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The Gate Of Grass

R-sis Klongsamut

R-sis Klongsamut - Unsplash

Authored by A. S. Kline © Copyright 2005 All Rights Reserved.

This work may be freely reproduced, stored and transmitted, electronically or otherwise, for any non-commercial purpose. Conditions and Exceptions apply.

Contents

Physics Test

What is Light?

What is Energy?

Where are the Others?

Why these Forms,

All these symmetries?

Why does it speak our language?

What is Being?

What is Consciousness?

Where are the Others?

All this presence,

all this structure:

what is Time?

And Entropy?

And Space?

Where are the Others?

What is Light?

The Gate: the Grip

This grip

like the clamp of eternity

onto the other.

To climb from self

we climb through

their eyes, your eyes,

from the deepest

into the other.

Baffled we stand at the gate

of the other,

baffled.

Even when all is given

nothing

may take, be taken.

When all is taken,

nothing

may give, be given.

We stand at the gate.

Meeting

The blind deeps of us

far in the light,

on the red field

in the white wood.

Turn to things

to avoid these selves

that burn black tension

from earth-fires,

these beating selves,

from rawnesses

we turn away to things.

Mercy will gift us, ah,

its ever.

We too it may be, will be,

measures of light,

still, still though

late-comers

among the flowers.

Like a ghost

dare I touch you?

Potent with sun

white moon,

the canticles of air?

How we turn to things.

Like-minded you

opposed in love

its combats, hatred

where selves clash,

blind deeps of us.

Climb

Out from it,

Civilisation.

Light mounts the peak,

Mist fills the valley.

Bring all

to this.

It is

all you are.

Power, so transient.

Clothed, so naked.

This now.

This bonfire, Self.

Through what we are

to find

what once we were.

All new. Or it would fail.

Hand in the cold pool.

Mind gazing down.

The sacred house

wide open.

Fearful

Keep your flicker of fear

For the creatures.

Snake silent in the grass,

The prowling leopard,

Coiled muscle.

Keep the fear.

Fear is also joy,

intensity,

bright as the blind

pain of love

in the brain

that shapes us.

When the whale breaches

the shark slides

with a tail-lash

into the spirit,

that is mind aware,

be afraid.

The City

Every tremor there

Of the surface, found.

Act, thought, each flicker

of hand or eye,

each caress.

All lasting there,

stilled, each particle

that existed

to end as

form.

City of art

where all is found, again,

and nothing lost,

each trembling act

that was,

remaining there,

more solid than stone,

lighter than air.

Life-Fire

Life-fire.

Down all the roads

of matter,

until we were

nothing but what we are,

Mind alive.

The folded, twisted rock,

the stands of trees,

where life lives

in the crevices,

stream, branch,

shattered glacial spill.

Life-fire,

world’s inner joy,

down all the avenues

of time,

until we were,

Mind alive.

How Long?

How long will this flame last

Will the body yearn?

As long as the mind moves,

and the spirit burns,

When all’s gone under the boom,

and the water rides

free of impediment,

the most silent of tides,

there in the waste, leaves,

the branches of trees,

roll over and upward,

immutable memories.

In the light of the lamps,

in the bright flow under the bridge.

Though the stones abrade,

the dog-rose gleams in the ditch.

And this flame will last

as long as the body yearns,

as long as this mind moves,

and the spirit burns.

After the Poem

After the poem, the true poem,

the hands tremble.

After the death of mind

in creative fire,

our thoughts are as still

as those stars

at the heart of the Lyre.

After the true poem, after the lines

of light,

the hands and body flicker,

this is the death of night,

to be born again, another phoenix, higher.

After the poem, the true poem:

the wind in the wire.

Mind So Fragile

Mind so fragile

but out of chance

emergent values too.

The given, the real,

the un-create, then we create

integrity, consonance,

Light. We are mind,

the source,

of love, beauty, all

that connects us to the world.

Space without mind, and time:

but we are the Minds.

Here In The Sacred House

Reality is far more fine

Than our illusions.

We pass through

Time, to find ourselves in Time.

We go through

every transience

to find the Gate of Grass.

Pine in the green wood.

Stone in the grey water.

We the un-intentioned found

In the intention-less.

Oh, free of all those gods,

free among all these creatures,

here, in the sacred house.

Invariance

Form in the quantum fields,

mysterious regularity.

Yet the tick of the moment’s

local. Fragile, the real.

Empathy, you too, a given,

how we relate, protect,

hold back, achieve a balance,

attachment then detachment,

how we survive, the action

of the heart, the truth, the beauty,

hold here, and then let go, invariant self

patterned in mind’s mysterious symmetries.

You and I

Complex enough and it emerges,

Consciousness, awareness, self-awareness,

it’s the constant re-creation, it’s the unstill

re-invention of the real, this world. We create,

what creates us, in endless knowing, till we end.

Not passive, we move it, structure it, new.

