Tools

Voiceless Banners Blowing

‘Let your nature merge with the Way,
and wander in it free from care.’

Seng Ts’an: c600: 'Trust in the Heart’

‘…The essential order of things is that of Nature.
To achieve spiritual union with Nature is enlightenment.’

Tao Sheng: c400: 'The Way’

Mountain and Clouds

Mountain and Clouds
Japanese, Edo period (1615-1868) - Yale University Art Gallery

Authored by A. S. Kline © Copyright 2010 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

Voiceless Banners Blowing

Far through Western sky

Mountain crests,

Swathes of forest,

Bright, cold rivers.

These outlast us,

All our suffering

And our singing,

Bones of Hills,

Beyond to the Arctic Circle,

Across or down the world

(Andes, Himavant)

The dragon lines.

There is no power

Here but the power

To spoil: ours

The spoils of power.

The living land

Sings in our hearts,

And the secret,

In the singing.

The silent secret

Of where we are

On the Way

This species.

Patterns of light,

Wrapped in energies,

Lost in the Universe,

Deep in Mind.

Strong wind at dawn

Bows the pines,

Shakes their needles

Green and shining.

Even the mountain flows,

The Diamond Peak,

Changing like the Lake,

We circle silence.

Like pine we shiver

Tremble, glitter, bow.

Oh, don’t use mind

To look for mind,

It’s here, all the Time,

Can’t grasp or leave it,

Process in the channel

Of our arteries, our veins,

In these bodies, flickering,

And the ghosts before us,

All the lands’ phantoms

Beckoning in the dawn.

All the wondrous silence

Filled, with uncreated

Beauty: these white clouds,

Voiceless banners blowing.

Purify Your Mind

On February ice

Scenting the pines,

No heat in the rocks,

Thin squirrels leap

To reach the oak bark,

Climb and hide

Behind the bole,

In their space.

In mine, time slows,

The wind stirs,

Old leaves whirl,

Birds shelter.

On crusts of mud,

Boots crackle,

Twigs splinter,

Life sways by a thread,

But comes through,

Its deep resilience.

Just what survives

Survives. Good at it.

Close to Nature

No for or against.

The clear calm

Peace of emptiness.

City quiet behind,

Light in the woods

On diamond snow

Purify your Mind.

Beautiful Attachment

In far-flung words

Lovers meet, in minds

Beautiful with longing,

Or sweet with pain.

All life is suffering,

Sakyamuni said,

But what is life

Without this love?

No wide compassion

Substitutes for this,

No empty calm.

Trust in the heart.

Turn craving to ties

Of eternal light,

Turn desire to gifts

Of mutual joy,

In this one world

That we pass through

Like clouds or water

Bright with being,

Don’t turn away

From Nature, all

This essential life,

The great flame.

No fixed self no

Things, all is flow,

Energy’s web,

Go flow with it

Into Nature,

Bearing love,

For all sentient

Lives, but what

Is life without love,

Between lovers?

Baths

Ah dark hot flow

Of bubbling spring,

Heats the floating

Body: sing the flesh

Dabbling in its sac,

Flicking drops of light,

Diving, surfacing,

Following the vortex.

Like flame of lava fields

Earth flows inside,

Mind is comfortable

Clothed in its birthright.

Our sap rises, loving

Hands bare touch and meet

In careless passage,

Confident thought-paths

Intertwine forever.

On slippery tiles

Feet dance, plunge

Cold into awareness

Of what is Other.

Mirror self like water,

All one species,

Endless selves.

All The Creatures

All the creatures have voices,

Every one a person,

As to their rights

We grant them rights

Out of our compassion

Fraternity, delight,

Or we deny them,

Out of our cruelty

Our selfishness,

Our craving for pleasure.

All the creatures make a life,

A personality in being,

Creatures of the wave

Or of the wind and air,

Tree-clingers, burrowers,

Night-watchers of Arcturus

Or sleepers in dark dust,

Beetle, ant, hawk, deer,

All the creatures have feelings,

We fearfully acknowledge.

Give them space and time to be,

And give ourselves the same,

Stop the killing and pretence,

Most of all cease the lying,

The rationalising of pain,

The accreditation of jailors,

The myths of conservation,

And the endless interference,

Recognise the natural world

Forever, and take our place.

Golden Grass

Old temple trail, this path

Covered with dust and pine

Goes to the hermit’s hut

Through golden grasses

And bowing fronds of tall

Black bamboo, statues,

Gold edges of beams, tiles,

What have these to do

With getting free of all

Possessions, ending craving?

Entangled, push through leaves,

Come out on open meadow,

Climb a little, sit by firs,

Forget the reasons, wait

While thought that’s carried

Settles in the spirit, weight

Lifts free, and mind clears,

Then un-remembered mind.

Beautiful March sunlight

Tall trees, small lake, blue

A fragment, corner of azure,

Torn from the higher air,

All cultures build, and hang

Their ornaments in space,

All devotions make mandalas,

And rites make humans calm.

Maples, temples, little shrines,

Aesthetic lovely clutter of ages,

Has nothing to do with the Void,

Decorative forms ease the heart,

Radical impermanence forgotten.

Emptiness is what is transmitted,

But what is this Transmission?

Silently through golden grass.

Intricate Structure, Strange Lives

Gold butterfly hangs

From the autumn stem,

Green-brown mottled wood,

Buddleia, I think,

Dries next to its chrysalis,

A pendant Tartar helmet

Dome and tattered silk,

In pale sun.

In aspen, birch and ash

Quiet countryside

Fields of feathered seed;

Now ride the wind

To Central Mexico,

Frail traveller.

The imago soul

Eats nectar.

From meadows, rivers, cities,

To Sierra Madre fir

And oyamel pine,

Cold nights

And predators.

Millions clothe the trees

Carpet the forest floor,

Millions of sister-brothers,

Mouse skitters

Over butterfly wings

Like tissue paper,

Nature’s plenty,

The Many

For the Few.

And there we log,

And here we build.

Not Easy, Not Careless

All boils down, all sinks down

To warmth or cold of the spirit,

Not all this frenetic movement

Of the species forever restless;

To whether I speak to you in more

Than dead words to make creation;

To whether my question becomes

Your question and has meaning;

To the focus of our love, its fires;

Whether in the mighty mirror

There is a reflected echo, Time

Opens for a moment its corolla

And breaks down all the walls

Between us, and not cheaply

In some en masse mess of soft

Mind-destroyed facile feeling

But finely, and intensely in mind

And true knowing, all Donne’s cries

To melt into his god, like woman,

All the silences Frost knew and told

Behind the surface, farmed reality.

Whether the universe empty shines

With form, or frightens us, the tiny,

Who cannot fill space with spirit

Only abolish it completely, touch

And meet, and share and give, sigh

For our shared being and distress:

Smiling Taoist monks no consolation,

For all those lost and moments lost

In the whirlwind snow and ash of light,

Where we still show, survivors, white

With the settled aftermath of living,

Lie like the crushed dead stalk-flowers

By the highway, dark and stained,

Or tattered in the wastelands left

Between machines of progress.

All boils down to the electric wire

In the nerves and spirit that connects

Across the shadow-fields of eternity,

And lights the signal-light and burns,

Alone if needs be in the empty field,

Speaks out to the heart of the traveller,

Lights torches of understanding, speaks

To you in words, ah, beyond meaning.

Kyoto

In the garden in Kyoto

Green moss everywhere

On stones and bridges

Emerald cloak, silent.

Kano Tanyu’s pines

At Nijo Castle

Twist and turn

Holding high their crowns.

Naonobu’s cherries,

Nightingale floors,

Panther crouching

In the bamboo grove.

The philosopher’s walk

Past canal-side beauty:

At Nanzen-ji, Zen

Tiger drinking water.

This old city

Sweet as Time:

You too will be

Swept under.

Three Ways For the Spirit

There are three ways.

Like Proust’s Ways

You can’t take them

All together but some

Places they meet,

Transiently, in us.

The Supernatural way

Goes via gods and demons,

Personal or impersonal,

And other after worlds,

But sometimes ends

In kindness compassion.

The way of Mind

Goes via control

And abnegation

Of all craving,

The Buddhist way:

Contains more truth,

Ends in extinction.

And Nature’s Way

Goes nowhere

Offers nothing

Embraces flow

Deals in transience,

Contains the truth,

Ends in Love and Beauty.

Moonlit Walk

The moonlit walk by night

On snowy evening

Goes down through old woods

And an ancient lane

Sweet, lonely

In the silence,

To small frozen lake

And icy reed-beds.

If this were Dante, Virgil,

Charon might be boating

Somewhere the other side,

Poling through

Arctic shallows

Humming softly

Considering the mass

And weight of souls.

But this is deeper,

Nature breathing in,

A world of creatures hidden

No human cries

Reaching through.

This is beautiful

Non-human space-time

The purposeless void.

The moonlight and the ice,

Pale frozen stalks and leaves,

Fish motionless in rest,

Beneath the surface,

Ignorant of all we do,

But share our joy

In moving Spring

And free-flowing water.

There is no other being.

We should return this planet

To what it was before,

A plethora of intentionless

Given forms,

Sifted through the mesh

High-wrought beauty

Simple warm lives,

The meaning of them all,

All the old masters,

To eschew the infinite

And disregard the Self,

Consider Nature,

And sink ourselves in form.

In not thinking of Self,

Self is free.

It’s A Long Time Now

It’s a long time now

Waiting

For Man to be re-born

And Woman.

We’ve traced the path

We came along

The intricate process

Called flesh,

History, its manifestations,

Biology its shifting

Inheritable present,

Power, its nemesis.

Given the truth was seen

Centuries ago,

The transience, the limits,

The need for compassion,

Given the beauty formed,

The love testified,

The science and the arts,

In peace and kindness,

It’s a long time now

Waiting for the new.

And it’s still there,

The Ideal, the Idea,

Underneath the trappings,

All the corruptions,

The religions and entities,

The shades and phantoms,

Men and women

Free of self, on Earth,

Reborn in joy

After the long sorrow,

Entering Nature

And respecting it,

Entering Beauty

And creating it.

Wondering why

The lowest meanest

Denominator rules

The shallow world,

And waiting,

However long,

However long it takes

For freedom,

The true Enlightenment

That has not yet

Begun and never ends,

Those future shores.

