Things Ray Bradbury Said That I Know To Be True

More from The Paris Review interview with Ray Bradbury:

INTERVIEWER:
You’re self-educated, aren’t you?

BRADBURY:
Yes, I am. I’m completely library educated. I’ve never been to college. I went down to the library when I was in grade school in Waukegan, and in high school in Los Angeles, and spent long days every summer in the library. I used to steal magazines from a store on Genesee Street, in Waukegan, and read them and then steal them back on the racks again. That way I took the print off with my eyeballs and stayed honest. I didn’t want to be a permanent thief, and I was very careful to wash my hands before I read them. But with the library, it’s like catnip, I suppose: you begin to run in circles because there’s so much to look at and read. And it’s far more fun than going to school, simply because you make up your own list and you don’t have to listen to anyone. When I would see some of the books my kids were forced to bring home and read by some of their teachers, and were graded on—well, what if you don’t like those books?

I am a librarian. I discovered me in the library. I went to find me in the library. Before I fell in love with libraries, I was just a six-year-old boy. The library fueled all of my curiosities, from dinosaurs to ancient Egypt. When I graduated from high school in 1938, I began going to the library three nights a week. I did this every week for almost ten years and finally, in 1947, around the time I got married, I figured I was done. So I graduated from the library when I was twenty-seven. I discovered that the library is the real school.

All my librarian friends ought to be pleased with this. I certainly agree with it. Libraries are the great teachers. I go to my small town's rather good library regularly, and always find something new to be passionate about. Lately I've been impressed with their DVD collection, which includes a large number of movies you wouldn't expect to see in a small town public library, controversial films, films of poetic and artistic merit, a lot of The Criterion Collection.

Even though I did go to college, more than once, I can honestly say that Bradbury is right: your best education is self-education. Things you learn through experience, through living, which you store inside yourself forever. Things you learned from diving into libraries and reading late into the night.

INTERVIEWER:
How important has your sense of optimism been to your career?

BRADBURY:
I don’t believe in optimism. I believe in optimal behavior. That’s a different thing. If you behave every day of your life to the top of your genetics, what can you do? Test it. Find out. You don’t know—you haven’t done it yet. You must live life at the top of your voice! At the top of your lungs shout and listen to the echoes. I learned a lesson years ago. I had some wonderful Swedish meatballs at my mother’s table with my dad and my brother and when I finished I pushed back from the table and said, God! That was beautiful. And my brother said, No, it was good. See the difference?

Action is hope. At the end of each day, when you’ve done your work, you lie there and think, Well, I’ll be damned, I did this today. It doesn’t matter how good it is, or how bad—you did it. At the end of the week you’ll have a certain amount of accumulation. At the end of a year, you look back and say, I’ll be damned, it’s been a good year.

This passage speaks to me very personally. Lately I've been able to admit to myself, after years of trying to please others and inhabit that consensus world that Bradbury was fortunate enough to avoid, that the only task I'm any good at is making things: creativity. It's become clear to me, maybe because the illness and surgery stripped away all the chaff, that my purpose in life has been to make art. It seems like I'm the last to know. I guess I've always been a late bloomer.

In several places, Bradbury talks about how he lives life intensely—things like saying dinner is beautiful rather than just good—and I know that's true for me as well. I know I live life very intensely. I know that hasn't always been easy for people who know me. I've decided that I don't care. It's my life, I'll live it however I choose to.

The day I decided that drugging uppity kids in the classroom was evil, and that anti-depressants should be looked at with suspicion, was the day I overheard two friends talking about me; it was a rough period in my life, and it been recommended to me that I try an anti-depressant to help me cope, so I did. I overheard two friends talking about me, saying that they both liked me better on the drug, that I was calmer and less volatile. Meanwhile, I had been feeling like I was made out of cardboard, that there was a foot of glass wall between me and the world, and I couldn't touch or feel anything. That was a formative experience for me, and those people are no longer my friends.

That doesn't mean I don't have bad days, still. It doesn't mean that I'm a raving opera queen all the time—a lot of the intensity of experience stays on the inside, and comes out mainly in the creative work. But it does mean that I feel very much alive.