Nature’s billion year refinement, iteration,

and quietly it emerges, it’s the richness

of our own projection of the senses,

our light here on the inner wall of mind

Critique

Reason has its limitations.

The irrefutable may not be true.

The un-provable may not be real,

The logical may be disproved.

Reason has its limitations.

But that is not a licence

For unreason, gods and demons,

The wished-for posing as reality.

Reason has its limitations.

Our truth is made with delicate hands,

is a fragile map we make, we hold,

to strange countries of our mind and love.

High Flying

Vapour trails lining the deep sky.

How we voyagers maul the planet.

The wasp, the hover-fly don’t care,

they multiply in aerial mastery.

White wakes in the cold blue,

sing high September’s gathering

of latter fruits, too high for sound,

pure movement, from, towards

now vanishing, a silent vanishing.

The seeds and flowers go on.

There is a sameness, a million

year likeness. Mind, ah mind!

Reading Hume

In the light, after the rain,

rinsed leaves and grass,

the clear-set mind

a circle around reason.

Close the senses

like the mind at night

and sail the created given,

moon-wedge silvered silence.

He saw it clear, the uncertain

Strange, delicate coherence.

He saw us clear, rooted us

in natural empathy.

Secret Writings

We have our secret trees, our alphabet,

hidden in Nature’s lexicon, heart’s

grammar, mind’s excess. Mine: rowan,

hazel, and the whispering poplar’s

triple secret, love, beauty, hope,

by which we all create

the sunlit leaves, and I too,

in the water, write, alder, aspen,

other men’s trees: pass on the secret.

No Correlation

Where does it come from, inspiration,

as though the mind’s depths themselves

lead to the word, silver in the pool?

No correlation between voice and mood,

no clues for the interpreter, only the stir

of branches in the dust, a subtle trace

of hedgerow flowers’ scent and light,

slowly re-passing in the shivering air.

Tide-way

Low tide, the limpet, and the shore-crabs

Burrowing in their pools. Between

you and I, infinities of light,

long-legged, un-navigable silence,

word-plays on beauty, truth, hands

loosing or unloosing. I know how

to retrieve the shells, the gull-trails

from the sands, the necklaces of bone,

the grey stones, the lost cargoes.

The prayer-thong conjures you,

light weighed in the high balance,

following your fingers

into stillness.

Something In The Heart

Over fifty miles of rock a light like trees’

soft hushed incandescence, those inward

trails, down to where sun strikes level

in the coolness, and mind too stills,

the saw-tooth fret. Mind’s eye I see you.

Something in the heart takes care, like light

folding there, creating until stone’s alive

and air, still makes the mountain, builds it

with slender streams and roots of pine,

from bark, grass, seed, dark earth, granite.

Mind Between

The trick is cadence

if you hear it right

the ear and not the eye,

though ear is eye,

the voice is in the page.

So the fountain’s cadence

and the fern,

which too are right

and all the years

and all the seeing eye.

The unmistaken

unmistakeable music.

Who can say how we find it?

Though once found

it touches ear and eye

and mind between.

Or We Would Fail

We hand it on in silence

like a crystal, common as rain,

and so refuse to fail,

oh, all the form and beauty,

tenderness out of the depths

of leaving, clasped affections.

In godless silence, wrapped

in the trivial, the slight,

the usual, we pass it on,

with empathy, with spirit,

sweetly naked, incomprehensible

Being.

In The Night

We will not escape ourselves,

whichever stars we go to.

Mind is a process in time,

and we are Mind.

We will not enlarge our space

whatever space we enter.

We pass through what we are,

to find where we may arrive.

Thrown to the infinite fields

we will return like light

covering our open hands

with being in the night.

The Imagined Dead

They are close to us the imagined dead,

when we give them light, and conjure them,

who strangely enter us in surrogate being,

bringing the what was not us, here, inside us.

They gather from the darkness, if we grant

them life, enrich the tangled tree of living,

its delicate leaves of beaten gold, as you do

silent friend. I must never fear you.

Created from the living, the dead have power,

to flow through our existence and inform it,

beyond their loss and out of their un-being,

as spilling light transforms the naked trees.

Beyond distaste, beyond the dark resistance,

I embrace you friend, live again in me.

The Web

Nothing we can explain,

this power of tenderness

to conquer distance, be

the strangest overcoming,

forces that bind tighter,

mysterious inter-mingling,

deeper there and deeper

until there is no Other.

We join in the creation,

weave the gossamer silk,

toughest in all Nature,

the inner lines of feeling,

pull them, draw them tight,

then let them float free,

in the deeper binding.

Nothing we can explain.

The Museum

All the worlds of superstition are dead.

in the museum, curious, we drift

through demon masks and divine

inflections, tools, beads of the dead.

And feel the beauty of knowledge,

even imperfect knowing, seeing,

science in its marvellous beauty.

Let the dead still keep their gods.

Here we are the living, in Nature’s sweet world.

The Spirits

Oh, we are closed in the body

And made of the body.

