Still/Here Sutra

Still/Here Sutra (Pranayana)

(for Bill T. Jones)


i.

It begins with a circle:
turning on the Wheel of living,
walking out spirals on the floor:

I know I’m going to see so many die
before I die:
    Why don’t I feel: “Why me?”
What are these gates
    we all dance through?
This is an initiation: into what?
    Where?
Who will receive me? Into death?
All the others who have gone before,
and I alone remain: remain. Alone.
Who will catch me? As I fall?
Alone: together: let me be—alone.
To learn: how not to be afraid:
    of losing all control.
Of losing myself.
Who do you love: if not yourself?
The world is full of light and blues:

the inspiration to get up, to quit this job
that is wasting my time: and live.
Every moment left: is precious.

What am I guilty of? Why
do I even feel this guilt?:
    survivor’s guilt.
Why did they all die:
    and not me?
What do I fear? Dying alone:
    being alone
when I die, surrounded by beloved ghosts.
What do I love? The light, the air,
the land, this body:
    this incarnated world,
inhabited by such wonders, and every kind
of aliveness, even the ones we can’t know.

Still I am here.
Here I am . . . still.
Still here—and laughing.
Here I am: still: being still,
here—in this place.
Still being. Here.
Being here. Still.
    At peace with stillness.
Here. Here, now:
    be still.
    Be here.
    Be.
    Here.

    Still.


ii.

It goes on, another circle,
a tangent arced from the life of this boy,
still being with what he strives for:

What I hate most in myself
is my willingness to give away my strength.
My time: my life.
As if it meant so little to me.
I hate my lazy willingness to believe
I have all the time left in the world:
I don’t.
When you know you’re going to die,
you can do anything.
    Why can’t I?

Why must I see them all die first?
Why must I be the last one?—
    I’ve seen it: I know it:
    Either the last one on the battlements,
    fighting the alien horde
    to give my family time to escape;
    or, alone in bed, the last one,
    surrounded by the ghosts
    of everyone I’ve ever loved.

I have Seen it. I Know it.

I thought many times that I must break
under this burden: but I have not.
It would so much easier to break.
Maybe—just maybe: I cannot be broken.
Maybe that is:
    enough.

I’m still here.
Here I am, still being: still.

A witness: a tether.
The one whose task and sorrow and joy it is
to put up the chairs, and turn out the lights,
and close the door behind him:
there:
    at the end of the world.

Wheatfield Sutra

Prompted by a post at prairiemary's, Indian Summer in Sandburg Country, which includes a Tim Barrus poem, I was thinking about how my own experience of being out alone in nature is much more of a religious experience than I ever got sitting in a church. I've experienced more than one transformative moment outdoors, in nature. Revelations seem to happen to me Out There with greater frequency, although they can happen anywhere, to be sure.

I remember reading in an anthropologist's journal from somewhere in Indian Country, a story about how a missionary couldn't get any traction with the tribe for some time. Finally, he sat down with the elders and asked them why they wouldn't come to church. One old chief looked him in the eye and said, "You keep your god inside a small white box building. Our god is outside, all around us, all the time." It prompts one to wonder, irreverently and perhaps irrelevantly: which is the greater god?

I was prompted, therefore, to go back and look at the poem below, which is from the body of work, or collection of poems, I call the Sutras. I've written before about the origin and purpose of the Sutras, so I won't repeat all that here. Suffice to say, the Sutras are, for me, as much a testament of my experience-based spiritual faith as they are poems. Perhaps less poems than epistles; they're not "fine art" poems, and not intended to be.

"Wheatfield Sutra" was written and revised in 1998, and was based on a purely autobiographical memory. At the time of my life in which this experience happened, I was perhaps 10 or 11 years old. We lived on the very northeast corner at the time of Ann Arbor, MI. My parents had built a house out there on the edge of town, which I loved, because all summer long I could run in the open fields behind our house, or get on my bike and ride for hours up the dirt roads north into the countryside. The church my family belonged to, Trinity Lutheran Church, was on the west side of downtown Ann Arbor, and was a good half hour's drive away, on a Sunday morning. It was a good congregation, with progressive-minded pastors, and not a bad church at all. That's the autobiographical background to this poem, for whatever it's worth. The poem is one among the Sutras that I feel particularly got to the point of it all.

•

Wheatfield Sutra (Vajrayana)


Driving to church that Sunday morning,
the boy slouched in the rear car seat
behind his parents, beside his sister,

watching the world flash by on the way into town.
Sunlight strobed through wayside trees;
beyond the road’s fenced verge,

endless fields of late summer wheat
bent under the sun: golden tan,
brightening the sky’s cornflower blue to white.