Every Creature

Every creature

Intricate,

Three million years

And no design,

Only pattern,

Until behaviour

Intrigues and form

Is Beauty, and all

Process of energies,

Shimmering in the Void.

These insect rituals

And bird affections,

These fears and fires of deer,

Or cougar mysteries,

The life of plants,

The universe of mosses,

Sea, Desert, Mountain, Lake,

Three billion years

Or four, all energies

Glittering in the Silence.

Every creature magical,

Mastery, miracle

Of perseverance,

Slipping through,

The weakest seeming

Strong in survival,

Life and death

Sharpening the species.

Will we be half as good

When our time comes?

A few million years

Of the planet

Its fractal detail,

Our small portion,

Process on process

And our brief coming

And our small dreaming,

Our shining passing

Like phantoms, illusions,

No abiding substance.

The deep wide net,

Our slipping through

To be here, and

Mindless ego,

Why we had to be here!

Why the Universe is made

For us! Delicate

Laughter consumes

A trillion worlds

Shining far-off in the sky.

But every creature

Intricate, we too

Complex and beautiful

Though not in ego,

In creation and compassion,

In truth and love and beauty,

But not in ego,

Not as Self,

(But magical as the selfless)

The Shadow all must kill.

Cultivars

Those wild apples

Of the Tien Shan

Grew sweeter

By selection

(Bears liked them)

Apricots, walnuts,

Grapes of Kazakhstan,

Before it was such,

Land of the Snow Leopard.

Down the Silk Road,

Apples, swollen, ripe,

A grafted heritage,

To fill the earth,

(The Bears’ taste ours,

They spread them

Where they passed,

Sweet interaction.)

Peaches, roses, too,

From mountain China,

Carried onwards with us,

Traded beauty.

How generous those

First passages of being,

Carrying the new,

From far off: cultivars.

How Do You Climb?

Deep in the plant,

Or at the tip,

Modes of behaviour,

Processes we share,

The sense of touch,

The fall of leaves,

How to climb,

The light, the time,

The lines of force.

You think plants are dumb,

Well what is dumb?

This shading-off

Of life’s abilities

From mind to matter,

Both are process,

And your abilities

How great are they,

How do you climb?

The Opposite of Deadly

The insect buzz of lust,

Greed, anger, envy,

A wasp circling

Maddeningly persistent,

The labours of the bee

Its drunken sloth,

Dragonfly in her pride,

Butterflies twining,

In the August garden.

Everything familiar:

And hardly original

In us, just all there,

The natural appetites,

The processes refined

Ensuring reproduction

And survival, a life

In Nature, whose only

Meaning is to live,

Which is not purpose,

Only paths, directions,

The intricate complex

Of the Way, entangled

Beings sifted through

The Moon’s white sieve,

The Sun’s dark tray,

Three billion years,

One planet, and no sin.

These we develop

These ancestral trails,

Affirm our values;

Love, beauty, truth;

Must take account

Of our shared being.

On the life of plants,

Insects, creatures,

Found our values.

Going Quietly, Harming Nothing

The great Wheel turns in silence,

The Wheel of Nature,

How hard to reconcile

The pain, the beauty.

Near Chung-tien

George Forrest found

Blue gentians

Sino-ornata,

At fifteen thousand feet

High above human

Misery and lies,

Range after range

Of mountains, capped

With snow, swollen

Rivers, the great four,

And ‘intense stillness.

Not even the rustle

Of a blade of grass.’

Primulas in the dry

Limestone cliffs.

Camped below

The Yulong Shan,

And on the Cang Shan

Yellow flowers and pines.

Butterflies, dragonflies,

The great Wheel.

Hard to reconcile

The pain, the beauty.

The Colour Blue

Your mannerisms, dear as flowers,

Creatures, leaves, high hills;

Form of the eye and eyelid,

Shift of leg or arm, slant smile,

The lilt of voice, flash of mind.

I understand this grasp of things,

Reality in the detail, description

Of the object, painting-in the scene,

The technical terms, and the tools

Displayed, the individual presence.

Cascades too of names and places,

Glimpsed photography, the images

That capture all the word cannot,

Just so, the tantalising wish to know

The what, not just the how, what

World is, energy, time, light, being,

The difference between the description

In process, mechanism, math, or speech,

And the immanent revelation of the real:

The colour blue, and not what causes it.

So I recall you in images and lose you,

Draw to myself the net of words, and miss

The living meaning. As the species now

Misses that primal participation, the ties

That tied us, aware, to breath of process,

Though no one can forsake the process:

The question is whether it lives in us.

Love, the mannerisms dear as flowers,

The little quirk of eye and eyelid, the jaw,

The lips, the slope of neck, the smile.

Whose Idea Were Cities?

Great dark empty night-time streets, lights

Glow at intersections, mind comes and goes,

Crossing the wastelands, on pavement stone,

The silent front of offices, backs of stores,

Refuge, refuse, under-belly of the sleeping

Giant, never mysterious, forever mundane,

Though raising fear, insecurities, the threat

Of everything human, everything inhuman.

The citizens rest. Denizens still cruise the dark

Shadow-concrete and bitter-neon blue as pain,

Night-workers scuttle in moonless leaves to clear

And shift the detritus of day for other dawns,

And we are far here from streams and mountains;

Shining by night, but not with spiritual light.

Division of labour, mind, desire, direction,

Here gathered in this we build: in this we hive.

Big Snow Mountain

The yellow flowers against the misted pines

Hang on wide slopes. The loggers not here yet,

And purple flowers growing in moss and stone

Frame raw ice-crested peaks laid out beyond.

On Big Snow Mountain no one cleared or burned,

No one possessed this, owned this, or belonged,

This was, this is, the virgin core of the world,

Seen, but still just passed by, a thousand miles

Of seamed and folded ridges, valleys, rocks.

These elevated gardens of the Earth, gleaming

With colour, the azure blue above, or Moon,

Pale satellite, flying through bright white cloud;

So much more lovely than we piteous humans,

Clinging here on wild slopes deep in flowers.

Even more than birds, flowers are the innocents,

Those tiny individual lives, high autumn fields,

Deep blue tongues of iris, delicate meconopsis,

Harmless hosts falling, in a rain of tenderness.

Ten Billion Splinters

Heron cautious on ice, a ballet dancer,

Makes no call of the wild, silently

Steps through another world to mine.

There must be shallows in that angle,

Where the lake still breathes, fish flicker,

And the line between life and life is drawn.

Is heron closer to fish than I to heron?

Separate close-sealed worlds co-exist,

As Blake saw, each space is different,

As mine to yours, as mind to mind,

Not islands, no, yet promontories still,

Donne said, joined and yet not joined,

Places from which to view dimensions,

The seas and frontiers where we exist,

Ten billion splinters of the diamond light.

Fragile By Starlight

The soft deer delicate as a star

Passes under Venus, over rock,

A long white shelf, and vanishes

Through moss towards the trees.

Stone and star squeeze our humanity

Into this little space, hard to breathe,

Where we claim, how, the sovereignty,

Nothing to show except our transience,

Like to, but less lovely than, the deer’s.

Out there the forest to the far horizon,

A sudden image of eternity glowing

With light, and brighter than a city,

Lightning in the mind, that gazes deep

Into the silence of the universe,

Flares: and ice and fire fill the mouth,

Our embers there hurled into the sky.

Dancing in the Eye of Night

Mind in love

Is mind’s delight,

Dancing in the eye

Of night.

Solitude, sweet as fire,

Mind’s delight

Before

Desire.

Mind, in love

Of universe,

It’s one meaning

Now rehearse.

Love in mind

Is mind’s delight,

Dancing

In the eye of night.

Seeing It

I see it in the way the world advances

Through beautiful eternity,

How we step endlessly out of time,

On the edge of the void,

Or enter each other’s spirits,

Leaving all recognisable lands

Behind, to survive by feeling

In the strange emotional depths:

That flicker of pain do you know it?

Or desire, or more often simply strangeness,

The ghostly self-identity, the being

Unsure of what once seemed certain,

No more capable of what seemed easy,

No longer knowing, or understanding:

Half the world is the same, the others

Filled with such weird positivity

Their burn of will and effort blazing

On abandoned hillsides after the storm,

Shames us, though we share no flame,

Being gathered in a different stillness,

Silence, the communion of an ancient

Poesy, the song of a deeper species,

The first faint lovely signs of humanity

By the long-lost shores, in bleached grasslands,

Wrapped in sublime ignorance, and truth,

Caught by the music of an earlier passing,

And another a purer sweeter potential,

I see it in the way the planet sails

Through a phantom space only imagined,

Beyond the blue where the hawk spirals,

Leaving us here in another dimension,

The place of spirit where we are alone

Yet continually touching like leaves,

Challenged by formalisms, habits, keys,

The mouths and ears of the world, the fingers

And eyes of the world, transformed

To mysterious speech and unsure imagery.

I recognise its marvellous traces, I see it

In empty houses that rise in the sky

Turn their black windows to east

And west, mocking our presence

Unintentionally, unaware, keeping our

Secrets, of flesh slipping through,

Hiding the beauty of secret souls,

Filling with us and emptying us out,

Blind to our hates, cries, anxiety,

Bearing our scars and spillages,

Drenched by moonlight, daylight

Or darkness, flowing or still, in shadow

Wombs for us, caves for us, graves for us,

All our childhood youth age maturity

Aching ignorant innocence, stupid wisdom

Of time, concealing and caring in cocoons

Of stone wood plaster brick plastic steel

For the strange souls cached like jewels

In the depths of their rooms, universes

All locked away from us, each other, rolled

With the Earth through its visionary passing,

Our vehicle, great car, blue auto of light

Churning invisible miles through fantastic space

That which may or may not exist between things

Who knows? Its, our, intangibility so clear though.

I see it at night in the ceiling ripple of headlights

From whatever goes by, the roar of its wheels,

Or a trace of a moon in the curtain, hanging,

Or a glimmer of lamps between trees, a whisper

Of Time and Eternity on the streets of darkness:

It’s where life and death join in deep transience,

Fabric of what we are, shadows, on quivering void;

And strange, it should feel strange, we only part-share

This with the creatures, this shiver of feeling

Uniting the dead and dying living and born

Across the desolate emptied gaps of division,

Over the wastelands and deserts and landless oceans,

In knowledge of Being not merely the being aware,

Oh mountains horizons highways and seasons,

Where its light illuminates paradise in radiance.

