The Peregrine, Peripatetic Catatonic

There is an animal I cannot escape
No matter the elusive sidesteps taken
Around the inevitable corner it waits
Coiled to spring, it coils and waits

Or when in thought the eye turns higher
Towards some purer view of things
It pounces at me from beneath
With the snagging claw to complement the wing

Then down it pulls; it pulls me down
To the ground of primal grounding
The throbbing heat and snarling chaos
Of the birth savanna 

Is that really how life sprang
And learned to climb the ladder?
Or can unrealistic mythology
Better penetrate the matter?

	Once walking down the hills and hollows
	That roll down to the lake below
	You broke a twig from the wild mint
	The cool smell drifted in the wind
	That brushed across my face
		And the summer lightning,
			The distant winter lightning,
	Wild onions among the jonquils and the monkey grass,
	Then following the cool and shaded creek bed
	Shuttered from the burning sun
	Beneath a canopy of interlacing branches.
	Again, later, young lovers, now only ghosts,
	But then living and hidden in the undergrowth,
	Having sneaked away from normal time,
	Suppressing their laughter from those who passed by, giggling
	As blackbirds fill the trees squawking and twittering,
	Nervously jittery, resting on migration,
	The bats and moths and bullbats flitting in the falling twilight,
	These and only things such as these, memories,
	Now so near, always so far,
	Jumbled, interwoven, tangled, 
	Yet, at times, distinct,
	Are all that are left as one moves forward,
	Leaving a great sadness by being things lost,
	A taste of peace, a shadow of peace,
	With the sorrow of being no more.

		The smell of a dead mouse discovered too late
		In a space heater
			Aroused a deep sympathy in the young child,
				A precocious sympathy.

He looked at her, unable to resist,
The call of ecstasy that leads seductively
To final torment beyond the kiss
The moth to the flame
That burns to singe its wings 	
To consume the body in the dancing fire
Until the body is the fire and the dance.

	The clover opened broadly in the false spring,
		Now limp and folded upon itself in the sudden frost.
	The redbud and wisteria begin to bud in the early spring
		Weathering the intermittent freezes. 


	II.

O, the moonlight falls gently, dappling in faerie light the crack-whore,
Who twitches and stumbles on the corner,
Crack-heads come and go behind her, through an empty door,
A car pulls up beside her; the window is rolled down; 
Unseen in the darkness, he opens the door.

Always modern and always changing, racing headlong---
	Never before such frantic mutation,
	Never before such confusion of time.

		We followed the blind visionary,
			Hanging between two worlds, 
				Hanging between.

To stop the wheel that never stops
Its unremitting revolutions
To end desire that is enchainment,
To find the point of stillness that sustains
The constant, nervous motion of the weary dance,
To never lapse from the perfection of trance,
These things have nothing to do with the times
Or the fashions of the times,
These things, neither new nor old,
Have to do with the timeless
Overcoming of time.

	Hope brings only greater pain
	For the only thing that is attained
	Is the absence of that hoped for.

Was one of such beauty nothing but the mask?
The mask is peeled, only to reveal nothing.
In an attitude of grasping prayer, futile reaching,
When the revelation revealed nothing,
I sank into the deep,
The deep of the sea.

	Shimmering leaves of cottonwood trees 
	Hushed and glinting in an autumn sun
	Whisper of peace beyond the grasp
	That overtakes one with nothing to ask.

I am asked not to see what I see
And to see what I cannot see

	Watching the shadows on the wall of the cave,
		Knowing only the shadows.


	III.

Humankind is saved by its ignorance
Of a reality (whatever that may be)
Too big, too far, too near, too wonderful and horrible to see.
Quotidian distractions serve to keep us ignorant
And sane (whatever that may be).
Walking and walking quotidian circles,
If we cannot be given immediate gratification,
Grant us, at least, immediate distraction,
Perpetual distraction from the horror
Underlying everything, beneath and beyond the surface,
The agony of each moment of conscious being in the shadow,
Overspreading all that is, pervading each moment before its unfolding.
Having lost the completion of the closed circle
We wander in faltering, retrograde orbits
Half-knowing we are going nowhere
But going urgently, frantically.
The voice that cries in the eternal wilderness
Is drowned out by the cry of the meaningless wind,
But cries still to tell us, in agony to tell us,
Of the need of the circle of perpetuity, eternity,
Of meaning beyond the reigning chaos of chance
Whirling the universe in a random dance
	No. Not this bloodless, breathless universe!
	Can there be life, and such consciousness of life
	In a lifeless universe?  Is so much birth, and death,
	And birth beyond death from and by nothing?
		Forgive me my backwardness, but I still cannot be rid of
						the unmoved mover.

Living is a weaning from existence
Learning to let go of all one cannot hold
Learning to surrender moment by moment
Atom by atom.


	IV.

