Tools

Values

Anders Jildén

Anders Jildén - Unsplash

Authored by A. S. Kline © Copyright 2004 All Rights Reserved.

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Contents

I: The Depths Outside

Goldcrest

How did we get so far?

Goldcrest, startling flame

swings on the fir-branch,

articulated in the green,

a Taoist on his mountain.

With so many flaws,

yet Nature’s sieve’s

fine chance, a broken symmetry,

and a few billion years.

Delights, the Tao, in randomness.

Deep, genetic time,

this clock beating in us,

counts the pulse of now,

with our eternal atoms,

this sweet, clear flow.

Light thrown down galaxies,

great, and undirected

intention-less fountain

born of itself, is Tao,

fir, goldcrest, mind.

Fences

Fenced off the wild,

half way down the mountain,

cut spruce and birch,

all this touching, fingering

earth, this restless turning

of hands and eyes.

Let nature make of it

what she will, those birds,

plants, creatures,

the greater species.

You think we can be here,

purer, closer to the guiltless,

still employ our

chemicals, machines?

Desire’s delusion.

Our trucks roll through,

our buildings take the space,

fox gazes on, heron stirs and flies.

You say we have the right to be here,

sinking fence-posts,

cultivating ground,

the ancient garden’s gardeners,

all over singing Earth.

And disused gravel pits return,

and quarries, all return,

eventually, to nature

if they are left (whole sides

of mountains, and another beauty.)

Civilisation

Oh we’re not clothed we’re naked.

The great and small

webs of colour we disguise

ourselves with don’t hide.

Feelings’ tide picks us up

and throws us on the sand,

to scrabble in the shells,

weed, polyps, bird-prints, stones.

We’re never dressed: we’re naked.

All our confident voices

lift to the gulf of silence,

the great swirl, mindless universe,

without desires, intentions,

pure, unfolding, like the fall

of water from a cliff, drops

for ten billion years, the way

the Earth made seas inland,

and our species saw.

Being naked we walk fearfully

through gates and doors, stop

truly naked ones from going by.

Civilisation wears clothes,

for body, heart or mind.

It’s hard for even the naked to be naked,

with all their mind still dressed.

When the wild passes through

we know, feel, remember.

Doorway

Moving around inside this body

my mind examines

the fragile flesh, the skeins,

sensitive, yielding being,

the carapace, the imago,

and puzzles at inwardness.

World inside the mind

which is inside the world:

there must be some geometry

that holds us in its equations

and maps our maddened contours,

geometry of consciousness.

Wind goes through the branches,

birch twigs, silhouetted,

blown round a winter sky,

mind likewise moving,

the glove creates the hand

its shape fits sweetly.

Roof open to the air,

door in a standing wall,

the rest is fallen, un-built,

what’s left is a lone wall,

with a doorway, which way is in,

which side is out, this empty house.

No Silence

No silent landscapes,

they should all be filled

with creatures, wings, cries,

a beauty formed here now

by their cascade,

chatter, flicker shine

of feathers, feelers, fins,

articulate strangeness.

Consider the unfamiliar,

the what no mind

could have created,

the sweet given,

outflow, richness.

Fear the noiseless,

absence,

the speechless, fear negation.

All the empty fields,

the furrowed industry,

lost wealth and vast production.

Fear the creatures’ silence,

air should be filled

with wings, calls, cries,

fluttering, crashing, sighing,

no silent landscapes.

Un-Confessional

Not the self, not

poetry is not the self,

but from beyond the self

in which the thing expressed

that mind may feel,

we cleanse of self,

and wash our faces

in the running stream.

Self’s memory is the lie,

the heart’s construct

of pain, its opposite,

or both combined

or featureless nothing,

but poetry is not self, no

beyond the self

those stars that form

the constellation, Lyra, are not

clustered, but made pattern

of separated distance,

converging in the eye.

Poetry’s constellation

is all the light, those stars

from differing spaces

not the self.

Deer

Climb down rock steps,

sidle along centuries,

slabbed light,

over earth’s skin

where water oozing

slow off the mountain

under all green mosses,

soaks ferns and glacial litter,

fills stone cleft below.

Pause to breathe

on last granite flight,

and from the eye’s corner

deer in the wood,

stream-straddled

bowed there drinking,

startles, breaks through

under-branches

quiver, still.

Miraculous heart

that suddenly sings

nature, touches

world, forgets

this life

in loving it.

Inattention

Pouring self

into the emptiness

becoming creature

of the first awareness,

You are so bound up

with the human,

our speech,

is not being

that's all the boundless

unfettered gleaming

returned from things,

and process stirring.

Miracle, this

reality,

always strange

mysterious given.

Throwing self away,

you think self achieves,

but life is this,

the greater inattention.

City

You the inside

of that place

you bound up,

as though

with its deep being,

its dimension.

Slow, grey-green waters,

slow dark barges,

stone flags

and passageways

where minds meet,

bodyways,

Plunge my hands

in time

the liquid silver,

see thumbs and knuckles,

raise them drowned

with you, with hours.

City your true place

lifted out of space,

some other planet,

and no mind there

to bar communion

of touching forms.

Meditation

Always too deep,

and waiting,

those more spaces

in landscape’s manifold

than I bring you

in our communion.

Light runs like water

out of galaxies,

the end-on rims seen

from this distant star,

and blue lost planet,

floating the bright sea.

This is one species

with one destiny

and little time to live

as we should live,

universal travellers

truth voyagers.

Mind is always

too deep and waiting,

silent in the larger solitude,

in nature’s empty house

but sweetly made

and given to the Mind.

Absence

And every move makes time,

all moves are forward,

time the now-vibration,

scalar count, the number

from event, and to event.

The not-yet and the once

are the same distance

away from us in feeling:

absence unlike presence,

has no scale.