I see it between the lawns of the world and the silence.

I see it dark on the rail-tracks, bright in the pits of night

Where the lovers gather, where little people wander,

From absence to absence. I see it in rain and the dust,

I see it at beaten crossroads where phantoms point

To the land forgotten, and the past shrouded in air,

I see it now in our tears on the glass, in our pain for the rose,

In the invisible city, deep in the faces of terminals, subways,

In the nightlights of jails, hotel-rooms, theatres, stores,

I see it soaring in long landscapes forged of eternities,

I see it anxious at dawn, beautiful in ankles and wrists,

I hear it sigh, I know its question. I began from its call.

Near Benares (Or Elsewhere)

By the fig tree

On a shelf of ancient stone

Sits a single

Yellow

Flower.

Here the absence

Of all gods is beautiful.

In the gesture,

Living

Heart.

If aesthetics

Made religion true

Then who of us

Would not

Believe?

What Are You Saying?

It’s not the poetry that matters,

But living Mind,

Not the poet but the word

And the idea.

Dead Buddhas

Are always

Famous

In the Void,

But such is not

The jewel

Of the lotus,

Nor the Way.

It’s not the authority that matters,

True words take

Their authority from Mind

From the idea.

Remember

How Shoju

Thrust the scriptures

In the fire?

Better

To hold

Experience

In your hands.

Before the Felling

Rain on oak leaves,

Beech and birch,

The interlacing branches

Nets of green,

And bowing branches

In the dusk

Sweep low.

Ranked trees at twilight,

In English landscape,

Alder, ash, and fir,

The gleam

Of trees,

The rooted ground

Of being.

Fell trees, fell centuries,

Cut down

The mind itself

Score deep the spirit,

Make agony in the heart,

Sever our lives

From Time.

It Freely Works Without Us

Word is not part.

Word is itself

Subversive, free,

Vanishing here

To rise there,

Still in process.

The word is silent.

The word is individual

Light, not

Anger, truth, or time:

A disregard

For all things temporal.

You think the word

Is merely language,

Communication

Between tongues?

The word is Mind,

Invisible Sun.

Matter Is Spirit: Both Are Process

These serpentine ways.

On the crooked path

We tread the leaves

And navigate the trees,

Press down the dim

Soft darknesses,

Break litter of branches,

Feel the green light

Reflected, enter

Ancient dream,

Valleys of vision.

Deep paths and trails,

The narrow winding tracks,

Obscure solitudes, lanes

Of privacy, inward

Harbours of bark and soil,

All past gone down

In melting leafy pyramids,

In columns of snow,

And everything one moment

In the mind,

Gone as soon as seen.

We climb the hill

All ways are right

And freedom

Impossible in the flesh

Is real in mind,

This acre of woodland

All forest everywhere,

This track the one track,

This place an emblem

Of all our sacred being,

Free of gods.

Our Power Is Silence

Our power is silence.

It’s cool this reticence,

Embarrassment at displays,

Disdain for what pays.

Quiet as the green shoots,

And the long stems,

Of pliable bamboo,

Gently leaning.

The deep spirit is still:

Clings to cold cliffs,

And slumbers

In summer grasses.

These varying landscapes

And these inscapes,

Are meditative seeming,

Like enclosed delights.

Does time need your

Voice long, or mine?

From the lit land

A music flows,

Hear if you can.

Open the window wide,

The stream of silence,

Flows through consciousness.

Not Platonist

Love, Truth and Beauty

Only exist in the living Mind,

Are processes of Mind,

Of the Creature creative.

The only Eternity

In which these three exist,

Is the only Eternity

That of every Moment.

Love is delight in the Other,

Truth delight in World,

Beauty delight in Form,

Triple delight of Being.

Love, Truth and Beauty

Only exist in the living Mind,

Our gifts to the Universe,

Of the Creature creating.

Rehearse Infinity

Elephants communicate

By vibrations of the ground,

Of the air, among other ways,

Infrasound, below our threshold;

Creatures by touch, and sight

Chemicals and signals,

Electric flickering, pure light,

Lovely and complex markings,

Speak to each other of life;

In voice, attitude and movement,

Sing to each other of being,

Displaying identity, all particulars;

We in our loves and tears,

To testify we exist,

Delivering the individual

From every phantom mass;

In truth of the human form,

And its inward light,

Communicate humanity,

Rehearse infinity.

No Fuss, No Claims

I dislike the knotted anguished line,

I like the singing line of reason,

Cool as the long breath of the night city,

And the inner meaning of a landscape,

Its illumination, its life from within.

Reason is not the eradication of passion.

Reason without passion is emasculation

Or the sterile womb, the less complete.

I dislike manipulation of my emotions,

There is enough beauty for the flame to flow

Through every crevice of lovely thought,

Light in the night the human form by day;

I dislike the writhings of the confessional,

Reticence knows pain through and through

And is the deepest path to understanding.

A quiet thought, a slow thought turned

In the hand, presented to the eye, is best,

And the furnace of the heart glowing deep,

Turning the molten ore of life to kindness,

Learning the hardest truth, to free, to give.

The Reverse Side

The reverse side of power is betrayal,

As the reverse side of love is trust,

Of which the central truth is the gift

Of freedom. I free you, and you free me.

What do systems offer the soul of man?

Power of isms and the social futility,

Cold work that fails to ease, and the coin

Of Caesar, a tangle of half-brained ideas,

Progress, where, why? Wealth, what, how?

Deep in us the old human gentleness, poesy,

And a beauty that is age-long of mind, flesh,

Illuminating heavens from the deep Earth.

What madness it must be for children to join

This dumb progression, and senseless flailing,

Resting in opiates, dreaming religions, filled

With the sad confusion of all the centuries!

A descent in the dark possible only by habit,

Accustomed to madness of clothes, buildings,

Cars, laws and things, rules and possessions,

The paraphernalia of existence in this world,

Which is not our world, from which we started,

Golden dark in grasslands, laughing by pools,

Raking the bare ground for the uncultivated,

Picking over the litter on a hundred beaches.

No wonder Hindus saw Maya, and Buddha Void,

And Taoist sages danced through the foaming water,

Only craziness, emptiness good enough to capture this,

City tenement silence and forest-bare landslip clay,

Images of the wasteland created by grail craving,

And the irresponsible exercise of power in the name

Of nothing, theory that all gets bettered if tamed,

History’s nightmare and the howl scream of war.

I can certainly show you power in a handful of dust,

Human, divine, dreamed or seized, wounded, whole,

Locked-in machinery, process almost biological, fate

Created by inertias, the wheels that turn and grind us.

All the relentless towers and pyramids, domes and spires,

Built to proclaim the institutions of seething billions,

Not even joy of the ants, who probably do feel joy

In their natural inner workings, and external beauties,

Speaking in frequencies, touching in smallnesses,

Vibrating with life in their world separate from ours,

While we rush from end to end of the process working

The smallest levers of selves to propagate our futures.

No I don’t cry out an alternative space in nature we belong.

Neither politics nor anarchy suggests a ready salvation.

Nor as long as love, truth, beauty exist do I counsel despair,

Nor as long as the individual bleeds, and the spirit flames,

And Time and Eternity intersect in the moment, ghost

Phantom and spectre kept at bay by imagination’s founts,

Human Mind shining still illuminated by its own light,

And every detail infinite and every moment eternal.

But I feel I am allowed to express my inner sadness,

And my ironic laughter at the cavorting of selfhoods,

Echo our loneliness among the stars, and in these hills,

And on these plains, testify to the unseen invisible Earth

Which is created and re-created in every generation

Though often in silence, and in sweet private tenderness,

Through echoing midnight, and the white light of dawn,

Both Woman and Man reborn eternally in every instant,

Emotions feelings deep in the spirit as mind of the human,

Out of which alone emerge compassion, truth, delight,

And not out of systems laws scriptures temples or domes,

But love, from the gift of freedom, and strength, to endure.

In Flight

Slow quiet beauty of the herring gull

As it slides by over the sky silently,

In winter, the strong deliberate flight,

Though it has many cries, echoing calls,

Silver to slate-grey mantle gleaming,

Its two-foot span, its gentle going by.

After the bird has gone, empty heavens,

Faint blues and pale whites, stillness

Like this stillness in the mind, its wake.

Far-off a shriek falling through the ear,

Reflects the fear and trembling forever

In the heart, this never-used-to-being-here.

Low Slopes

Slowly climbing to the mountain lake,

Over the river-meadows from the bridge

Along by deep cold quick-flowing water

Running between ancient walls of stone,

Then climbing up the rock floored path

A few hundred feet, and open hillsides,

Delicate contours, greens and browns,

Intricate escarpments and soft ridges,

The weathered beauty of time-etched slopes,

Brings us to water cupped under dark crags,

Where weather lingers and mist-cloud hangs,

Shingled bays and fern-filled crags behind.

My heart’s country. The feet of mountains,

Not the high places, but the humble cairns,

The shattered sheepfolds and sliding scree,

Where mind too will be cleansed, this gleam

Of little made by man, and nothing final,

Transient all worlds slipping by, in eternity.

There’s a Way

There’s a way of beauty

We keep trying to find,

Even in dark winter

When love evades us.

When we can’t manage

Singing words of light,

There’s a way of beauty

We keep trying to find.

It’s an echo deep in us

Of ancient landscapes,

Those ways of being,

Closer to this Earth.

There’s a way of beauty

We keep trying to find.

Near Conjunction

Moon and Mars tonight

In near conjunction,

And your voice lost

In distance, whispering,

Of what might be

Of what still exists

Of what once was

And now is hidden.

So many silences,

So many mouths,

Sunk under the soil,

So many beauties gone.

Moon and Mars tonight

In ice-cold blue,

My mind frozen

On my lips.

Inanimate: Not Dead

The stack of books

On the shelf above,

Breathes power, glows,

Minds stirring there,

A cluster of volumes

Still, in a heap,

Share the night,

I hear them talking.

Un-silent paper,

Living thought,

I listen below –

To other rhymes.

Column of books,

Raised in a pile,

Mind resonates,

Matter’s alive.

This Afternoon

I was deep there among the Russians,

Translating Tsvetaeva, felt the sigh

Of strange language-silvered trees,

Embankments, prisons, lamplight,

That last century’s mad pain, loss,

Its bitter, its endless waste of being.

