Poiein

hardly possible to ignore
each eye-opened dawn awaking
world born first time anew each day
the first day new creation
rebirth yes too but also
each day new day each moment a new

first hours each morning chill
maker arises from dream—
spinning wollen thread hiking mountain vale
cooling purple-red stories out of day's=blood
hiss of summer's wind-tossed trees spun into melody—
to make new day something out of nothing
birth creation reconciled gap between
mulberry and morning-glory
all green-gold before first tea

what will it be today
scarf or hummingbird cloak
irony of a night soul forced awake
at dawn or at least when sun hits tent
creative friction anew
in span taken for tea to steep
what will you maker have made
by then
so rarely spinning words from hoard
when melody alone fulfills
tease meaning from the film flicker
cinematic sequis spun into light
rope burns and orgasmic joy
rhythm creaking swings of childhood
symphony of vertigo spin till fall on grass
druids shrouded in acid hazmat cloaks
long silence of birdsong sibilant pines
each new day younger or older than the last
unpredictable change of hair red gold white

how did we walk this far again anyway
by each awaken make a new day
so far beyond where cardinals stay
aflicker red from green to grey
such habits pull my hands and break
a form down

to nothing is my dawn allegiance
creation's light fall on what he makes
each morning formless until most made
first artisan celebrates each day anew
first day of creation every day
birds flicker in the fever of living
each second vibrate pulse into being a billion motes
time of slow god and slower hanging tree

pull back now
these darker screens on which to paint
careful what you make manifest each early dawn
last moods that linger shadow all your day
what maker creates both dark and light
a round of wheels cycles spinning tops
magnetic field and solar wind
elegant particle dance
no wonder old ones imagined sun gods in such light
when every day's a new creation
new imagining new world new life
what will he make fresh awoken
this first hour of new universe made
dawn of new life lived

Akathleptos

Slow humming in the air as the finger writes
along the seam of a bag to close its contents in.
Musical tones that hum in the mind's ear
long past the recording's end. Ringing stillness.
Piercing bell tone that fills the mind, crystalizing
quiet nothing. A bell ringing in an empty sky.

Connections: Driving a two-lane back road, glimpse
at the edge of field between wood thicket and tall dry
cornstalks, buck deer lifts many-pronged head to watch.
A single antler found in the lawn under the window.
Something hums behind that liquid eye. Antlered gods
watch from autumn browns and greens the moon rise.

Nights dreamt under desert stars, immense sky pulling
you out of sleep into floating vertigo: falling up
into asterisms thick as milk, bright enough to see the trail.
See other suns laved with wanderers. Disk of skydust.
Stars so close to high-desert camp you can hear them hiss.
Mountain itself vibrating, gong struck by solar wind.

Days of blood and sand, beating fists on indifferent
granite slabs till they're streaked with drying iron rust.
Implacable silence of stone reply. There is no why.
Broken on an altar cancered with flowering lichen,
poison flask of grey silence, questioned, unanswered.
Mute tenacity to break down walls that won't be.

These smaller mysteries are all we can obtain.
Slow catechism of local spirits, determined and listed.
The largest truth we know, love is all,
compasses only a piece of the boat. Rocking across rivers.
One night, doors opened, light poured out over
lintels made of translucent ivory carved with runes, names,

the long list of those who had passed before. A threshold
radiant with actinic epiphany. A door opens, a door closes.
And forget again, containered back into pitted shells of brain,
blood, internal living ivory not yet fossilized with patience.
Pans too small to hold much water. There for the filling,
easily overflowed. Bread loaf made from the memory of wet.

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:

•

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. . . .

•

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.

Hesychia

and come to rest not in struggle's evasion
not in some sense of duty or disregard
not ever as escape to lands seen only inward
not to stay, to saturate in drowning sorrow's plagues

but come to rest here even as everything else still happens
to rest in pain, hate, suffering, judgment, angst, torpor
and joy, and clean water to bathe in, in wings wrapped out
in red berries by a rainsoaked trail, mist on the lake,
    the sun absent and present, moon full moon bright sun
    moon sun gray light

to sun like noon even cloud arid desert dry ice
in wings alight obscure veiled brilliant gleam
fold of ear canal into labyrinth void red loon's eye
emerge chipmunk den summer cave cedar stripling moss pine shout

to cave of caves the land being the land
duress spent tented at treeline's edges, peering
to silence interrupted unvoiced articulate speech of doves
run through still to where stillness can be silent, unanswered