And time is not the river,

the world’s what flows

creating time, this pattern

of event, done, now, next,

an absence, then a presence.

Time change, and litter

of change, never a vector,

and creatures too project

themselves through past

and future,

in imagination. Deepest

construct, time,

mind’s space it draws

with nows

inside eternity.

All Kinds

There is the poetry of things.

Lovely sensory description,

feel of people, action, texture,

colour through observant eyes.

There’s the poetry of things.

There is the poetry of self,

psyche sliding against life,

the warring concrete words

the wards of solid memory,

the titanic poems of self.

There are the poems of others,

watching, finding others,

loving, aiding, being, calling

others in sheer voices,

selfless simple poems of others.

There’s a poetry of feeling,

the rage at being here, being this,

the ecstasies of yielding, in

apocalyptic transformation,

the roaring poems of feeling.

And there are poems of mind,

slight and enduring,

watchers of night and trees,

deceptively speaking

voices with no self, outside others,

elusive poems of mind.

Hill-Fort

Trees clothed this place,

these cliffs clothed it,

this grass, this stone,

this stream,

clothed it from the start,

a hundred million years

of being non-being,

falling through the sieve

of elemental adaptation.

The hill-fort later here

is melted down,

its native rock-face

split by shining roots,

bright trunks

with glittering crowns,

three clear rowans,

mother, daughter, child,

the almost human.

And I, the passer-by,

this year, one year,

eating the blue berries

between spine and turf,

stone-thrower among ferns.

I climbed to this place,

but cannot hold it.

Trees hold this place

and streams and stone.

Whitethorn

May thorn, black latticed spines

make splintered hedges, mound

the dark fields, flow through

gateways, ditches: change bows

in beauty, bounds spill here

of this, and not our, time.

Flute furrows, purple-soiled canals,

shape-shattered, mauve wind-curls,

and the stressed sky rides

through blue liquidity, grey sweetness,

heart hum almost: straining

life strained bound in form.

White bulks, their hummocked heads

cascade mephitic queerness,

an opaque sleep, life smouldering

moon creatures, great grazing

globes of chalk, thorned clouds

pinned, pegged down the field rows.

All this a lifted beauty, revelation

long neglected, inward awed mind

gazing through a feared wild magic,

forced, panged, but not yet maimed

by all disorder, pain, or transience

of entropy’s gorged passage.

Earth-Flame

Nature’s blind-chance beauty’s

subtle order, how such landscape

grows in eye, clouds, mind,

the inner stress’s interplay,

sculpting energies of surface,

and random world makes

purpose, life of movement,

becomes wave’s fall, bud coil,

beaked flower, charged blue.

Fear then the intention-less

bleak, bare, driven dark it

sometimes falls to, pulsing, shows?

Empty of desire, not void

of beauty, order, rank,

that purposeless made this,

the wildly tender Earth,

the carved, rolled, scored,

cleared, fresh, fine, fretted earth.

Each space, each flow,

each distance, mind and shape

though we un-entering see

gleams with our likeness,

is ours, our empathy re-gathered,

beams from wild lightning’s

strange ringing. This planet rolls

a ball of light, inflamed.

That Strain, That Churning

All rare, all charged

each blue night

of moon-wet leaf-web,

each rain-filled constellation,

all these mad mouths

of echoing, falling time.

until all Earth’s stressed being

strains to the gates of sighing,

leaps the mind, and whirling

breaks on the land.

Original in newness,

folded, tender, delicate

with ancient form, flight, curve

piercing bright strangeness,

so easy to the eye,

all without purpose

all withdrawn, in-curled,

to a deep remoteness,

what fuels our shudder of unknowing,

our alien being here.

We strange inside this strangeness,

sweep of mind without meaning cry,

call, quiver of light off furthest shoulder

of land, dark dense of stone opaqueness,

root’s yield-less grasp, wave’s thunder

through the fierce throat of the bay,

night-glow off distant water,

our space that is not place,

but charged, but starred.

Shadows through rain and light,

angled by roof and door,

summit-dark, winged,

a smoke from the night-stars,

Draco, and Cassiopeia,

boom, burst in the sea’s jaws

the roaring of leaves, the hill’s voice,

wild aspen, birch and poplar,

brushes waved at darkness,

skirting the edge of white.

Deep there, and with no speech,

no tongue, singing world.

You, alone, you touch it,

close with its communion,

what energy does in silence,

time-locked, mindless moving,

and cleanses, shames, appals,

depth outside all knowing,

and an inner shaping,

that strain, that churning, we too feel.

Un-Managed

You say dig,

draw plough

the deep soil

cultivate an

ancient sweetness,

in long tradition,

carve the earth’s skin

blade scoured silver,

furrow, fill, and rear,

enrich.

Each touch

so light as meadow-down,

so slight as leaf still

mars the given, burns,

beats, rakes, and axes through

the un-spared beauty,

destroys its selves, its beings,

the fine, non-human

purely thrown, and

gathered again.

Let nature, let alone,

swallow, take itself,

breed, bear, flow,

a new

fling, from

an eternal fire.

Alone

In words

everyone’s memory

is anyone’s memory,

language horizon,

I he am you.

In the mind

everyone’s memory

is its own memory

the self its limit,

silence too.

What communicates

itself, is species.

What keeps the inner core,

is lonely life.

Find Silence

Find silence in the mindscape,

and the mind-ness

of this world.

Whose clouds spin down

the sky,

whose ash-leaves rise,

The voice, the face,

the eyes

of what is loved.

Life’s buried beauty

all chance play

intention-less,

arousing form, and force,

the inwardness

rare of what’s outside,

never corrupted by

our varied purpose

though we destroy

what burns in splendour

so and grieve the mind

locked into silence.

Going

The forests thrown away,

whole mountains down,

the green chain gone

between the earth and cloud.

