provide an endnote or lexicon. Each poem reflects the title word in both content and form, and in some cases, represents the concept of the title as a process that happens during the poem. The poem therefore becomes an enactment of the title.

The poems in the series are for the most part written in new styles and forms that emerge organically as I write, spontaneously, without pre-planning. The poems were written in the wake of several powerful life-changing events (as mentioned above, the illness and death of my parents, my own chronic illness, surgery, and ongoing recovery). Many of these poems have surprised me in the process of their emergence. I find that I am not writing at all like I used to write, before all of these events happened in my life; in fact, I'm unable to write the way I did a decade and more ago. I am in transition, learning to read new maps, after having discarded all the old maps which had become worse than useless. When you go through a life-changing experience, it affects your art, even how you make your art.

So, the title for this poem series came to me rather late in the process, really just a few days ago, after most of these poems had already been written. The title is Theokritikos, derived from kritikos, defined in classical Greek as one who is capable of judging; and from theo-, or theos, classically defined as god-related, as involved with the gods. Adding theo- to kritikos changes the latter from a mostly literary or social-justice implication of analysis, judgment, and understanding, and brings in the transcendent, the mystical, and the theological. I do this deliberately. I am well aware that the poems in this series have always contained questions that are eternal, even theocritical, in implication.

Theokritikos is a complex formulation that I hope might have pleased Kazantzakis. Implied is both criticism of the gods, and criticism of life in service to the gods. I realize in retrospect that many of these poems are in the spirit of Saviors of God, which questions everything, even the abyss, and sets fire to the heart and mind.

Here are a few lines from Saviors of God, which I feel resonate strongly with what I am writing about here, and share tone and temperament with the poems in my Theocritikos series:

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I have one longing only: to grasp what is hidden behind appearances, to ferret out that mystery which brings me to birth and then kills me, to discover if behind the visible and unceasing stream of the world an invisible and immutable presence is hiding. . . .

During those fearful moments when the Cry passes through our bodies, we feel a prehuman power driving us ruthlessly, Behind us a muddy torrent roars, full of blood, tears, and sweat, filled with squeals of joy, of lust, of death. . . .

PAIN IS NOT the only essence of our God, nor is hope in a future life or a life on this earth, neither joy nor victory. Every religion that holds up to worship one of these primordial aspects of God narrows our hearts and our minds. The essence of our God is STRUGGLE. Pain, joy, and hope unfold and labor within this struggle, world without end. . . .

In the smallest lightning flash of our lives, we feel all of God treading upon us, and suddenly we understand: if we all desire it intensely, if we organize all the visible and invisible powers of earth and fling them upward, if we all battle together like fellow combatants eternally vigilant - then the Universe might possibly be saved. . . .

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Few poems in this series have been well-regarded. Some have generated intense controversy, most have been ignored, some labeled incomprehensible or baffling or worse. Well, you know, poets argue eternally about accessibility and difficulty in poetry; my opinion has always been that a poem should be what it is, in order to be true. If a poem is more difficult, that may only be because it's addressing complex, nuanced ideas, which the poems in this series do. I readily admit that they are "experiments" in the sense that we experiment with life till we get it right. All life is trial-and-error, experimenting with the tools we have to build what we can. Two or three of these poems have been officially published, placed in various journals and periodicals. Most have not, except here. They've so often been greeted with bafflement or dislike that I admit I haven't tried very hard. (I began the Letters series of poems during my own illness, begun when I almost died from anemia last year, and are ongoing—the Letters poems aren't really any more welcomed than the Theocritikos series.) But that's okay: I'm not writing them to be loved, I'm not writing them for you.

I foresee printing the Theokritikps series, someday, as a small-edition illustrated chapbook. Despite their unpopularity, I am moderately fond of these poems, for meeting several of my own artistic needs. They've been responses to darkness and light, and have helped me sort out my thinking. I've learned much from their making.

Apoptosis

Long walk down a long incline, long exhaling,
slow long disintegration, and you sit there
curled in your easy chair wondering if you should go on.
Spent all your energy today trying to care either way.
Fingers stroking root to keep you going, fingers
in the cleft of a life, somehow tickling the soul.
Some rhythm, some fuel in the mitochondria that could be
the power that powers the soul, which the body is inside.
A long cloak. A long remembering of winters.
Death and rebirth are all you have to live for.
Still a reawakening, a cold morning cocooned in wool.