and those pure narratives of self reflecting self detach
and drift away into no need to know if they self-exist
those sunlit fields of words deep into necessary twilight
and self comes to rest in silence as deep as mountain root
    and world spine and snow-scraped waste
    and long days of nothing much

intrusive between these poles of rabbit and god and sacrifice
into in out of out between every point of sapphire outcrop
in presence of time becoming timeless each night
inner absence make sky into stone into seal door

door of worlds opens out silver blue gold black
frame of entry make heart to stone to prayer
circles enscribed in air over stone spiral sun dagger
star of reclamation invitation moon risen to sun scribe

Emptying

It was perhaps prophetic that the turning point in my decision to leave The Poetry World and strike off on my own was a poem called Kenosis. It was significant that the responses I received about that poem, and others written around the same time, were contradictory, even reactionary.

It's been a process of letting go, of emptying: of kenosis. It's the living Void, the experience of emptiness, of nothingness. By living, we mean, continuing, exultant, sinking and cooling.

I continue my process of emptying by desiring less and less to categorize my writing into those bins labeled Poetry, Prose, Essay, whatever. Let's just call it Writing. In the same way that I care less about defining what I write as Poetry, I find myself aware that the standards and concepts by which reviewers and critics judge Poetry mean exactly nothing. More precisely, those standards by which Poetry is labeled and judged don't always apply to the marginally-poetic-if-not-Poetry writings that I make when I am writing in a spiritual-poetic-mythic mode. One dismissive critique of this species of writing has always been, "Well, it might have something interesting to say, but it's just not a well-written poem." Yet, if the same critic had judged the writing as Essay, or Prose, they would have accepted the writing more readily. I'm not interested in explaining or justifying a poem. If you think it doesn't work as a poem, or if you just don't like it, then unless I get from you a real reason for why you feel that way, I have no obligation to even respond.

The important point here is: writing is not automatically made better by being confined to one style or form. Or by being confined at all, really. Writing that is not necessarily intended to be Fine Art Literary Writing doesn't necessarily need to be judged by those literary standards. When I write something kenotic, my personal purpose in writing is cathartic, revelatory, even visionary. Because I have to. I do my best to always write at the highest level of quality that I can achieve, on any given day. I don't throw a piece of writing away if it has successfully expressed something important, just because it's not my best writing. Heretical as it is to say these days in The Poetry World, sometimes content really does matter. I might recognize that something I wrote isn't my best writing per se; but if it does what I needed it to do, that might be enough. I'm not rationalizing slacking off here; quite the opposite. What I'm saying is: it might not be possible to write great fine-art literature on certain topics; and, that doesn't mean one should avoid writing on those topics; and, given that does the best one can on any given day, one has to accept that not all days will one be writing at the same high level. It goes in waves. Sometimes you might take a break, then write again on the same subject, till you get it right.

Which leads us towards the existential questions: What makes a poem a poem? What makes a poet a poet?

It's not just enjambment, the breaking of the line, by whatever criterion the line is made to break. I've written before that prose-poems don't really need to be defended against or for "the death of Poetry." Prose-poetry is simply another, equally valid mode of writing.

Once again I find myself in a lifelong situation of walking a definitional line, being an insider/outsider, being both/and rather than either/or. If some critic or poet or reader thinks something I wrote is not a poem, that's fine; they're welcome to call it whatever they want. It's not my box they're trying to put it in. I'll just continue to write what I write, and go on. I don't require to be named, or categorized, or even noticed.

When you go through a life-changing experience, or sequence of experiences, your art is going to change. You can try to force it back into the known and familiar boxes, or you can leave the door open, the windows open, and let whatever breeze moves through your house flow through, emptying out the old stale air, bringing in the new.