Buzzard in an empty sky

passes by.

Fog clearing pine-trees

but remember now

the mind like mist,

like dust, blown high.

Fox on an empty trail,

slips by.

Learn your own language,

your own thoughts, forget

complexities that corrupt:

the simple world’s in-wound,

it stays intention-less,

keep pure the eye.

Trees and hills go down,

whole seas run dry,

the whole mind lost

between the earth and cloud.

Hawk in an empty sky,

flickering by.

Owl-Cries

In early winter dark

And owl cries

the frozen earth

slides into silence.

Human, we destroy:

no one is free

of guilt

no mind denies.

Dog barks in the dark,

territorial cries,

an instancy we cannot match

owl-call, dog-cry.

We know too much,

allegories of paradise,

its dark degree

of resonance, and why

mind with the owl cries,

beats on the bell of light,

goes on. We would be free,

and slowly recognise.

II: The Citadel of Mind

Ancestral

Voice from the mind,

and out of the silence,

smaller than Capella,

or the furthest boulder,

out of the grass and stone,

voice going by like dust,

half-heard, half human.

A clear call, voice, of woman,

a child, a girl, or the voice

of creatures, tiny as a flower,

tormentil or bird’s foot trefoil,

fragile as a winter leaf-veil,

a floating pebble, a sand-grain,

or a tree, there, on the mountain.

That voice, always, powdery

shrunken, like a withered stem,

pale as a soft seed-head blowing,

elusive sunlight, hear, hear it?

Listen to the thousand years now

of this grassland breathing

these woods talking, sighing,

with a voice, light spine of thistle,

pure as floating cloud.

Mapping

Mapping the universe,

tracing the mind,

we are tracing time,

so, counting the species,

describing, describe

what’s there in the silence

after the wake has gone,

it’s here, it’s given,

all from nothing,

and randomness

deep at its core.

When will we humans

forget superstition,

follow the true, and live

in the natural world

for its own sweet sake?

When will beauty take root

in the eye of the watcher,

and speech in the mouth

say the mind’s dancing?

Mapping it all, describing it here,

may carry us clear.

Wilderness

There’s no route back,

there’s no way there,

into unknowing or the land,

gentle or innocent,

no trail back.

I climb these quiet slopes,

walk down the woodland track,

but I am still human,

there’s no route back.

Fall on the mountain side,

far pyramid of light,

split by the boulders,

falls to the green pool,

I see in the mind’s eye

stream-bed and valley

thirty years gone,

hearing its roaring,

scenting its grass and trees.

Such delight there in nature,

but don’t ever believe

the voices that say,

go back there, go back.

There is no way back.

Flicker of ions now,

lens of the universe,

knowledge and mind:

there’s no route back.

As Selves

See how as selves they come,

each, individual.

Watch how as selves they spill,

plumes, waves, seeds,

all these things.

We attend to them,

and they attend us:

gaze at the coiled branch

that reflects

our gazing.

What we enter into

enters into us,

becomes itself,

becomes the individual

world in focus.

From the eyes’ movement

from the casual scan,

one thing in silence

enters deep awareness,

and becomes.

All as selves they come,

the living, these things,

each one a landscape, a world-flow,

every one contoured, enfolded,

fulfilling reality.

River

Spine of the field,

thistles and grasses,

deep juice of light.

Earth is dark with

the insect flicker

millions under our feet.

Showers of seed-hairs,

cover the low breeze,

then hedge-tangle, heath,

the talons of fruit, the dark

corners of herb, the galleries

leafed and thorned.

Knowledge is sky,

is sight, the deep folds

shedding into the blue,

bright hairs from barbed stalks,

tufts, whorls, tresses, rays, air

filling slow with the shredding hordes.

summer plenty is summer dust

clothing a landscape, bodies and faces,

is all time’s renewal,

of mind and being

in the heart of nature’s

unseeing river,

flow now of flame.

Things

It all spills through the mind,

how we live,

confessional words,

the heart-intense speculation,

the flow of time

and passes the time

things, things.

But mind intense

goes out beyond this

through summer trees

along horizons,

over carved hills, beyond

the silence

beyond things.

From there

what’s worth re-calling?

Only to stay there’s best,

be unknown,

still the words

that here

keep on falling.

Where thought stops,

there are things.

The More And Less

Grounded the eye

fixed on minute life,

the things themselves

the deeper being there,

from roll of fields,

from shattered grit-stone walls,

to the dark corner

and the winter light.

Grounded the heart

lost in minute life

our varied kinship’s

movement, rustling,

leaf, eye, there, or limb,

by pine tree roots

and half-broken boulders,

we too pass by.

Grounded the mind.

This Earth is all,

its scaled existence,

that we pass on,

the more and less,

of what was given.

Mind-Clothes

Deny the emptiness,

these Things are best.

Our search will end

when they come to rest.

The Way is not a trail,

there is no path.

Be where you are

and know what we have passed.

To lift the stone,

to leave the stone’s all one.

Mind is process,

Self is what is done.

Determined through our being,

not despite,

we make the choice that makes us:

Selves ignite.

Forget: begin again

with joy, erase.

The word is never

only what it says.

Revisit emptiness,

no prison’s best.

The heart is naked

when the mind’s undressed.

Every Child

That everything should be

an act of love

and no truth traded.

That we should see

by means of empathy:

accept what we have no perception of.

That shared and given multiply,

that things are emptied,

and every richness only in the heart.

That superstition die and science

this science of ours

be servant to the empathetic will.

That life and all things living

take up the sacred space

in which we can move like mind-dancers.

That knowledge grows

with intellect, and violence ceases

that freedom be mind’s individual freedom,

no nations and one species,

that the garden

is planted, and allowed to every child.

Intense

The intense, do you feel it?

Nature’s intense

deep stressed tremor

of energies the human

struggles to possess:

we, surface always,

its hidden inwardness.

