I place the paper
out where I can
see it in passing
Days go by
waiting for the
precipitation that
earlier
came as barometric
shift somehow gauged
in this weathervane
Words start popping
through like vestiges
of a spring-like rain,
blessings
in this winter of winter-
day, warming and fragrant
worn like undergarments
in a drafty house
offerings
to the Knowing Emptiness
Oh, under it, under all the vestiges
of what if, what old boards and
dust and fragments, but these
That pepper the bed clothes with
less than perfect sleep, tossing
and turning under the weight of it
This reality, packed up in numerous
boxes ~ to-go for this, to-go for that
under packing it, as What Is is
So much more yet where does at-
tention, at tension, go ~ no resting.
Others instead bring beauty, grace.
But no, these old things beg to be
of Use. Or is it that ? Perhaps but
what if, what if, if what, if What Is
Were already of Use? Bizarre order.
This memory of tossing and turning
now folds into the voice of the light
Opening out over crystalline hoarfrost
warming and dazzling just as it is
this juxtaposition of dour and dulcet.
The rigid supposing, how does it serve?
As if what if were magic, elixir of
fortitude, grace, wonder, and not burden.
Leave it open, don’t pretend resolve.
Clustering what ifs wait in the cold
not sure of their fate. What if they knew?
I say these things
You laugh
What heart are we
And where
The attachments fall so
Heavily at my feet
Stubbing toes and more
I Am That
Does it matter where
I Am
Relax, says the sky
I am here
You can’t go anywhere
Without me
This vastness answers
All my questions
Just because they appear
To be moving
Doesn’t mean the clouds
Abandon us
You have finally stumbled
Across my breadcrumbs
Now it’s my turn to laugh
Because you are the path
Finding your way home
Could never be easier
Conjuring vastness
There a hundred fold reward
Who has strayed
Off the path perhaps me
Order is never lost
Only found that single garment
A dazzling raiment
As I plainly step out of my skin
The absolute waiting
Beyond comprehension
A stillness not
Measured nor breathed
Paths converge
Never having been split
If I could see with the eyes
I See with ~ the wonder and gravity
Of What Is would be deeply evident yet
Needing no evidence nor questioning
And yet the power of those eyes
Is that they don’t see in the plainest
Of ways, but as the ordinarily extraordinary
Depth of field without f-stops
Nothing captured for posterity, contrasting
All sense of judgment with the luminosity
Of vibrancy such that even the Camera
Obscura lays wait, no pin prick necessary
As bubbles burst upon forming, projections
Simply do not arise, people do not gather for or against
And even places do not serve as some kind of Dominion
Nor as shoving off, point of departure
How odd that our lives seem to balance
Between a collection of events and things
As we surround ourselves with tangible markers
Of the intangible. What a task
We ask of the humble traces of earth and sky
When their very nature is just to be
No claim on anything, but abiding and giving
Nonetheless. Purpose perhaps but no need.
for James Wheeler (in asking to take photos) and Peter Kater (for Dance of the Innocents)
With each veil, whether opaque or transparent
There you are, such that the phenomenon
Of ‘behind’ a veil takes on a new slant.
You’ve redefined it for me in the juxtapositions
You carry, heavily, awkwardly, and some tenderly.
For ‘behind’ becomes ‘out in front,’ the evening drunkenness
Marries with the sober mess of another day
Creating one breathtaking yet somber step
In the choreography of this life, the life
You have surreptitiously invited me to witness.
Which of these veils lay, in their transparency,
Across your heart? How do you know
Your own heart when that which obscures lends
Its fashioning to nearly every breath you take?
What, in your own private ken, can take your breath away?
Why not let it be so even here, even now.
Regardless of what it could bring, what could
Be said of you, of the other. Melt, like the snows,
That brick of larder sheltered in the walk-in
Of the kitchen of your existence. Taste.
What is here. Taste. Join me in the life that is yours.
Join me in taking in the smells, the fragrances.
