Who liveth alone longeth for mercy, Maker's mercy. Though he must traverse tracts of sea sick at heart, ---trouble with oars ice-cold waters, the ways of exile,---Weird is set fast. With the rebirth of Spring each year My mother is reborn With anticipation for hatching of chickens And the less revealed hatching of birds in the woods, The blooming of dogwoods, fluorescent greening of trees. The testimony of that shack Is rural past, normal poverty ---- Choked and swallowed by vines That slowly splinter its walls, trees push Through the floors and ceiling, Beyond the rusted tin roof Curling it back, Reaching through the walls In day after daylight of forgetting. The weakness I revel in is constant desire for salvation, Continual, perpetual salvation always as exploration, Ablution, renewal, rebirth, fresh experience ----- And knowing this, too, shall grow thin through familiarity, Then vague absence will search for new redemption. We walked that night Looking in opposite directions, Bumping into each other, Stumbling over each other. What fools we were! Clearly two clowns. I have stood beside you. I have felt your warmth, your breath, the reality of flesh, But now you are passed into What Was. These stones crouch easily without ache for movement Watching you and me---- one shift of shadow on the ground---- A creeping of an inch in the movement of the sun. Did I not tell you once of the whisper of stones? Did I not tell you once of the murmur which I could not comprehend? I missed the message in a sudden rush of wind Or the passing of a car with a rattle on the road. There is unimaginable knowing lurking beneath inert solidity---- Beneath the heaviness is life, as beneath grass, birds, rocks, everything, you and me. If that current were found we would hesitate, Wanting to grab it, Wondering if grabbing it brings immortality or electrocution. Wealth stands wasted, Wind beaten walls covered in frost, Ruined habitations, wine-halls and altars crumble, Fill with snow in winter and weeds in summer. In a sick green light Amidst frightened bird cries and fleeing wings, Amidst floating dust, withered grass, wilting trees, All beings are weak, thin, panting Because of the blue man who lives in the flames on the river. He must die or be transformed to change this dying. Now is the time for far reaching suffering---- Reaching outward and pushing inward, ever deeper---- A refining of suffering and ecstasy on higher and deeper planes. Now is the time to begin growing old, As the implications sink into and envelop one, As growing old becomes the road, on which we have been walking, But now the walk is renewed, as these steps are the last steps Of open youth and the first steps in the closed corridor. Wasn't there something I looked for? The suffering of this tenderness! Tenderness I have never found a means to express---- Never approached expression remotely. This cold rock tenderness. This thunder blood tenderness. This falling, deflating tenderness. How I want to tell you. Do you listen? How I need to tell you, But I cannot say what I cannot say. I ache Between inversion of hope, despair, Life, death, beginning, ending---- Between, always between. This must be the nausea---- When everything is here too much---- Pulsating, pressing in, suffocating---- I lie down. Have I betrayed my brothers by growing old? Did they, instead, betray me? Does the sin of aging lead to exclusion, Rejection and expulsion from the tribe? Is there escape in relegating to unavoidability? In knowing their eyes not open to the incomplete fraction of more? You let go of things so easily---- That is your nature. You hold onto nothing and go when you must Leaving behind what is left behind. But I, although I wander alone And wear the mark of stranger, Have coffee with ghosts And the wind that dims the candles Is a wind from years ago. The potted marigolds in the breezeway Are at once wilting and blooming, The blossoms dry to papery brown And beneath the green leaves and reaching stems Hang shriveled leaves curling back on themselves. Constant care and watering are needed. The cactus is growing quickly. The arrival of summer definite---- Spring's moderation lost (not long ago seeming hot) But now summer has come With hot wind over dying pale grass In this year of drought. At night the wind barely stirs, but no cooler, The trees silent, black and heavy. Around humming electric lights spiral frenzied moths and beetles. Sheet lightning across the western sky, Thunder rolls across distance, growing quieter Until drowned out by tree frogs singing. The faint smell of rain strings tension. Is the silent lightning closer or further? Hear me through the tense stringing of night, The crisscross of veins and humming wires, Strained cables suspending the darkness: Plucking them I formulate thought or melody Which travels concentrically outward Vibrating distant branches. I'yehe! My children, My children, We have rendered them desolate. The whites are crazy---- Ahe'yuhe'yu! We shall live again. We shall live again. You've got it all wrong. What you think you know that I meant Is not what I meant. Somewhere in the imprecision, the ambiguity of words The translation failed between speaking, hearing, thinking. Do not presume to teach me of the ascetic purity In the role of artist, do not assume Those unflinching sweet words whitewash the dark. Perhaps we are abreast on the track and look across to each other But may not have circled