All depth we open,

surface, we constrained,

dumb, limited and transient

mortal feeling.

Landscapes are mind long,

cloud-ranges Earth long,

the billion fold leaf and stem

selfless and self less, mist hung,

sweet being going unseen,

the riches, heart beauty,

feature and face and feel

of an endless moving,

and we, for all, changing

energies outplaying

Being’s waves’ caress.

Denial

All these hunted broken species,

all these pounded lost species,

lives bred for death,

swift lives,

the faces in their silence

not encircling

the shudder of the hells

we make for them.

Under Blake’s oak-tree

the sheep in sacred light,

and mindful shepherds

face a slender moon.

Breath steams all night,

they tear the grass of time,

the penned and caged,

the chased and persecuted.

And we, de-sensitised

by sentiment pass by,

fine in the farness,

in an unstained watching,

pass the spiritual life

of inner Nature,

the given world

beyond our making.

We live among the species,

hidden beings,

and we deny their pain,

their minds, and consciousness.

Hawk in Winter

Hawk now flames down

in individual fire

the wind of winter silence,

turns in the wind,

flares now in being,

a flutter of mind,

against the eternal stream,

cries now, falls now away,

and flickers between clouds,

eye-lost, heart-lost.

No, deeper, deeper at heart,

thrown inward distant,

un-fallen, far, farther, ah farer,

known now by mind-tokens,

not diminished,

flown there, dark mote

in the storm rays,

light broken, soul-spilt,

flare out of loss, out of fall,

soared through the skeins of sky.

Deep, and the sole fire, unique one,

founded, and held here, and unforgotten.

where down the fields of light, mind

goes furrowed and dark-fold

beneath your ever-ascent.

Abyss

Walking past what is in men,

in women, body and mind,

walking silently by

their individual stirring,

their deeper than pain prompting,

of what is not I, rich, strange,

fiercer in marvellous beauty,

all in a curious journey,

life-cradled, ages taught.

Then to reach out to all

shock of self-knowing,

self-making web of seeing

of the flayed heart laid bare,

aching with self and its going,

person and that resolution,

break on the bastion of other,

beat over stones and shore,

or breeze on the grass, shiver.

Precious, a flickering light passes,

shaken in storm-wind, hail-flight,

swoops on the mind, falls right

as a force from outside, given,

flames in our silences,

till flesh burns and the spirit

crosses dark abyss, sighs

through the city cries

its relentless tremor of parting.

To Know Is Not To Feel

Scientists, oh,

we people, then,

have found one more

measure of nature

conserved, one more

law.

Blue is still blue,

pain is pain,

love elusive,

the mind a rag

caught in a storm wind,

blown to eternity.

To know is not

to feel.

Through ash

the embers glow,

brighter through ash:

a blue world

in the dark

turns alone: unseen

a flight of birds

drags mind through the sky.

Patience

This prison, patience,

the past are here,

the mayed brightness,

deep cloying sweetness

of have and given,

tremors and pity-ache,

and darker self-pity

of what now cannot be

touched, known, clung to.

What rod in the heart,

what flame of ice, patience,

hand over hand, over the rock-face,

hour on hour, over the floes,

the wait worse, without doing,

the silent, the waiting

but not in nature’s

deep flowing silence

creation’s furtive womb.

This prison, patience,

whose deep tenderness,

whose beauty circles

the space of the dark,

and a slight courage beats

against the inner-wall,

against the mind-strangeness, wonder,

we the so much, the so far.

Not As It Seems

The cone of blue ash

at the heart of the fire

a gash of crimson

crumbles and falls,

and I no longer see

what this world is.

At the heart of the wave

in the grass-green curve,

where the barrel rotates

and a white spray boils,

I try to see

all its reality.

The dark soil heaves,

root, stone, and leaf,

its crystalline deep,

its viscous un-weaving:

can I see to its being

in all its revealing?

The wind on my face

from the glittering star

speaks of Altair’s ascendance,

and here where we are

of the planet’s pure tremor,

the blood in my heart.

Candle

Watching with Li-shang-yin

the wax spill

over the dish.

There is memory: it stays

in the fingers

a touch to a thought,

an inch of charred cotton ash

and a flake of white wax,

solidifying moments.

Flame has a still blue heart,

walls flicker, are soft,

and time past is mute.

I can breathe and can move

the lineaments of your face,

your hands, your flesh,

wings of the butterfly,

craters of light,

as a thought in the dark,

then flutter of storm-tossed blind,

dark rain on wet glass,

and in the dish, hard wax.

Transformation

Can you transform?

And hold

the difficult thing

in your hands,

love, death,

hold it as if,

the transmitted part

of yourself

turned outward

was before light,

its planes upturned.

Can you transform?

The words are insufficient,

they are not that process

by which mind’s pain

confronts infinity,

though some will never,

they are not that

going on, beyond the word,

trajectory out-flung

from which we fall

back into ourselves, changed,

reborn.

Can you transform?

Moment

We are here

in this corner

of eternity.

The universe

slides through the stars,

and penetrates

the spirit.

We are here,

in time,

which is the Moment

altering to

each Moment.

We are here.

Each says itself

each must proclaim

in time its being

one alone,

we are here.

I touch you

in this corner

of eternity.

I touch you,

we are here.

Beauty

There is still beauty

in a dying love,

a winter sun,

whose light modulates

towards the trees,

in echo of the past.

What mind concedes

a dying love?

Severing that yearns

for transformation,

for springtime

out of exile,

in the heart.

Where no beauty seems

where pain is,

beauty is, the tender

halo of the leaf

its planes of sheens,

that tilt towards

the soft tiles of cloud.

Past beauty shines

and futures past knowing

also gleam

slow towards the east,

not in this west

where beauty lights

a last and dying love.

