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Solstitial

SOLSTITIAL

This longest day
Hard to throw off endings,
The slip of names and times,
The ongoing of impossible disasters,
The rot and decomposition, composting dreams.
It is the words
That lack the elegant bright moment.
It is the mind
That, persistent, contrives distant futures.
It is the habit
That dredges what lies safe in darkness,
Holds it up, misinterpets and despairs.
So many words for failure
So few for bliss.
And thus our bias
Sweeps us toward an edge,
Soft screaming, torn thin.
World watching on
Keeping balance between
This dark, this light,
This day, this night,
Knowing it is not the thing,
Not the specific, nor the particular,
No soul weighing more than any other.
But it is the spin, the dance, the chant,
It is the hymn of becoming and return,
The melting of light, the retaining pattern,
Constant
is the revolution
of breath,
The breath of revolution.

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DREAM BETWEEN DREAMS

It shall be called
The dream between dreams.
It shall have the sound of rudra veena
Howling the low, long song
Of mountains.
A doorway that vanishes
In walls and moments,
Hunters of persistence and cunning
That track betweens
With such eager precision.

A sepia lithograph of ancestors
Scattered with scratched code.
A stuttered sunrise,
A mumbled equation.
Fragmented, woven storeys.
Intercepted thought-
A patterning of stars.

It shall take beauty to itself.
It shall wear a body
Suspended and gently packed
With birdsong.
It shall have a sunrise
Located in a northern way.
Magnificence untranslated and untranslatable.
A verticality, a rotation, a specific gravity.

Freed from the body
It twists to a certain extent,
A mind will take colours to itself
As murmurs of joy.
A shuffled deck of cards
(Where all images are constantly changing),
Vapour words uttered to themselves and gone,
Drawn from all tomorrows,
A suffering of beauty.

The rudra veena says:
“Music is the very means
Ye shall venture through vastnesses,
The telemetries of time and space,
Control panel of deity,
Bender of physics, answer to worlds,
Mating call of galaxies.”

The rudra veena is an instrument of South India, a pumped up, pimped up sitar, more growling even than the surbhahar ( a bass sitar). It has two huge gourds at either end, that wrap around the person holding it, and a long,wide fretboard. It has a monumental, alien sound in recordings. Live, it probably vibrates bones and deepest soul. Beyond human, the rudra veena is the player, human being the instrument.
( search ‘rudra veena’ into youtube and give yourself a thrill!).

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CONVERSATIONS 14

HOW EASY
Wonderful wonderful
how easy a cat will purr
how easy a flower will open
and scatter
how easy a smile
how easy a hand
how easy a good word
leads the way
becoming a vast flock
of joyous song and seeing.

VERBAL WARNING
Word to word
invisible tugged ties,
chains golden from tongue to ear,
a ripple of bells, a chime, tinkled river,
mind stream quenching thirst,
a million million reflections
showing nothing much of anything,
just how it is.

SEDIMENT
In the deepest oceans
Are the bones of all
That have ever lived.
A sediment free of sentiment,
World shaping pressure
Of was-ness turning into is-ness.

GRACE
Dressed ghosts, borrowed rags.
Why so hungry always? Why so?
As if bereft. As if supported.
As if punishment. As if reward.
As if a test.
Interpret this.
Pain and beauty.
Edges, boundaries, limits.
A dance to slow music.
If we can be but elegant, somehow,
so the universe turns toward us
(as we turn toward its ever open eyes),
weave a new way, gentle, strong,
accepting, melting, acquiescing.
Grace, it would be.
Perhaps reason enough.

RED SHIFT
Heat haze.
A shimmering road.
All the colours shifting towards evening.
A sharp sound rumbles into deep distance.
An elucidation of edges.
A smudge of vast moments.
Thought storm, tranquil dreaming.
Your voice (somehow) in my head (somehow).
Via the heart of things,
we ricochet amazed
through crystalline spheres.


HOW ELSE
A tissue of lives.
Connective, connected surfaces.
A fine tracing of whorls and ridges,
Whispering alphabets
Attempting an understanding,
Perhaps a cataloging,
An exposition of position.
A thin, sky thin, elucidation
A slender, tender hinting thing.
Not quite dream, not quite wish,
Nor remembering, nor forgetting.
This placental sustaining,
Held suspended,
Amniotic day,
Bridged away from pain.

