Text to flesh
We are being textualized to extinction…
In the beginning was the word
-logos-
and the word became flesh.
Now, we, converted into text,
are only known through our words
and the word that we name ourselves with.
So how do we translate ourselves
back into flesh?
Must we become gods?
The children lurk
The children lurk
absconded in darkness,
shreds and shards of a broken self:
floating fragments
in the universal void within.
They smile and chant and play
forever alien to themselves.
My smiling and chanting and playing
are but the faceless echoes
of their calling out to darkness
for redemption,
for an unknown light
vaguely remembered
as in a dream…
To own the rose
If we want to own the rose we must bring about its death,
shatter the sacred continuity of its cycle.
All death comes as an act of possession.
Beauty dies because of our compulsion to understanding
cannot satisfy itself with its lack of answers;
it must prod the timeless freshness of its scent.
Man’s hands are wilting machines.
Whatever he touches dies
because he is the hand of death.
And then he wonders: “why do things vanish,
why is my yearning for persistence always met with loss…?
Because we want to possess the rose
-the moment as fleeting as the freshness-
because things possessed and known
travel in time where death is the ultimate destination
and we are the deaths’ dark knights.
To be silent
To be silent is to infold,
like some flowers when night comes,
and to open, by the chemistry of darkness,
to another black luminescence
from within the central fountain
that light unseen except
by the eternal flower maker
peeking through the other
pair of eyes
to listen as if
it were the simplest atom of the voice
like the astonished awakening of sex.
Fate
Land of gloomy dark lagoons
where a scripture undeciphered
holds the secret of man’s doom.
Where each life defines its ends
in obscure circumlocutions,
and the paradox is solved
in a presupposed conclusion.
Beauty
Those Greeks knew
where Beauty keeps her abode:
in the perfect proportion of elements,
the precise number, rhythm, texture, gesture,
not to speak eloquently, but to evoke in the heart
it’s own powers of dialogue.
By that sobriety of form and expression
the gates would open for a bursting forth
of that passionate exuberance of the soul
-the aesthetic emotion-
that overwhelming first-hand knowledge of beauty
so extraordinary in its power,
that it is an agony.
Initiation
From certainty to paradox and from paradox to double paradox
quantum leap in the mind and of the mind beyond itself.
From the walled city of old exorcisms near the cemetery
towards the holy mountain of unknowing.
A knowing which is not knowing
paradox of the intellect becoming non-intellect
suppressing itself as intellect in order to know the enigma
of that which cannot be known
in order to conceive the inconceivable
which becomes even more inconceivable upon conception;
a conceiving without knowing
in the same way a new life in conceived
without understanding of the mystery
without it being aware of its own conception
without its knowing that it has been conceived
with the enormous mystery at the center of its heart
as its atomic nucleus.
Child’s play
From my small patch of sunlit porch
I watch the children play.
They laugh and sing.
They throw and catch a ball
-eternity bouncing back and forth
between them.
I smile at them, rejoicing
in this traveling wholeness I observe,
this total exclusion of winners and of losers,
in the fading rays of Summer.
I want to walk the steps from porch to street
and join them in their play,
but my feet are heavy, my heart is old.
They are innocent and I am not.