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Posts Tagged ‘transcendence’

IN ABERGWESYN COMMONS

There the world shall open out,

Open out beyond the senses.

A wide valley shout with clouds,

A bonny plaid of river grasses,

A brow of grey tumbled crags

And the ravens and kites wheeling there.

The road rides the waves of miles,

Pushed upwards, lean and full of longing.

Free of voices, free from thought,

As if it were a better world

Unsullied, shaped by simple life

And simple death.

Praised by its mist of rain.

Blessed in its silence.

I have told you the road.

And you found it so.

Open-hearted, washed, released

In Abergwesyn.

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BHAIRAV (THE WEIGHTLESS WEIGHT OF AIR)

Air.

Flowing river from mountains cooled,

And the passion of stars

Piercing the bow of Time.

Air.

Layering droop and singing yet

On the long slope of dawn.

Air.

Tinted blue yet.

Twisted warm and wan.

Twisted slow, rolling.

Air.

Dreaming pulses

As reasons’ reflection

But vague yet.

Vague and languid,

At edges stalled.

Moistened in sleep,

But not.

But not.

Air.

Piled deep

Down to the stars.

Life sways hanging, drifting.

Trees with their hair

Loose and swaying

Singing, singing,

Down to the starlit voids

Hanging the tidal edges

The endless full innocent darkness.

Air.

The trees shape

Single syllables

Howled whisps of vowels

Finding froth from feeling.

Air

Patterned, pressured, punctured

Parcelled.

Air

Twisted and released,

Spread out and stretching,

Tidal current

The vapours caress

Their gradient glacial moments.

Air

Sun bright now

Shifting shimmering.

It suffers all thought.

Turning about

Returning it to silence.

Air.

Sun-bright now,

Spirit-filled

Song-filled

The tongue of gods

Hungry for this and that.

It will not

It will not.

It will

It will.

Invisible lover of every surface.

Air.

It stretches, it pulses.

Gods are born from air.

They flow in and out,

Grow fists of nothing.

They flow in and out.

Gods born from

The turbulent throbs of air.

Movement shiver shafts.

Silence

Silence.

Bhairav is a well-known Indian raag of the early morning. I have only recently grown to love it and its variations. Perhaps the tense sharps and flats put me off. It has the energy of cool space, of heights, of growing light, of distance, of precise wing-tips, of soaring wings, of the dip and soar of red kites. This is a sort of verbal alap – a slow exploration of the moods and directions of morning air, here in the mountains.

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A DANCE UPON Y GARN

The bones of the hills

The bones of rivers

The bones of the mist

The bones of meaning.

How shall we talk to the bones

Of things, the sweet marrow?

That great grey slope,

A rising falling sine wave,

A rumbling note bending horizons.

Converse with it dressed thus in cloud

And become a stranger removed from illusion.

Untied, drifting, anchored only to words

And a dance that is so so slow, it brings worlds to their end

And changes them that new languages are needed

To begin to know it, to begin to know it.

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The Doors of Midsummer

A breath of cloud moves east across Y Garn’s face.

Words are as scarce as swallows in a cold summer.

Anyway, anyway, they only grow from dream to tangled lie,

flowering like the bindweed covering all beneath,

Weighing down, weighing down until nothing else remains.

The doors have opened in every hill,

An invitation to join the dance and summer’s feast.

But we are taught to doubt generosity,

To look for the trap in openness and goodness

(nothing is true that comes so free and easy).

River and clouds are the rulers of this world

and they move on in their own time, unbidden.

Tune to a key that sings of endlessness, even though

no one here knows anything of that song.

For emotion is born from time and loss:

In timeless halls is no such thing.

No such thing but endless dance and bliss.

If the summer never ends

It will be a hard winter, here.

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SWIMMING MOON

swimming moon
and floated in light

this sorrowful world
surrenders to peace

a few hours bathed clear
in blue shadowed silence

thought waters
white, rippled
reflecting one perfect smile

all will settle homewards,
belonging

never having left:
a moment only,
forgetting completion.

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A PARTICULAR DEVICE

When we look so close at life inside us,
it simply becomes a tree of madness
where ghosts host and catcall,
swapping bodies and their nightmare mysteries
( from which we have never, ever, recovered).
Such strange animals. So many hands.
So many dances. So many attributes.
A collective deity ( or a pan Demonium).
There is a clue in it all somewhere,
a clue, a clew, a thread, a maze,
a spider, a monster, an eater of the charming ones,
a hungry axis, a deliverer,
a coin on his eyes and on his tongue.
The rite of the Opening of the Mouth,
escaping gravity through the small angled shaft,
homing on the singular, most singular star.
Dust to dust. An assay of hearts
before the animal-headed ones.
We are Jongleur, kindly admit us.
Remove our head. Give us the bliss of love and asses.
Return us whole to the world without end.
And let us cease to burn.
Let our mouths be filled with the cool waters.
Seven rivers from the Garden.
A lascivious sprouting of leaves, a splayed, secret hand of fig.