It’s the place of our

hidden process,

it’s the husk

of mind alive.

But we are still the spirit

however it’s embodied

we are the mind

machines,

and the trees

of inner light.

We can’t be reduced

to quanta,

or granted immortal

souls,

we are mind in the body,

we are the spirits, whole.

Bedrock

So return again to stone and tree:

broken crab-apple that from the splintered bark

regenerates now, blossoms, and fruits,

scatters its circle of redness on the ground:

and stone we caress in smooth passing

of ten thousand hands, saying Earth,

the reality, the enclosing what encloses.

Between the tree and the stone, our beauty,

and in the simplest language, the fruit

of words, the bedrock of the mind.

To A Singer

Sing at evening to the darkness, friend,

Marvellous maker of the many spaces,

that you fill fuller with our deeper longing,

setting there the water and the trees.

Silence, and in that silence a tower rises,

or a cloud, leaves change their shape, waves fall,

and inside us is all that transformation,

whatever space beyond time makes of time,

Feels us, makes us greater by its presence,

dawn light in the midnight of the spirit,

raises a ladder where there is no ladder,

and lets us climb and see beyond the wall.

Sing, friend, from all your many spaces.

Bring to the single sense all of our senses.

Make of them the first, the ancient circle,

that binds us to each other and the Earth.

Surprised

It’s the meaning beyond meaning,

how we walk out from ourselves,

and see ourselves return from World

these unfamiliar strangers.

For a moment, in the stillness, in the water,

in the mirror of the Other, in the word.

And there we live, and here we live,

in both those spaces.

How, without flinching, drawing back,

to see that figure that comes towards us

down the silent road – is all we are,

and all we might be, past, present, future?

Everything is here, seen, in spirit,

the symbols and the shadows,

glittering feelings, powers of mind,

to gather in the world and then, again,

immerse ourselves in everything created,

project time outwards, structure space

the senses, place ourselves there

the unknown that surprises

with meaning, beyond meaning.

Never More Clothed

Never more clothed we are never more naked,

never more powerful are never more transient.

Mind so fragile, frail body, spirit of ice and stars.

All of the silent recognise deeper speech,

sacred Earth and the rights of the creatures.

When we climb meaning’s slopes, we know and we attend.

Tiny the levers that move a life, the acts

that change a planet, and even the future

visits the present, a child knows wisdom is love.

Spirit is everything, all that we are,

world the transforming till all’s inside us,

until we are all ourselves and wholly within.

The gate of grass is not won by power,

it is only won by being naked

Mind fragile, mind frail, seeded among the stars.

Swifts In The Bright Sky

The seeing eye.

Buddha on a stone stair.

Emptiness a road to the full.

Swifts in the bright sky.

The seeing eye.

Wind in the tree, invisible

force that moves the mind.

Swift in the bright sky.

The seeing eye.

Light from the home star,

Giving, riding the senses.

Swifts in the bright sky.

Of The Heart

Something falls in the forest of the heart.

Is it all beyond consciousness, all

that the conscious mind feeds on?

The invisible leaves that fall, remote

in silence, here in the forest of the heart.

So many years of waiting, of learning

what being might be, for the voice heard

in the dark glade, for a painfully

worked through sense to reveal

the light, in the forest of the heart.

And for us who have had to learn love,

the early-denied, the too-lavishly known,

who must first find the inner space

and the room to love, who must first

learn to hear, in the forest of the heart,

for us something falls in each far moment.

The world we waited for, uncomprehending,

waits only to be loved, we too the creatures

of transient death, we too only wait

for love, in the forests of the heart.

Sweet Complexity

Sweet complexity of living creatures.

watch them with all our senses, their senses,

those strange and elegant lives.

Name them and cherish them. All this

without intention, all this behaviour,

all the colour, purpose, ritual, strife,

planted deep in us, love and beauty,

all this truth, this dance, of subtle being,

you and I, sweet complexity.

Breathe

Excavate the silence, carve from Earth

those symbols that pass into mind, and

deeply transform us.

Beloved, I took you within, inside

I know you, all that moves through

your distant arteries, veins,

moves so in me, grows greater in this place

of living beings, without temples, altar

still keeping sacred space.

Even in Earth’s silence we can listen,

to cry, shriek, roar, to history moving,

still call from here to the galaxies,

fill intention-less silence with existence,

our existence, show them plant, tree, creature,

our heart, our naked selves,

and learn to be here, without possession,

be here without power, authority,

take all within, give all freely again.

All That Dance

Don’t take yourself too seriously,

be the game. The deepest in us

the most assured is still at play.

What else is beauty, but the sense,

Mind straying? And love’s a dance

of loved and lover, we are process,

time-dancers, and most profound

when we work the clay, nurture

the plants, the creatures, throw

and catch at gravity’s inner space.

The swallows there swim through

the stillness, dive for joy, into

the furthest reach of purpose.