Empty the self to find the self. —a saying found in almost all meditation and contemplative prayer traditions

Kaimos

this
has not been an easy voyage,

no: at times flinty, even cruel;
at others, most brilliantly illuminated
with the immune grace of
bright moments of utmost connection:
timeless, immense, momentary, gone—

the yearning after

after unattainable things

the circling over others
the presence of an absence haunts

under unending grey skies
no sense of direction or time
going in circles, urgently—

tonight
they are dancing in the small
town under an old mountain
in the northern woods where roads
are scarce

they have been gathering to dance
there for over two hundred years

returning as though uncentered
driven pulled to return, return and dance anew—

endless timeless purgatory of
roads wound infinitely out and down
never really arriving

when will end
this endless circling

no change
no direction
just orbiting a trough of valleys
filled with bog and silted-in lake—

you go and you go and time passes
but you never get anywhere
and you're stuck behind
some other traveller determined
to much slower than necessary—

no
this
has not been an easy voyage
and the arrival always delayed departure
shouldered endurance of
durance vile

and the yearning
will it end
cycling patterns of push and release
cycling moments of still calm centers

like eyes of geodes
in the side of a blind slate hill
exposed to the light for the first time
in a million years of
sleep earning itself a forbidden dawn

Veriditas

butterflies everywhere butterfly gold flower blue black band of wing shadow sun greenlight orchid scent purity of water flowing slough cedar foot and mangrove

green lake mirror in gold sun set windless birch bosque

spring treefrog peeper on bamboo

green heron wing cup curl into shadow over koi pond ocean shore river night

whisper trees whisper long sigh in afternoon sun breeze over all and air over all settling branches in high crown bent over bowing to sky earth every earth one

flank cedar on dolomite spear up to sun as in Greece where cedar soar on white dolomite cliff this place like the other merging one becoming same place same time same light Greek light dolomite crown of swaying spear branch and feather

slow sludge stagnant pond algae choke solid mat algae grown together wings of flies

sentinel sagebrush on mountain south slope bright sun alkaline soil hard pan pack think crust sage brush in wind tumbling

and butterflies everywhere luna green moth butterfly eye of heaven eye of earth eye wing sun antenna questing nectar sungold honey nectar sweet fragrance juniper sage cedar sweetgrass earth loam earth ascending earth one green one green man gold sun blue heaven and all rise merge to one green karst of mind

Katabasis

into the out of to edge and earth seadrumming drift on shore to end of day
out from surf to sand flow foam into cavecool arc windlight in inscape
of end stark in to back roof of mouth cave stone stain silt and flood
down coast down hill down trail to silt sand falling cliff span
sit wetdry sand all over seabreeze light over naked skin
sun bury pink burned skin sandfoot hardstrung
gale into end weather earth sea down coast in
ruins canyon slip wade to sea stone arch
wind spin cave in arch breathing sea
seals fathomless eye watch shore
estuary flow to tide out edge
past arc of secret archway
slip down night fall
cool under trees
sun down to
gold light
down
sun
to

sun to sun earthspirits wind through beach caves
last nude swimmers walking through surf come in
through tunnel cave to starlight shore same ocean same
and in last light turn dance upcliff face feet certain sure
ancient dreamstone in line of seastars gulls kelp bladders
strewn everywhere to be found naked under the sun
the books of tide and sinew

into
lost beat
come heart
to live inscape
come wind to earth
begin long arc return
to sun star tide sea shield
moon and cave drift whirl
in arch spin naked in seafoam
silhouette and stones of the ancients
visitors to shore retuning inland harps
strung with wind a life spent nailed to shoreland

and every sunburned prayer an emptiness of sign and seal
strange witness to the lemniscate of inward summer freed

Moralizing vs. Experimentation 2

The next question that came up in the attack on my new poetry was along the lines of: How could I ever expect this sort of poem to be published anywhere in the established print media? i.e. it was doubted that the poem would get anywhere in any edited literary journal.

Well, the first error in that criticism is the assumption that I care to be published in such poetry venues—which tend to be inherently conservative, regardless. The second error was in thinking I would be so stupid as to bother submitting to any venue I already knew would reject the poem; anyone could recognize what a time-waste that would be.

So, pay attention now: the criticism about publishing is quite correct.

The poem under question (which may be found here, titled Kenosis) will very likely never get published in the establish(ment)ed poetry journals such as Poetry, Paris Review, Antioch Review, National Poetry Review, Ploughshares, or Prairie Schooner. (Ignoring for the moment the inherent editorial conservatism of most of these journals; and the implied conservatism of the viewpoint that assumes they're even the best place to publish poems.) I never expected it would. Nor did I ever intend to submit it to them. The assumption that I would even bother to try submitting to those venues is amusing; I'm far more cynical about the poetry publishing mainstream than you could imagine—because I've worked in it, as a typographer, designer, and jack-of-all-publishing skills. I am far more likely to submit an "experimental" poem like to a smaller, less well known journal—one that is fundamentally more open-minded to the unusual and non-mainstream, even to the orthographically unusual. At the same time, since the poem has "meaning" and "content," it's also unlikely to be accepted at any of the "postmodern poetics" journals—but I wasn't planning to submit it there, either.