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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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NARAYANA

Over time
We shall fly over time

As cormorants skim
Fast as black light and suns

Watching pattern ripples daze
A dress of taste

In another’s dream
Who sleeps

Near eternal, an
Ambient drone

Slow exhaled life
As warm as

Revolving about that
Dim heart distant

So constant to be forgot
And we

Floating as hawks
Tragic as angels

Longing to dip and fish
Those exquisite ripples

Understanding
But not caring

The illusion that is
Neither wave

Nor part
A weighing of not

This and not
That

Dazed by art
Longing to

Drown in it
Over time

We skim and hover
Become dream

For want of anything
More particular.

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THE VAPOURS OF HEAVEN

 

Shall they stray far,
These wandered thoughts,
Drenched with the vapours of heaven?
Shall they, distilled, sublimate,
Take new form, grow winged
Then smiling, dissolve?

Shall they, folded,
Nest upon timeless light.
Sleep, and wake golden,
Luminous, singing?
Shall they, without surcease,
Dance eternal energies,
Still named, at home
On vast, breathing cascades
Of space?

Shall they, (these thoughts),
Turn swallows, spin as swifts,
Light as thistledown, rise
Like willowherb, weightless,
A drift in summer,
A slow gentle breeze
Bird-filled?

Shall they stretch, sprout nerves,
Become sensible, grow good souls
With new names, find mouths
And lips and tongue
And sing their own song?

The vapours of heaven:
A saffron casket, rainbow-locked.
Small whispered bells,
Honey-lipped bees.

A sky stretched
To blue transparency.
A tent with purpose,
An unseen sea,
Scaled skin of cloud.

In amongst and between,
Within cloud and moving mists,
Droplets suspended awaiting surface:
To acquire direction, to know gravity,
To locate tidal choirs.

It is all music, all music,
Nothing but song.

vapours of heaven8 vapours of heaven26

These images are taken from a series of ink drawings, scanned and photographically enlarged to reveal strange details. The revealing of other structures formed a parallel word stream imagining thought/word becoming sentient of themselves, hence the text, as one possible accompaniment to the images. (Other possibilities included star names or quotes from the works of John Dee). Some of the images are pixelating because of extreme enlargement, so these I may remake as pencil drawings…

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Spera iovis, Jupiter

An ineffable thunder.
A benevolent sky untouchable,
Bewashed with holy white.
His eye, from that smoky height,
Benevolent, or careless.
Sucking up breath, bellows,
A bull in heat, a vast progenitor
Bestowing fast waters, furious light.

A plunger, a pummeller, a fondler
Of breasted mountains, a piercer
Of earth’s deep, warm valleys.

The biology of deity: what is fecund
Evolves to the remote ineffable.
The lusty roarer, to righteous, wrathful judgment.

Template to transcendence, he dabbles yet
And dribbles his pleasures in little lives
Spread-legged, surprised by glory.
Panting and flattered by the fierce blast
Of his rumbled, lascivious breath,
His weight borne down and admitted.

So it is a face of infinity,
A voice vague with distance,
A beam breaking clouds,
A covenant, a breaking into and out of,
Grandiose lusts and transfiguring flesh,
A feast of flesh for formless air, a cold, clear possession.

No other face but a storm of thunder and a sudden cloud,
An animal roar, a shower of gold.
All encompassing as air, as mountain squall, a rush of cold water,
As clay turned incense, as sacrificial fire on beacon top.

The placation and violence of an unseen height. From there is sought
Return of revolutions, approving victories, an evolution
Of sorts and measures.
An eagle’s wing, a single feather, a sharp beak, a clutching claw.
A rosary of names heroic, a prayer of appeasement and summoning.

Above all, and through it all,
A mystery of heaving curtains,
A spotlit stage with screaming plot,
A certain, definitive gravity, the thunderer.

A strange evolution it is from dark cloud and downpour
To remote, inviolable vastness.
But they all do shuffle and elbow eternally,
These interferers, these hungry, unconcerned
Bickering departmental managers,
Jealous and lusty,
Breeding prophets and demigods in casual catastrophe.
They run off with themselves, whooping and roaring,
Eternal adolescents, hormonally sparkling, unrestrained
In all their sudden, bright passions.
Free from opprobrium, earthy,celestial gardens of delight.

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