Then a bleak cold rainstruck day full of wind and ire.
No impression made on the flow of otherness, though,
since everything seemed to be smooth on errantry.
Dying to live in the same precession as living to die.
On the day of the dead, when the year too dies,
the path turns to leafmold and ash. Flicker of werelight.
You have to die and be reborn to be transformed.
A lot less theoretical than it used to be, this threshold.
The renewal and replacement of nature. Why did the Buddha
die from eating a mushroom? Like all fungi, mushrooms
break down old useless dead things, making way for
new life that is to come in its place. The Buddha died
a natural death. You can't go on till everything is shed,
shriven, taken from you. The transformed life is emptied,
first. So many days of wander.

Long dream of being unable to either wake or dream.
Some days you just live, inside a disposable bag of separation.
Dying and living, the same. Out back the mold smell
comes from trees in high cold winds. Comes down the chimney,
comes over the threshold, where a new world begins.
Doesn't make a scene, just arrives. The gray and the green,
eternal conflict of growth and dissolution. The gray takes down
what the green has wrought. Elemental Pan, spirit of growth,
of life, Green Man, his twin brother the Brown Man, Gray Man,
cloaked in wet rotten leaves, autumn threshold of decay.
One enters the woods, one leaves the grasslands. Wave
as you pass on. Cells eat each other when it's time to go.

I've died and been reborn. Again and again. This time, skin slotted
by knives, thin hard scars seeming an ecstasy of drowning,
seepage and sainthood in one flesh, this time the healing begins
with dying. The creative destruct, end of the world. Clear out the old,
bring in the new. Have to demolish the living world to make room
for the next to come. Clear out the old dead things. The Goddess said,
Your heart didn't heal right last time, so we'll have to break it again,
and reset it so it heals properly this time. And struck Her anvil.
It was a true dream. The morning birds pulsed with light.

Oh but this suffering and endurance I've witnessed 40 years of days
in the wilderness is supposed to be for my own good, my healing,
If only it didn't ache so. Rather be in bed with four naked souls
exploring the death of epidural skin cells under massaging fingers,
than spend another day in ascetic cemetery glut. What hospitals
lack in their chapels are those sacred temple prostitutes of gone eras.
Those lovers who give you a reason to want to live, to come back
from the dead, thereby healing you faster, bringing you back to life.
Love and death, the only reasons to go on living.

If we are hollowed out and emptied, it's to make room for spirits
to enter and entwine. It's we who are the vessels. Greenmantle is the shell
that sheds a cloak of leaves that burns in autumn to make new spores
for spring renewal. And so the house that Pan built. You have to be broken,
again and again, to become soft enough for the god to enter you.
A million years to make this black earth soil. Blown to dust in a dry season.
Desert wind that hollows the heart, make mine a pilgrim's cave.
Have to let go of what you thought you knew. Have to empty the teacup
in order to be able to fill it with new tea. Each drop of pure water
into the bucket filled with scum pushes one contaminated water drop out.
Eventually, a million or so drops later, the pure replaces the oilslicked.
It takes no naked skull to know that the god created a mechanism
of making, the power under life. It takes no bridge to stretch the chasm
between the making and the mechanism of the made.

Now we fall down. Now we slow to winter's sleep.
The dead of the dead. That spring will come around the wheel
once more requires a leap of faith. This could be our last winter,
the gods' sleep when wolves eat the moon and the father-god, half-blind
so he could see, loses hold of the runes that hold the worldtree
in its shape, so it all goes to snow and frozen fire. We come from
a dark abyss, we end in a darker void, we call the luminous
interval between those life. When we stare too long into those
silver-edged voids, they tend to stare back. Everything unnecessary
gets stripped away. That can be a great undoing, or a little one.

A thousand sayings, a thousand days. All of it unnecessary fog
over the mind of clover. Too much of mind, now, the overflowing
teacup, let's return to the body's inner fire, blue stars in our flesh,
blue sun on a necklace sparking out hearts, fire inside bones and thighs,
and the long return to life, after long dark, each dawn. Shut up,
now, in the cabin of words, and watch birds flash in the fire of green.
At last it's morning, after nightlong embers have fed the dying.

Notes to Overcome

Notes:

As much of my poetic juice as I'm pouring into writing song lyrics for the new music commission, I'm also writing these other poems as they come to me. Which they have increasingly been doing, again.

Remember, one of the rules of creativity is: The more you do, the more you do. The more you do, the more you are able to do. It's anti-entropic: it feeds itself, it starts to run under its own power, like the ancient dream of perpetual motion. One of the reasons you know that the creative process is divine is precisely because it's anti-entropic. Doing work over there feeds work over here. Being in the flow means that everything is flowing, the river of creative force is available to feed all the various media that you might work in. Activity here increases activity over there, because the floodwaters are non-specific. Everything feeds everything else.