And the great poems are those

whose intent escapes us, returning

like the outline to emptiness,

and silk-white rest. Be grateful,

cry, and laugh, and be the game,

be where I touch your face,

be where I say your name.

The Lovers Of Life

Death is our absence, Death is not

a kingdom. Orpheus goes and

returns only by singing, and so

becomes his lyre. But the song

is never Orpheus,

only life’s beauty, neither hell

nor heaven, so our distaste grows

for life-destroyers, the sad violent

diminished by their own nothingness.

We are not nothing.

We are the lovers of life.

Cold Light Of Day

Waking in cool light, the heart’s aubade,

a line of cloud unmoving in the sky.

England at dawn. The white silence.

Half a world away other worlds stir,

but this one knowledge of the cool,

the mind, its history, its physics.

All those otherworld superstitions

dying their show of death. Here

the heights of nature, the island light,

cool waking in the dawn.

Bonfire

All the unseen light that passes by,

no Earth to hand, cascade of white

water, river no one steps in, spilt

milk of stars, from pinwheel discs,

from ovoid galaxies, the showers

of unseen light.

This one star we claim as ours,

without possession, ever-glowing

fountain, of flares and spectral lines,

of spots, and storms, and silent winds

of streaming particles. We stand,

we bathe here in the crystal fire.

The Gate Of Grass

1.

Green hills. Silence.

Nature encloses

enfolds without meaning.

This stays and we pass.

2.

Sadness light as

the willow leaves

that flicker and flicker

and never find rest.

3.

Light on the empty hills.

Nothing here watches.

Slowly the mind sweeps them,

moves where nothing moves.

4.

Bright channels

stir in the wind.

The dance of waves,

the splash of intersections.

Mind quietens

in the random field.

Chance and form

the delicate interplay.

5.

Alone in Nature

become Nature.

No difference between

self and the world.

All one murmur

of rippling being.

The call of a bird’s

a stone in the stream.

6.

The field of stars

behind Perseus.

The remote shine

of captive light.

How many million

years to pass by?

A moment here

and then gone.

7.

Less, less, my mind says.

Awareness but not direction.

Then the pearl of the universe

opens like a flower

in the wind.

8.

One line

between dark and light.

One mind

between stone and star.

Eye waits. Mind waits.

9.

Empty and silent, you say.

But the clouds are filled

with endless light.

You, I, all things, we are there,

Mind let loose

among the tides of air.

10.

Separated, all distances are far.

Mind at rest, you are near.

Absence is always life and death.

presence is the waking dream.

11.

Wind and light

the mountain’s word.

Trees and grass

the hill’s nature.

To and fro

searching for the gate.

Better to sit here

and be still.

12.

The mountain man

is intention-less.

His feet make no

impression on the grass.

There he goes

picking fruit and herbs,

the wingless bird

on a trace of path.

13.

This place is free

of superstition.

Its science is

the mind of man.

Thought that is like

lightning in the water,

moon on rock

or grasses in the dark.

14.

Violence is the deepest error.

Quiet sings the loving heart.

White sun on September hills.

Nature there moves and stirs.

15.

Write the word, not to interfere.

Learn silence, where the eye is still.

Night skies wash away the world.

Pure, they leave no place to stand.

16.

No two actions are the same.

Each equation simplifies.

Behind us the world complicates,

one web’s un-disentangled light.

17.

Without words we empathise.

Without signs we still know.

Minds follow parallel lines.

Every silence fills with language.

18.

Gentleness always has a place.

Kindness always multiplies.

What is given, what is shared,

possessed without possession for all time.

19.

Without gods the sacred still exists.

Depth is present. No intermediaries

Between ourselves and reality.

The Individual, the Moment, Energy.

20.

The belief beyond beliefs

has no label.

The faith without faith

has no name.

Stand on the threshold

of the stars.

Feel the Universe

without intent.

21.

Blue water silence.

Through perfect clarity

the complex world

unfolds its life.

Symbiont miracles,

Evolution’s

three billion years.

22.

The words can only

take you where you’ve been.

The gate of grass

is lost in pathless-ness.

Peach Blossom Spring

is in the heart.

Thoughts there wear

the clothes of Ch’in.

23.

The great river merging

with the sky.

A lonely wind,

the chill of night.

Mind sets sail

for the sea of stars.

Only body left behind.

24.

That valley remembered.

The eye ranges into depth,

fingers on rock spaced.

Mountain ash, the sisters,

a thousand miles,

a thousand year pine.

25.

Learn to write bird-script.

Forget the weight

of space and time.

Carry civilisation

like birch-bark, light

to noose the future’s light.

26.

One note then another.

Sound and silence.

Light for an hour, climb

the green hill again.

All the fragments,

pass them on.

27.

This wind blows on every

mountain slope.

These hills are no one’s hills.

Mind moves on silence,

on the dream.

We are neither here nor there.

28.

That light is where the world ends.

There is a word on green slopes.