the same number of times. Our respective despairs are isolated definitions: For you the greatest sin and evil, For me a necessary condition that appears hopeless But does not exclude hope----- A nihilism to work through and beyond. Do not presume to teach me. Do you think I contradict myself? Very well then. "I used to be shy, but no longer. I've learned the value of using everyone And everything to get the most that I can get. After losing timidity I learned the world was my oyster And I go pearl hunting every day." Things look old so quickly now. What before was a matter of centuries Is now a matter of a decade or two. Signs, fashions, cars are antiquated relics Faded from the crisp, sleek, bright modernity That sparkled in their unveilings. There is suffering. There is suffering because there is desire. Do not desire and do not suffer. Think not of tomorrow. The reed bends and the great oak snaps. Power provides according to one's impeccability. Live each moment as a plenum, Wanting nothing to be different, Forgetting unreal past and future. I know with my mind But my heart is frenetic, Craving action then stillness. Gaia and Kali are expert seductresses. Sitting encircled by seven mirrors Each reflecting a different face. Contemplation does not tell which is truer Or which the original. Personae grow like skin cells, evolve and conquer, Fall away, like snakeskin or scales when dried and dead, Sometimes resurrecting themselves as spectres of homesickness or probabilities. All evil karma of greed, anger and folly Of my body, mouth and thought I now confess. There is prayer for the feeding of hungry ghosts. We say grace with the Prajnaparamita: O Bodhi, gone, gone, gone to the other shore, Landed at the other shore…. I search for the ox Now and then seeing traces. There are none among the living To whom I declare myself Or tell my heart-thought With rain approaching The feel of the air changes---- White, grey, violent blue clouds, With patches of weak blue between---- A greater weight of silence. Gnats dance clustered above the grass, Small points of light disappearing and reappearing At different points of their spirals, avoiding collision, Like electrons or planets or moons. Two hawks rise in circles between towering clouds. There is underlying a vital humming and a quivering of trees. They storm the walls. I am not enough men to stop them. Chaos is eminent. Again and again Not knowing who I am. "The wind is alive. I am afraid to breathe the wind!" "You should be glad that the wind is alive, it should not scare you." "The grass---- everything is alive---- it frightens me---- I am afraid to step on the grass." "You should not be afraid. It is better that all is alive---- animism." "The wind! I cannot stand to feel it inside my lungs!" The time of stone, strata, solidification And the time of the gnat. The breeding, hatching and rule of the dinosaur And the time of extinction. The time of man, only a fraction, Still strains comprehension. At the limit of exhaustion In the floating of illness Sinking toward warm rest, lucid sleep, Knowing it is time to start The next gauntlet of exhaustion. Thinking I dreamt the slouch of the beast. There is POWER In this rain, This lightning and thunder. This primordial green, this ancient rain, Are at this moment all that ever was, All that will ever be. When that is all that matters---- Sublime! Samadhi. When there are visitors The venomous fangs are retracted Behind smiles and strained silence, Disguised with greetings and excuses for the permanent mess. Everything is too much to take---- Everyday worries brought to fever pitch. She keeps a harpy in the cage of her ribs That now and then bursts through the skin, Bones, muscle, pushing perfect breasts aside To lean out, lunge out and sing hideous, grating songs From its beaked face. With a knock on the door She is back under lock and key And the rage is hidden in that hidden cage. In deserts of smooth rock and sand, In flat places of sensory deprivation And high places of thin air The eagle can become your brother And the owls speak, offering guidance. There the word is spoken and made real. Such places and moments must now be sought, Recreated in our minds. We have worked hard to build far from these places, To shut them out, To live in fortresses guarding against them, To silence the voice and make it unreal. It is he, it is he, The person with the spirit of an owl. Look! Below is the floor in ruins. Suddenly we were in a world of cloud In the middle of a great white plain And in the stillness were whispers. Blind fish without division of day from night, Crystals growing in the dark, Caves of stale air and slow trickling water Branch inside mountains, hollow roots reaching under earth, Vast chambers, high ceilings, huge with blackness. In torch or electric light disturbing old darkness Suddenly are bones, now part of the walls, Ribs filled with rock, Skull with mineral eyes, coated by the slow dripping of stone---- A different scale of time Measured by the melting of rock and the flowing of glass From the tops to the bottoms of windowpanes. The fossilized smile, crystallized spine, Limbs protruding from the stalagmite Have long measured time with this slow clock Although at one time the death and rebirth of sun and moon, The timing of thirst and hunger, the flash wink of lust Were disguised as forever. "Would you like a drink?" "That would be good." "How about a game?" "No, thank