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Posts Tagged ‘the Sublime’

WHAT IT SHOULD BE

Does it, (pay attention,) does it,
Even when become a stream continuous and downward,
Does it lope back to steady prose, pedantic, precise, nonedescript ?
Or else might it wend songly and weirdly woven
Painted true but in madman’s colours, seen from mirror’s view,
Haunted, glanced at the corner of the eye,
Dancing words, rolled, roiling words,
Words that spurt fountains unbidden but shaped from
The lips of stone gods.
We are all here short moments in the moment of time
Gliding darkest matter on pools of spinning light.
We are voiceless until breath finds shape.
Voiceless until we sing sprouted feelings.
The heart, it is not a steady thing.
It is a giddy thing, a butterfly, birdsong thing,
A river thing losing itself babbling wilder gestures.
That it makes no sense, that it fills itself to bursting,
That it runs hands full and scattering meanings,
That it reaches and fails and reaches and finds something else,
That it is not music, that is is not is not music,
A tamping scuffling rhythm in dust, a dance becoming,
A mouth dance, a tongue drum, a skirl, a pibroch, a lament,
An imitation of storms in the mountains,
An imitation of the mist cleared by slow spreading sunlight
An imitation of the meld, the mix, the utterance, the name.
A dipping down to the roots of water, to the mud, to the squirming.
Entangled. Neither one this, nor the other, that.
Turning inside out to find to find what brings it all together.
What enables utter forgetfulness of edges, renames the names.
It is what prayer should be, what gods recognise as their own spark,
Generation unto generation, world without end.

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LI PO WAITING FOR DRAGONS (DINAS WOOD)

Li Po, I suppose, will be standing there,
hands thrust deep into sleeves,
breathing the slow hills.
Admiring the play of light
and the way the oaks
catch the late year’s brightness
on their wriggled limbs.

And how green is the gold,
and how golden the air
spicing the hazy distant.
In leaf litter, the rustling
of jays and squirrels,
gathering up the fallen year.
In the glass layered river,
sounds swallowed
and turned to light,
light to sound.

Li Po remains motionless,
holding all the river of his thoughts,
so he forgets nothing, misses nothing.
What has gone, and what arises:
balancing the mind of clouds,
the mind of mountains,
the mind of Dinas, cave-filled, hunched.

He sees the forest crown
shaping syllables: each tree
a slow, fast, steady song.
He weighs dark and light
On the cliffs of Craig Clungwyn.
Notes the rainbow mists
above the Doethi valley.
Floats above the scouring wind,
hawk and skylark and willowherb seed.

Li Po, waiting for dragons,
for the roar of the Tao in the mountains,
the narrow road winding northwards,
the cauldron of the seven stars.
For the eye of the world to open unwavering,
mind melting into mind.

He will not have long to wait –
a century or two
at most.

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NIGHT THE FIRST

It is not the placid herds of angels mooing praise nor the conniving pedantic demons.
It is not the male nor the female, nor the roaring furious ones, nor the cowered silent ones.
Nor the eloquent silence, nor the tearing ripping void of sorrows and despair.
Nor the words
Nor the music
Nor the movement
Nor the flash of wings
Nor the sleepy curled furry ones
Nor the bleak uplands, nor the cold winds, nor the emasculating inanities.
Not the glorious truths of dust and measure, nor this, nor that, nor memory, nor forgetfulness.
It is nothing but a book of voices, an intercourse of pulse and pause. A regardless cause, a fleabite itch, primary and secondary, a flowering of galaxies in a tumbled arc across what is not itself. A fierce catastrophic ejaculation, a burst of incalculable seed that looks, feels for, fertile ground uncompromised by purpose or censoring scissors redacting sense and nonsense. A piling out of truths and lies. A justification for beginnings. All the words ever spoke uncysted, growing wings and spines to feel the new red flow, to make a difference, a sifting wind blown unmappable, desert nothing to be quenched but regurgitated photonic haze.
It will inevitably
Fail to favour the blasphemers
With muscle and righteousness,
The gore-caked murderers insistent
Will be cropped and fed quiet bones
Ground down by swans
To cloyed, sweet dust.
There it is, a landscape emerging from mist, a dawn construed half familiar, half achingly strange, inhabited, or not,
Pierced with fierce birdsong
And scything swallows.
A slow mind of colour ripped up,
Pasted from a memory belonging to others,
A grated zest palled, recalibrated as means to an end,
Muscular worm palpating, digesting,
Evacuating.
A little nothing, an almost nothing (see there, a failure to avoid fake evaluations, an arrogance indicative of the species that so presumes an elevated itch: the ability to destroy is the right to destroy). Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from the evil of others. Every time. And slay our enemies who laugh at us with good reason, mocking our belligerent, petty gods, our loathsome, vast and irreducible shadows….