The boy felt trapped in the coffin
of his clothes, his Sunday best:
the jacket too warm, the collar too tight,

the hated necktie choking him: and stared
at the dancing wheat and the sky and the light.
And—it was a revelation, if not a new belief—

the boy thought to himself: “I could praise God
much better from the middle of this wheatfield
than I ever could in church; and more truly.”

That was the moment of becoming:
the instant of opening. The boy threw open
his mind: and the vision has never ended.

Old Journals 2

When I moved from my parents' house to my own house, about a year and a half ago, I put all my old journals into a plastic bin, to gather them all in one place, preserved. Someday, I plan to go back through some of those old journals to find poem fragments that I can recall leaving unfinished, which I want to work with at some point. There are also ideas for musical compositions, and some sketches in there. Like most journals, a lot of my old journals' pages are devoted to boring personal rants and ravings that no-one should care about, ranging from the incoherent to the near-essay.

I don't really want to get too far into the project of going through all these old journals right now, to mine their content, as that's too big of a Pandora's Box to get into while the weather is still good, and I want to be outdoors making photographs, or in the garage teaching myself woodcarving, or writing more new music. Perhaps over the winter, I'll get into the mining, since there are several months here where being outdoors is a cold prospect at best, an impossible one at worst. It will be an occasional process, most likely, mixed in with other projects. Better to go slow, and not be drowned by the tides of the past.

In recent weeks, though, I've been looking through the old journals for one specific set of writings. When I was in my mid-teens, just beginning to explore my sexual identity, in secret, in private, I naturally turned to writing out some of my thoughts and feelings as poems. I kept those journals very carefully hidden. Had digital cameras existed back then, no doubt I would have explored that creative option, as well. I've been thinking about my first typewriter lately, and having re-discovered a big binder full of old poem juvenilia, I'm thinking about looking into the origins of some of my poetry, which for many years began in my journals. I am going to be looking more closely into this set of writings sooner rather than later, because I'm at a point in looking back through my own family history and memories where this material has risen in importance.

I began keeping a journal—as distinct from a diary, which is usually daily entries about daily personal events and thoughts about them, which I have never done—in my early college years, probably at age 19 or 20. Most of what I wrote was no doubt crappy self-exploration, the things adolescents write through in their journals, to figure out the world and themselves. But I also began the habit, from the beginning, of sketching ideas and poem drafts in my journals, which has become a lifelong practice. The poems that were worth preserving, I eventually typed into my computer(s), adding to the folders full of poem drafts over the years. That practice has continued to the present day. Nonetheless, in the turbulence of recent years, some poems have never been transcribed, or not completely.

At the moment, I find myself too easily spraining a mental ankle, if I try to talk about what I'm going through right now in words, either in journal entries or in poetry. So, I'm still taking a break from writing poems and essays—in some ways, a renewal against expectations of my practice to never go looking for a poem, but to let it find me, when it's ready. So I'm writing a lot less at the moment than I used to. At the moment, mired in some difficult life experiences, I am very aware of how limited words can be to convey what I feel, and how easily words can betray the reality by being all too easy, all too facile, all to cheap.



The first journals were spiral bound notebooks from one of the bookstores that catered to students at the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor. Ulrich's Bookstore was on the corner of East University and South University, just across from the main campus square. I bought a lot of supplies there over the years, from notebooks to drawing pens to musical materials and textbooks. The one or two English courses that I took in my early college years were writing courses, and I used spiral notebooks from Ulrich's as my coursework notebooks. So it was not much a leap to use these same sort of spiral notebooks for my personal journals, as well.

When I was living in Surakarta, Central java, on a Fulbright, I changed to lined bound school notebooks that one could buy extremely cheaply at the school supply stores. I began to use those books there, and bought several to bring home with me, which I used for several. I liked the size of these books, as they neatly fit into a backpack or shoulder bag.

These days I use unlined artist's sketchbooks. They're larger, and better bound, and I like the unlined pages now because I draw and do calligraphy in these books now, not just write in them.

Here are two spreads from my 1993-94 journal, in one of the lined journal books brought home from Java. They show my initial writing of a poem, one of the Sutras. Specifically, Whitman Sutra (linked to in a later, more finished version).



Click on images to see larger versions

Sometimes it's interesting to look at drafts of finished poems, to see what was changed in the writing and revision processes, and what remains from the original, first draft. As I said, many if not most of my poems have begun in this way, as dated entries from one of my journals. When I type them into the computer, I tend to revise them at that point; perhaps later revisions will happen, but all on the computer, with its easy cut-and-paste editing capabilities.

In looking at the first draft of this poem, I can see where changes were made before I ever typed them into the computer. Sections were moved around, and lines and words altered. It's the beginning of a series of poems about Whitman, written over several years, as well as part of the series of Sutras still being worked on.