The third assumption underlying the criticism was that I aspire for this poem to be published—which is not at all certain. But that is not at all why I wrote the poem.

Considering how many times I've stated my personal truth, that I never write for publication, or for a journal (unless directly commissioned), or even with publication in mind, I confess to being frustrated at having to repeat myself yet again:

When I write, I'm not thinking about the "destined future" of what I write—frankly, to me that seems incredibly calculating, and rather arrogant—when I write all I am doing is writing.

It happens in the moment, and it is about the process of creativity in-the-moment. The artistic product that results, be a it a poem or artwork or piece of music, is an entirely different matter. Similarly, revision and editing are entirely different processes from writing, and are processes that I only think about later, not when actually writing. Submitting a poem for publishing is a process taking what I've already written, and trying to find it a good home—not about forcing what I write to match what has already been published, even in the "prestigious" poetry journals. If I do have a philosophical bias with regard ot poetics, that's it in a nutshell.

As to the poem's "future," if it even has one, and assuming I give a damn, the criticism made several unwarranted assumptions not only about poetry in general but about why I write poetry, and what its purpose is in my life—again, one can only surmise that the objection was a moral one, beacuse it consisted of some other poet projecting their own values onto my poem.

If you think about it, that evaluative projection in its essence can be summarized as asking: "why didn't you write this poem more formally"? which can be reduced to: "why didn't you write this poem they way I would have?" or perhaps "why didn't you write this poem in a way like other poems that I like to read, and understand?" To address the last point, which does come at it from a slightly different angle, I might once again quote Jean Cocteau:

We are inclined to judge what is beautiful by what is familiar.

In other words, "making it easier for the reader" doesn't really have anything to do with the style or orthography of a poem. A complaint about legibility, comprehension, or readability may be a valid complaint, but it will fail the instant one tries to use it as an apparently-objective mask pasted over a personal prejudice.

Kerygma

In earnest the mallards rise to the river's surface, and expel. On the sandbar, a clash of quacks and wings, a shrill ruckus that makes four deer wading at the ford pause. A stare, an earflick, then lowered heads drink before long ankles carry them on, white rumps gracefully swaying. Branches of a box elder, falling sideways as the rains erode its root-bound banks, droop over the sandbar. The mallards sleep there on hot afternoons, standing one-legged in the shallows, safe from overhead.

The grass is getting long, now. Leaves fall everywhere, dry green. Two woodchucks, brave and brown, lie on the glade and chaw at blades sawing in the breeze. Everyone pretends the redtail hawk has moved on. The sky's dome is dotted with black dots of sparrows, the woodchucks stay within reach of dense juniper bushes.

Oak branches curve down, black jagged lightning bearing fruit, where the wild turkey flock has just glided down. The day's round will take them foraging, then back here to roost. They fight and call in between bouts of pecking for food. In the evening, cinders zigzag from lower branches to higher, as they settle in.

Deer are silent, never saying much to strangers. They keep their dreams to themselves. You can listen a long time to hear a deer thinking. You must silently stalk them, downwind, remaining still when they look your way, unbreathing. When they look away, inch forward. When you can touch them, fingers brushing fur over spine or flank, and they do not start and run, perhaps then they'll speak to you.

And the eye of the great blue heron watches from its roost across the river. It preens long wing feathers. And the great golden eye orbs slowly in the ambering light. The heron turns to look at you, a long stare that could mean anything, could be a reproach, or a wish. And the great wings spread and flap as the giant neck lunges out. The heron swoops down and levels off above the stream, flying upriver, towards sleep, and dreams of silver-sided trout hovering in a deep riffle at the bend.