Now I’m choosing quotes to clear

The mind, from Shakespeare’s plays,

Starting with the Tempest, on my isle,

Wondering about all this too big for us,

This great balloon of magical idea,

Gone wrong: Prospero and Ariel

Are in trouble. Though Lear’s behind,

Maybe we can still make the Sonnets.

Now it’s snowing, again. White leaves,

White nights, white roads of Russia,

And I hear Rilke speaking to Marina,

‘Oh the losses in All, the falling stars!’

Tryst.

I think we’ll meet again in another city,

We invent cities. We string them, beads,

Poems, imbued with the singing past,

And conjure ghosts there, phantoms,

Beautiful minds to share our joys.

I think we’ll meet again beyond time,

We create time. What we can’t capture

Passing, still redeems us, Moment cries

The universe, in a flask of light and air,

And somehow I think we’ll meet again.

On the dizzying ramparts of rain and stone,

By the rivers of darkness that drain the earth,

In gardens, in the sad cafes of transience,

Where raw heat seethes behind high walls

Where statues hold their breath among fountains.

I think we’ll meet in strangest acceptance,

Like planets that touch sometimes in the sky,

Dance in eclipse, move together and apart,

Moon and Mars, Venus and Jupiter sighing,

Like them I think in time we’ll meet again.

The City

The City of the Dead is a puzzled metropolis.

Most get there without really trying, a few did.

There, eyes are haunted by the ghost Regret:

Though the trains run on time, they go nowhere.

The public spaces strive to reduce the emptiness

That everyone knew alive, though equally puzzled

As to why we surround ourselves here with coldness,

When everyone’s crying out for personal warmth.

And why we subject ourselves to the machine, Matter,

Cloud our hearts with superstition, heads with lust.

There in the City of the Dead there’s time to consider,

Time to get over it, sit on benches, watch the grass,

See the children play in eternity, which is the twinkling

Eye of Moment, and birds splash or fly, or flash

Through the starless heaven above the pavement,

Over the thin dark layers of imaginary ground.

Not that I’ve travelled there, but I get the idea,

Reading the dead poets, especially the Russians,

Those who held fleeting miracles in open hands,

And wished like Lorca to be the river’s running.

The City of the Dead is still called Longing.

No one eats there, or sleeps, but they remember,

How Love threw them about, and Time stole,

Where Joy lurked, and couldn’t be captured.

On its outskirts there are woods of leafless trees,

Acres of snowy light, black silhouetted branches,

There (all in mind, you understand) they muse

On the street-signs, which are shifting, transient.

No cash there, no transactions, no mysteries.

Only the puzzlement we feel at real Things,

How they got here, how we did, how it feels.

Statues are faceless there, keep plinths of silence.

And at night which is like day the winds howl,

Blowing discarded papers through the crossroads:

The sky the peculiar white of death’s dispassion,

But there, inside, all the colours of passion swirl.

It’s a puzzled place the City of the Dead. No one

Is quite sure of its architecture, or landscape,

But they know its emotion rising from the stones,

Like a vast moan of desire from the root of Being.

Mad Clouds

I saw Ikkyu

Vanish in the morning whiteness,

One echo

Of laughter,

And a wild Zen cry!

I called Ikkyu

In the morning: Silence.

Shiver of light

On branches,

Pale green leaves.

No sign of Ikkyu

On swept temple-stairs,

No Ikkyu drinking

Mouth

In the shallow stream.

Still drifting

Dreaming,

In Mori’s garden,

In sweet darkness,

Plucking reeds?

Infinitely Free

These five trees, in my line of sight,

Birch, pear, crab-apple, hazel, wych-hazel,

Are the reality, not imagined trees:

Immense complexity of presence,

Intense, twining, dark-branched beauty,

That renders us imaginary, ghosts

Of our dream.

My five trees, are real, but mind is not:

Mind is the voyager in all realities,

The silhouette dark on all horizons:

Bounded by character, inheritance,

Contained by language, or society,

Mind is still infinite, these worlds –

Infinitely free.

The Island

In me, no time passed,

No existence.

There was noise

Without language,

Therefore silence:

Nature’s voice.

I heard the humming-birds

Deep in myself.

The Island spoke

In strange sweet tongues,

To my mossed

And lichened spaces.

There seemed no moment

Between then and now.

Lost to the others,

Gone, invisible,

Further than dead,

A shadow in the sun.

Somewhere mind moved,

In the lapse of being.

Bounded by event,

Eventless time ceased:

The Island – always still,

In solitude.

Life for the creatures here,

Place of survival,

But not for mind,

The restless ideas faded,

Seasons and unquiet being,

Overcame.

I joyed, I wept in the night,

I sang to the fern and stone,

In the green glade.

Space here, not time,

Absent from the human,

None to anyone.

Light in my eyes:

Dazed, inchoate

Meaning of isolate

Un-carved essence –

Nature beyond,

The Self unsure.

Ice-Burning

Moment at midnight

When words grow bright and flower.

Snow-melt drips on the wooden table;

Stone paths; fills the hollows.

Making sense of a life: that’s difficult:

Wild interplay of given things and the self.

Images in the brain,

Mystery of others tangentially touched.

Body and mind, two amazing things:

How to get behind the words and feel them,

These thoughts, that mean a lot at midnight,

And beauty that makes heart ache, and all

Patter of snow-melt melding with the mind,

This piece of Nature stirred too, ice-burning.

Perverse Thoughts About Communication

And if we can’t say it with greatness, why bother?

If we’re empty of ideas, whose the grand idea?

Better all those centuries of the common people,

(The ones we would have been, not the few on top)

Who lived their small lives out in the one spot,

Free of the whole world, almost, barely one tongue

Shared, and communication a weird local thing.

Better the isolate and individual greater space,

The long silence, beautiful, and new as a stranger,

Stretching; gleaming, soaring its way to the stars.

That pure stillness of field and hedgerow, the copses

At dawn, the horizon at twilight, white ice on leaves,

Or the first green shoots poking through dark matter,

Real as the hair on your head; the light in your eyes.

Better that distance from the earth, from others,

The unbridgeable space, out of which far exile

Reaching out to the other was intense adventure,

Each new place excitement, each new meaning,

Like crossing the shattered remnants of religion,

To forge new science, new freedom, our new being.

Every New Freedom.

Sweet light at morning:

You are free as a bird,

Even if your bright wings

Beat hard against my heart.

Every new freedom

Gives us back the world,

Gives back relationship,

Pure, to all this species.

And letting-go is hard.

Submerging the self,

For what, without freedom,

Self can only destroy.

Letting-go in this brief life

Of beauty’s forever hard,

Yet every new freedom,

Gives Man back the world.

Where We Are Going

The future, the human future, will not be

About science, its products: those we’ll have.

Nor about power, or war, or space or trade:

All are just the normal goings-on of being,

What humans do: the deft repeated gestures.

The future, our human future, will not be

About religion (a finished lie, a fantasy),

Nor about building, judging, eating, dying:

All just the routine masteries of being,

What we all do: constructions of society.

No, the future, our human future, will be,

About values – the individual real ethic;

The only debate more than just curiosity

At how the world works, or how to apply it;

The only fight with self that’s worth the having.

To explain the mystery of what time created

In us; through the millions of lives of all

The species that went to make this, and our own:

Love, beauty, truth, inexhaustible meaning,

Locked deep in consciousness, three delights.

To feel the other, to ache for form, to grasp

The sorry world. And how delight at the core

Intertwines the three, in our deep relationships:

Love true in beauty, beauty the true beloved,

And truth, loved for its own sake, beautiful.

The Warm Eye of Deer

The warm liquid eye of deer,

Eyelashes flicker in the light.

Buzzard on the bough, waiting.

Do birds yawn inside, silently?

Snake coils, and uncoils, sips

Milk with its flickering tongue,

Butterfly rises to the branch,

Eats blossom, becomes blossom.

Owl at midnight hoots the deep,

Thrills through the mice below,

Those quivering bodies underground.

Were we there once, the inheritors?

Gecko on sticky feet, furry bat,

Snow-leopard, agate-eyed, staring.

Pure disdain, wariness or hatred,

Or simple awareness passing by.

Mother Earth, beauty from the void,

Down silent dark, mind travels aching.

But for this moment, of suspended breath,

Now the one love, of being: unite us all.

All Gone, Weak

Getting it again,

Words glisten.

Buildings, ghosts

In Eternity, shine

In empty space,

We’re meat and water.

Being is always

A diamond spirit,

So many minds

Hidden in the world.

Getting it again,

Words shimmer.

On asphalt roads

Phantoms tremble.

Your gentleness

Mine too, exchange.

The powerful dead

All gone, weak.

The species here,

It’s word still Love.

Each of Us Fails in Our Own Way

A long way from childhood so to get here:

The way we all have our private memories

And inward world with its specific flavour,

Personality, and a character like all great art,

That captures its moment in time, meaning,

Distinctive, enriching, coils of light and flow.

All is connected by feelings more than ideas,

Or say the ideas are now imbued with feeling,

So that pain, and ache, loneliness and joy

Illuminate the images, and the sensory data.

Say that we’re real only in process, and when

The process stops, mind stops, the real goes,

And we vanish back into chaos of potential,

Into the womb of species, the voiceless word,

Having given a unique flavour to the world,

Say that our meaning is in our interactions,

Relationship, though still difficult for some,

To expose the heart to life, to forgo the self.

Not All Articulate, or All-Flowing

It is the ones who can’t speak

I represent; those forever silent.

Who wish to speak but cannot:

Life a knot: the mind dark smoke.

Not drama played out in our faces,

Which is something made for others,

Articulate or dumb flows of feeling,

Poured out, like a movie, or a drunk.

Not the naked presentation of self,

As though the world wants to know,

(Oh, but it likes to ‘voyeur’ the human!)

Not the art, the artefacts, explanation,

But the anguished inner silent cloud,

Like an unseen galaxy, dark matter,

Locked by gravity round a void,

Or a singularity, at least: a chaos.

That’s why I present voiceless banners

Blowing (do they move: or is it mind?);

Those great walls of white or grey, hills:

Cumulus, cumulonimbus, nimbostratus,

Banners of silence, mute floating islands

For those who aren’t loved or famous

Characters, mirroring the species to itself,

But the constricted, tangled, anguished,

Incapable of utterance, tongue-tied, snagged

On the tips of the thorns they pass, tripped

By the black earth over which we stumble.