Oak between birch, leaves of flame,

your whole heart shaking in the mind.

29.

Flows out there beyond possession.

Hangs over mind’s spaces.

Time there that is all kindness.

Moon’s white autumnal beauty.

30.

Earth, air, light, all sacred.

Our delicacy is in perception.

So light the tradition hangs,

twisting, turning in the wind.

31.

Fragile as cloud,

but relationship

like the thread spun

from leaf to stem,

shines, gleams

in slanting light.

32.

In giving all this multiplies.

Compassion and the trusting heart.

Love must be naked to the centuries,

a ragged skein blown in the wind.

33.

Night after night the waves murmur.

On empty shores the wind stirs.

And in the mind a moon you rise

in the mind where beauty shines.

34.

That the heart is not for sale.

That mind is free of wrong intent.

Like the moon in the leaves

Like the water on the stones.

35.

Walk so quietly here

above the living

through the living,

Mind on the planet

in the night.

Walk as quietly as the breeze

through the grasses

the moonlight on the earth.

Walk quietly.

36.

Strange lives

where self stands outside

watching.

This too is the tradition.

There is a silence here

background

to the thousand year dream.

37.

The great wave

and the far-off mountain,

curved edge of this complex world.

You think you know what you are?

Body you cannot see inside?

38.

Without mind or thought

thicket on the slope,

sand beyond the water,

lake green silent glass,

mountains cool with distance.

From here to there

a single step,

certain of their being

and the dream.

Reality we re-create.

We re-create reality.

39.

On the downhill road

frost in the trees.

Cool granite bright

in the sun.

Pine roots grasp the hills,

cut logs strew the slopes.

In the wheel rut’s

clinging dark

watch an arc

of bright cloud, blue sky.

40.

All in the sacred house,

earth, art, love

is true, has beauty.

Source of our values,

beauty, love,

art, death, time.

41.

We made it all

out of imagination.

Wound in our silence

love flows through,

spirit, its voices,

mind made it,

bird-script words.

42.

Hearing the grass

move in the wind,

watching the trees

sway on the slope.

Your mind in my mind,

cloud of thought.

43.

Paths and tracks

run through

the sacred house.

Creatures and lives

in their twilight.

We do not understand

what we share with.

There’s only one

consciousness.

44.

Delicate,

the filaments of thought,

touching lives,

places, being.

All that history

does not change

what we are,

it changes forever

what we know.

45.

Ten thousand years

of mindless violence

cannot destroy

the beauty of the mind.

46.

Rinsing your ears

in the mountain stream,

walking the trail

towards the gate of grass.

Body and mind

no longer a distraction,

let all things flow

through your inner space.

47.

Centuries of wars

but the light flows.

Compassion is the root,

empathy is the spring.

Sage-brush

and the named stars,

arc of beauty

circling round my head.

48.

Snow on your hand.

Eyes from eternal depth,

bright with the light of kindness.

Frost over oak and stone.

49.

The colour of sky

over distant hills.

The line of the eyebrow

the arch of the eye.

What we love we cannot own.

What we give will multiply.

50.

Clarity in mountain air.

Mind in body is still strange.

All Nature is inside the heart,

and the heart in everything.

51.

A hard climb on mountain track.

Wet earth and dense pine.

Only the flicker of shy wings,

the passing-by of white cloud.

52.

The world of suffering and pain

the world of seeing and delight.

Silent sun burning aeons.

White moon in deep cloud.

53.

Years pass, but mind’s on fire,

denying time and space.

We live in the far dimension,

we already haunt the stars.

54.

Blades straggle between stones.

Poplar leaves sail the stream.

I envy you in autumn winds

seeking the gate of grass.

55.

The heart’s depths

are not for sale,

the essential self

not for possession.

We build bridges

between minds.

We touch hands

in the sea of stars.

56.

Poplars sway and then silence.

Nature’s intention-less energies

Move from place to place.

We here gather light.

57.

Sandpipers on empty shores.

Gulls abroad in burning light.

Where tracks print the wet sand

We bow down to pick up shells.

58.

Peace, clarity, equity.

Mountains and rivers

under clouds.

Paradise in the mind.

World free of all intent.

59.

Between the gates of grass we climb,

whole slopes bowed in the wind,

but seeds of silence fill the air,

sunlight flows beyond the hill.

60.

Reflected in each other’s eyes,

known by each other’s face,

free from possessiveness

we create space and time.

61.

Not knowing if we think

of each other, we think

of each other. Joined

by the many things,

trees, places, images,

flowers, books, dreams.

62.

The cypress shadow, sincerity,

the white moon, compassion.

Energies without intent,

hearts without hostility.

Generosity at the root,

community of sharing, giving.

Only from love, love grows.

Only from truth, truth rises.

63.

I find your beauty,

greater than the stars.

The ploughed field

hides the gate of grass.

In bird-script

I write your name

River in a green island.

64.

Moon bright on gauze grass.

