"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.  . . . 

(. . .)