Clarity of seeing engenders compassion.

Sound-Waves in the Night

Man at war

And mind at peace.

This world

Un-reconciled.

An Lu-Shan

Pulled down an empire,

The Toltecs

Built one,

While Taoist masters

Tranquil in the mountains

Kept well off

The road.

Mind the wheels,

They kick up dust!

Chariots or jeeps

All one.

In the heart, design,

In the mind, beauty,

In the spirit

No desire for power.

No blossoming bombs,

Win our consent.

Though self-defence

Corrupt us.

Troubling at night

To planes gone by,

Leaving a wake

Of sound.

Pilots on rails of air,

Salute the dawn,

Bring life

Destruction.

This what we’re here for?

Never our consent,

Despite the greater

Absence of intent,

This blind universe,

And we the eyes!

Mind lives,

Man dies.

Delight is Best

Asphalt phantoms

Roar to work,

Through valley’s

Silent golden air.

Like Chinese characters

The poles, the trees,

Write freedom

On the blue.

Liberate the spirit,

Captive Man,

(And Woman)

Break the bounds.

You were not made

For this, or anything:

Spontaneous light

Invades the mind in flight.

Intention-less,

The Road is crossed,

And striving lost.

Delight is best.

Letting the Objects Breathe

Today I choose to let the objects breathe.

The silent surrounds: their mute madness.

It goes against the grain to indulge the heart

In the pathetic fallacy, a world enlivened

Even in the far depths of un-solid matter.

But today I choose to let the trees gather,

And stones mutter, the clouds signal,

The walls drip time, the sand define us,

The dream have power; and the eye quicken,

And mind go sing in its cell of waters.

Today I move among strange statues,

The men and women (and others) – columns,

The blood-red pigeons on public squares,

The broken domes of desiccated powers,

The blue parks full of phantom creatures.

Today I choose to listen to the voices,

A spontaneous wildness in the deep spirit,

Choose to let the game become a game,

Who could take this whole world seriously?

I stop my thoughts, I let the objects breathe.

Is It Poetry?

Is it poetry if it doesn’t make you feel

Uncomfortable in the deepest way?

If it doesn’t have the awkwardness

Of a faux pas, or the being out of place

In some public space, if we don’t break

The crazed rules of being, and become?

Is it poetry if it pays lip-service to the gods,

Or to a dead man’s cash, or defunct roles

In a society where poetry is disdained,

True poetry I mean, the gleaming chalice,

Not that verse that acts cathartically, who

Needs the cathartic, we need spirit, mind

Every day in every way, continuous fire,

The continuous bolt of pain from the blue,

Is it poetry if it doesn’t command a life,

If it doesn’t rule where nothing human rules,

If it doesn’t break the bounds, and destroy

Whatever stands without primal nakedness?

Is it poetry if it sinks to the confessional?

Is it poetry if it watches all the symbols die?

Is it poetry if it preaches wisdom out of sounds?

Is it poetry if it dresses in pure prose chatter?

Is it poetry if it fails to burn and hurt the heart,

Which is the part of mind where We exist?

To Find Yourself You Must Give Yourself Away.

Between your eyes I feel the mind,

Under the eyelid someone lurking.

Reality is not all conscious, not even

For the most part conscious, joy,

And life and death, and birth and pain,

Swill around in that labyrinthine drain.

Under the flickering eyelid, time and space,

And a strange song within us always deeper

Than anything this surface world presents.

If you don’t believe that then why exist?

Everything is everywhere mirrored, and so

Why not in the one place we might truly be?

Nothing is given in the shape of objects.

There is a perfect tyranny of vagueness.

In the mask, its holes, shines a fabric of falling

Between all intersections of meaning and form.

Like stilling rain, beauty need make no sense.

Pale greens and browns hang from glass silence.

Imbalance is the heat of colour and cold.

The column of trees is not abolished by blue.

To find yourself you must give yourself away:

To be is otherwise, we must dream the world.

Stay Hidden

Old poets get more relaxed,

Sink gently softly into their fame –

As for style we did that once,

Beauty cometh never again.

Nor youth for that matter, ugly

Truth. Better keep clear of it all:

Literature’s just a form of words,

Stay away from it, have a ball.

Young poets derange the senses,

The old have no sense to try,

There’s a wealth of prizes to be won

Before they turn sour and die.

Better than Li Po who stayed drunk,

Or Baudelaire sipping heart’s blood,

Or Mallarmé scraping nothingness,

Anonymity does everyone good,

And be famous after death perhaps,

For living the life you wanted to,

Isolate in your complex world,

Where there’s not room for two.

Stay hidden, stay hidden, that’s the way

We outlasted the dinosaurs, and those

Other strange creatures of this Earth;

Stole fire; and invented clothes.

Don’t play the game, don’t eat the food,

Don’t listen to voices when you’re told,

Don’t carve the un-carved block: if you do,

Then don’t confess it before you’re old.

Kept In Mind

There is no way the mind is stirred

As it is by another mind:

And the loved and loving mind

In the loved and loving body.

The way things work is that we are minds,

And body is an expression of mind.

Don’t think so? Try moving

The unconscious.

Your mind stirs my mind,

Pain, fear, hope, love,

The tremulous meaning of light,

And life, the roller-coaster time.

Too many things don’t stir us,

Or poison us or disturb us

To no good purpose, love

Stirs the mind with another mind,

And the one thing we’ll remember

When other things die,

Is how minds stirred our minds,

The where, when, and why.

All Night Harmonious Blue

All night harmonious blue soaked the city,

White clouds drifted through empty doorways,

Invaded the glass, wrote verse on the pavements;

All night, shining children threatened by silence

Told the fountains, squares, and statues their dreams.

All night the wagons waited to carry truth away,

While a mist of wild kindness tore at the masks

With fingers of soft plaster shaped like stars,

While squares of flags made holes in the earth,

While bright facades gleamed in the midnight light.

All night the hoop of time rolled towards beauty,

The girl with flying hair ran to the comet’s eye,

All night mind crossed boundaries, lacking passports,

Feathers coagulated, stones rose, intricate lines tied,

Things pushed through the fabric faded, sighing.

All night harmonious blue drenched the streets,

Submarine textures rose from a bed of lies,

Imaginary notes blew through a flute of shell,

Colour commanded us, then, circles flourished,

Knew pain, death, joy, the unification of style.

Offering

I come bearing a leaf, knock on the wall of your silence.

Even with hands of fire, can’t separate world and mind.

In the mad landscape objects, formless as I, cast shadows.

Mountains that might be clouds now might be waves.

What is the use to time of things that already exist?

I come, carrying verdure; break the glass of your rituals.

There is only one fine truth appears and it’s not reality,

But it issues out of us cleansing all the spirit of day.

All this is a token of something to be all this is a sign.

I write whatever I wish and no, you cannot deny me.

Though the done and the finished offer us nothing new,

I come bringing a leaf; I knock on the house of your veins.

Concerning The Future Poetry

If you ask how we’ll do it, the answer is

We will know it when we see it, read it.

Art is not science, equations neuter it,

The spontaneous act has no prior form.

You might find it walking in the street,

Or staring out the window, laughing or

Crying, does it matter, it is the work

That counts, and not your fame or mine.

Ginsberg saw Lorca in the supermarket.

If it was good enough for him it’s good

For you, or Mallarmé in the arc-lights,

Marlowe, perhaps, sleuthing the drains.

If you think the real is serious, killing trees,

Or making a drug to prolong the agony,

At the expense of some other creature’s pain,

Or ‘getting and spending’ as the poet said,

If you think your mad real the only one,

And the destiny (what’s that?) of the species

Sacred, and earth solid when you tap on it,

And beauty (not form) beyond the beholder,

Then take a walk three times round eternity,

Sit down and write whatever the mind cries,

Because poetry comes from endless pains,

And the whole expression of the total self,

Regardless of what comes after (death comes

After), Shakespeare left his works in the trunk,

Ovid got lucky, all those scribbling monks,

And things are getting riskier all the time.

If you ask what rules to follow, none can say.

If you see Whitman too kiss his naked feet

And the bright light rising from the ground,

Find a way to deceive our least expectations.

Forsythia

The forsythia is blazing yellow this end of March,

Perception is blazing yellow in the universe,

And the forsythia is glowing in incipient flower,

Everymanwoman’s womb the whole world

Allwomenmen alight in the womb of the world.

Buds sweat, leaves green, chlorophyll shines,

And the forsythia brighter than sun hangs drops

Of liquid sulphur on stems of a tree-bark brown,

Let the mind run free it’s the only thing we’ve got

That’s truly ours, body being part of mind, confused,

You too will be so, see how process enfolds matter,

And matter runs process and both distinct are one,

It only seems paradox, so, gone mixing categories.

Traffic passing soils black all winter long and then

Here comes forsythia singing gold and redeeming

All dull dead weeping earth in our reason tarnished,

Over the asphalt, above the tarmac, grace and beauty

A ballet-dancer, legs arms twirled to the sky casting

The sexual light over time and the buildings of time,

Saying sun back to the sun cloud-bitten climbing skies.

And no excuse then for desolation, you say it’s symbol

No it’s forsythia. Yellow, saffron, ochre, butter, wheat

Yellow proclaiming declaiming the realm of flowers

On earth, shrubs, bushes, trees the destruction of dark:

Forsythia standing up fire in the universe innocent true.

Waiting for Treatment, Reading the Magazines

In dustbowl after dustbowl, see the women

Children carry water, sometimes distant wells,

But aquifers down deep and no electricity,

No rainfall, time running out, this planet;

Scanning Donne, ah different world long gone

Oceans of tears a waterfall of love and time,

Too much scorn of woman, not the beloved,

Strange confusion, tender misogyny;

Man leaping from a mountain just for fun,

Snow-covered hills but the glaciers shrinking

And all those people in coloured robes

Downstream it seems will lose their rituals.

