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Posts Tagged ‘presence’

GODDESS BOWL

I am the unknowable bliss at the moment of death and birth.

I am the shatterer of stars.

I am intimately enwrapped in every moment.

I am the passion of breath.

I am the fragile vessel of eternal light.

I am the bright moon burning.

I am the smell of molecules and the wetness of love.

I am every skin and every longing.

I am the drip of cave mouth and the yawn of lions.

I am the eternal tree of photons and its infinite song.

Beyond size and judgment, beyond care and carelessness,

Beyond mirrors and windows, every door speaks my name.

Every bowl acknowledges my precedence.

All vowels and consonants praise me.

All silence contemplates my forms.

All seas, all rivers, all days, all nights, all revolving,

All steadfastness, all remembering, all forgetting, all breath,

All consummation, all conceit, all dream, all thought, all name,

All essences, all senses, all waters, all featherlight caresses,

All thunder, all change, all disappearing, all sorrow, all tears,

All reasons, all homecomings, all roads.

Perfect, unsullied, naked, unadorned.

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CWM DWFNANT (2)
(Our geography)

It does not dwell here
It does not stay.
Coming and going in mists
Dissolved to spirit
Absently haunting
The green valley quiet.

Its wings are white shadows
Milk dropped in pools
A cleft, a demure device,
Dark and luscious mystery
Hovered near madness
Far too far from reasonable reasons.

It dwells otherwise, a dark language
Spoken backwards.
Returning time to itself,
A rotating quern of years and miles.
A mighty sign at the corner of the eye.

Blessings to the world-weary
That strip the meat back to bone,
Break the bone to feed on sweet hidden marrow.

The lick of mist, the lick of its still wrist,
Far-flung, a throat of words
Pushed back deep into the hills.

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A LITTLE TRANSLATION
1
Silver lands, wind breathing shivers
raindrops from black branches.
Puddle sky shudders.

These words fade, returning silence.
Raven slow, arcs vast horizons
In her bright, dark eye.

2
Turn over and sleep and
turn again.
Mind dreams on
Weaving its own worlds.
Root chant,
Bird’s feather heart.
Everlasting communion.

3
Wind roars.
Green buds.
The mountains
Full of rain.
There is brightness
In the air.
Hedgerows
Woven with birdsong.

Remembering a bygone tune,
The old man pauses,
Lost in memory,
And then forgetting.

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UNFOLDED
(Out of Taliesin)

I have been in many forms
But come back to this one:
Floating wingspread one,
Weightless and watchful,
A feathered arc, a bowl,
A cup of air brushed in
sunlight, wary, joyful.
(The wind has left a dust
Of snow on the far valley
Side, slate the dark sky
And the hills vanish
Like the living do, into
clouds of drifting whisper).
So easy it is to forget – a wonder
We do not learn it earlier.
And remembering: a dream
Patched from here and there,
The glue of emotion
The glue of regret.
A world unfolded from sound
And holding firm, fast spinning.
A potter’s wheel, potter’s hands.
Hollowed is blessed and so
I am hollowed and void.
Blood and breath, clod and clay –
A holy work to keep it
And let go of it.
(The trees bend and roar,
Their thoughts this droning chord.
A chant to the maker, blameless
Of suffering.)
These poets, suspended, becoming saints,
Hanging from the four directions.
Their parts scattered to make new worlds,
Their words taken literally, or buried,
A bed of seeds for Spring days
To play with.

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CORNER OF THE EYE
(A touch of faery sight)

I see, and not quite see, this sleek man in blue
Quietly through the oak woods of Sunart,
(Just so, as through your own mind now),
The whispered past and the roaring futures.
Green rock, black root, the boulder house split,
Door leaning ajar, and the elders:
Roof and walls of a tumbled croft,
And hearth music in the song of insects
That drub the late summer air
In the folded waiting of the far north.
Listen to a tuning fork, high and clear struck.
The sense of it continuing on, a breath on sound,
A pulse of wingbeats. That is how it feels,
Stepping between the path and the oak
And the high larch, and the dripped lichen.
Watched by the timeless, curious eye.
Gone, to them, in a single blink,
As they to me, a flit of mind
Between the oak trunks,
A notion of peculiar colour,
Frictionless worlds sliding by,
An atomic resonance,
A flicker of wings.
Only this.

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The Blossoming Magnitude

I step out.
Thick darkness
And above night fog.
A few stars come and go.
This world
We cannot ever leave.
Every inch of us
Reeled out from its heart.
Made to stretch
And grow and fade
Between each breath
And each stillness,
Between each moment
Of presence and absence.
The world pushes through.
Wherever we might go
This world, too, shall come.
We are seamless
And utterly loved.
A fragment only
In strange fragmented minds
That do not realise the utter silence
Contains the voices of all.
The utter silence that answers us
Is the blossoming magnitude
Of the simple ground.
A round flicker of star,
Tasted, acknowledged, named.
Never are we severed,
Never lost, nor alone,
Though the angry, hungry tide
Of voices may say it.
Our science is love
And our gravity, delight.
Obedient to our breath,
We come and go,
Remembering how it all goes.
A bowl of sky.
A bowl of earth.
Enough food there is
For all things.

