Home

I sift the image debris of old homes, brushing the sand out from bones carefully. I have become a shadow watcher, reading wood shavings on the floor as tea-leaves. I see light paint recede into ever-darkening corners (park, lamp, candle, hung filigree). Each space can lurch into life-- a sudden carnival stage-set-- turning slowly, creaking loudly. These spaces are humming, and strange, and then quiet. Sometimes there are passages and tunnels underneath, other times there are torn light pathways from walls that breathe like skin to an outside world. There are always lights that mark the edge of the stage.

5

With echoes for neighbors
we will die together
and live in the shadow of the seasons,
in dust,
in the open book of prairies,
in grass we trampled once
and signed with our footprints.

We will stay like relics
of our kind
for our kind--
reminders, shadows,
echoes of echoes.

from 'Voices' by Adonis (Ali Ahmed Said), Transformations of the Lover 

6

Mihyar assembles space
and spins it on his tray.
He towers over everything.
Nights are his paths,
and stars are his fires.

One look at his face--
and the sky brightens.

from 'Voices' by Adonis (Ali Ahmed Said), Transformations of the Lover 

When We Pray Alone

We are brought thick desserts, and we rarely refuse them.
We worship devoutly when we're with others.
Hours we sit,
                     though we get up quickly,
after a few minutes, when we pray alone.
We hurry down the gullet of our wantings.

But these qualities can change,
as minerals in the ground rise inside trees
and become tree, as a plant faces an animal
and enters the animal, so a human
can put down the heavy
body-baggage and
be light.

Rumi, tr. by Coleman Barks

The Wanderer

A wanderer, I make a prayer
of dust.
             Exiled, I sing
my soul until the world
burns to my chants
as to a miracle.
              Thus am I
risen.
               Thus am I redeemed.

Adonis, (Ali Ahmed Said), Transformations of the Lovers, tr. Samuel Hazo

The Annunciation

It was not night, not even when the darkness came
That came blacker than any night, and more fearful,
Like a bell beating and I under its darkness dying
To the stun of the sound. Before that
It was not dark nor loud nor any way strange,
Just the empty kitchen, with the smell of the bean-flowers
In their late blossom, coming in at the window,
And the stillness, just that empty hour of the afternoon
                              When it is hard indeed to believe in time...

W.S. Merwin, from The First Four Books of Poems

Attributes of the Lovers

Sifting through old writings I came upon this enchanted tiny fragment.  As I continue to read and study and write-- over the years the tracery of my thoughts overlap.  I find much comfort in the repetition of obsessive themes-- as my thoughts circle back like wing-beats to a similar theme I can try again to overlay the trace paper with something more true, more frilled and delicate.  I have always tried to write about a spiritual beloved-- to outline the shape of ecstatic love with the graphite dust from everyday passions, from real figures and shapes.  How to address this type of love/ beloved except with constant praises and attention?

Attributes of the Lovers:

Magpie, orchids, alexandrite, tourmaline, Iceland spar, wormwood, ergot and ecbolics, ominous appearances, banshees (?)

Gary Snyder

“If a Bodhisattva retains the thought of an ego, a person, a being, or a soul, he is no more a Bodhisattva.”

            You be Bosatsu,

            I’ll be the taxi-driver

            Driving you home.

The curious multi-stratified metamorphic rock.  Blue and white,

clouds reaching out.  To survive a winter here learn to browse

and live in holes in the rocks under the snow.

Sabi: One does not have a great deal to give.  That which one

does give has been polished and perfected into a spontaneous

emptiness; sterility made creative, it has no pretensions, and

encompasses everything.

                                    Zen view, o.k.?

Cratershan 15 August 1957

Lookout’s Journal

Gary Snyder, Earth House Hold

279

Last night in sleep I dreamed- yet what sleep is there for lovers?-- that I was searching inside the Kaaba for where a prayer-niche might be.

The Kaaba of the spirits, not the Kaaba which, when you reach it on a dark night, you say, "Where is candle or moon-light?"

Nay, rather its foundations are the light of the whole world, from which the rays of your spirit take light. Only how can the soul endure it?