Else we slip unseen,
Or so we conceive it,
Mouthing wept whys
Into blank cold nights.

These are some more pieces from my ongoing project, “Death and the Maiden (A romance)”, which developed from a couple of images from the V and A I have posted earlier. At the moment I have a series of layered images, becoming dreamy abstracts. These I may add text or calligraphic elements to. The verse imagery parallels and complements the pictures, I hope. Love, sex and death – how very…

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Peel back the curious eye,
A dancing touch to your innards,
Let it pierce the mysteries
Of your fleshly mechanics….

Your cool fingertips, smooth as pearl,
Slip down roads to sudden roundness,
A blessing of seed…..

Swimming where oceans clash,
The liquid crush, wave on wave.
Our very ground throbs feathered…

Pouring souls into circles
Achieving the fruit of life,
Its juice drips warm to sleep….

Your face, a half moon
In the sky of my desiring….

The most perfect words
Slip between the cracks of sleep…

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Cradled in bone
Time rocks to and fro.
We trespass not so far
Then flow smooth and fast
Into luminescence,
Penetrating softnesses,
Following sages, burning letters
Flying before us.
An unprecedented rivalry of substance,
A cloud of element and vapour.
Demure, then ferociously hungry
We exchange bodies for heat and flame
And roaring liquids.
Pouring vessels.
Spout of hard bliss.

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Skywards

SKYWARDS

Days ornamented with cloud,
Days dressed and wrapped in skirts of wind,
(The silk, shot silk green, the rippled fields of barley).
June bordered with honeysuckle, with dog rose,
Woven with the flitter of chaffinch, of bullfinch.
Woven into the choir of blackbirds
These hours, these stretching days,
Reaching skywards with the steepling grasses
Well towards solstice, well towards standstill,
The uppermost sun, the huge curving moon,
The silver singing stars of summer.
And us here, all of us here, within, without,
The commonest of senses, simple, watching
A gathering of friends, a multitude murmuring,
A cellular symphonic, rippled, waving, skywards.

June Now

JUNE NOW

Days as laid out cream white,
Days as numbered and round,
Days as fragrant as elder.

Worlds turned facing sunlit skies,
Worlds warmed, fed and content.
Golden bowls, sky-blue bowls and green
Holding as much as may be.

For a few weeks, near perfect balance:
Heaven and earth set spinning
On fingertip of time,
A measured delight.

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Soft

SOFT

It lies ready,
Gleaming, gentle
For the gentle sun,
Gentle for the rain.

Gentle the dead,
Soft the morning twilit
Silence.

Soft the hour
And cool
Before birdsong.

A silvered grey
The heavy grasses
Full and laid
In low waves.

Seed mantra
Low and fragrant.

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pattern of nine1

Please click on this link to view a preview of my newly finished book:

stave runes all

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WHITEBEAM OTHERWORLD

1
The desire to move
To the centre of silence
Where the big trees
Pin their shade
In the deep valleys.

Where big wings wheel
Marking an upward swing
Of stars and moments.

A cradled place,
Habitation of saints.
A long dust, incense
White hawthorn,
Incense lilac.

And the voice
Of dappled rivers.

2
The present slips
From between our fingers
But the past is always with us.
We, its shadow,
An uncertain glimmering
At the edge of cities.

Moving to Otherworlds
Where past and future
Dissolve the moments
Like sugar in water.

3
He writes the wisdom down
Upon his own skin,
A continual palimsest.
A fugue of breathings,
We flicker in and out
Of that dream,
Actors, watchers, or both.
Now summoned
We shall dance.
Dismissed,
Will return to shadow.

Close your eyes, love,
And see the world
As it is,
As it dreams itself:
Whole, hungry
And continually singing.

—-

Summer’s Tale

SUMMER’S TALE ( The Ancestral Speaks)

I have found an acorn, small and green.
Given my murmured breath,
Given it my own waters.
It has grown thick and strong
Arching to heaven.
I have planted it deep
In my warm darknesses.
Rooted, it quivers
Bursting forth white blossoms,
A dripping mistletoe,
A sacred thing.
Becoming worlds we,
Trees of life, twined,
Exhale and rest
On warm earth,
A sun-dappled ground.

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