White with snow are the hills on the horizon.
The rivers are quiet, the pools frozen.
Clouds from the north taste bitter cold sunrise.
The deep, dark, breathing earth accumulates to itself,
As if the threads and shreds of shared sentience
Net down the long years and become soaked
With drip and ceaseless dream, each wish and ache
And spark of memorable brightness,
Catalogued, compacted, savoured, saved.
And with these do they clothe themselves: in a world’s memories
And thus, learn to speak in howls and long whispers,
An aesthetic without emotion, a dance only, a game, a chess board,
A gwyllbwyll, a ritual that is not quite imitation nor mirroring
But has its own exquisite golden reason,
A long dreaming sublimation of spent and careless thought.
All these cobwebs and leaves, they are truly
the only gold to be cherished.
The damp and fusty decay of life thrown off,
Carefully considered and gathered again for feasts of kings and angels
And dark giant forms that have no concern for any future,
but nurture the past cradled in deeper woods, rocked in song,
Draped in arcane languages, swung on sunless, starless seas,
Shattered on mirrored starry pools and fountains.
A moment too slow for this world’s water
( a dream of even clearer water, a blood clear river,
a serpent spiral of cool life,
Silver water, perfect loom of water,
eternal life giver, rock cooled, cave silent,
Tremulous with distant footfalls, distant light.)
More real than the real, more real than time,
more present so it is squeezed between each chink
Of time and space, our substratum, our mother matter,
our folded vast and black pinions,
Our beautiful storm, our glory and tragedy,
our mulch of words.
To where all words sink and their images too,
to reform, re-loved beautiful monsters, free from doubt,
Unburdened of guilt, violent and innocent,
purely, demurely selfish and sharing the virtues of edge and shadow.
Ploughed deep in the dark trenches,
the midnight river boat of sun and moon,
sung with choir of gods and stars and lascivious,
long limbed goddesses born for pleasure.
They will swallow us all, open up and consume,
become fecund and full and birth us over and over,
their lovers named and unnamed, loved and laid to rest.
The smallest of things, a feast of passion most holy.
Most holy the earth and its names,
most holy the mystery beneath us,
the mirror within us, the eyes, the feral eyes,
the hungry eyes that look back
and do not ever, ever, look away.
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Conversations: Invisible Friends at a Year’s Ending
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, asides, comment, commentary, friends, gold leaf, ideas, inspiration, Poetry, Ryokan's Mind Moon Circle, wall relief, wood relief carving on December 26, 2016| 2 Comments »
this dreaming breath
named from a confluence
long streams tumbled for a while
on the meticulous dance of sun and moon
clothed in scars and mystery, veiled, draped about.
shaped by a host, a singing constellation of unnamed stars.
—
Having been in the woods
One may never come out.
Though scrupulous,
A whisper breath will still
remain, like the memory
Of mulch in the nostril,
The coolness of the skin,
The crack of twig, a cobwed brush.
We become inhabited-
The same as we ghost
Forgotten places.
Murmur.
Reverie interupted.
—
Leonard
This poet’s voice.
Like honey,
Like an earthquake.
A gentle mountain
With thunder.
Sun and rain,
we smile, we cry.
All vistors
With return tickets.
—
Heart’s warmth, the only sustaining fire.
We are huddled beings, backs to the night,
glorious in our strangeness, bred for our dreams.
Peculiar are the haunted songs echoing,
peculiar the views we insist upon, peculiar the words,
peculiar the moments.
revivified by the lightest touch,
ignited by the slightest breath,
flowered and flowering,
the thinnest web of cells strung together,
pushing outwards,
holding back,
translating silence.
—
This one breath
Is ours.
Then than
Too,
Is gone.
This stream
Of word
Caught in a
Flashlight
Moment
Then
Lost.
Remembering
What is
No longer.
A wonder!
—
Her shell-like,
Bending low to this little earth.
She will turn away
In sorrow and disbelief
Fall and fade
And become dark
And empty
Once more.
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