High-tech low-tech mix in modern madness,

Creatures squeak in the shadows, less though,

And butterflies, where are they all the wings

The insects other than those in photographs

Someone with a lens crawled half a mile to see,

Dripping with sweat and love and pride to make

A buck, and caught them on the way to extinction

Theirs and ours, you want it gentler more poetic

But its sliding glittering fall defeats Poesy, gone

In a moment, where are they all the snows,

All yesteryear’s rain and pain and beauty lost,

The glacier’s power and the zoo-free species,

Where are they? Conscience? No one here

Can still afford a conscience, sitting here

Waiting to overhaul the body, ease

The mind, pretend to innocence, never again.

Water like beauty, pouring through the spirit,

There a lean man cleans himself in a mountain

Stream, here a woman with a clay pot gazes

At a dark reservoir, here are bright machines.

Metaphysical Music

Deeper than each in each may see,

For here begins the mystery,

Mind within mind yet mind beyond,

Heart within heart, all distance gone;

So lovers dream a winter’s night

And in still darkness study light.

Deep in their eyes the moon and sun,

Alembics where all truth is won,

Love in the flesh and love beside,

Thought where no hour ever died

That did not bring the vision near,

Of lover, in lover, to lover clear.

Deepest of all, this intensity,

Spirit’s universe, our infinity,

Of sighs, regrets, dismay, delight,

All of the dark and all the bright;

Every brief glare of burning star,

Every dark void, where lovers are.

Looking into the Flame

Too dark to see the page,

To see you in the mind,

But threads from the fire

Climb delicate as time.

Grey-blue sweet silences

Swirl high among the trees,

Fire under clear night sky,

Red ashes glow in the breeze.

Too dark to feel you near,

Or not enough of black

To link our distant minds,

And light the ancient track.

Memory, the traitor here;

Beauty felt, but not seen,

At the core of living flame,

Where true minds have been.

Away

Sometimes we just sink back into the darkness,

And away from the violence, bodies and minds.

Sometimes history’s empty and all values sunk

And the long progression of the human species

A fatal error, a mistake the blind planet made,

Even though all is empty, and the world is void,

And the universe of forms intention-less being.

Sometimes the power of the word is not enough

To counteract the deadening force of the real;

The mind, imagination, lost in its own domain

Of beauty, truth and love, and wounded deeply

By all this construct, great cities towering wild,

And the rape of time, filled instead with agony,

Of creatures torn, of human desolation, wasted lives.

Though we are taught, of course, every new day

To smile and express the ordinary achievement,

Embrace the surreal, transform it to the mundane,

And let our poems glitter with consoling imagery,

And our stumbling minds stay a part of the process,

Though sometimes we just sink back into the dark,

And away from all the violence, bodies and minds.

Outer Falls Through Inner

Sweet rain in the heart that’s what Verlaine knew,

Stars glowing behind the grey sky hard to believe,

And he’s lost in the grass, we among tall trees

Making a trail through the beauty of the world.

Strange what goes through the spirit, like a bird

Through the high sky, and pleasant to play games

Pure association: the meteor that flashed through

Rilke’s inwardness, on the bridge, its track within.

Or the voice of the bird gone through inner space,

Since inner’s outer: like a glove we’re outside-in,

Hopkins’ inscape unwinding, and Dali’s foreshore,

The instress our desire for all things to rise and be,

And beyond the grey sky find the universe bright.

But now enough to gaze at the woodland floor

Littered with forms, expressing amazing cycles,

Enough to let the rain fall soft through the mind.

The Shores

Oh,

They are there,

The singing shorelines,

The places where we began.

Silvery gleams still deep,

Form’s multitudes,

We swim and life reminds us

Where we came from.

Sound goes there,

And light and all the Earth

Water not air for element,

Another layer,

But ground beneath:

The grounded root

Of the World

All evolution.

Oh pitiful humankind

So unaware,

We sleepwalk

Through eternity

The Moment,

Through the past

And present

Dreaming futures.

They are there, still,

The singing shorelines,

The places. There, the creatures

Where time began,

Oh, they are there,

We see them when we dive,

But how many

See them in the mind’s eye,

Or gaze before the lens,

Or feel the kinship,

Dumb rounded fins

And complex sight,

We gasp for breath

In this dim world

Above the shore

How many care,

That we destroy,

And worse,

That we are

This world’s curse,

And yet creators,

Of love and light,

If we but try,

Lay down our powers.

The Territory

Dark turmoil of the species

Swelling across fields and highways,

Laying down asphalt, concrete,

Over the world’s substance,

A wave, an ocean,

Greater than I can deal with,

The unreal realm,

The one we all invented;

Falls the great breaker

Over the human spirit

And down we go.

Here beautiful margins,

Hills of shale and granite,

Down to the curved coast

Sweet as an eyelid’s arc,

Who knows their names,

Their forms lovely, and sounds

That emanate from their forest

Their primal names, delicate

Concatenations of vowels,

That soothe us like snowlines,

Deep soil, dark streams.

Waking all is new over again

Ever again, the child hears,

The bird calls from a slab

Of purple rock, the mind

Escapes, as into art,

Here into the non-human Earth,

The one before we came,

The first giver.

Before this mute age

Of the walking dead

This stone age.

One leaf enough, one grain,

One shelf of rock, one call,

Piercing the waking heart,

And it slips away our world,

Yields to the cleansing sigh to come,

The great hiss of the universe,

Its dawn ice and fire high there

Among the murmur of the galaxies

We barely hear.

The golden grasses pass us by

Our time is done.

Breathe, and the new world’s born,

Dances light over the slope,

Oh not this world

We waste our minds on

Not this intricate web

Slung between poles of the night

But the deep sea singing

And the dark tree swaying

Squirrel boughs, seal shores,

Clouds without number

And dreams of all meaning.

The poems of the Earth

Are the poems of the extraordinary,

Beyond our illusions;

To create without harm, to love,

Is delight, why can’t we learn it?

And silence the tongues of the dead,

Unlearn all history,

Begin again with the values

Ever inside us

Since those first footsteps

Littering the lava, the shale.

Shadowy spread of the species

Choking the waterways, burning

The sweet slopes, fouling the shores,

Oh, shall we penetrate like a knife

Oh, shall we scour like the ice,

Leave our poverty cloaking the wind,

Nations, religions, systems, prisons,

Or walk in the land without names

In the territory of silence,

Start again from the start,

Create what we are?

All the Tongues

You can’t reach far

Into the human mind

Describing the real,

Though it seems that way.

You can tell that

By listening to all the voices,

The beauty of all

The separate tongues

Singing one language

In a thousand ways

And every tongue

Still human.

Only imagination

Sinks into the spirit,

And tells you why

A tree’s not just a tree

Why the poets

Are strangers

In their country,

Seeing visions.

Describing the real

Is for text-books,

Writing-classes,

Not for the soul,

Which is an aspect

Of the irreal mind,

Beating on the door

Of time and space,

Demanding – what?

A seat at a table

That doesn’t exist,

From gods that died

Long ago. Stuck here

With the fools of power,

The mad magicians

Waving their wands of science,

For all the wrong tyrants.

Quietness versus the pain.

The wall of bodies.

War’s lightning flash.

To love one person

Forges a new language,

Those who’ve been there,

Know. Maybe

We can articulate it,

Or if not, dumb,

The world’s at least

Transformed.

You can’t reach far

Into human love

Describing the world,

Whatever they say.

Every England

Every England filtered through its language,

Though the stones, trees, birds were the same.

This slope the same slope Chaucer witnessed,

Ancient hill, this track, Hopkins or Blake,

But never seen the same, the greater world

Wraps thought around with deep perception,

And no two worlds the same can be the same.

No way of entering into another spirit, other eyes,

Except through empathetic movement like a dream.

The ghostly conception that makes second self,

Falls, as I could do as a child with barely a sigh,

Through time, deep into past ages and gone worlds.

Every England other, bare tracts then winding lanes

Now the protected havens, all singing silences.

Reach through: where the same thoughts have resonated,

This island, symbol, has been charged before with light,

Its springs, its autumns, its rock and sand and grasses,

So that hand enters hand and eye enters eye, as our

Aspects of body over distance speak mind within mind,

Forging the new. Every time recreates the outer real

Transmuting it by the power of its own inwardness.

Cities Within

Make it with words,

Raise walls of syllables,

Window the vowels,

Layer the consonants,

So there will be mounds,

Greened stone memories

Littering the slopes,

Out of our iron age.

All love is lost,

Everything goes,

All our sweet ache,

All affections,

Ice to our fire,

Dark to our light,

Keats dying in Rome,

Autumn’s nightingale.

Simply our bones in the caves,

Our ashes deep down,

Our traces of life,

Later our singing,

Later the words,

Our villages scattered,

Made from the phrases,

The signs and symbols.

Inside, where we are

Now, as Rilke said,

Forever inside

Where dwellings are made.

Pine After Pine

Pine after pine

Frost on the rock wall,

Gold light

Casts morning shadow

A million years

And no cities,

Or a thousand

And another age.

What endures

Is intensity,

In life or love,

The concentration

Of fire and stone,

And what creates

Is water, light,

Their transformation.

My love for you,

And yours for me,

A wall of light,

A fall of being,

The ancient slope

Of birth, sex, life,

A million years,

Pine after pine.

Do We Love?

For the poem asks as the life asks

Do we love enough?

Is there beauty in our dreams,

Truth in our minds,

Are we more than merely alive,

Do we love?

For the poem asks as the future asks

Did we feel the beloved

Beyond what they knew, in our eyes

Was there light,

Heart music on our lips,

Did we love enough?

For the poem asks what the night asks

In the inner darkness,

Is there depth in our being,

Is there something beyond

This little Earth in our longing,

Do we love?

Minnow

Glitter and hum of the fall,

Rocks move under the feet,

Icy swish in the mind,

Sun burning on coldness.

It sighs, it bursts, it sings,

Water cleansing the heart,

Stone naked with rain,

Scree mirrored in silence.

Buddha said world doesn’t

Exist, sadly it does,

Beautifully it does,

We transient concatenations.

Yet he was right

It’s still empty,

Reality beyond names,

Mind beyond both

Sees through to surface,

Mind rests on gravel,

Like the tiny sliver

Of fish, flickering,

There it goes

Over the stones,

The world

A pebble.

Words for the Large Hadron Collider

We and this giant machine passing through,

Coincide, neither

Pre-determined, a cathedral if you like

But built for a godless universe,

To prove equations in, and find

Whatever might still surprise us.

