Early morning autumn
waking in darkness.
For a moment
pushing aside the covers
placing my feet on the floor
I wonder
sleep still slung about me
will the light come?
It comes.
The world opens
in white petals
a lotus flower
in still water.
Portland, Oregon – October 1, 2018
In deep night, darkened sleep
I sail on the spectral wings of phantoms
who carry me to enthralling realms
dizzying orbits of dreams loosened
from the moorings of time
spinning in an ocean of space.
The pale light of morning presses
against the shuttered glass, the quiet,
when even birds do not yet call.
I open my eyes to a shimmer –
darkness leaving without a word, in silence,
as portents of labyrinthine sleep
order themselves into the light of day.
So often, as sleep vanishes into fading night
I wish a few moments more
for I doubt the meaning of the day before me
wonder if it will be kind?
Shake it off, illusion of night!
The day dawns new as never before
I in it, I it’s being with all else in it –
light, sacred, enchanting – without end.
Portland, Oregon – September 11, 2018
“Only that day dawns to which we are awake.” Henry David Thoreau, Walden.
Something is not coming
from out of the thin curving horizon.
I cannot wait for what may be
as if the future was a being with power
rather than an illusion, a chimaera of time.
Hours and days, years I’ve lost seeking
a phantom I thought might be
sought in the night, could have become real
imagined would be if I were another.
I have lost myself in a tyranny
of expectations, plans, dreams
as a child wishing for unicorns and faeries.
It, whatever it is for me,
is not out there or on it’s way
from a never-never land before me
as if my steps would take me there.
What I wait for is in my loins
my essential self as a pure oil –
balm and nectar – heart, soul, salve, healing.
My projects and plans
my precious hopes and dreams
vanish before me again and again
while in me is stirred the cauldron of life.
Hope has no foot in tomorrow
but walks the path of each moment
as the shadow of my steps
on the path below my feet
on this day and in this season
as the leaves begin to fall
the wind bristles the hair on my arms
the light slants low over the horizon
and I swallow an evening star
as it lowers gently before my eyes.
Portland, Oregon – September 4, 2018
There is a bridge over a wild river
where, to go, is to go into another land –
a forgotten self, uncharted, unknown,
unbidden, hidden in roiling swollen waters –
one’s being in its turbulent depths.
I hesitate – one step forward, two back –
keen to save my life from falling headlong
into the swirling and raging waters of life
where have gone before me
wandering saints, itinerant holy ones
huddling in hermitages, fasting in deserts,
drowning in baptismal waters of life.
They may live in silent rooms, spending days
with lost souls of a city, searching
highways, twisting byways to find
ones who are lost in riches or grief.
They sweep floors, stop to look in the mirror
to find their own obscure and hidden lives
lost in the shadows of deep and abiding love
unbounded by fear for who come their way.
When I was young I set on the path before me
fearsome creatures made of darkness,
saying, believing, lost in loneliness:
“I cannot cross over.
They will not let me pass unscathed.”
Will age, my growing older, give me courage
to step on the bridge, look below me
into the chaos of what has gone by
and what is still to come and say
“I wish to know, after all, what I look like
and who I am from the other side.”
Portland, Oregon – August 28, 2018
Photo is my own, taken August 2018, of a hikers bridge over a tributary of the White River, Ti’Swak (AKA, Mt. Rainier) National park.
What I cannot say
being awakened in each moment
is what I want to say
to convey to myself the holy –
ineffable, silent, mystery – tremendum.
It comes.
If I can live through this moment
the next will come
bearing its lights and fullness.
It is the end of words
what they try to mean
when they wish to say
just one thing, only one.
Too much, just the thought
before the word.
I saw a bear cross a raging river.
My heart filled with joy –
clapping and shouting
rejoicing in the being
of that moment –
raw power in power
with my eyes to see all
all before me.
That was not it.
Not enough that joy
too little that exhilaration.
What was it? What was it?
What happened when the bear,
confronting the raging river,
to herself said,
I will leap
into the roiling waters
I will see
what will come of me.
Portland, Oregon – August 15, 2018
This experience of seeing the bear cross the White River, which carries the snow/ice melt of the Emmons Glacier from Ti’Swaq (AKA Mt. Rainier), the largest glacier in the contiguous United States, happened to me just a few days ago.
Our days proceed on calendars squarely numbered
moving along ordered pathways, day after day
the sun seeming to rise, crest, benignly set
on the axis threading through our lives.
Moments, knotted on stretched and straight lines
confuse our senses, dissemble, lead us astray as if
we knew who begot us and when – our taut genealogies
spread in ordered years behind us, on paper unbroken.
I look back on a long line of those who shared my name
to see where I began, in a place not my own.