a gold maple leaf
the last to fall from its branch—
cicadas, ceasing

Imago

At the end of that dark day, near sunset, I pulled into a rest stop to stretch my legs. A group of monks and nuns in pale gray robes clustered at a picnic table. Flying in ecstatic circles, over lawn and concrete, a thousand giant dragonflies, four inches long and a half inch in diameter, feeding or mating, being a manifestation of beauty. The monks were all speaking French; and I felt the old language take life in me, as I contemplated chatting with them. I would say, Bonjour, ca va? And once introductions were complete, we would discuss obscure theologies in multiple languages. Leaving the bathroom, though, they all spoke English. The dragonflies still danced in waves and ripples and spirals. I stood in their midst, encircled and surrounded by flying bolts of light. It was a summoning. The monks and nuns, it was easy to believe, were not human, but emanations or emissaries. They ignored me as I stood, hands out, to touch those whirling and diving wings, power throbbing my palms, the threshold between worlds very near, in the shadow of that dark tree near the edge of the woods. A tent caterpillar nest overhanging the sidewalk, looming, intimate shadows within. The monks and nuns got into their cars and drove away. It was a meeting of overlapping worlds; strangers at the crossroads.

Thus I came to an insight about the true nature of God: the whole theology of the Trinity is wrong. It’s actually a four-in-one, not a three-in-one; four is a much more sacred number. Father, Son, Holy Spirit, and Godhead, which is called Mystery: that deep silent Unknowing behind the imago dei; that one can only arrive at by sinking and cooling into release; a still small voice one can never quite shoehorn into image or word. That dark day I had gotten lost, been waylaid, found deep pools of reasonless waters; I had driven myself hard, and gotten nowhere. Now I return to the unknown and silent. I knew this once, and lost it. Now I must re-learn it. Like starting over, maps are useless, the territory uncharted. Every structure stripped away, in order for the voice of Mystery to re-enter, rebuild, again.

I am too tired to resist, to fight. The day empties me. I am dying, and just want the powers that be to take me now, and get it over with. I am willing to die to the old life, to be void. That emptiness that is what used to be; that hole in the air that used to be shaped like a body. So the dragonflies might dance through, and catch light in the indigo twilight.

Poems Published, Summer 2007

I just back from two weeks camping in the northwoods of Superior National Forest in Minnesota. I sought rest and rejuvenation, and partially accomplished my goal. I wrote a great deal each morning in my tent, including some new poems.

In the meantime, I've had six more poems published. One poem was just published by The Externalist. I have also had five poems published this past month, in two installments, over at Monsters & Critics, for which I'm very grateful. Most recently posted at M&C is a prose-poem about my father, his cancer, and my being with him this past year as his principal caregiver. I moved back to his home in the Midwest to be his caregiver in July 2006; he died in June 2007, after one good/difficult last year. The last few months were particularly good, as he was feeling strong and fit, until his final illness caught up with him. We had traveled to Michigan so he could show me ancestral and family gravesites, and visit several relatives. I've written extensively about that trip, with photos, here.

Below is the prose-poem that was just published, repeated here as a memorial to my father.

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Apokatastasis

A blue afternoon. A clear blue sky, paling to white at the horizon, cloudless; a March sky, though it's still December. No more snow since that first big storm after Thanksgiving. If we don't get more snow soon, it's mean drought come summer. Dust in the air will mean topsoil blowing away before rain or young shoots can hold it down. It's easy to feel hopeless. The light coming through the bare branches of the oaks seems to filter to brown as it passes through the ghosts of acorns and turning leaves. Come sunset, everything will seem gold and amber and brass, painted mellow by the sun's tilting lantern.

We stagger into the radiation treatment center at the hospital; my father is going to get shot five more times with fast protons, and high-energy hadrons. They take more x-rays, to center the targeted region, a little lump that grew on that spur that sticks out to the side of the spine, the lump that grew larger all through months of chemo. They call that a mixed result. Blue crosshairs are painted on his torso, alignments for the accelerator's aim. The radiation oncologist says to my father, after today's session, Our goal is to make sure you die of something other than cancer. That's a successful treatment, nowadays, for an old man who's dying anyway. It doesn't keep from us from sleepless nights and worry, but it's the most hopeful thing any doctor has said to us in months. We can try to choose our deaths, our times to die. We can still struggle to try to control our fates: our liberations.

I drive home while Dad naps. The light is getting that gold tinge. The sun skates through bare orchards on the horizon. The land here is flat and gently rolling, with lines of trees along the roads, at the edges of fields. Tall machineries mark territory and home boundaries, insectlike. Crows fly from silo to silo, searching for loose grain, fossil corn, something the barn-dwellers missed. We are silent. Perhaps I can sleep, tonight; finally. Near the rim of a bowl-shaped sink, not really a valley, deer move slowly from out of the trees, turning blue with final dusk.