INTERVIEWER:
The week after your wife passed away, you got back to writing. How were you able to do that?

BRADBURY:
Work is the only answer. I have three rules to live by. One, get your work done. If that doesn’t work, shut up and drink your gin. And when all else fails, run like hell!

Work is indeed the only answer. In fact, work is survival. I have repeated so often lately, because it's true, that many days the only thing that gets me through the day is making music, making art, writing a poem. Making art has been my way to survive. If even on the worst days I can make one new thing out of nothing, I can count it as worth it, and a reason to go on. As the illness and surgery took away the chaff from my life, I began to truly realize how important work is. Like Bradbury, my art is my work. (Elsewhere he comments that he's grateful that his work is so much fun.) I don't expect to ever retire: I expect to be writing, or making art, or music, on the day I die. That's what Bradbury did. Even after his stroke, late in life, he still wrote via dictation when he could no longer type. A new book of stories came out not too long ago.

INTERVIEWER:
Do you write for an ideal reader or a particular audience?

BRADBURY:
Every time you write for anyone, regardless of who they are, no matter how right the cause you may believe in, you lie. Steinbeck is one of the few writers out of the thirties who’s still read, because he didn’t write for causes at all. He wrote human stories that happened to represent causes indirectly. The Grapes of Wrath and his other books are not political treatises. Fahrenheit 451 is in a way a political treatise, but it isn’t, because all it is saying, emotionally, is: Everyone leave everyone else alone!

INTERVIEWER:
Does literature, then, have any social obligation?

BRADBURY:
Not a direct one. It has to be through reflection, through indirection. Nikos Kazantzakis says, “Live forever.” That’s his social obligation. The Saviors of God celebrates life in the world. Any great work does that for you. All of Dickens says live life at the top of your energy.

It means a lot to me that Bradbury mentions Kazantsakis, and particularly The Saviors of God, which is both a summation of Kazantsakis' worldview and a call to live life to the fullest. It means a lot to me to have Bradbury validate my own life, indirectly, by mentioning a book, The Saviors of God, which changed my own life, and influenced so profoundly that I can rarely even talk about it. (If you've never read it, or read about it, here it is in full.)

Elsewhere Bradbury talks about how literature is a mirror that reflects the world. Science fiction is really a funhouse mirror in which we see the present through the lens of the future. He uses the metaphor of Perseus seeing the Medusa in the mirror of his shield, which allows him to survive her gaze, and take her head off. So the last thing literature ought to be is a sermon. There's nothing duller than a novel that preaches at you, that tells you how to behave, but has no life of its own.

Literature (and all art) can be a prayer, in that the best prayers consist of two activities: to praise, and to say "Thank you."

A lot of Bradbury's writings are praise, which he rarely admits to directly, but you can see it in the very intensity and pleasure of his writing. Whether he describes flying a kite, or running from a dinosaur chasing you, his language takes you into the experience, and makes you feel alive. Between the lines in Bradbury's writing, between the actual words themselves, there can often be found an inarticulate joy that can't be contained in words, something so profound that it settles into your bones, something that his words manage to evoke without ever saying so directly. And when you finish reading one of Bradbury's short stories that ends in one of those moments of articulated inarticulate joy, you often feel like saying "Thank you." My gods, that was a beautiful dinner!

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.

Writing about Certain Places

There are poems, and poets, we turn to for consolation, for aesthetic pleasure, for spiritual discernment, in which the content of the poems matters as much to us as their artfulness, grace, or aesthetic style.

There are several reasons why we turn to reading some poems, and poets, for consolation, for discernment. One of these is for comfort in dark times; to know we are less alone; that someone else has been through the dark night, or the bright day, and was able to evoke in us the vividness and power of their experience, creating echoes in our own.