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SGRAFFITO

Eyelids turned translucent,
The walls of flesh dissolved.

In utter darkness a pool of mercury trembles.

He should place the day upon his forehead,
The moon’s taste upon his lips.
The music of crickets he should place
Upon his ears,
And the music of starlight
Upon his breast.

These veins: bright rivers that knit a certain landscape.
Blood red are the hills in sunlight,
Rust, the slopes, in rain.

Falling beyond breath and beyond sleep.

His two eyes should both behold
His best beloved.
In his left hand, his cares.
In his right, his passion.
Upon his feet
Strong wings of lust.

Small, dark, is the day.
Fevered and wan the sun.
The crow’s wing coughs.
Withered is the hill.

Swells the beginnings and endings, bright burning, dreaming names.

Let him be surrounded
By a great host of angels and demons.
Let him observe as they mutually engage,
Rise and lift, conjunct and consummate,
Until they fall apart slaked, becoming satisfied dust.

This scatter of farmsteads
Glistens white as quartz
Washed desolate,
The cold stream
Of winter’s winds.

In utter darkness an impossible music shapes words.

Light from a billion years
Pours from the sky,
Not casting one shadow.
It sinks to a core of iron and gold,
Filling silent caves to feed a petalled tongue.

In utter stillness everything waits and forgets to wait.

He should focus upon his own coming and going,
The last bright moment of his breath.
The sudden possession of valley roads,
The heralding wing-tips of hill hawks.

His wish is fervently to disappear
From the sight of all men,
So he shall contemplate
The paradox of rainbows.

He shall write his name forwards
And backwards
Until it become a single,
Unutterable line.

Diamond backed
The pines at dawn.
A burning roar,
A stormfront clamour.

Rests within these moments of choice, the fall of dust.

This heart a bowl, a harp, a bird.
Weightless, filled with hope,
An open sky is all it lacks
And courage to give it all away.


Sgraffito – a process of scratching through different layers (clay, paint etc.) to reveal what is beneath.

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Dream, Dreamer, Dreaming.

The Master’s Garuda boat
Untouched by the turbulence
Of the rocked earth.

The long, deep lake shudders,
Sweeping away the lost
Into other worlds.

Winding avenues of rock
Rising from the shore,
Steps, tunnels, pathways.
The clustered, caved homes of disciples,
Comfortable, apart, sedate.

Shrines of Herukas,
Whispered shadows.
The First Seventy dissolving, dissipating.
Shallow basins and channels guiding
The flow of gore,
The seepage, the transformation
From flesh to food
For the invisible ones.

On carved, curved walls
The lives recorded,
The passage through hell-worlds,
The First Seventy Disciples return
To dissolve in mantra –
Butter lamps floating
On red globules of spent life
Drifting into sinuous darknesses.

Keeping watch, the New.
Taking turns as long as can be withstood,
In the presence of final collapse.

A chance to overcome despair:
To witness the passage of the Elements
Untouched,
To dance clear of the smoke,
The flame of laughter
Fanned
By True Emptiness.

The horror of Reality –
A flower of great beauty,
But no one name.

On the roaring edge,
The Master asks a simple question.

The Sublime awaits.

There is no answer.

———-

(Imagery from a dream last night, satisfyingly Jungian, dark, bright, strange. A mountain lake, an earth tremor sinking boats, a large prowed boat rides the wave, safe. The main story, a Master with disciples living in the steep rock-cut lakeside mountains. The return of the First Seventy Disciples, old men coming back to their Master to die together. The New disciples, set the task to be continually present during the dissolution of the bodies, encaverned, aware, candle light in small shrines. Hard to bear the horror and glory of the implacable transformation, taking turns, Master watching on, silent, slight smile, compassionate, unforgiving. One opportunity, every opportunity, to break through, to break out……)

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( the diving, swimming, flying man is from an Iron Age Celtic coin of the Bellovaci tribe)

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