Yearning

Yearning, strong force

wave crash, juice fall,

this psyche’s power.

Yearning, what moves

the heart with its call

greater than we are.

Flood within, that

seems beyond us,

dances us, puppets.

Yearning, lasting fire

burning sap-free

at being’s root.

Our unrequited self,

hurled at the star fields,

brightening them there

falls back to silence,

sadness, frustrated knowing

coils in its arch.

III: The Sacred House

Going Beyond

To set you free

from all possessiveness

not struggle with the mind

but let love flow

until all jealousies are lost

beyond repression.

Give, to give the heart away,

losing self, so self might be

the guardian of the boundary of being

that holds not merely

memory of the body’s opened gate

but enters spirit.

In you, unrealised energies,

to set those free, to conquer self

from objectifying mental prisons

from the limit, that the sill

might be a threshold

of new being.

To be one, among the many,

beyond morality, and superstition,

where ‘true, sensitive and kind’

measures all meaning,

in selfless creation:

to love until all mind is love.

Give

Free from sexual jealousy

I create you: you create me.

Beyond the bricks of law and state,

Integrity, rebuild our fate.

The traveller of mind goes by,

the world renewing in the eye.

From all of matter’s darkened stress,

the spirit rises, more not less.

What is given’s multiplied,

What is shared is death denied.

In the world of spirit, see,

I create you: you create me.

Vision of our infinite life

is the one true paradise.

Streets of love are always sweet,

where the true in knowing meet.

What we do with love, is pleasure,

Mind and being’s deepest measure.

Search for joy without a pain

Mingles joy and hurt again.

Free of sexual enmity,

I create you: you create me.

Time gives all the heart away,

In this brightness where we play.

After Them

People of dreams,

drifting tribes

criss-crossed these deserts,

made their silence.

The loss of the vision

of eternity

makes the people

of dreams.

Spirit fell from their hands,

into rocks, and streams,

deep into soil

where being rooted.

Sank into dust,

was carried by water,

sings now if you listen,

if you hear, there.

This terrain, these field-rows,

these places of trees,

these mountains belong

to no one, to people of dreams,

who gave, who gave

and lived without keeping,

and shared without seeing,

embodied this silence.

Open, More Open

Deeper I find you, giving you away,

damaged heart, sweet trier at life’s game,

one of those born without a shell,

naked spirit born to look for love,

to make the pure relationship, of you.

Spirit to spirit defenceless in the silence

with delicate hands I reach, with eyes of light,

to find a care enough to touch you with.

Mental traveller in the gates of time,

have I the city of art where all is found

open and more open, where the heart

has every act of you, the never-lost?

Deeper I find you in the seeing eye,

where all are different and all are rare,

and none rejected, who with life

search out the silent centre of delight.

Deeper I find you.

Life Is

You think life is space,

life is spirit, sacred creatures,

spurts of existence, the ever-varied,

not time or space or gust of winds.

Energy, moment and the individual.

All things different to the different eye.

Create the given, sacred and the free,

and not the universe of hopeless powers.

Life is sacred, seeks joy and its own imaginings,

creation in the sweetness of the dark,

the gift of ages, and a hidden cosmos,

out of whose centre is the sweetness.

Give, share, love, touch with kindness, touch

with truth, what sees itself is self to whom

it seems, born in the body, crowned in the mind.

You think life is time? Life is spirit.

Coming From Cyllene

Hermes, dark, thin anxious

takes his way

on the ethereal road

between minds, and he

is Eros for a moment, sighing.

In one hand he brings us

the rod, with joy and pain,

the twining snakes:

they writhe between his fingers:

he has winged hands and feet,

the feathers beat at his ankles,

brush his heart,

but he flies naked

with the truth of words,

and snakes that coil,

the truth behind the words,

whatever it may be,

hidden like those gods he travels from

or the silence

that he moves towards,

a slender, anxious,

fine, pale, mind-made god,

passing dark

as Eros,

among lovers.

Sacred House

The sacred house,

there, your face shines,

in the never-known.

You, body that flames,

will you see mind,

will you see?

Who can? Truth

inside you there,

inside you hidden.

Fingered, the three

that climb the wall

your unknown dark.

In this the swallow seed

planted cloud flight

wing-beat, throb, tremor.

The sacred house.

We pour it from jar

to jar,

white as an eye, mooned

over you

through you,

over the worn lip, used sill,

seeing, the table there

its bread, its silence.

Tangles

Freedom’s illusions

leave tangles

deeper, deeper

torn threads of a life.

Celebrate or evade,

you destroy or create,

kindness its own enemy

grace fighting intensity,

mind warring with body,

pass through to the new

until there is no more:

better to calm and stay.

These things are hard to say,

how we use, use up loyalties,

give to the unworthy, unknown,

deny those whom we owe,

for freedom’s illusions,

deeper, deeper,

the heart lost, entangled,

given and long-given,

silks of the spiders webs

caught on the open briars,

glittering with dawn-dew, rain,

nets of our summers.

Cycle

It begins with old certainties

it ends unsure.

It begins with flames

of the body, it ends

with fires of the mind.

It begins with the glitter

of words, it ends with trees,

and in complex nakedness,

that began in naked simplicity.

It begins with intoxicated seeing,

ends in intricacies of time.

It begins with waters, cries,

it ends with necessities.

It begins with freedom,

imprisonments not seen.

It ends with freedom

in prisons of the dream,

not knowing how to care.

It begins with the founding

of loyalties, learning faith.

It ends with another truth,

in a stranger place.

Few

These years are few,

the years we think we understand,

White-veined boulder sits

on a ledge of slate,

how many generations,

these years are borrowed years,

energy taken, the second law,

then released slowly

to fences, cut-logs, trails,

and somewhere cities,

whose years are few,

and civilisation, meaning

the learning how to be

true, sensitive, and kind,

the miracle.