Also, these other poems serve for me a different purpose than the lyrics written for the music commission. The song lyrics are specific stories, specific narratives about one part of my life and the lives of others like me. These other poems, especially the Letters series poems, help me cope with my own very personal narrative of recovery, grief, suffering, PTSD, and the daily need to find a meaning in life, a reason to keep enduring what is occasionally unendurable. They too are anentropic, if not overtly anti-entropic, in that they help me be able to not slide down the gravity well into acedia or despair. They become part of my self-healing process, a necessary response to what has ben going on in my life, medically and psychologically. I began writing the Letters poems, after all, as a response to encounters with personal mortality, as a response to almost dying, as a way of pulling my head out of a morass of confusion and despair. You need to vent, to get it out of your system,, to get past it. As I've said before, Making art is the best revenge. Revenge not on people for supposed harm done to oneself, but against the entire systems that try to destroy us, and fail. I never expected to write so many of these Letters poems; I never expected to have the need to. What I try to do is turn raw feeling into art: so that these are not raw screaming into the journal, are not merely venting and shouting and yelling at the walls of life's limits, but that something artful, more permanent, more transcendent might be made. They are fueled by painful circumstances, and sometimes reflect that more than not; but I don't want them to be merely a cry of pain. I want them to map the way out of pain, not merely recite its effects.

There is a scene near the end of Shakespeare's The Tempest, where Prospero realizes that revenge, that inflicting suffering on those who caused his own suffering and exile, will do no good: he must either forgive and let go of his righteous rage, or he will destroy those things he most loves, beginning with his daughter Miranda, and ending with his own honor, his own sense of self. It's a scene where suddenly the tone of Prospero's speech changes from verbal fireworks to calm self-knowledge, rooted acceptance, and powerful self-confidence that needs no more artifice to be self-sustaining. It is a moment of anti-entropy, when Prospero chooses a path of perpetual service that needs no more rough magic. First he releases his anger and desire for revenge. At the last, he releases the spirits he has mastered—however lovingly, they were kept as slaves to his unrealized passions—and drowns his books of magic in the sea. He remains an extraordinary person, an exceptional man, who has been tempered by exile and suffering into a man who make a fair and just ruler, a king whose reign shall be praised overall.

That is an example of how to make a good life out of suffering. It's a template for overcoming pain, obstacles, and the personality-ego's desire for revenge, for lashing out to create suffering in response to its own suffering. It is a template for how to break the cycle of hate, revenge, judgment, and guilt. It leads to a greater wholeness in the person who makes such anti-entropic choices as serve the highest good. The genuine essence of wizardry lies not in the personal power over matter and energy that one has gained, but in choosing to expend one's power in the service of life itself. Prospero leaves the island at last to go serve life, and no longer requires the external trappings of magic, or wizardry, because he has at the last learned to master himself.

I do not compare myself to Prospero, although I do aspire to attain something like that service of wizardry. I make art in part as an act of self-mastery. These poems in the Letters series, as diverse in content as they have been, as similar in tone and style as they might be, all serve my own need for self-mastery. They give channel and direction to energies that would otherwise flail in every direction, and splash over their bounds with perhaps destructive force.

Remember, another rule of creativity is: Use the power, lest it use you. Use your creative process as well as you can, live within it as consciously as you can, or it will use you instead. Serving its own need to be used, to be released, it will exit through whatever channel is provided—which might be your own darkest Shadow, if you give it no other channel. Creative force will out, no matter what. You have a choice about how that happens. With self-mastery comes self-knowledge, and a greater awareness of your own energetic anatomy—including this truth that creative force will out, no matter what else you might hold true. So far better to choose where and when.

Remember, one rule of psychological repression is that whatever you suppress over here will pop back up over there, often inappropriately. The energetic force of the psyche will out. It's up to you where and when it comes out. Sometimes you can measure how self-repressed a person is merely by observing how much is inappropriately leaking out over there, in ways seemingly beyond that person's awareness, or control. Judgmental, self-righteous rage is often a clue towards denial of one's own shadow: and when someone responds with righteous rage to being told the truth, what is happening is that they are fighting hard to remain ignorant, to retain their subconscious denial, their not-knowing. I have encountered artists whose paintings are blatantly, toxically pathological (in one case I recall, psychosexually dysfunctional), and who go through their lives suffering one toxic relationship after another. Yes, art can be a tool for personal therapy: but it can also be a barometer of personally willful, self-ignorant denial. It can be a tool of suffering or of redemption; it can drag you into a shared hell, or it can transcend.