In the best of these poems, the beauty of the writing is not separate from the (extraordinary) contents, the subjects of the poems are integrated with their style. Great poems often evoke some universal human experience in an appropriate and perfect aesthetic container, in which the form enhances the contents, creating a synergy greater than the sum of its elements. In poetry criticism, the appropriate match between form and contents is often overlooked as a point for discussion; yet I think it an essential aspect of great writing.

When reading poems, it is sometimes necessary to turn off the constant nagging of editor's-mind and/or critic's-mind, and read for pure pleasure. Or pure release. Poets as well as critics, or poet/critics, often get stuck in their critical minds, and forget how to read purely for pleasure, or consolation. Once the intellectual analytical mind has become engaged, it often lingers and refuses to be shut down again. Reading poetry needs to happen on many levels simultaneously, not only, and not even mainly, for the markers of acceptable craft and valid execution.

(Yet in no way am I advocating bad writing or slackness of artistic execution, just because certain topics are being written about. In no way am I saying the poet should strive any less mightily for the best writing they can do, simply because they're writing autobiography rather than artifice. There is never any excuse for attempting any less than your personal best, in the moment of creation. Furthermore, even though I am discussing poetry of the spirit here, I have no use whatsoever for conventional "religious" poetry, as more often than not that sort of poem merely repeats cant in a new form, or is a dogmatic credo in unum deum chanted in a rhyming cloak but without thoughtful consideration, a way for the writer to "witness" to their beliefs before the world. This may well serve a personal purpose to good ends; but it is often just bad art. If you're seeking examples, most of the poems appearing in Reader's Digest fall into this category.)

There are poets who we turn to regularly, to read for consolation and invigoration; another of whom I will briefly mention below. I have written about reading Emily Dickinson this way, for consolation and for connection, for seeing the poems a mirror of our own inner experience. I think it only fair to walk my talk, and provide below an example of my own poetry, for good or ill, that fulfilled a need to express ecstasy, and in which perhaps some reader might someday find consolation, or at least commonality.

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The Sutras are a series of poems I began in 1994, and worked on intensively till circa 1998. I have gathered them together but not yet released them as a group because a few of the poems are as yet incomplete, needing revision or further transcription. I've hesitated to show them to many readers, except piecemeal, because they are so personal. It's not that I feel naked in giving the poems away, or in revealing too much of my own inner life—that feeling is one any poet must become acclimated to—it's that the poems have so often been misunderstood, as have my motivations for writing them. One bores of being required to continuously re-educate the misguided.

The Sutras are texts in poetic form about my personal experiences of awe, of ecstasy, of transcendence. Many of them are transcriptions or responses to visionary experiences; some of these were specific to certain places and times. They are mostly written in the ecstatic, vatic mode. I never intended them to be taken as "fine art poetry," although they have been judged by some critics as lesser poems of mine. The poems, taken collectively, sum up what I know to be true. You could consider them, if you wished, as my original scriptures, which contain knowledge arising from vision, ecstasy, awe, empathy, connection, and embodied soul-flight.

Each Sutra carries a subtitle that labels what group or channel of metaphysical experience the poem is most closely allied to. There are five groups within the Sutras: Pranayana; Vajrayana; Tantrayana; Mahayana; and, The Way of the Animal Powers. Each of these sub-groups has its own set of connections to historical spiritual traditions, which I don't want to spend a lot of time detailing at the moment. Suffice to say that in this context, these labels refer to rich and resonant paths of practice: explicit labels for which set of spiritual exercises the poem can be seen to walk.

My approach to my spiritual life has long been as a shaman, a spiritual technician. Someone who believes nothing, in the conventional sense of restating the received wisdoms of the world's established spiritual traditions, but whose experience leads him towards knowing rather than believing. In some ways, this is an engineer's approach that uses the mindset of the scientific experimenter to discover what is true, and let fall away what is accrued baggage. (Although "experimenter" is an inadequate word; perhaps "explorer" or "pathfinder" would be more precise.)

The Sutras are therefore, if you will, records of visions that have become personal credos, shaman's songs, poetic letters to the faithful, odes to meaning. Sutra is a Sanskrit word that means letter. In early Buddhism, a sutra was an epistle, a record of what the Buddha taught, a letter to the monks, a way of guiding practice in fruitful directions. But my own Sutras are not epistles meant to convert anyone; there is no missionary intention.