One reason I have been looking back through these journals, to find these poems written during my sexual awakening, is because I have been thinking Walt Whitman, his poetry and life, for almost a year now; thinking about how his poetry and homoerotic life have influenced my own, among many other gay men who happen to be artists, poets, and/or musicians. So it was interesting to find this first version of Whitman Sutra as part of this looking for the homoerotic poetry I was writing at that time. The search is ongoing, and interesting bits of my own past have been coming back to mind during this process. More on that later, as it develops.

A Transformative Moment

All those whose lives are spent searching for truth are well aware that the glimpses they catch of it are necessarily fleeting, glittering for an instant only to make way for new and still more dazzling insights. The scholar's work, in marked contrast to that of the artist, is inevitably provisional. He knows this and rejoices in it, for the rapid obsolescence of his books is the very proof of the progress of scholarship.
—Henri Pirenne

I was recently asked what the earliest transformative moment in my life was, that I could remember. Being gifted, or cursed, with an excellent memory, it's hard to choose among moments, when in one's early life everything is momentous, a portentous first. What isn't transformative when one is still young? There have been many moments of transformation for me this lifetime. The genuinely transformative, as opposed to the just really cool, all changed the course of my life.

I mean that more subtly than you might think: sometimes the observable outer course of events changed not a whit, but how you feel on the inside, how you interpret successive events and how you feel about them later, these are utterly changed. One aspect of learning from experience is that one perceives and evaluates experience itself differently. What changes is what we think about events and persons. We constantly re-interpret, endlessly re-evaluate. Everything is conditional, and open to re-evaluation.

The genuinely life-changing experience is not always obvious, dramatic, or easily spotted. Sometimes things take a while to percolate, and you realize what happened only afterwards. The awareness of permanent change, in the moment of its event, is a rare luxury.

Nonetheless there are vivid memories from my childhood that have left permanent marks. I can review these memories still, perhaps colored or papered over by later experience and interpretation, but still very sharp and vivid in my recollection. I can look at several of these early memories, now, and see which have endured as transformative, because I can create a narrative, now, of what followed. Life is made of stories, after all.

There is one very vivid memory I retain from early like, whose actions and events have colored almost everything that followed. I didn't know that till much later, but from that moment flowed many attitudes, approaches, beliefs, and cascading series of similar experiences.

I was eight or nine years old.

There was a nature center, a pond and some woods, some marshland and prairie, with many birds and garter snakes and turtles and other small wildlife, that was adjacent to and associated with the elementary school I was attending, Thurston Elementary School in Ann Arbor, MI. The pond and woods and nature center are still there. Just past them, adjoining the main road through the subdivision where my family lived, which at that time was the extreme northeastern corner of Ann Arbor, was the community pool for the local subdivision at which I spent many days each summer of my youth. These places are tangled together in memory, as well as adjacent in space. I sometimes still have dreams set in these places, in our old house there on Lexington Drive, or in the public schools I attended.

In the nature center there was a small island in the middle, with a small peninsula that goes out towards it without ever touching it. Within the peninsula is a marsh wetlands area. The peninsula, I recall, was made artificially, and was basically a banked trail that veers towards the island then away again. Trees line the trail, mostly on the pond side, leaving the marsh side more open to the sky. I spent a lot of time in the nature center, year-round; some of my earliest memories of encounters with wildlife and birds happened there. I remember one winter morning I was running across the ice covering the pond, when I fell through at a thin patch, got soaked, and spent most of that school day sitting on the classroom radiator, drying out. I remember skating on a public rink cleared off snow and sticks on the pond's surface every winter; I was never a good ice skater, though.

This one afternoon that I remember, it was in early or mid-summer, probably not too long after our last day of school. I was wandering through the nature center with a schoolmate and his older brother. Or maybe we were all classmates, and they'd begun their growth-spurts towards tallness. Always a late bloomer, it seems, my own growth spurt wouldn't happen till years later. Anyway, three boys wandering as friends.

That afternoon, the three of us were walking through the nature center near the pond, no doubt talking about the subjects that boys that age find compellingly important. We walked out on the bank near the island, in no hurry, looking for snakes or turtles or birds to watch. In a tree at the edge of the bank, no more than three feet above my head as I stood right under the tree, there was a male redwing blackbird, a mature bird by the three colors of shoulder stripes, singing with all his might.

Redwings are glossy black birds, with the males over the course of their first years of maturity adding a brilliant colored patch to each shoulder, red, orange, and yellow. They are not just beautiful blackbirds, they are songbirds. Redwings have several different sounds they regularly make. The male in spring emits a loud three-part song, two syllables followed by a long twittering call; it's a territorial warning song, telling other males this is my turf, go find your own. In the Great Lakes and northern regions of North America, the redwing is a migratory bird, absent in winter, coming up north for its summer breeding season. For me, the first sign of spring has always been not the return of the robin, but the return of the redwings: that's when you know spring is finally here.