In an unreal moonlight, distant and cold,
A glossy, blue-black rook
Alights upon the mossy, lichen-covered rood
I heard the scream of an owl, the sad call of the whippoorwill,
The mockingbird, the cricket cry, the cicada fade,
The mournful lament of the mourning dove,
All out of place and out of season.
The world falls into the growing space between the ideal and the real.
What has led to this point is seen at last 
As false starts, false springs, deaths not noticed or realized,
Each half-conscious step of the half-conscious way
That led from there to here
And leads from here
	     From here to where is never clear.

The world rushed in 
The wind that whirled
Leaves in spiral dances	
And trees in whipping seizures
Frantic wind
Distant sunlight
Slants into the growing shadows,
Glares too brightly on windshields.

	Give me cool, dry air
	To replace this throbbing heat.

Perched upon the cusp
Of a new age being born
As always
As ever
A weary, anxious world
Gropes into uncertainty	
Of vapour
Of dust
The human genome unravels
Tracing labyrinthine threads that point
To mystery
Incredulity 
The faltering reach into space
Unrealized colonization
What end waits?
What salvation?
Each moment a death,
A frontier and a birth
Unfolding
Collapsing. 


	V.

And so it was that I came to wander
A dark, obscure and unknown way
Of stops and starts and unforeseen windings,
Coiled, like springs, coiled in anticipation.
And it came to be that I strayed
Into the valley dark and hollow
Where are stored ghosts and bones.
All light was veiled in that black valley
I waited in silence for one sent to call my name,
But no angel came.
	Mourning and weeping in this valley of tears.
Once, when young, in an exploration somewhere above
The valley walls, three figures approached, it was in a desert,
A desert as yellow and golden as polished gold, as golden as the sun,
As a great wind circled around with a fiery wail.
The three figures approached, and they were silence,
And where they went they carried silence with them
Within the screaming, siren winds.	
The Three walked to me, the one in the middle, 
Stretched out his arm, and placed his hand upon my shoulder,
So that instantly I was within the silence
And did not hear the endless howl of the wind.

The appearance of the Three was that in body
They were formed as man, but without countenance or features,
Smooth and polished as if fashioned from gold and burnished so
completely
They burned from within with their own fire and light.
In that glowing desert all was golden 
Burning without heat.
The Three spoke, but in silence
That spoke of the secret of silence,
Trying to tell me something I could not comprehend.

That was once, long ago, 
I was taken up in the spirit
To that highest of deserts in the thinnest of airs,
Above the valley, above the mountains.

And once it came to be that I strayed
Into the foothills
And knelt, beseeching God, beseeching, crying:
	Give direction to my straying
	Meaning to my wandering
	That has led me many places
	That has led me nowhere
	That has blindly led me, blindly,
	By reason of my lack of vision.

			We send up these sighs

To feel this hope one had not hoped 
Nor dreamt to feel again
Relentlessly undercut by hopelessness
This fire that longs to bloom
Within the hollow breast,
A bud trembling to blossom,
Restrained and repressed
An impulse for love that has not stirred
For ages in breathless limbo
An expansion and contraction
A yearning and denial
A reaching and hiding.
Such desire, longing and desire
Filled with mocking certainty
That all leads nowhere.
Yet, this bud of fire trembles in the freezing air
With desire to bloom.

Winter repeatedly interrupted 
By false springs
Beckoning the tender beginnings of life
To reach tentatively upward to then
Be laid waste by sudden frosts, then
Spring comes early anyway
Humid and oppressive.

Spring, inextricably bound with mothers
And life reborn:
	The autumn before 
	She remarked the frantic, dancing colours 
	Of the butterflies,
		"So sad that soon they all must die."
More than a reminder of birth
Spring is now bound with death,
Of all that is lost, and lost again,
Endlessly. 
That is the shadow of life,
If one calls life the light,
The death and loss that birth implies. 

When butterflies return in spring,
In that season of resurrection,
They are not the same that fell
To ground the previous fall,
	Those are long since dried in the wind,
	Dissolved by rain, snow or ice,
	Or were disassembled and carted away
	By organized streams of fastidious ants.
They are not the ones, 
The same yet different.	
And yet, from this idea, the cycle of seasons,
The cycles of insect, animal, vegetation
Grows the waiting for the bell that brings
True resurrection and a birth not broken
From the beginning with death and loss.
On this we wait, we hope and wait,
Through revolving seasons for

	This God, unapproachable, incomprehensible,
	God, creator of slugs and 
	Stars that shine backwards through time
	To perhaps, the beginning of time
	On the furthest edges of existence
	Discernible to our telescopes...

		This God, creator of eagle and gnat,
		The lion and the rat,
		Slugs slithering on the warm damp ground
		And stars scattered across an interstellar space
		More distant and cold than we dare to conceive,
		Forming an infinite question.

			Lead me to the rock	
				That is higher than I.