On a rock in the sun

these years are not years,

butterfly, yellow-winged

settles there, regards pebbles,

displays its intricate being

give up beauty to be considered,

objective poetry, while moment

flies in hairy-seeded ranks,

glows in berries, amber-leafed.

The mind is few,

its thought is non-thought,

these fires are borrowed fires,

in light above the grass,

a hundred million years,

of sunlit blades.

Sea Voices

Susurration of the tides,

the rock-pooled sea

winds in its trailing leaves

its watery lights,

brine smells, and fills

unbridled pools,

then dries to the sun,

sprawls headlands, ribs of reef,

through tangled shoals

and sighs for night.

Weary of lovers, waits for lovers,

laps stone, silicate barrens,

weed, winds and shells,

taken and undertaken:

bring me, bring you to me,

from the never-ending

to the dark contained,

in flow of abnegation,

susurration, reach of worlds,

and tides, the heart laid down.

Not For Ever

What we possess. Nothing

forever. We cannot make

the free turn to us,

there is desire,

tricky as light, as fire’s uncertainty.

Can we return to where we were

in fire? Say.

What we know. To pity

is not to heal, forgive not

to undo,

there is the pain,

returning like the light

or dark’s uncertainty,

to where we are, in fire.

What’s hidden from us.

All the universe, ages’ gift,

centre sweet of all-being,

in beech nut’s core, leaf’s vein,

where is all the world,

strange as light or mind’s

fragmentary glitter, all that fire.

Others’ Hands

In others’ hands

you carry the fire of my heart,

to other’s hands.

What was mine

wakes in the lip

that tracks the thigh-way,

becomes the tower,

through which we swam

to the place where

others’ light pours for you.

Between others’ hands

you watch the mirror of time

the rocking of stars

in others’ hands,

taste the moon’s pearl

in its oyster bed,

lick the brine of my wound

in others’ hands,

stand to the entering wave,

as the eternal opens.

To others’ hands

you carry the stone of my heart,

the stone day buried

again and again,

in the place that no-more names

a weeping of light,

over pale wet sand.

Face to Face

But you to me

a silence and a storm

what spoils us

for the ordinary life,

and strips us bare,

and sets us face to face

with all the universe,

species, and a planet,

and those stars.

But I to you,

a meaning and a tide,

that silvered thought,

makes all it glitter so,

stripped us alive

and set us face to face

with each all universe

in self and self,

an inner curve of stars.

Over and Under

Over your eyelids

the light of the eye

of your mind.

Beauty is spirit,

to be carelessly seen

to be splendour,

to be light of your eyes

over your eyelids.

Under your heart

glows the swell of your breasts,

bright nipples of fire.

Meaning is spirit,

a dance, the unrest

a glory, the light

of your breasts

shines under your heart.

Pupa

Awareness in you? Light,

Heat, touch, you wait for.

In me, too, a silent heart.

All the continuum, then

from mind, a chrysalis

to spirit’s winged colours.

Down all the dark leaves

opening in the sun,

and in this silent heart.

Muse

Pale girl, with nervous fingers,

your limbs gleam

through your torn dress.

You stare, you question,

examining the man

(you are no older,

the same virginal face,

the only one of us still pure)

pale girl, pale cold skin,

the hair, long, dark,

that fringes your eyes,

anxious, imperious though

when challenged,

following the turn of page,

lifting your glance to watch,

then look away

towards the real window,

the leaves, those trees.

Tender flesh, but mind of fire,

an ice of time of silence,

confidante to the dead,

child of light,

you are no different,

it is I, I changed,

here, now, with another’s eye,

another’s hand,

another’s mind moving.

Mouth

The whiteness falls,

it is snow silence,

and the spume

flowers on you

falls in you,

shown like stars.

You take its sudden

stillness, the white flower,

set it again

inside with your hands,

offer it pale shores,

and nameless space,

give it the last quiet

where all is true

all is known,

the place between your hands,

that no one sees,

but this mouth

you believe

whose lips will weep

with your name.

Refuge

Lay in the fingered silence

that shadows over you, no names,

that passes between us

covers you, failing.

I climb the pale steps

we are the shades, two

we swim the hollows

of liquid truth,

the spent drops shine

on an edge of light,

and the flower drinks its night.

Between. The dampness of tear

no eye shed, all eyes,

across the burial stone,

its weeping.

Lay in the fingered silence,

the nest of dark, eternity

ending there at the way fork,

at the cross road,

where the ditch-rose

white over black

falls, petals, on

mortars of stone,

chalices of air,

whose weight is time,

and the grail

an ear of peace

a word, refuge,

failing.

Involution

To be, to touch, to interfere,

hard to be silent, all inaction,

hard not to intermingle, fix,

and tip the sliding beam.

To be, to love, to see, to tangle

mouth to the other mouth slipped,

seed-eaters, leaf openers, pushing through,

agents of tenderness, agents of change.

To be, to know the sensitivities,

how to keep it all from falling,

we too slipping through the stars,

suns aimed, planets unfurling.

To be to be loyal, to be

true to whatever is the spirit,

loyal to what we must let go of,

loving what leaves us in flying.

To be, to be kind, kind,

hard not to be destroyers, choosers,

leaving that one road deep in dust,

spurning the one heart, unknowing.

Poetry

Poetry is not what you think.

You must be the word

and not by trying

turned inside out on the page.

Word is awareness, the poem

its eye. Its trembling eyelid

your five senses, free of gods

and demons. Poetry

is what you are, reveals you,

naked, nude at the window,

in the mirror, and unlovely,

your lack of humanity, truth.

Poetry is not free, its pain is

shared, and is not other than

your integrity, your loyalty,

your kindness, empathy,

with and to the thing, of the spirit.

