Have we some power between us (fragment)

“Have we some power between us, we two together, that acts as a sort of magnet, that attracts the supernatural?” It was natural enough for something like this to happen, he thought silently. Did she agree? He didn’t know what else to say, nor was he sure what he had just spoken a moment before.

Yet before she had time to reply, he realized he had been dreaming.

He lay awake now on his bed, alone. And yet, in some very subtle way, she was still there with him now more than ever.

Poesis (1996)

To build or construct out of component parts

something which can stand alongside the wonders of nature

and the ancient monuments

To write

not a description or a retelling

but what it IS

Build out of language

a natural edifice

Each small body of words is one piece

one marker in the monument

And because of this

there are echoes of the whole in each part

past present future

Tho the subject is inconstant, inconsistent

full of unstable vibrations

"Indivisibly Divided" (fragment)

[. . .]

The miracle stood still

in the bright wing sphere

of its own wonder

The voice had spoken

The thunder said thunder

The mind muttered a name

And in an instant all was changed

and the world where all were one

became two

separate worlds

indivisibly divided

by earth and sky

afraid of loneliness

and longing for home

[. . .] 

"Infinite in finite" (fragment)

You cannot say it.

It has no shape

you can define.

It has no name

you can speak.

It has no meaning.

It is nothing.

It is like an open mouth

that has no word.

"Too soon"

1.

I was warned I was too soon, but I went on

with a buzzing headful of omens 

any which way, saying

“Turn back, go to the right, no, no, go

 forward: that tree 

  will tell you,

   ask her the way!”

2.

I went and asked, and saw that

it was all as I had foreseen.

One thing after another, all as planned.

“Why, it is all a dream!”

 I said, and hurried,

  in dream-self’s bravado,

   beyond her. 

3.

It was then that I turned back

and found the past was changed.

And the future flew past my head

 as if I was again 

  too soon.

The Secret Life of Keruvim (fragments)

(. . . )

Evening comes

as always,

and as you forget,

you hesitate

between one thought

and another —

you welcome darkness

but wish for light.

(. . . )

Unpeopled room which

the light will people,

known things which

ask again to be known —

the book left open

the newspaper

the basket of letters

which she

      who you love . . .

     “How does it come

      this wave of infusion?

      How does it enter the blood

      that you feel it

      with such

      violence?

      How does it enter

      the angel

      and remain pure?

      I mean, how does

      the angel

      remain pure?”

(. . . )

It is too easy

to answer one’s own

questions,

to give left hand

to right

as Keruvim do.

What do you say

to yourself

but your own confusions?

Do you wish yourself,

when darkness comes,

a sentimental farewell?

"How to survive"

1.

Shadow shapes on paper

record and receive

impulses of pencil

and keep them still

till time rubs them out

        right left

 left right

2.

We came to the sea’s edge

 to a beach of hard sand

  thro the path of the wind

   in a field of wheat

    face to face

         to face

    the moment’s

    reflection .

What record does it leave,

 and where, what

  pattern are we

   weaving?

(. . . ) 

The Mirror

The Mirror

( 1 )

It was beautifully difficult to watch him work — to see how well he could handle these different voices all at once with such painstaking ease.

With energies extended and refined by his new consciousness, that very night he began to write from dictation whatever the book said to him as soon as he opened it.

The next day he began to speak aloud whatever was dictated to him by the book. That was how his poetry came into being. The book spoke to him in his dreams, with his own mouth. Its pages were tongues of fire.

Sometimes, in order to find his way back into the book, he first had to find a hidden way out. But before that he always made sure he wrote down whatever the woman in the book had written.

( 2 )

The easiest thing, when he was writing, was when the book wrote itself.

It made no difference at all whether he knew his poems arose from hidden depths or whether he imagined they were his own willful inventions.* Whenever the angel dominated him, his life was ruled and shaped by collective mankind’s unconscious mind. He was swept along on an unstoppable underground current as a mere helpless observer of events.

At five in the morning he wandered along in an unknown dream he had long before known there was no way for him to escape.

In pages yet to be dictated, he foresaw a man-sun and a moon-woman, their combined love-light shining like a homeward beacon in the blackness of space. He could see very clearly right away how everything would make way for the combined flame of their love.

*Jung: “It is not Goethe that creates Faust, but Faust that creates Goethe.”

( 3 )

The progress of the book became his fate and largely determined the course of his days. So intent was he in his writing that his real life simply became another part of the story.

Yet there were often large contradictions between life and legend, between the story of his life and what he thought he wanted it to say.

And as he carried on he began to encounter more and more of his own reincarnations in all the naked splendor of their actual tangible realities.

So he began to write more and more stories about himself -- not out of some shallow self-adulation but simply because these former and future lives occupied the foreground.

But they were more than just stories. Writing them, he participated in a higher consciousness capable of moving freely in space and time. These hidden histories were integral parts of the bigger picture he intended to reveal -- the buried treasure he had been digging 

so desperately, his whole life, 

to bring to light.