I turn around to glimpse my own foreordained end
blinking like a beacon on a far headland
closer and closer to its ragged, fog-enshrouded shore.
Clocks tick for each moment’s passing. They are gone.
Tolling bells sing of hours we cannot purchase back.
Holy days, ordinary times, seasons of winter to spring
come and go in a succession of events we thought we knew
yet those to come will bring what we cannot know.
Where come then the bending curves, failing edges
floating as leaves in the wind or worlds spun in space?
Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests
rounded to suit their needs, earth and twig spheres
bounded but by sweeping winds pushed in waves
bending in orbits of elliptical flight.
I look to see where my life goes
scrying the far distance for cairns
markers on travelled roads, leading me home.
Yet, they are only mirages after all
falling off the world’s edge before I reach them
harbingers without coherent meaning or sense
though to others they provided comfort on the way.
I try to see over my horizon’s watery edge.
A distant bank of clouds, lying on the world’s rim,
obscures the possibility of seeing what may come –
it cannot and will not be seen, life’s mystery
breaking onto an immutable and curved eternity.
The sun sets in an azure haze, an orange blaze
glowing under a softening sere dome in pinked violet
resolving into a ravishing image of one’s life lived.
Portland, Oregon – July 26, 2018
Photo is my own, taken on the Pacific coast, Olympic National Park, September 2017.
We hang on its rim, the precarious
edge of a world waiting to fall
into space
abandoned
alone.
What we knew is falling into darkness
and we float on ethereal seas.
Our own ground – mountain and lake,
plain, fertile land, stream
pitch of hill, soggy lowland –
is careening into a field of stars
spirally spun over a golden sun
receding in spark and flame,
as a galaxy opens wings around us.
It is a new world to be born
out of our flame-licked ashes.
What we could have done to stop it
has not yet been done
nor can I see that it will be done.
The hour has come.
Portland, Oregon – July 19, 2018
Between here and there is a great darkness
beyond the blue into deathly cold, breathless deep
space – empty but for the ceaseless tug of home.
I see them brightly hanging
celestial ornaments adorning the tree of life itself
on infinite branches in curves and shadows,
on ghostly clouds spun as silk by the setting sun.
I am but one of many opening my eyes
to the movements and lights of the night sky
adoring the lovely pair as they swoon
to the sounds of an ancient melody played
on lyre and harp fitted with cosmic strings.
I would go there, to the moon
to the dreamy dark chill of Venus
to look back on the earth
to see where from I came.
There it was just beneath a warm calm
summer evening, velvet dusk fading slow to night
waves stringing along a blissful shore.
Not far away. Not far away at all.
Portland, Oregon – June 19,2018
Photo is my own, taken from our upstairs west facing window, on June 16, 2018.
Before the creation of the earth
I fell into a crack in creation
falling through the stars
in a cosmic cradle careening
in timeless and empty space.
I landed at last on a wide beach
in waves of blue water and clouds
swirling above my naked head.
I stood, looked about me, breathed.
I walked up into the headland
to the brow of a cliff and there
below me, the wondrous beach –
the monotony of waves one after another.
I was afraid to explore more
the leafy interior – its sounds
movements in the slithering underbrush
of those also fallen into this place.
I fear I have never left the beach
but, enthralled, watch over the ceaseless waves
letting the clouds pour over my naked head
as if not a thought or care had I.
Portland, Oregon – June 12, 2018
My inspiration for this comes from a piece in Parabola, Winter issue, 2017-18 entitled “A True Story.” The author is a teacher of writing who asks students, at the beginning of the year, to “lie to me” or, to write a “false biography.” She says that “…it reveals more about its participants than a standard autobiography.” So my writing here is a bit of stream of consciousness, to see what would come, spontaneously, if I tried to write a “false” autobiography. Neither Mr. Freud nor Mr. Jung will I let read this.
So full is the world of sorrow
the grief of what is ending
the horror of what has begun.
So large is the scale of grief
that I cannot immerse myself in it more
than what comes at me in waves.
I grieve in small ways, symbolic
changes in life, to my own small life,
that strike me, move me to sorrow –
not as a young man, over the loss
of one who is lovely, but over loss
in the world, of life
in forms other than human.
Today, they came to cut down a tree
whose branches gave me comfort
its very largeness felt of strength
an endurable and lovely presence.
Here now it is cut and, tomorrow,
they will remove its last branches
though yesterday it was well and tall.
I watch, as rain falls,
nurturing the ground where, tomorrow,
the tree will give way
and something else will grow.
I will as well, rooted here, for now.
Portland, Oregon – May 31, 2018
I wrote of this tree in a poem I wrote called Deodar: https://incascadia.wordpress.com/2017/02/18/deodar/
In Cascadia 