you." "Chess? Backgammon? Cards?" "No---- I don't play games." "Not any games?" "None." "Come on, dance. Let's dance." "No." "You can dance---- come on--- you'll like it." "No, really, I don't like it." The small chiming of the clock Accentuates the silence. "I do not like them Sam I am." "You have no meat on your bones. Look at you---- none at all---- so thin---- No meat on your bones---- They look like they're wrapped in rubber bands---- Just look at your hands!" "My rings fall off now. They used to get stuck." "Would you like a light?" "Yes…. Thank you." "What do you think of the weekly crisis? Do you think this time there will be war?" "Sooner or later they will find a reason." "You are always so quiet. Why? You interest me. There is something going on in there, But I'm never sure what. Who are you? What do you like? What do you like to do? What do you think? Who are you?" I cannot find who I am. I am a permanent identity crisis. Sea urchins move in packs along the ocean floor Stalking swaying forests of giant kelp in pulsing green sunlight Their movement unnoticed by fast schools of fish. All with their own time---- rocks also, and sand, And the time of the sea floor and the violence Of tectonic plates colliding. Islands push above water, steaming, hissing, Cooling---- then tiny flowers bloom vividly and die, Then grass, trees---- The quartz precision of pollination, Migrating birds with routes and cycles Older than thousands of generations, The origin unknown---- the knowledge, map and timing Handed down unconsciously. The alert will be a warbling siren blast. Turn off the stove, all gas; unplug all electrical appliances, Close blinds and drapes, leave doors unlocked but closed. This will not help at all. The time of bones becoming stone, lichens growing, continents crawling, Vapour In implosive collapse to neutron star, Mayflies, In expanding dust of supernova. We stop and wipe sweat from our foreheads In the hotter modern sun, itself a dying star Too small to nova, burning, burning, Toward black cinder. In the beginning of things There was not what is nor what is not, Death nor immortality, no signs or objects, No night, no day, no dark, no light, no void or fullness, Only in deep peace the ONE breathed in its own power. Now in us, smaller than a bird seed Greater than heaven and earth, Is a point of power Through which all endures Is perceived and sustained. I have known many voices, But not my voice. I have changed my faces, like clothes, But don't know my face. I am trying to learn to hear and see. The Dance on many levels, many times, Intermeshed and intertwined, Penetrating through each other, juxtaposed, Growing through, beyond and around one another---- Worm, cloud, beast, angel, The anchored sprouting of anemone and barnacle, The intricacies of history, prehistory and post-history, being and Being, nothingness and Nothingness. Is this dissonance of clashing times and keys A cacophony resolved in higher harmony, Or nothing but noise of chaos? This is new, but couched in the ancient, Under the modern sun, a dark bauble in the jeweled net. That time has passed as though it had never been. Somewhere in a parking lot amid broken glass and flattened cans, At a shrine or precipice, Eastern and Western, On a coming and going fading in and out channel on TV, In the lonely static and distant voices, snatches of music, Between stations on the radio, Between the words of chanted primal prayers, In the incantation of words too powerful to be written, The ghost of all I have known or imagined said: Live as if each moment is the first moment. Live as if each moment is your last. Live as if you will relive this moment eternally. Live as if you will never have this moment again. Do not forget your life. Do not forget your death. Do not forget you are Christ and Buddha, Satan and Hitler, Atman and Maya. Live as if only now is real, no past or future. Live as if past and future are as real and present as the present. Live as if nothing is real. Live as if appearance is the only reality. Live as if you will never be young again. Live as if you will never be old again. Live as if you want to be here. Die as if you are ready to die. Be here. Do the best you can. Cope how you will. Understand as much as you can. Always know there is more. Know that this is all there is. Know that you can know nothing, But know that you should try to know. Know we are slaves to our cravings, And the world is a feast and a hunger, Our strength and weakness, our birth, growth and death. Sanctify the sewer and the altar. Pity those who deserve pity. Feel sadness for them that they may not feel for themselves. See the beautiful melancholy of our predicament. Pity reactionary, fanatic fundamentalists and fascists Who preach freedom and prosperity, But don't listen to them. Think about birth and death while you are between the two. Live as if you have just awakened to find yourself alive. Live as if life is only a dream. Live as if each moment determines the existence of the universe. Live as if the game you play is life and death. Quiet sunlight from the west Reaches through and beyond the hall, Rich yellow, golden-red, As if this apartment were a chapel in timeless twilight welcoming dusk. The dust hangs comfortably on the light, easily, not nervous for the moment: muted purple, orange, grey, golden golden golden
Table of Contents
Letter to the Author:
Patrick Wallace at patrick_wallace_2000@yahoo.com