( 4 ) 
His poems soon enough outgrew him, as children do their mother.  . . . 

(. . .) 

Words do not always arrive

Words do not always arrive

in the form of words

Sometimes the lips

decipher the writing

Sometimes unforeseen

words burst forth

from ancient heads evoking

archaic images undeciphered

It’s like light

enters the dark forest

and for a moment

the sleeping body awakes

In a clear soft shaft of light [normalized version]

In a clear soft shaft of light
standing alone
  on the flower hill—

(Has Time come over the hill
 w/ bird-song & tree-song
 & day-song & night-song ?

     Has Time
with little bell tolls
     told you
whose footsteps (obscured
by clouds) might be traced
homeward again
among flowers
now here, how far,
     so near, now —
in a clear soft shaft of light
standing alone?)

  — by the wind
     on the little green hill
in the leaves blown

his heart beating,
     his glad hands heeding

the lost world now
again his own

     w/ marvelous under-
standing

In a clear soft shaft of light [concrete version]

In a

clear s

  haft o

  f ligh

  t stan

  ding a

lone

on the flower hill—

+ + + + + + + + + + + +

+ + + + + + + + + + + + +

(Has Time come over the hill

+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + +

w/ bird-song

& tree-song

& day-song

& night-song

?

Has Time

with little

bell tolls

told you

+

whose footsteps

(obscured by clouds)

might be traced

+

homeward again

among flowers

+

now here,

how far,

so near,

now —

+

in a

clear

soft shaft

of

light

standing

alone?)

— by the wind

on the little green

hill

in the leaves blown

his heart

beating,

his glad hands

heeding

the lost world

now again

his own

w/ marvelous

under-

standing

Myths are History (3): from Charles Olson, "Poetry and Truth, Lecture I"

"I happen,
as a poet, to be interested in
creation as a structure —
which is
cosmology.

I got to it in a series of visions
or dream
similar to other men.

Cosmology is a spiritual condition
many people have already known
in other ways —

to get around on the other side
of the nature of any thing
we can now call our experience —
and not something subjective,
but common."

Myths are History (2): from Charles Olson, "Poetry and Truth, Lecture I"

"Coming back
to that question of a poet’s images
and his coming into possession of them,
leading him
to something that we too
familiarly know as
mythology . . .
                     
                        mythology
has never been anything but
the turning point

that leads eventually
or possibly to

cosmology

to the question
—how do you, how
as a person, not only
as a poet, does one live
one’s own image,
rather than use it
simply
for writing— ?"

Myths are History (1): from Charles Olson, "Maximus, from Dogtown-I" (excerpt)

"like Ocean
which is 9 times around
earth and sea (Heaven is 9 times
around earth and sea folding and folding
earth and sea in its backward it
wraps and wraps the consistency
[. . . ]
On that edge or place
inverted from Ocean starts
another place
Tartaros in which all
who have been by the statutory
thrown down or overthrown, are
kept watch on Night and Day
(Night’s house is right over
their heads, in which one door
Day goes out when her mother
comes in and neither
are ever together at the same time
‘at home’ — Hell is just over
their heads
and so is the ‘way-up,’ Bifrost
(Styx’s house and Iris the messenger
[ . . . ]
this marvelous ladder the
color of all colors
. . .
and a great part of her melted
as tin does from the heat of him blasted
where Zeus had tossed him

and then in the bitterness of his anger Zeus
tossed him into Tartaros

the previous time when all the land had seethed
and Ocean’s streams and the sea
had boiled —
[. . .]"

Among the Ruins

1.

“It was then
in the clear morning,
our young voices finding
first sounds of joy,
first sounds of grief —”

     “. . . your hand holding mine
      we walked together in the garden,
      innocent but knew it not —”

“. . . we heard terror and delight,
your hand in my hand was afraid.
I tried to learn
new innocence
in your eyes,
but they became
frightened
of mine —”

     “. . . and in the wide
      cool wave of the shade
      I learned new joy
      alas that
      leads the footstep astray— ”


2.

Into a cloud walking
into the sun
forgive me that we become one.

Forgive the love I cherish,
forgive the things that perish
along the way.

Slowly goes the holy
into the unholy .


Into a cloud walking
into the sun
together sharing the secret union
we become one.

And slowly the unholy
becomes holy .

Now no more hide new eyes
come together from paradise
in the high middle noon
of this life.

[ . . . ]

“Requiem for the inner child” #6

The children pass thro the cave doors

and in the high grass
build kingdoms of green, where
they dwell under the will of
the butterfly,

knowing full well how the soul floats
as the butterfly does, where it will . . .



Your eye searches the field
of living green .

You come so near to where
their voices float up from faraway games .
Lying in the grass, their world
hides the clear blue sky . . .



At last their voices surround you .

You have come so near
you almost understand them . . .