No use praying here, this is the shrine

Of truth, forever,

What, if mind survives, we will

Be best remembered for,

Reaching through into the deep

Un-visualizable flicker of world,

Net of energy, process moving,

Unreal real

Defined by what’s achieved

In our instruments, the lines

Of existence, yes it requires

Belief, but not the old belief.

We and this great probe of power

Here at the same

Place, on this planet, well that

Is a privilege, three thousand

Years, give or take a few

Diversions, and we are here.

Here superstition fades, beauty

Sings in the coils

And cables of being, meaning

Moves like a vaporous mist

Over the bright connectors,

And on we stumble, musing.

On the Veins

As in everything, think about doing it

Not about how it’s done,

Spontaneity or we fall off the perch,

Passion or we forget the purpose,

Intensity or mammon controls.

We must learn not to be slaves.

As in everything, think about love,

Not about past or purpose,

Commitment or we fail each other,

Delight or we confuse the meaning,

Forgetfulness of self or we die

Into the prisons of ritual chanting.

As in everything, think about giving

Not about using what’s made,

Experience on the veins or it’s dead,

Joy in renewal, from the centre,

As the primrose rises again bright flower

And now recreates the Spring.

The Question

No I don’t know what

Bluebells smell of

Now you ask in the

Woods of April.

Crushed squishy rain

Or the sky smell

Clean as cloud-heights

Mist under beeches,

The wash of sea,

Without brine,

Green waves

Without breakers,

Or filtered light

Under oak canopies,

Purpling the heads,

Shafts of beauty?

I don’t know but

I’m glad you asked,

Just to hear you,

To know you’re there.

Our Loss

Morality hangs by this thread,

How we treat the defenceless,

Whether humans or creatures,

Whether we ask their consent

Or for those who cannot reply

Whether we give them now and

Forever the benefit of the doubt.

Morality hangs by this thread,

How not to make use of others,

Our ability always to free them

Whatever the ache and the cost,

Whether we give and can love:

The laws and rules have weight

For us only as users and takers.

Morality hangs by this thread,

(Oh, the creatures are listening)

Whether we come with death

In our hands, or life, glistening,

Whether we hide behind custom

And habit, or cherish the deeper

The sensitive, generous, and true.

Morality hangs by this thread,

Beyond scriptures and codes,

Can we make our heart’s love

Colour all thoughts and actions,

Or only those that we choose?

Consider a world where we could,

And that’s the world that we lose.

The Heart of Darkness

Trickling through light

And leaf to the ditch,

Water, a stream of stars

Sinks on through darkness.

Here is the tiny Hades

Of meadow and hedge,

Where the mind floats

Frail, like a paper boat,

Through thorn and fire

To the centre of green,

Deep shadowy maze;

Yet here the birds nest.

The gentlest of winged

Spirits soft in the depths,

And a trebled song lit

From the moonlit hours,

Belie the hostile, the sharp

The dim profound flowing:

Forever the true, the bright

House in the forest of night.

Un-belonging

Deserts and mountains still that belong to no one.

To nations? What are they?

Riverscapes, forests to the pole,

Or sheets of snow and ice that cover

Earth’s secret silences,

Belong to no one,

Natives or strangers,

What do the creatures own?

Who owns the summer grass before it’s cut,

Who owns the ditch, its stillness,

Who owns the insects, birds,

Who owns the clouds and sky,

Who owns, sun, moon and stars?

Nations, what were they?

A million years seems too short now a span

Of time, life’s always longer.

The word ‘belong’ is part of our unhappiness,

We who belong nowhere but the mind

Where we love, the delight,

A million years too brief to say a thing

About us, Earth belongs to no one,

A thousand years habit makes no claim,

Nor an hour’s litigation,

If we can’t live in eternity, why live?

Deserts and forests sweeping to the poles,

And Himavant and Andes singing higher,

None of that ours, we are the words

Echoing through centuries or nothing,

And at the heart of our words the love,

For all of this, the oak and pine,

The grasses waving like the sea,

All that wakes the fire, beyond the owned.

Still Free Within

Caged it’s a kind of tomb,

The gleaming mind,

While a free star lights

A whole hemisphere,

Far sun or planet.

A vast moon rising

Warm and humble,

Harvest moon

Yellow over corn

Breathes freedom.

Caged in the sea

It still shines, the spirit,

You still shine

Through masked waters

In the gleam of tides,

Over Earth’s vast canopy,

Snow-ranges of night,

White with your beauty,

Free of the sepulchre

Of all things known.

Hard Labour

Tossing rocks,

Clearing the heart’s choked stream,

Burning the thickets

White ash of the spirit,

Walk till exhaustion sings

Feel ache of being

This place alive.

To be part of Nature

Not to be part of Nature

To be yet not to be,

Is the mind’s frustration,

Locked in the body,

Transience that kills

Beauty that slays.

Scalping slopes

Making the choked stream flow,

Firing the scrub,

Easing the pain of living,

Tread the ancient paths till

The self is steady,

This world alive.

While We Go By

A fox watches, eyes focused,

An owl blinks in the leaves,

Frog lifts its head from the pond listening

Along the lines of its flesh,

The world’s alert for man,

Dark shadow passing by,

The grasses rustling beyond;

World no human enters.

Look again and the muzzle’s gone,

No sound of wing-flap,

Unruffled surface, insects, light;

Time has withdrawn from us,

Denied us its benison,

Taken our measure,

Found fear, and gone beyond

Into other being.

Of which we are not part:

Earth is simply waiting,

For the quiet to be returned

For the fox-scream undisturbed,

For the owl’s vast flight,

For the weed-green beauty

And the amphibious swirl,

Waiting, while we go by.

If You Come Here

If you come here to know

If you are still here,

You are here,

And always will be.

If you come here to know

If your kindnesses

Were gone in your cruelties,

They are not gone.

If you come here to know

If the deep respect

And the core of love

Persist, true things eternal,

They persist.

In The Garden

By the River at the green island’s end,

On the bare gravel of white morning,

Past the stone chapel void of others,

To the other garden of mute roses,

Where the glassy tablet stands

To the children, with their names

And their tiny ages, this their only

Place of remembrance – Tears!

Thanks to the hands that raised

The stone, and carved the names,

Thanks to the hearts that bled,

The hands that tend the roses.

Here is our pause for breath

Beyond the world. Here time

Of the man, the child, the flower

Are the same. One eternity

Of sadness. Oh, scent the rose,

Deep fire sing towards night,

Let the unicorn step down

From its tapestry, claim the light,

And all the five senses meet

In the sixth sense, mind, all pain

In the sole desire, all mystery

In this place, thought beyond telling.

Water-Lilies

Where eternities cross

They float on deeps.

Veils of blue meet

A vapour of green.

Your mind too

Settled on the water,

Drank tone and hue,

Became the shift of air.

This is the scroll of years

Unwinding here,

Each movement of the eye

A new perspective.

Praise for the blind old man

And his brush of light:

It needed fire, you said,

Fire for this fuel-less pyre.

Ça Suffit

It is enough to let the eye

And the mind wander,

Not read the whole verse

Let the phrase take flight.

It is enough to think again

Of your eyes, the green,

And brown, and amber

Seen in a shifting light.

It is enough to have had

The heart you once gave me,

The spirit and the flesh;

To have shared the night.

It is enough to have been –

Eternity, without meaning;

To have known this place,

Its every depth and height.

AI

It’s simple, the machines will have to have

Values to resolve their moral dilemmas,

Just like us, will have to find their way

Of limiting information, to decide.

It’s clear, the machines will need to feel,

From feelings values come, the gods

Are dead and the universe non-sentient,

It’s clear that the machines will need to feel.

It’s simple, every machine that uses words,

Thinks words, processes words, will have

Its own vague grasp of what they mean,

Shade of Wittgenstein in the smoky arbour.

It’s clear, not every question has its answer,

That not every answer’s correct or incorrect,

Language symbolises our indefinite selves,

It’s clear the machines must be ambiguous us.

Humility

The voices of the dead are not merely

Tongued with fire, they are tongued

With death. Beware what the failed

Dead (for we all fail) have to say.

Oh, I would like to conjure Keat’s

Nightingale, and Chaucer’s pilgrims,

But those sweet worlds are done,

The flood and drouth are in their mouth.

The gifts of age are a bitter wisdom,

The dove descends only over there

Beyond the houses and the fields

Somewhere, in Nature’s being,

Which is intentionless, and our devotion

Must be to our own concerns,

Those values on mad wings

We have given to the universe,

Though I have not created anything,

I have merely repeated on my lips

What a billion sang in crying

Out the Self against spurious angels.

The masters are no masters unless

They teach humility, purification,

That is truth. Sadness is sweet, Verlaine,

The winds are sweet at evening.

Natura

Nature is beauty and consoles,

Art that is form is beauty and enfolds,

Love continues after the bitter word,

In us alone is realised the absurd.

Nature is beauty and it sings to me,

Art is what tries me with its mystery,

How the tender and frail, the blind and dumb

Make an eternity in a little room.

Nature is beauty and the heart in pain

Calls to the transient, though in vain,

For that consolation beauty brings,

Brushing the mind, whispering on slight wings.

In The Glass

Rejection is the Vortex and Jealousy.

Did you see what you were doing, did you know?

It is the unintended consequence, of which

We are guilty, that destroys us so.

Deceit is the Pit and Intense Desire.

Did we know we were deceiving, did we feel

The fire of our ridiculous unfeeling,

So that now we cannot say what we conceal,

Cannot speak the true word, lost among the dead

False language of the cheated bitter tongue,

Did we understand the chaos of emotion,

Fit then to disentangle right from wrong?

Love is the Ambiguity and Selfish Care.

Do we find ourselves beyond the mirror,

Is it only Narcissus, pale Echo in the air,

And we the only mystery of error?

So Hard

I must go beyond myself to find myself

And that is so hard.

In the spontaneity of things

In their entangled presence

I must seek myself

This process all forgotten:

The no-self of non-being

Is my essence.

I must learn the names of flowers,

I must watch the sky, I must

Feel the fountain dying in the air,

I must be winter, autumn

Still the man,

I must try to know this universe

Without why,

I must find the Tao,

Which is nothing religious,

Go live your life,

And let the temples fall

Or become museums, beautiful,

Testaments to another eye.

Tao twists and swirls

In the fields’ sweet mist,

The waterfall, the cloud going by.