Its hospice is all light, its carpeting is knowledge and reason, its Sufis all bewildered, where is the clatter of your shoes?

Fortunate one, the crown and throne you hold hidden in you are beyond the imagination of Kay-qobad and Sanjar and Sohrab.

Bird of heart, fly amidst the garden of its beauty, for there is a secure abode; where is snare or beating stick?

There is a gift in the midst of your body's loans; search in the middle of the soul for the gift of Giver.

Rumi, tr.A.J. Arberry, Mystical Poems of Rumi 2

As cinders curl inwards on themselves

As lit cinders curl inward,

You are the round changing edge,

slow-burning tracery,

charcoal-spiral.

I follow you closely along the burn-path,

you are smoke from the edge,

you are cinder ground ash,

you are the curl of the wood as it gives, just now, into fire.

You are smoke-storm racing down the hill, hot path,

water-seeker.

I am black pitch no-sound, whisperer,

quiet-coiled.

You are singed, then waterspun,

dervish-one, molten-borne.

I am cooling bath,

routed-out, muddied-one,

sacred pool, crystal heart,

spark-found. 

elg 2010

All minerals and schist

All minerals and schist,

you are true sun,

golden, bright.

we two have to tone down our brightness,

we can’t be beacons and fuel

this time.

Now,

we are inward gold, handspun,

molten.

your hair is like floss dear,

your sweetness spills out

like rays from a lit cut gem.

eg 4/22/2010

304

Give that spirited wine, for we are all in such a state that we cannot tell wine from cup, head from foot.
We are all fresher than the lily and the rose branch, become entirely spirit and spirited glow.

Rumi, tr. by A.J. Arberry

Psalm

I ponder you in clamor and in silence
Tracking you through the course of time, like game,
To see: are you my much sought-after falcon?
Should I kill you? Or kneel down and pray.

For faith's sake or the sake of denial,
Stubborn I search for you, and uselessly.
Of all my dreams you are the loveliest
And I daren't shake the sky to let you fall.

As if reflected in the flow of water
Sometimes you seem to be and sometimes not;
I've glimpsed you in the stars, among the fish
Like the wild bull when he is taking water.

And now, us two alone, in your great story
I stay to match myself again with you,
Without my wanting to emerge the victor.
I want to touch you and to shout: "He is!"