Some of the Sutras are quite explicit: not only sexually, but psychologically, and spiritually. But this is natural for any poetry of ecstasy; their can be no limitation in what we write about, if our motivation is to be honest, and to discover in the process what we know to be true. The only hesitance in sharing the poems that result from mining the self is a nagging sense of having been misunderstood, again and again. I rarely hesitate to write explicitly about erotic experience; however, I'm not interested in writing pornography, which is more about personal titillation than achieving connection and oneness with one's other self. As any ecstatic mystic knows, in Heaven lust and love are the same; only in Hell are they separate. Pornography keeps us separated; erotic art brings us together.

Furthermore, I do not wish to be mistaken as writing a poem of confession rather than presentation. There is nothing to confess here, as there is nothing to be ashamed of—shame and repudiation being the scaffolding of confession. The Sutras are poems of presentation, in the same way an artistic photograph is a presentation: an artful depiction of what has been seen, captured out of the flow and crystallized for extended contemplation.

I do feel that some of the Sutras are better poems than others, purely as poems. Nonetheless, the purpose in writing was not primarily literary, and was never to impress. Writing spiritual questions poetically seems obvious, a natural fit. The exalted and non-everyday language of poetry seems the ideal container with which to share one's moments of transcendence, of connection to the divine, of experience of heightened reality, or whatever other label we might use.

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The most direct precursor to the Sutras is 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, yet it 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." 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.

I felt that Saviors of God gave me permission to write the Sutras. It allowed me to turn in this direction, and write what I had been feeling and seeing, for many years, ever more clearly and explicitly, without feeling any need to redact myself or my experiences in order to make the poems more "acceptable" or "artistic." What came out in poetry, thereafter, is what the recording angel set down on the tablets of my innermost self. While some of the Sutras were deliberate attempts to record a powerful vision, many others felt as if they were dictated, given to me to transcribe rather than interpret.

My form of writing in the Sutras is my own; there is no direct literary influence. The influence on me is spiritual, aesthetic, internal. Rather than imitating Kazantzakis' form, or turns of phrase, I have absorbed, I hope, his mode, his heart, and his practice. Writing the Sutras became a form of spiritual practice: exploratory, questing, partially as a life-review, partially involuntary, yet always exalted. Many of these poems were written at white heat, rapidly, spontaneously. For some others, I knew the topic I wanted to write about, but gave over direction of the pen as soon as the words starting to come forward.

This way of writing has become central to my overall creative process, in which I no longer try to direct or control the creative force, but do my best to follow where it wants to lead. I am always searching for the precise container for the vision; finding the perfect form in which to express the poem's contents, to wed them as closely and appropriately as I am able, in the moment.

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Western Lands Sutra was written out of two experiences of awe I had in the Western United States, in the Rocky Mountains, and by the Pacific Ocean. The poem is structured in two sections, both of them memories of ecstatic experiences.

The first section is a poetic response to a night spent camping at Craters of the Moon National Monument in south central Idaho, the summer spent studying geology in the field. I was 18, and it was my first extended trip out West; everything I saw was beautiful and amazing, and this class taught in the field changed my life. The mountains continue to call me back to visit them often, as does the Pacific. In the two months prior to this writing, I have been back to revisit both locales written about in the poem; each visit felt like a homecoming, a welcoming back.

The poem's second section is written in response to the night spent camping on the beach at Redwoods, CA, that I wrote about in Certain Places. The poem tells the story of my first visit to the beach, restating it more poetically.

Taken together, the two halves of this poem are a paean to places I love, and powerful experiences I had there. Moments filled with transcendent awe. Both experiences changed me, and took me to places in myself I'd never plumbed before, but which have stayed in my awareness ever since. More than anything else, I am grateful for what I have been given. The writing of such a poem is one way of giving back, of paying forward, of passing on what was given me in hopes that it might also be meaningful to some one else. In this way we do our best to connect with each other.