I stood there, directly under the singing blackbird on the branch above me, and lost myself in the singing. Everything else seemed to get farther away. Only the bird on the branch, singing, was there, in front of me. My friends seemed to be farther and farther away. They may have kept walking while I paused, but I don't think so; I think they were only a step or two away. My vision seemed to focus only on the bird on the branch. I remember his head turning as he sang, looking at us first from one eye, then the other. His bouncing on the branch made it sway, shaking the leaves. I was falling deeper and deeper into the bird's song, and his black eye.

Then, with no warning, I was seeing out of the blackbird's eye: I saw three tall forms before it on the path beside the tree, one shorter than the other two. The bird was singing, and staring at us, and I was seeing from the bird's eyes. The bird was thinking about challenging these interlopers with its song. There was no sense of an "I" present; although there was a sense of some kind of self. Some sense of self-awareness, but not a conscious one; perhaps this is what the Buddhists mean by sentience. I remember that the bird was filled with a kind of all-encompassing hunger, a desire to find food. This complete and utter need to be filled, and the unquestioned demand that need be fulfilled. This must be what it's like, to be a newborn baby, or an animal, to be so utterly and unthinkingly filled with need, with hunger, with every cell in one's being speaking the same thought, the same need. A complete and total, single purpose, single need to be fulfilled. It was overwhelming, utterly and totally enveloping.

I might have stayed there a long time, lost in the bird's mind, but one of my friends spoke me name a few times, then touched my shoulder or my arm. That broke the trance. I was back in my own body, feeling disoriented. I blinked a few times, swayed where I stood, shook my head a little. Then I was back. My friends were concerned. I don't remember if I told them what had happened: I had already, by this age, learned to not tell people the things I experienced. It seemed to upset most people, if I spoke of it. We walked on, while the bird stayed on the branch, still singing loudly. My friends were talking on as before, and I remember we hung out on the school playground next to the nature center for awhile. I remember standing next to the swings while one of my friends pushed himself rhythmically back and forth. I remember being very quiet, not speaking much. I couldn't get the experience out of my head; it stayed with me.

So now you know: one of my personal gods continually takes the shape, every summer, of a redwing blackbird. Redwing blackbirds are forever significant and special to my awareness. They catch my attention every time I see them, and I always stop to watch and listen awhile.

Years later, as part of the Sutras, that series of poems that are records of visions and dreams and beliefs, I wrote clumsily about redwings, hiding what I really knew behind words in a poem, afraid to come right out and say it. But the thread of this transformative moment has left a permanent mark, expressed many times in my writings, where the image of a redwing blackbird will take on a symbolic resonance. And ravens and crows also turn up, as cousin clans with their own meanings and iconography both personal and universally archetypal.

This is how a moment transforms: it rings through you, for the rest of your life. You always go back to the memory of it, no matter how many years pass. The transformation lies in the permanent track or groove into which both memory and symbols slot easily, like the phonograph needle falling easily into the well-worn grooves of an LP record listened to many times. (Sometimes one must settle for simile when metaphor is too strong, too personal.)

A transformative moment conceals itself in everything you do, later. It shows up, again and again, made into its own archetype: a category of personal god-image.

•

Redwings (The Way of the Animal Powers)

calmly black, call by the roadside:
three-colored elder glides on stiff pinions,
circles me, cocking a dark eye, and lights
on stiff deadwood down the embankment.
the light is fading; I have stopped here before,
to breathe the sunset changes,
to hear the birds gather.
something moves in me, now,
breaking out from my heart.

these sentinel, sergeant birds,
keepers of the gates of change,
silent instructors
who call only to each other,
eyes black, still, silent,
watchful.

when will my own changing eyes
turn dark, my shoulders sprout colors,
my arms grow strong black feathers
instead of pale hair? I want to be
blinded by the air, and air’s lightness;
I want to spin in the road’s dark blur,
stiff wind splitting the grasses,
wildflowers swirling like late snow.

black wings gather for the evening concert:
those do not sleep, who guard the secrets.
unlikely gift: I hear something like words:
I am spinning, my heart aflame. the wind
burns colder, I cannot walk away;
doors open in the air.
sheets of light, shadows flying.

I slowly, slowly, start to learn
the dark thoughts of guardian birds,
red, orange, yellow:
badges of life, hard words to the ground,
seed fragrances of night.

and a new soul, flying.
find me in fields at sunset;
don’t bring any baggage,
there’s no place to leave it,
and no way to carry it with you
through those gates:
the passages are wide enough
for your elbows only,
and your dark, three-colored shoulders.

(Poem originally written in 1995; revised slightly in 2009.)

Text As Art

text: an excerpt from Spiral Dance Sutra

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.

•

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.

•

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.

•

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