It punishes with hard empty hours,

when the hands cannot grasp

or even touch, rewards with knowing,

after the need, the hurt, the fact.

Never imagine the poet does not know

what happens when we conjure,

nor what if we miss, regret.

For those

For whom the body is a value.

For those who give the spirit

with the body, it is true, and said,

where there is most feeling is most pain.

Yet on this un-navigable ocean

where we own nothing forever,

and cannot force the free to turn to us,

our unfulfilled desires must not be sadness.

We must learn the lesson: free the other,

make as is known, and as was said,

the movement of infinite resignation,

acknowledging the rights of those we love.

The ocean of the human imagination,

ocean of night and the sacred creatures,

forgiveness and freedom are still a joy,

where the heart can free and forgive.

Give, share, wish truth, wish empathy,

celebrate the mind’s extreme intensity,

those places where it still can lead the body,

until we go beyond, and there is love.

In the house of the spirit, inspiration,

ideas, not matter, drive the world.

Love is from beyond the starry pole,

is the power of the stars, the living sun.

IV: Values

An Die Geliebte

Fragrance of mint and bay.

Did I lose you in the silence?

There are no depths beyond which

we cannot see. The question

the poplar asks the sky is not

answered in the water,

and you, you are beyond,

fragrance of mint and bay.

There is a green world where

the mind goes in green spring

down the leaf to its cleft,

down the tree to its root,

there are no depths beyond which

we cannot see, the question the poplar

asks is not answered in the water.

Did I lose you in the silence,

Fragrance of mint and bay?

Values of Light

Values don’t come from within

they come from beyond.

The values that echo inside

all start from beyond,

out of the natural world,

and the history of our

one species, the absurd one,

blessed with delicate sight.

Values are fire,

they light the earth and the water,

they are the loved and the lover,

the power, the prime mover.

Sing the values of light,

that are mirrored within,

and come from beyond

out of the natural world.

Dark-Light

Often this dark world’s prison:

illegible space of untenable silence,

oh, but free the other,

into unrealised energies,

into world possibilities,

mind, spirit and emotion.

Inscrutable trees do not

communicate their branches,

clouds randomised are form,

all form’s Individual presence,

and every presence is form,

you, form, I, form.

Rebel against what limits

violence, power’s dead hands,

the abusers, the destroyers:

vision is where the symbol purifies,

in the loving heart’s integrity,

and time’s eternity’s shadow,

and eternity is Energy, the Moment,

the godless universe, being there.

Often this bright world’s flowering:

inscribed space of enduring quiet,

oh, free the other,

into unrealised possibility.

Once Only

Each voice once, and once only.

No I can’t write for you what I wish,

or I, the voice emerges,

and sings from air and stone,

out of ashes and wet earth.

What echoes from the past,

what binds us to the present,

your voice that darkens me,

or lightens me, once only.

The hand too on the curve,

the pigment there, the tower,

painting, building, statue,

once, and once only. Death

is imitation’s breath.

What will never come again,

our hostages to time and silence,

our footprints in the lava

that carry us through aeons,

each eye, each mouth,

each mind, each world,

crying its name, calling

its beauty, once and once only.

Aspire

To make the relationship

of ‘You’, open, naked, living,

caring, spirit to spirit

in the given. There

we aspire.

Spirit is the relation

with being, is mind,

ah, live for relation

not for things. There

we aspire.

No I, no world, and

the Oneness, all are true,

Self in world, and world

in self. There

we aspire.

To free the other, lose

erase the self in other,

to go down, be lost

in sweetness. There

we aspire.

Will the other’s happiness

despite yourself, make

‘You’ an I. Relocate

the self in nature, sacred

and entire. There

we aspire.

Falling Back

In the dark place

of fire

how can I know you?

Baffled we turn back

from entering the other,

their thoughts, their pain.

There are worlds

that do not need us.

See in the mirror of

being. Other world.

We fall back from

the other’s life,

from other life,

other stars, other

planets not for us:

the loved one slips

into an other silence:

all wish

to be desired, we

fall back,

to see into unhappiness,

relationship, to feel

other frustration, helpless

know their pain, lost beauty,

gulfs of time,

and not to speak, for fear

of loss, and not to hear

the voice speaking

from all the distances

that separate.

Blade of Tao

The blade of grass

is being, it uncurls,

points at sky, tree, earth,

is energy.

It cuts us free.

Swirl in the deep water,

what moves there?

Secret in the shallows.

The blade of grass

feeds sacred creatures,

knots of energy,

knots of light.

With the seeing eye’s

delicate blade

you trace out the hill

and the river.

This is the blade

you can’t possess,

not through pity

or forgiveness,

not through violence

or power, it eludes,

the blade of grass,

is being, it unfurls.

Leaves

Trembling to find

your silence

as infinite

as star lines

as the deep field.

I lose you to time

who were mine,

to the opening of your

leaves in other hands,

the column of the flesh,

the poplar cleft

its twin poles soaring

to plumes that sway,

brushing the night for ever.

I launch you to the light

that falls, from gone

and now eternity.

I listen my way in

to silence,

to energy being,

to the vast glow

of the burdened night

labouring towards dawn,

to the hands

that turn you.

Mercy

But your complex game

is simple,

spirit falls

through the body’s net

and the mind’s

shallows, to

simplicity.

There I unfold you,

all the bounds of pain,

all the blade edges

all that flails and pares

and then

sobs to

stillness.

You are your own speech

from the silent stage

where the darkness grips,

and faces wait

for the mercy seat

for Ariel’s

rising.

And the furious fire,

the unbridled leap,

the self lost in self

imagining contact

is not abandoned,

brings still,

the plummet of return.

Flute

The grass flute

and the dark branch

I sound

between my lips.

The moist branch split

from the deep wood,

the bright sap green

from the hazel stem,

singing the island

the clear dancer,

and the grove

pink with leaves.