Tudor Arghezi
tr. Andrei Bantas and Thomas Amherst Perry

Annie Dillard

From Holy the Firm

Every day is a god, each day is a god, and holiness holds forth in time. I worship each god, I praise each day splintered down, splintered down and wrapped in time like a husk, a husk of many colors spreading, at dawn fast over the mountains split.
I wake in a god. I wake in arms holding my quilt, holding me as best they can inside my quilt.
Someone is kissing me — already. I wake, I cry, “Oh,” I rise from the pillow. Why should I open my eyes?
I open my eyes. The god lifts from the water. His head fills the bay. He is Puget Sound, the Pacific; his breast rises from pastures; his fingers are firs; islands slide wet down his shoulders. Islands slip blue from his shoulders and glide over the water, the empty, lighted water like a stage.
Today’s god rises, his long eyes flecked in clouds. He flings his arms, spreading colors; he arches, cupping sky in his belly; he vaults, vaulting and spread, holding all and spread on me like skin.
Under the quilt in my knees’ crook is a cat. She wakes; she curls to bite her metal sutures. The day is real; already, I can feel it click, hear it clicking under my knees.
The day is real; the sky clicks securely in place over the mountains, locks round the islands, snaps slap on the bay. Air fits flush on farm roofs; it rises inside the doors of barns and rubs at yellow barn windows. Air clicks up my hand cloven into fingers and wells in my ears’ holes, whole and entire. I call it simplicity, the way matter is smooth and alone.
I toss the cat. I stand and smooth the quilt. “Oh,” I cry, “Oh!”
I live on northern Puget Sound, in Washington State, alone. I have a gold cat, who sleeps on my legs, named Small. In the morning I joke to her blank face, Do you remember last night? Do you remember? I throw her out before breakfast, so I can eat.
There is a spider, too, in the bathroom, with whom I keep a sort of company. Her little outfit always reminds me of a certain moth I helped to kill. The spider herself is of uncertain lineage, bulbous at the abdomen and drab. Her six-inch mess of a web works, works somehow, works miraculously, to keep her alive and me amazed. The web itself is in a corner behind the toilet, connecting tile wall to tile wall and floor, in a place where there is, I would have thought, scant traffic. Yet under the web are sixteen or so corpses she has tossed to the floor.
The corpses appear to be mostly sow bugs, those little armadillo creatures who live to travel flat out in houses, and die round. There is also a new shred of earwig, three old spider skins crinkled and clenched, and two moth bodies, wingless and huge and empty, moth bodies I drop to my knees to see.
Today the earwig shines darkly and gleams, what there is of him: a dorsal curve of thorax and abdomen, and a smooth pair of cerci by which I knew his name. Next week, if the other bodies are any indication, he will be shrunken and gray, webbed to the floor with dust. The sow bugs beside him are hollow and empty of color, fragile, a breath away from brittle fluff. The spider skins lie on their sides, translucent and ragged, their legs drying in knots. And the moths, the empty moths, stagger against each other, headless, in a confusion of arcing strips of chitin like peeling varnish, like a jumble of buttresses for cathedral domes, like nothing resembling moths, so that I should hesitate to call them moths, except that I have had some experience with the figure Moth reduced to a nub.
Two summers ago I was camping alone in the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia. I had hauled myself and gear up there to read, among other things, James Ramsey Ullman’s The Day on Fire, a novel about Rimbaud that had made me want to be a writer when I was sixteen; I was hoping it would do it again. So I read, lost, every day sitting under a tree by my tent, while warblers swung in the leaves overhead and bristle worms trailed their inches over the twiggy dirt at my feet; and I read every night by candlelight, while barred owls called in the forest and pale moths massed round my head in the clearing, where my light made a ring.
Moths kept flying into the candle. They would hiss and recoil, lost upside down in the shadows among my cooking pans. Or they would singe their wings and fall, and their hot wings, as if melted, would stick to the first thing they touched — a pan, a lid, a spoon — so that the snagged moths could flutter only in tiny arcs, unable to struggle free. These I could release by a quick flip with a stick; in the morning I would find my cooking stuff gilded with torn flecks of moth wings, triangles of shiny dust here and there on the aluminum. So I read, and boiled water, and replenished candles, and read on.
One night a moth flew into the candle, was caught, burnt dry, and held. I must have been staring at the candle, or maybe I looked up when a shadow crossed my page; at any rate, I saw it all. A golden female moth, a biggish one with a two-inch wingspan, flapped into the fire, dropped her abdomen into the wet wax, stuck, flamed, frazzled and fried in a second. Her moving wings ignited like tissue paper, enlarging the circle of light in the clearing and creating out of the darkness the sudden blue sleeves of my sweater, the green leaves of jewelweed by my side, the ragged red trunk of a pine. At once the light contracted again and the moth’s wings vanished in a fine, foul smoke. At the same time her six legs clawed, curled, blackened, and ceased, disappearing utterly. And her head jerked in spasms, making a spattering noise; her antennae crisped and burned away and her heaving mouth parts crackled like pistol fire. When it was all over, her head was, so far as I could determine, gone, gone the long way of her wings and legs. Had she been new, or old? Had she mated and laid her eggs, had she done her work? All that was left was the glowing horn shell of her abdomen and thorax — a fraying, partially collapsed gold tube jammed upright in the candle’s round pool.

Bethlehem

“There in the church of the Nativity, I took worn stone stairways to descend to levels of dark rooms, chapels, and dungeonlike corridors where hushed people passed.  The floors were black stone or cracked marble.  Dense brocades hung down old stone walls.  Oil lamps hung in layers.  Each polished silver or brass lamp seemed to absorb more light than its orange flame emitted, so the more the lamps shone, the darker the space.” 

Annie Dillard, For the Time Being, 78