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And is it not true,
Waiting a while in darkness
There blooms a sky
Once blank
Now full more and
More of stars?

And so, too,
in silence waiting
We see thoughts roar and multiply,
Emotions self-arise, endlessly,
and, fecund, roll
To oblivion.

It happens without effort,
This stretching, purring cat close by,
These hillsides echoing
With wild cries of foxes.
This air, motionless, cool,
A taste wrapped in grass and woodsmoke.

Without edge,
Without distinction,
Mind fills up all space.

The world, a cup
Half empty of sorrow,
Is half full of joy.
Yet we thirst
And must drink
Regardless.

Gulping life,
A taste to keep us,
A withstanding
of emptiness.

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WHERE SHALL THESE GHOSTS

Where shall these
Ghosts, oblivious, remain?

Down by the shore
Counting dead-man’s-fingers,
Peeking in mermaid’s purses,
Teasing the mouths of anemones.
A ghost amongst ghosts,
Toes wet and dancing,
Sand-wriggled.
An audience of waves,
A laughter of gulls.

Enchanted
By hedgerow robins
And blackbirds after rain.
A cooling skein of late summer cloud.
Showered and drifting,
The pale washed sky.
Home, then, to warm silence,
A collected, amiable
Gathered-in darkness.

We are scattered, all,
Sown to seed the soil.
Strewn in time and place,
Nourished in small, bright things:
A voice, a scent, a feeling.
Reflected morning on a dew wet web,
As delicate as that, even.
Nothing to be proud of,
Nothing to disdain.
Held together by forgetting
And remembering, bursting
In and out of existence.

By the midgy lochside,
Mountains hidden,
A smudge of cloud.
The lap lap of waters,
The pooling dip of oars
On bright grey water,
The long islands rising
Anchored galleons of rock and green.
Crushed heather, rain wet grass,
The smell of woodsmoke and broth.

—-

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VOICE AND NAME
(Says the yew of Llandovery)

A song uninterpretable.
Vast as mind.
As black and white,
As dark,
As ocean elided.
None of the small, bright words,
Clear and ambiguously bright.
No fluttered pennants, simple and gay.
No battle standards, maces of cerebral dogma.
No knife-edged brilliant certainty.

It is a howling void of the real,
Resolving in beauty only on fullest surrender.
What is your name?
It would take an eternity to say it,
And then nothing would be unknown,
Nothing left out.

Dark time, invisible to counting.
Inconsequential moment
By-passed, mistaken, overlooked.
A beggar’s bowl by the roadside,
Never full, never empty.

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BLINK
(for Nathan)

How is it some patterning of the familiar, some phrase turned this way, that way turns more than echo, enlarges, exponents, fractures into its own chaos pattern?
We blink and the world disappears. We sleep and the universe unravels. We talk to the distance, converse with the invisible, as if our thoughts had pulses. And then there is that silence, in that forest, where that tree falls, unhindered, unremarked, unwitnessed. And the question marks the doubt.
What will be missed?
Slowly turning, slow breezes of distant breath,
We are enwebbed,
Weightless, waiting our turn.
A sweep, a cascade,
A clamour, a whisper,
A yes, an and but,
A slight widening of eye,
A lick of tongue to lip,
A spark, a cinder reseeded.
Upon an ash of dull vocabulary, a sudden dust devil dancing, acrobatic heretic, acrostic cross-stitch. And there it is, temporal flux. Gravity well. A siphon, a vortex, a cascade of neurons inventing new species. A bloom of bacteria basking in the bright futures of near-death.
Nothing is further from the truth, it never crossed my mind, a creature of habit, transfixed in the headlamps. A tumble of the banal: our raw matter to tease out, to squeeze.
I am winged yet
And spinning,
Woven somewhere,
Laced, enbroidered,
Pricked out,
Sketched.
Not quite becoming,
Hesitant.
You were and are a mirror of sorts, silvered, distant. A moon sailing through cloud. There, intimated, expressed, uncovered. A lapse in time. Time-lapse. Shutter speed. Blink. Blink. Forgetting,
Remembering,
Forgetting.
To whom belongs the face in the mirror?( Always looking a little surprised, a little disappointed). Of all the voices in my head, strange rainforest bouquet, there was, is, will be, one more calm, one more complex, a careful equation. News from Nowhere.

” Matter
is merely
mind
deadened
by the development of habit
to the point
where the breaking up
of these habits
is very difficult.”

Stubborn, fixed. It is alchemical. I, alembic, a host of raven wings and a lost crown of kings.
Here, it grows late. There: later or earlier. Those who watch, watch over the sleepers. Those who sleep, dream the waking world. Blink. It begins. Blink. It ends. The mirror remains a mirror reflecting upon what it is not. Blink. Turn away, it ceases. Turn back, it re-appears.
As if never gone away. As if never gone by. As if never gone.
Even, even, they say,
In a complete vacuum,
In a complete darkness,
No matter how dark,
No matter how hard they try,
They say,
There always, always, seems to be
Half a photon
Somehow
Remaining.
Light
Persisting.
(Just
A
Thought.)

—–

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