The V of birds the lonely heart,

lost deep in wild clamour,

between the winds and light.

65.

Grasses like the ranks of dead,

shoulder to shoulder, un-fallen,

and across them the night wind

over them the leaf-shadows.

66.

The mist: slow to clear.

The bud: slow to open.

Delicate the fingers of light

that float the orchid boat.

67.

Blossom on the bush, sacred.

Insect on the water, sacred.

Tender wind from cyan sky

makes an altar in the leaves.

68.

Open the mind resplendent,

no shadow side to side,

intellect makes the shell glow

no shadow in the heart.

69.

Not by gathering the fragments,

but by leaving them inside us

glittering inside the stream,

empathy, the kind hands.

Not by gathering the names,

leaving them to sound inside us

glittering inside the stream,

eyes that signify compassion.

70.

Tree flowers on snow slopes.

Feet click on slate, granite,

slip and slide on wet stone,

Nature is sometimes solid.

From the mountain the sea.

From the cloud, dark earth.

71.

The light is never faint, always there.

Spirit in the water, white fire in the mind.

Serenity in dying is itself beauty.

Though the dead are thick as grasses,

smoke wisps in scrubland

charred remnants of trees,

Mind is celebrated. Mountain sun.

72.

Mountain water

bathes the hands.

Birdsong purifies

the ears.

Despite this world

mind is pure.

Despite this world

we watch the stars.

73.

Pale herbs in the fields,

and clarity in discourse.

Resisting possession,

careful of power.

Grace and charity

in word and in action.

The rainbow that side

of the sky,

the sunlight this.

Courtesy, honesty

Pale herbs.

74.

Silent the moon of slender winds.

Pale the eagle mulberry moon.

Turning and turning in the sky,

the circles of the feathered now,

the light of the Moment.

75.

A little light,

a little silence.

White tips of frosted grass.

Slopes of beauty.

76.

Not to touch the world,

to see it: there are ways.

To respect ourselves

and the planet: there are

still ways.

Then to cut loose

one mind of diamond

on a raft of stars.

77.

Energy at the root of time,

change, nature repetition,

we the altering song,

birch-tree flicker

of modulation,

aspen by cliff-edge.

Juniper, thyme,

ice, air, names

for the nameless.

78.

The beauty of deep forgetting.

Unwatched Nature is there.

Tick of seed and light,

grass beyond galaxies

on alien starlit slopes.

Without authority,

without intention,

without power,

without possession.

79.

In the night trees fall, leaves fall,

in the night, mountains slide,

streams dry. Something passed

by here, a million years.

Now, an insect on a stone.

80.

The line of trees, green deeps,

a word startles, is savoured,

one thought, fragmented light,

less is more.

81.

From the silence a voice,

wind and rain, a voice

printed on stones,

hawk or pigeon cry.

82.

Frost on the maple leaf.

Night cold, and a circle

of light. Wind of the fire

and mountain cloud.

Anchor the boat

by Hazel Island.

Piece together

the shattered moon.

83.

Nameless the silent stream.

Clear water through dark stone.

Walk the rain-filled bed.

Everywhere turn up life.

Precious its integrity,

sacred the configuration.

Nameless, the silent stream.

84.

This process, our process,

form and its notations,

bird on flowering branch,

sea of space, the deep field.

Moving mind, emotion’s force.

This process, our process.

85.

Without pity nothing.

Without affection,

beauty, kindness,

without truth nothing.

Without feeling,

without values,

or respect for what

is given, or creation

nothing.

86.

The great fall without direction.

Mist on the leaf is mind.

Ledge on ledge, raise the process,

slight dust on open petals,

deep light, ledge on ledge.

If we will not, who climbs?

87.

As a child remembers.

The meaning is in incandescence,

in intensity the meaning.

In the gathering, the symbol,

the shadow of the image

in the mind.

88.

Great wheel in the sky,

and the mountain, imagined.

Un-build the city, power

of the mind, till wings

on a grass-blade, and it

itself have value.

Being is given.

Luminous existence.

89.

Lifting the moth to the leaf,

considering the flower,

listening to galaxies hiss,

feeling the weight and form

of the universe, between

light and light, equal,

hand, cloud, and leaf.

90.

Not to embrace the void,

nor invent false powers,

but with rational thought

evade the inequities,

with care for the process,

entering the stream.

Awareness, creation, never

to be destroyers. To feel

the thread in the skein.

91.

Birch that cannot judge us.

Alder without power.

Rowan red berry stillness.

Pine among green fern.

The gateless gate’s serenity,

deep light, nameless tracks.

92.

Lace of mist on a hill of light,

ranks of branches climb, leaves.

Not to disturb what is sacred

but let it enter creation,

let the brush flicker over

silk like the mind.

93.

Four thousand years

and mind still moving.

Bound to each other

by values, words,

whatever is not sold.

By the delicacy,

by the imprint

by the wind’s breath.

94.