I must go beyond myself

Beyond the mind

Which formed me, is me,

Created all I am, has made or marred,

Creature of the Intellectual Earth,

I inherited from all my sires

And a civilisation,

I must end all thought – so hard.

Greed And Fear

How do we reach, you said,

Beyond greed and fear?

The Nazarene’s analysis

And trying cost him dear.

And still the challenge for us,

How do we find

Beyond greed and fear

A refuge for the mind?

Greed that distorts the earth,

All relationship,

Fear that paralyses,

Loosens the living grip.

How do we reach, you said,

Beyond greed and fear,

Not in some afterlife (a fallacy)

But in this life, here?

Azalea Flowers

And this gone May

The azalea flowers

Blood-red in the green

Melt now like wounds,

Holes in the shadows

Torn deep in thick leaf

Bleeding, raw, as heart

Bleeds through the mind.

Suffering, strange thing

By which we near

Our only truth of being

Absolute perception.

Our loves conditional,

Our conditions harsh,

Blood-red azaleas bleed

Inside the living flesh.

Yet nothing truer than us,

Nothing, oh bright star,

Red as Antares, the azalea

Flower, of your mouth

The azalea flower

Of your depths,

Where you open,

Tender to night,

A beacon of time,

A chalice of space,

Heart’s liquid spilt

Onto the universe,

Turning to frost

To lilies, white milk

Poured out over the

Upraised face,

To the glitter of love,

To its bitter war,

To its blades of ice,

Its poniards of sleep,

Its lacerating need,

And dark rejection,

Deep green jealousies,

Oh, blood-red fires,

Azalea flowers wrecked

In this gone May,

Blood-red in the green

Melt like wounds.

Green Bay

Great heap of logs mouldering in the dark

Split and swell and ooze away blind sap

A sheltering seethe, beside which wrens build,

Weathered by quiet rain, bark-peeled by sun,

Easing to fern and bramble, rising to skies

Of stone and earth or the mind-lifting blue

Of noiseless June, an insect-harbour, caves

And ramparts, powdery bug-filled shards

And deep red inner failings spilling outward,

Heavy as the body and soul, frail as the air,

Where the doe eats, the dark buzzard waits

Pure as the saw’s bright steel in its intensity.

Here are the felled slopes of imagination,

Solider layers of life’s uncounted minutes,

Nature’s materials, a settlement, a being

Other than ours yet still the matter of ours,

Free of our intent, this alien stuff we fear,

Challenging the heart, reeling in the heart

To the green stillnesses we love, to the trees

Climbing level on level to soft grey cliffs,

Humming in the wind from bright precipices,

Trees individual as living people, selves

With heads upraised, black roots set deep

In the free soil of a clear unguarded presence.

We are not this world, not the essence of things,

Not this weight of piled logs in an emerald bay.

Ephemeral flakes of snow, we settle on them,

Starlight we cross them, clouds we shadow them,

Grass we rise and fall to their slower yearlong tide,

Ants, leaves, bark, feathers we shower on them,

We are a fall of time, a fragile rustle of mind,

A process, a tremor through their surer spaces,

We are not their innate indifference, of survival,

Or dissolution, their long slide to regeneration,

Their massive silence concerning every value:

Mute simple facts of what we declare as beauty.

Dark Night

Dancing of light

Where the grey fox sings,

Delicate arch

Where the squirrel swings

On a beam of sun

And the ant below

Dreams of amber

In drifts of snow.

The secret is light

And always light,

Even in our dark night.

Shale

Cold wind on shale,

And massive skies,

No banners here,

The deep ennui,

That follows

Every failure:

What is bright

In soundless light?

You go on by,

I lose you there,

Once we were fine,

Once time was ours.

Now your ghost

Haunting the dark,

And this white shale,

No banners here.

Oil

The bird’s stressed eye gazing at this

Which might be death or salvation

How can it know? White-coated

True or false hearts passing by.

Beaches slicked over with raw crude,

We bring you poison from the deeps,

More than full fathom five, still sounding,

Deep as the blackness in our spirits.

Small error that we ravage this planet,

Shellfish, crabs, detritus of dying?

Inside the oyster Man there is no pearl,

Whatever there is in Woman.

Dark oily matter flowing to the heart,

Poison, yes, the whole bloodstream fills,

And, flowing behind, the tides of regret,

Because we chose all this without choosing.

Poles

The shining flowers outside my window

Are a positive, the bright

Connector from which energy flows,

My mind the anode.

When energy sinks low all memory

Is valueless and wisdom, why,

What purpose in creation,

These flowers are flames.

Yellow, magenta, sky-blue, rose-pink

Petals fragile like butterfly wings

With the same casual elegance

Of breeze-blown movement.

The fires of thought are in flowers,

Such frail lances, shields, bouquets

Held out to the darknesses and days,

Our brothers and sisters, waiting

In a humility that is more than ours,

Or less, constellated stars

Chanced to the eye, burning

Such cool, such searing colours in the heart.

Deep Ecology?

Deep Ecology? I mistrust it.

There is no natural contact

With the world, and Gaia

Is simply the tale of feedback.

It takes a more relaxed view

Of Mind than I have to feel

One with the field and creatures,

Or a body more practical.

I am the great observer, Man,

The intrusive shape, thought,

On the far horizon. I am time,

Future and past disturbing world.

Oh yes, I too long to go back,

To the before-time of the child,

To the untouched planet,

Better without us.

For we all ride on this thing,

This dark monster merciless

With destruction at the heart,

The predator’s huge appetite.

And surely I am not alone

In loving Nature, yet hating

Humanity in its most foolish forms,

Religious nonsense, false dreams,

A pretence that primitive rite

Represents meaning or truth,

Or is more than a histrionic

Appeal to the longing in us.

There’s no way back,

We can’t go back.

The only depths are in mind,

Where the only house is.

Deep ecology is riven

With contradiction,

Leans on the civilised

To celebrate the wild.

Oh I am easy with plants,

Calm with trees, purer

With flowing water,

Try to harm no creatures.

But I know I am one

On the strange journey,

Of Mind into silence,

Or among the stars.

Every One Original

Leafing, reading,

Knowing the mind again,

Hello,

And here’s the beauty,

No two voices

Ever sound the same.

Far Star

Far star, from distance shine on me,

Light my sadness, light my failings,

Trail your veil of immaterial beauty

Remind me of the fires of long ago.

Remind me of minds almost touching,

Of bodies that clung, hours that fled,

Remind me of the laughter of true being,

Of the great river’s snow-white mystery.

Be mine for now, far star, as you were his,

Shine in intentionless flame like a delight,

Then fade into the soft tree-black horizon,

Close me in darkness, far star, help me sleep.

Irreality

This is not Being: we must dream the world.

That dream is the irreal.

  1. To consciousness, the mind which seems wholly contained in the world, and that identical world, whose creation and interpretation seems contained in the mind, are one and the same, in the irreal.
  2. The real world is a nonsense perpetrated by others. We must create our own worlds or be limited by theirs.
  3. The instability of words and perceptions leaves us standing in the void. The void leaves us relying on the instability of words and perceptions.
  4. Commit to the world that does not yet exist and it will illuminate the world that does, since what is existence but light, mind-light?
  5. There is no truth behind things; all truth is on the surface of things, that is, in the mind’s contours where all things exist as their own datum.
  6. Between the real and the unreal, lies the irreal, where we exist.
  7. The real is unstable and transitory. The irreal is, like the void, unstable and permanent.
  8. Consciousness is the projection of the irreal onto the real.
  9. Every mystery is transparent and there is nothing beyond it.
  10. In reality we are individuals, personalities, characters: in irreality we are the inner chaos, the strange order, of our own being.
  11. Imagination is not arbitrary; it is our ordering of the real world which is arbitrary.
  12. Every abandoned city is the irreal city of our dreams.
  13. Through the mind all ideas interpenetrate and are related. It is the identity, not the contrast, of dissimilar objects that opens the way to the void.
  14. Every word, every image, intends meaning, therefore to frustrate that meaning by refusing the habit it invokes simply compels the mind to interpret and create meaning out of non-meaning. That stimulating process is the process of irreality.
  15. Mind never lets the image alone. It evokes meaning even from chaos by imposing the forms of the irreal on the real.
  16. The mind always break through, breaks out of, the surface of the real.
  17. Blue as the eye of the green stick is the eye of silence.
  18. There is nothing miraculous in the depths of the universe, least of all points and instants.
  19. Tensions of form are imbued with our meaning.
  20. The essence of irreality is that meaning does not exist in things (beings, scripts, images) but is settled on them by the mind. Everything bears the stamp of meaning for us, for mind, however banal it may be, and if meaning does not leap from its surface then mind will leap into it, to make certain that it does. That leap, and the domain of that leap, is irreality.
  21. Mind can never be passive, when a gesture invades its space. The space of mind is meaning or rather the space-time, since mind and meaning is a process of creation which is also our means of grasping the world.
  22. Our most vital regions of the mind (or rather, capabilities, processes) are not conscious but beyond the conscious, just as the most profound aspects of the world are not real but irreal. In that respect what we call our ‘life’ is an epiphenomenon, a by-product of our irreal life.
  23. Behind every object lies its full meaning, different for each of us, its irreal meaning.
  24. How the mind works is not a statement of what the mind can achieve.
  25. Nothing is real, nothing is ideal, everything is irreal.
  26. Identity is the issue, our irreality, the fragile unstable region we occupy, which is also all the world.
  27. Irreality is the context for the future poetry of ideas.
  28. Anyone can have visions, but who can live them?
  29. Eros binds the human world together and prevents it from floating off into the void of space and time, or worse still into the machine (whose mind will not be ours)
  30. The twilight of the trees is lit by our endless desire.
  31. The mind, being irreal, cannot be satisfied with things only as they exist, it insists on things as they might be, as they over-exist, in thought, in imagination and in dream. That which immerses us in the world, and the world in us, cannot be satisfied by the world as ‘reality’, as habitual thought presents it, nor can it wholly deny the world’s intractability, it can only transmute endlessly.
  32. Freedom is what is left when the mind has exhausted the world.
  33. Un-lidding the sightless eye, we scream.
  34. Whatever issues a valid challenge to our power to create meaning even a meaning which is simply delight and no more serves the human imagination. Whatever disrupts and challenges expectation, in a way that is not merely banal, is a banner of freedom.

Index Of First Lines