The birds are whispering together.

Cold husks of leaves and seeds litter the ground,
scuttle through pathways to the street.

You were the one that found the rocks.
The layered soapstones, the agates, the moss-in-quartz.

When we kicked along the edge of town,
It felt like daylight,
it felt like just before-sundown,
it felt like winter hinge,
day-hinge…. in breath between day and night.

What was this we used to call it years ago?
Evensong?
What Rilke called it?

Spectre stone,
Rock formation
Shadow form.

The lit fuse of memory is running its trace through my storehouse tonight
shining indiscriminant on that summer season,
afternoons stacked brightly like old slides,
packed tightly like clothes in a trunk,
dust and yellow grass, heat and edge of nothing town.


I don’t know what I am trying to remember.
But I miss that person, most dearly.

You are ravens-head,
lampblack.
I am powdered ash, white stone,
goldenrod.

Together we make a circuit,
halo-haze, coiled spring, resin-ground.

You are obsidian,
lava-ground, jet-stone.
I am cindered-flowers, dry marigold,
sandalwood, sweet smoke.

You are inscriber, chalk-marker,
Graphite-sewn.
I am worked-on, cinder-prone,
Soapstone.

(older poem, elg 2010)

Helen in Egypt, by H.D. (Book 5:8)

...we are children of Zeus;
I must wait, I must wonder again
at the fate that has brought me here;

surely, she must forget,
she must forget the past,
and I must forget Achilles....

------

... but never the ember
born of his strange attack,
never his anger,

never the fire,
never the brazier,
never the Star in the night.

So many things, however, are a genuine heartbalm like the prickles of the Pleides rising on the night. Piers tells me that the local patois image for stars in their first state (like an etching) is "flour sprinklings". (211, Monsieur, L. Durrell)

You are what your deep, driving desire is.
As your desire is, so is your will.
As your will is, so is your deed.
As your deed is, so is your destiny.

(Brihadaranyaka iv.4.5)

Sagesse, by H.D. (10)

Or is it the great tide that covers the rock-pool
so that it and the rock-pool are indistinguishable

from the sea-shelf and are part of the sea-floor,
though the sea-anemone may quiver apprehensively

and the dried weed uncurl painfully
and the salt-sediment rebel, "I was salt,

a substance, concentrated, self-contained,
am I to be dissolved and lost?"

"it is fearful, I was a mirror, an individual,"
cries the shallow rock-pool, "now infinity

claims me; I am everything? But nothing";
peace, salt, you were never useful as all that,

peace, flower, you are one of a thousand-thousand others,
peace, shallow pool, be lost.

projections

In my room, the world is beyond my understanding;
But when I walk I see that it consists of three or
four hills and a cloud.

(wallace stevens, CP, 57)

chang chung-yuan:

It is traditionally said by Ch'annists that before one is enlightened one sees a mountain as a mountain and a river as a river; in the process of attaining enlightenment, mountains are no longer mountains, rivers no longer rivers; but when one has finally achieved enlightenment, mountains are once more mountains, rivers once more rivers.