Sometimes both, as another rule of art as life is: Sometimes the only way out is through. Sometimes when you find yourself in deep water, you have to become a diver, and go deeper into those waters, to come out the other side. First you go through the agony in the garden, then the crucifixion experience, whatever narrative form that takes for you, and only then can you see again the light of heaven.

And, sometimes your art is more personally powerful, and more universally meaningful, for having gone through hell to get there. What you make is tempered by what you have lived through. So it is with these other poems, whose writing has helped me cope with overwhelming emotions, with a life-threatening medical situation and its aftermath. They help me get through one more day. They help my recover my life. I still don't know who these Letters are written to; I may never know. Writing them is more important than sending them out. I don't even know if they are artful, or good art, or decent poems—although I do feel that at least some of them are. I don't know if they will ever have an audience—although some of them are probably worthy of being shared. In some ways, writing this other series of poems, these Letters poems—which has been going on in continuous, sporadic parallel to everything else I've done creatively over the past year and more—is an act similar to Prospero writing his books. Releasing these poems into the world is like drowning them: I give them to the sea, and see what changes. No other act of self-mastery will suffice, to keep my own head above water. The more you do, the more you do.

Overcome

it was a good day, mostly. A satisfying day, if cold.
I wrote something, then wrote something more. I went
out with the cameras to the river and stood with the light
for a long time, the way an artist is supposed to. Sometimes
I wonder what the neighbors think, seeing me walk around
the block to the bend in the river, cameras hung from me,
tripod like a giant microscope over my shoulder. I made
something of the day. I made something.

Suddenly, dusk hovering at the eaves,
a mood comes over like the end of the world.
I catch myself dropping the brush to weep.
This infinity that never quite goes away.
It's what artists do: make themselves open, attentive,
to see everything that's there, that no one else
bothers to look at.

This morning, reading, sitting on the porch,
a ruby-throated hummingbird hovered long
at the pink-and-white morning-glories,
hovering a long time probing each blossom's heart,
at the flower trellis inches from my knee,
on the other side of the window. Motionless,
I wait, watch, dare not breathe. Then whoever
paints the day moves his palette on, and the flicker
of solid light that is this fiery tiny bird, disappears
in a flash and whir. A long lingering followed,
as I had put down my book and had nothing
better to do, to look at, then the sun-patient flowers.
This year I thought the morning-glories would not survive.
Instead, they are a profligate marvel, a riot, a band of gems.

Night brings on silent desolation. I am mourning for
something lost, I don't even know what. How can a painter
ever trust words? Words turn into ashes. But you can
grind ash into pigment, and apply it to the day. Words
leave less than ash, behind, in their wake. They dissolve
in a flash and whir. Wind up the world, watch it run down,
again. I know what's missing. I just don't know why.
When and where have their own mysterious alignment.

Moods come over you like cold weather. I shiver when
I should be sunning. Cold useless reptile blood stirs slow.
The third anteroom is full of useless reptiles, waiting
to be swept out. As soon as the sun strikes the adobe,
back in Taos, back where I can see the sun, back
at Joshua Tree, where the sun was anvil-struck brass
and blood and heart-filled sacred sinew. Drum in veins,
blood and feet shuffling, nod head towards sleepless dawn,
copal in the firepit, magnificent strands of blessing link
up in parasols of solar haloes. Moods are like that:
the sun comes out, the sun goes away, behind cliff or cloud.
It's not up to you. You just weather it, like monsoon season.

Now there are crickets on the porch and in the basement.
It's too cold for them to want to sing. But a cricket in the house
is the gods' blessing. At last a trade blanket, a pillow for making love,
even if your belly can't fold that way anymore. Some
movements are restricted. It started out such a good day.
How did it end up here, in something like dying mesquite embers?
I need to get back to the desert. I need to be behind the wheel.
I need a white scarf, a barnstorming white-and-pink biplane,
and nowhere to be but the next farm field to land in
when you run out of gas. Free afternoons by the lake. I missed
all that, again, another summer missed. Now it's night frost
under a silver moon one day past full. Nothing resembles
forgiveness like a waning moon.

I'll sit on the porch awhile. The morning-glories are closed
in the dark. Maybe tomorrow I'll wake at dawn and bundle up
in love-made blankets and stare at clouds from the porch.
If there are any. You have to do some time in blankets,
a necessary hour. If you spend too long ignoring the vines,
they start to come inside, invading hours and lovers
like bird-beaks and pine-cones, flowers and snow.
Do you think I can't see that? I'm trying to talk myself
into something better. It takes everything I have to fall asleep.
Once you wake up, there's no hope of returning to the dream.
That's not the loss that matters, though. What matters
is the end of endless suffrage.