And I say

the flute is sacred

and the leaves

are sacred,

and the universe

without a god

is still

eternally sacred,

a high flare

of the water drop

flung

from the fountain’s tip.

Falling

Through time

the heart falls

and not through space,

or falls

creating time

through mind’s space

where time

is stored,

the knots of time

are stars

in galaxies

of unremembered thought,

or knots of pain

in body’s space

unseen and

unexplored.

Being falls through time,

that is our state,

that sore anxiety inside

the flesh,

of falling from

the space of what

has made us,

itself unmade.

Heart falls through time

however bodies fall,

and solitude,

the mountain and

the seashore of the mind

is where we see

life’s knot of stars, fallen

entangled in the pool.

Time

You who try to deny time

it will deny you,

oh silvery mermaid

in the pool of light,

oh silken weaver

in the web of night,

your panels of sweetness

chill against the flesh,

oh boredom’s murderess,

though you run from time

time won’t run from you,

and in the whiteness

moon and tenderness

time will deny

you who deny it too.

You who close your eyes

against time, beware,

oh slipping mermaid

in the bed of light

oh silken arch

across the stream of night,

your tresses of coolness

tender on the flesh,

oh silent murderess,

though you see nothing

of time, time looks at you,

and in the paleness,

moonlit softness,

time will show care

to those who deny care too.

You who threw yourself

from the cliffs of time,

oh falling mermaid

in the gulf of light

oh silken stone

flung through the cleft of night,

your arms of silence

cold across the flesh

oh torment’s murderess,

though you fly free of time

time clings to you,

and in the bright excess

moonlit shadowiness

time will fall through

those who deny it too.

Blind Truth

In nature, in nature

and all its values,

shaped in honesty

even when masking,

the moth on the twig

the striped silence,

truth there and beauty

and nurturing empathy,

that you stress, you stress.

Though we are the last shake

of the sieve, and in us

the forces of creation

the attributes of destruction,

curiosity, cunning, co-operation,

we touch the earth

we drink water and air,

we tend the fire

of nature, nature.

The many-fuelled bonfire,

and the fountain

all of its being, all

its values, formed

without meaning

with local purpose

with mindless beauty,

intention-less nurture

blind truth of nature, in nature.

Deneb, Great Star

There is the beauty

that engages spirit.

The deep fluidity

of inner vortex

lifts towards all this

complex stirring of the Earth,

Bird, that flies but not in air,

that rests on void,

rests on all directions.

Bright hiss of Deneb

in the night.

Spirit, meteor of flame,

green-vapoured Ariel,

naked in rags of fire,

how seldom here

naked to another

those stars that turn

and turn away to set,

but rise still in the mind

where line, where symbol shows

the mystery of feeling,

knowing, being, here

where all this whirling

hurls us through the heart

brings us to this Earth where

all is flame, and beauty

that involves the inner spirit.

Deepening

That glance of sunlight goes,

the white clouds intervene,

and all the shadow shows

spirit flow through the green,

to find your beauty,

truth, enduring lies,

beyond those trivialities,

the world denies.

And I too deepen

colour intensifies

blue flower at evening

as the baffled eye

enters the night of leaf

where blackbird flies.

She

She waits. The greater

critic, and is

beyond flattery,

idle words. Naked,

she is true,

there is no veil.

Make no assumptions.

Her hands are cool,

but seldom granted.

Her breasts are her fires

you may worship there,

or quivering folds

of light-wet flesh,

this thing of being

we never understand,

but don’t praise,

cherish and exalt, don’t praise

the word,

because she waits

and is beyond all that,

as purposeless, as made,

as heart-bright as the star,

as cold, as passionate,

as occupied, not with you

with form,

comes naked, is true,

and wears no veil,

but oh, make no assumptions,

the greater critic.

Scorpius

Purified fire,

that gateway.

One word of Tao

echoing

like split bronze.

The gate’s intensity,

all things measured,

weighed against our love.

Red brow and jewelled

tail, symbolic fire,

deep in galactic ocean,

your meaning clear,

life risen against death,

energy made time,

the semen spurt’s

communion, all and nothing.

Our night is cold.

Purified fire

our gateway.

Will I hear

the word

lost among rustlings,

worlds of landscape,

sage-brush, red-eyed silence?

Work It

By genius you mean form,

intensity, the mind possessed,

it is an act and not a state,

it makes its presence.

But it can’t matter,

it’s the things,

the words, the stone, the light

and shadow, form

not us that echoes.

By truth you mean work,

the exercise of skill, the mind,

the body, feeling flesh,

at work, creating time.

Work is what matters,

free, silent work,

as stars work, or leaves,

to make the things,

the canvas, object, line,

the sound or stone,

the form, our echo.

Meta-Fear

That Plato never understood

that they are processes not things,

mind-work not object, they,

the Beautiful, the True, the Good?

Aristotle, revering the Master,

seeing just how far he’d got,

perceived the collective act,

and the Individual, saw farther?

Giants help the pygmies to the sun,

we grasp the Many and the One,

in fear and trembling,

which is another thing.

Naming

It is you, silent

in all these verses,

speaking in words

that are not yours.

It is you.

See the night now

happening above you,

and the wind touching

new on the wet roofs,

near to you,

over you,

naming you, silence.

It is you, silent

in all these places,

all mouth’s spaces

that touch on you.

It is you.

Moon-Fog

The wind blows through

the house without walls.

Trees and cliffs

in a mass of fog,

white smoke,

distant fires.

Moon is a symbol

not a place

that floats in space.

The fountain without

a source

flows through the galaxy.

Nothing I need,

and everything.

The insect that climbs

the page

is itself a word,

dark on whiteness.

Cool here

in the house without walls.

Warm our hands

at the great fire,

eat our portion,

know this earth.

Index Of First Lines