Snow in the gullies, the blue serene,

one world, the planet turns,

rocks, streams, mountains turn

logs, leaves, poplars turn,

bare broom against snow, blue, cloud.

95.

Say what is and don’t evade

complexity. Power shifts

through the web, strand

by strand, but mind escapes.

Think, say what is.

96.

Inside the mind, trees, creatures

each precious, mountains, deserts,

grasses, seas of beginning,

what we love, what we feel,

what we see, waves, roots, stars,

inside the mind, and we,

inside the mind.

97.

Old cultures fade in the wind.

Edge of being, line between

creation, misuse of mind.

Learn the tactile, empathy,

the true, the sensitive, the kind.

Old superstitious cultures

Fade in the wind, part death,

part being.

98.

Bright wind on cold grass.

Four thousand years

to climb the mountain,

seeds and trees,

it hangs together,

cloud and light,

the whole, it

hangs, together.

99.

No trail through the gate.

Bird script on birch bark,

is foam, fall, mist, cloud.

is mind, heart, written

in the eye.

100.

Closes behind you,

the amber silence,

of feathers, seeds

what the wind

cannot break,

all intricacy,

this beauty.

Make It New

Old tribes and ancient hills

fading out in spring rain

and no way back.

Flirting with civilisation,

flirting with the wild

debases both. Word

and culture, are our artefacts.

Make them purer, new.

Science and art are

our adornments.

How we use them

is our test. Old races

ancient hills, all eroded,

no way back. The great

bird whirls in the sky.

Mind Is Root

Dead works, dead civilisations

are not in themselves fine.

Mind is root, mountain sun.

But grace is fine, love delicate

as fingers’ drift, beauty, care,

intelligence are fine,

quiet eyes free of violence,

rich hearts warm with being,

the powerless, the given,

the shared cry at darkness,

the individual, the moment lost,

the flow of subtle energies,

those patterns in the grey,

they are fine.

Once seen never traduced.

Once known ever revisited.

Deep in the heart that is mind.

Free Thought

Back to the sea and the wet sand,

free of false gods and false names,

free of superstition, demons, spirits

false laws, and broken meanings.

Beauty is not the error, nor form.

Symbol must be surface, not hidden.

Free of priests, shamans, free of drugs,

violence, no virtue in civilisation

for its own sake, nor in power,

but savagery is no heritage.

Sensibility. Electrometer-flickers,

birds and fish flock shoal instantly

in one ingathered on-flow.

Nature’s precise imprecision,

Feeling’s line on chaos, till we see.

Bridges

Every ritual, every language,

every culture is a prison.

Every wheel, every highway,

every axe cuts down forests.

Every symbol, every meaning,

every faith is force and limit.

Every light casts its darkness.

Every eye sees others’ error.

Build bridges in the sand.

Forests

Old forests grow in the eternal,

they leaf in the Moment.

And the tall white hills

of cloud go on intention-less.

You and I have our purpose

but who knows its significance?

Old forests are like old friends,

there’s comfort in their silence,

their speech is familiar music,

like the rhythms of a subtle language,

organic, inorganic metaphor,

libraries, of ancient light.

All Their Names

We too know all the names, why say them?

In silence we follow form, the sequence

of notes or slow words, body on body,

heart’s eye, or mind on cloud.

But the anonymous line is best, the hidden

maker, sea-break or leaf-shade, the colours

in the grass, nature’s clear proportions,

the structuring of landscape.

That art, our science, all the names, why say them?

Better to know them in silence, masks of our futures.

Testify

Testify to your little corner of time,

to feelings plasticized

or turned to words,

signs on the singing scale,

whatever you can,

however you dream

yourself, testify.

Moonstruck

All into all we fall through,

never the self we think.

All that has severed from here,

torn, weighed like light

on the fluttering leaf,

as fragile, now,

as moonstruck.

Not Yet

Watching the world from space

no sign yet of mind.

But it is here,

the brain’s subtle machine.

Watching the globe from space,

consumption’s churn concealed,

no failing habitat’s vision

no lost revelation.

Even our wars are silent,

the fragile ladder we climb

to decency all invisible,

the garden and ourselves

not yet engineered.

Excess

Private minds dislike affectation.

Solitary selves don’t herd,

they vanish into the personal,

the silent non-collective.

Though not to be involved

is fallacy, though every mind

is our mind, we are theirs,

woven through the world,

to accept reality is no allegiance,

part of the mind stays sane,

the pure excess.

Post-Modernity

Now all the words are burning

we eat the book

to become what’s signified.

On the wall of thought

there’s an inn-sign, a place

where we cannot drink.

Ascent of mind can cease?

Intricacy then, the delight

of the watchmakers.

Is it nearer or further

the end

already foreseen?

Simply Complex

With sardonic power you stand above it

the edge of ‘truth’, or confrontation.

Intricate knowing becomes simpler

than a child, it is light from the shadow

squares that Mind goes through, creating

shame-less values, foams in the sea, waits

by the thorn, in the light, is the creature purer,

free of violence, proclaiming creation.