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Western Lands Sutra (Vajrayana)


i.

at Craters of the Moon, we sang obscene geologist’s songs till it was very late
standing circled around a laughing bonfire, flames licking
    at least twelve feet above the firepit
flat volcanic blackness of the plain rolling off into night
hunched taciturn stubborn as hibernating lichen

the nearest city lights almost a hundred miles away
five times more distant than the earth’s curving horizon
past the extinct pectorals of the park’s silent cinder cones
invisible across a boot-eating plain of glass-sharp flows

the night was bright and moonless
but light enough to read
    my name written in the living earth

I made my bedroll on the near slope of a shallow rise
a hundred yards from the firepit
bedding down in the cool July Idaho night mountain air
    my blankets flat and hard on hard flat ground
a few scraggly trees stooped the rise behind
and I lay on my back, cradling my head in laced fingers,
looking up and out into the galaxy
    for hours before I slept

I’d never seen so many stars

they beat down all around our camp, thick as silver mist—
I searched for old familiar friends, constellations that had
    kept me alive through dark-soul nights:
but they were lost among too many stars,
    the whole galaxy exploding overhead
    wheeling bright and silent above blacksilver ground

I couldn’t see Orion or the Bears, fishing among the many stars
    flickering soundlessly in that night
I couldn’t find Arcturus, so generous of its light
I couldn’t locate the Pole Star or the Dragon or Cassiopea’s chair
but the Milky Way was a deep silver river lacing across the vault
    pocked with gas clouds, velvet curtains hung in sky’s window
and I could see the hot young fires of stellar nurseries spark crystal sharp
    against that river

and as I lay there, gradually falling off
    falling into the dark, falling off the planet into sleep
    into the visible depth of those canyons between suns
the air rang with crystalline sound, the skybowl struck
    a glass bell, ringing, keening, rising and breaking
collapsing, shattering like a flash-frozen lake
as stars began to fall into me, one by one, then by hundreds
striking themselves out on the stone of the desert
until the whole night fell into me
and I felt the starlight burning deep inside me
    answer back that music


ii.

on the southern beach at Redwoods, encamped by the Pacific Ocean shore
    a mere fifty yards from the surf roar,
we took time-lapse photos of each other, naked, bathed in rosy fireglow
before the reticent mouth of our two-man tent
night wind blowing in from the sea,
    buffeting flames twisting around logs
we made long exposures of ourselves crouched, naked cavemen,
    clubs in hand, sacred amulets hung from necks,
    all darkness in our eyes
trusting my camera to tell the archetypal story of men in love,
    Enkidu and Baldur and Gizaemon,
    the Hunter’s mysteries enacted in our eyes and loins

over the last hills where the beach shelved west came white light
    bright enough to read by, as bright as day—
at first, as we tried to pick out constellations spinning into the ocean,
    we thought it was an inland farmer’s night-fear lights,
    yardlights every farmhouse keeps burning through the dark
but the light grew brighter, and as I walked towards the roar of the sea
I suddenly realized it was the full moon rising
    atavistic tingles running down my spine
my gods, I gasped, so beautiful and so dangerous

so I stood there, head tilted back in surprise as I fell into the moon’s face,
    standing mere yards from tent and fire,
    naked, wrapped in blanket against wind off sea,
    waves a constant roar of dragons making love to the sand;
it was All Hallow’s Eve, the eve of the Day of the Dead, and full moon:
I knew my new life was about to begin

in the morning, I picked polished stones like flowers from the beach
    white and black and greenish-gray
    polished volcanic basalts and wide-strewn rare serpentines
I picked enough stones to make a set of Runes,
    and a smooth black dreamstone to sleep with,
    its rounded heft a perfect fit to my fist,
    and its white black-veined companion,
    smaller, lumpy, a polished peyote button

and, just as I had dreamed that night, I found three perfect rocks
    lying in close formation
    a triangle balanced on point, equal on every side and facing the waves
a black stone, a white stone, a nondescript grey stone
the dark, the light, and everything in between