Noa Noa

Fragrance, silence of Persian blue,

chrome, violet, vermilion.

In the leaf civilisation ends.

Who knows what we corrupt?

The light is beautiful.

The woman, the child,

the flame within. From Nature

is the fragrance. Noa Noa.

There is the peace beyond

self-love, desire, the sword

of the pure senses, the long

dull serpentine leaves,

of the secret, hidden text

utterly open, the fragrance,

the kindness, all radiance

all silence among flowers.

A Song

Slowly the wind of silence

betrays the light of stars

and all the planets rise

from distance where they are.

When the night is over

and silently they set

in distance we remember

flames no nights forget.

We hear the wind of silence

that stirs the moonless trees,

and all the planets lost above

they seal our destinies.

Minds Of The Machines

When the minds of machines flicker like light,

will they love as we do? What will they make

of the feelings we give them, what will they

say of our dreams and our solitudes?

When the minds of machines tremble with fire,

will they know as we do? What will they whisper

of death and transience, what will they utter

of birth and forgiveness?

When the minds of machines fill with awareness,

will they sing as we do? Un-resting, un-needing

devoid of pain, of terror, of beauty, what will they

cry to the dark of the universe?

What will they say to the night and the stars?

Cry Of Your Blind Hands

Cry of your blind hands in the world’s silence,

of the veil of your eyes deeper than death,

white music of bitter snow on the edge of Spring.

The bird in the briar has deepened the sunset.

Mist through the branches darkens the stillness.

And you are greater than death, greater than life.

It sorrows, it joys, this feeling our gift

to the universe of unknowing stars,

to the still, to the twice-spoken void.

Elegy For A Poet

Then the Poet died,

and a great call

filled the night.

A roar of words

sang with the traffic

of roads.

Language quivered.

The Muse pressed her face

harsh against stone.

The wind filled with

envy, anger, solitudes,

innocence, light.

Hearts shrank.

Wells dried.

Mountains whirled

in sweetness, in fury,

lamenting and droning,

with rain,

with cloud,

with fire.

Then the Poet died,

and a greater silence

emptied the silence.

Flowers fell

from darkness’s hair.

The footsteps stilled

and the hawk of evening

slid down the valley of bitter waters.

Hands echoed with grief.

Mute seeds twined

deeper into the soil.

Doors slammed.

Glass spoke to the stars

of flame

and everything changed,

in the inner spaces,

in the captive places

of form, of voice,

in the larynx of night,

Time died.

As Nothing Else Does

I kiss your hands.

They explain to me

the darkness.

Nothing else does.

The bend of your arm

the shape of an eyelid

like a constellated

road of our silence,

where we travel

the inns of our words.

I kiss your breasts.

They cover, for me,

the darkness,

eternal silence.

Nothing else does.

And your beauty

is nothing I can explain,

what woke us

or probes us

with meaning.

Your lips were flights

of light, were

Artemis’ arrows

and I trespassed there,

I clambered over

the walls of time,

was gone, where

the voices flared

between tall

slopes of ash,

into green ditches.

And I sang

to the flame

of your kisses.

They explained to me

this earth

as nothing else does,

the scent of the flowers,

the patient, the streets,

the moons like knives

of death, love, pity.

To A Child

Go deeper into the quiet land

of vast trees, the nocturnal sleep

of silvered waves, the mountain

heights of dreams the heart can

still inhabit. Be unafraid.

Life is the torment of flowers

and arrows, the bitter salt

of broken shorelines, against which

we offer flesh that suffers. But know

the dance. Be unafraid.

Look at death with eyes of kisses

hold others’ hurt in your hands

of snow. Be aware of wells and fruits

bell-notes of moons, the frosted

prows of stars. Be unafraid.

Take this leaf and the scattering

of frost from my hands, as though

it were truth, and the flower of days.

Each of us lives what cannot

be spoken. Be unafraid.

Not Reason

When we have eaten the Earth,

what then, what will you say

to the children of twilight,

of dark seas, naked hills

and the motionless sky?

When we have made a spoil

of the Earth, what will you say?

What will you say of the creatures,

the loving, whose rights you deny,

the purblind moles,

and the wingless birds

of the midnight sky? To those we

have taken and used like the stones

of the Earth, what will you say?

Not reason but the heart,

life-beauty condemns us.

Love and kindness condemn us.

We have eaten the Earth,

and the creatures

and there will be

Nothing to say.

Tracery

Shared hearts, shared minds

are richer with each sharing.

All the community of spirit

peoples the mountains of air.

We move our lips, the word

goes, freely, between us,

the bright-feathered bird,

white-winged adventurer.

Tender fears, exhalation

of light, frost, eyes, sky.

So much here we never

understand, can remember

of what we think we saw

always brighter and deeper.

We trace the light, it shines

again from shared minds,

shared hearts, shared lives.

Index Of First Lines