Yes, you may suffer immunity from those. Walk
Anew into your own life through my eyes,
Landing there in a freshness that is Timeless.
May these words beckon to you in the way
Your touch has softened something in me,
Even in your withholding. For touch is beyond
Flesh, includes flesh, is the origins of flesh,
Something more than the senses that sees, hears, and listens yet.
The book within which my mind/fingers/perception now inter-tangles
Is a numinous window/doorway/matrix where abiding is
–
Beyond and through the inside/outside being question/answer
Nothing held back even in the current system version and nuts ‘n bolts
–
We are meeting everything we are ALL the time NO exception
Where are the reins, if there are any reins at all, once a bit ‘n bridle
–
This book unwritten and written both, abides with effortless grace
Just before its expression, as the tenterhooks of the unconditional
–
We praise those who can pull the physicality from the vision As if
Its existence were something of utterly impossible proportions
–
The way you cannot put your finger on the music itself only the score
But to inhabit or rest with that which is only you or self, vibratory-self
–
Do not go to that tempting sense of separate identity, so many filters
Must be engaged, energized -only to dumb down the very essence of You
–
What is pleasure but an awesome joining with What Is, no separation,
Which identity and falsehood claim as their territory, a cocks’ waddle
–
We take exceptional acceptance to preferences in which identity relies
Not even realizing we are doing so, we become the pecking order itself
–
I am this book, closed or open. I have this life. I am life here and now.
Many pages are there written, unwritten, erased and rewritten, evermore
–
Transparent to the phenomenal existence of the felt sense and beyond
Pages turn within pages, simultaneously flowing, multi-directional space
–
This book that carries space as the primary ingredient and we write with
The particles of our beingness, sometimes so tightly and so densely
–
Only to see in sharp contrast in those moments outside of time how we
Catch our breath on the densities, grasping and gasping in that weather
–
Worn way of guarding ourselves from What Is as if there were something
Better to have and hold even though having and holding are pure fiction
–
Just look at the nature of phenomena, what has ever stopped phenomena
In such a way that What Is is stored, saved, made impervious to that which
–
We Are. The background and foreground, look there, as they are so often
Reversed or better yet, made real in their opposites, then chosen and fitted
–
As yourself. Choosing, a kind of choosing we call living this life, takes us over
And the true choice is no choice: simply not setting yourself/other apart
–
All within these pages whether of paper of earth or pages of touch screen
Enter in and rest, as the you you know/don’t know is already resting within.
.
September 25 – 28. 2013
for Becci
.
If I had painted myself today
I would have been thinking
of our conversation and how
.
you seem to be in two places
at once while I — take chase
in hopes of getting sympathy
.
for an aged cheese, long sitting
on the shelf in wait of a gourmet
taster, just like you, someone
.
who’s not deterred in the least by
stinky concoctions, can see them for
what they are — real, incased, beauty
.
in a tough rind, the skin of this
body politic, the only one evident
to me at this time. “I don’t think
.
you understand,” I say to myself after
the conversation has gone on to other
doings. I’m so tempted to say, “What good
.
will it do?” But I don’t. Instead I look
for anything that could serve as pigment,
binder, carriers, brushes –preparing.
.
As I paint myself today, the body which
is not me, returns into its elemental
unfolding falling back towards the
.
natural order of its emanation: water
to water; seed to seed; fold unto fold;
mineral saturations and truth and grit.
.
“What/where is that other place you exist?”
.
I have sometimes written a poem without having to be aware of the writing
You see, the poem aside from its writing or typing is an entity of its
own. It is seen, heard, felt, paused,
And squeezed out from behind the corner of the eye, the eye that is not
an eye
.
One where seeing comes in a whole other spectrum than
The usual one –not one you can manufacture here –one that exists already
It comes of its own accord like twilight or dawn, nothing can stop it or begin it
.
When you pause in the words, you’ll see a whole shift of light
It can easily be blocked, consciously or unconsciously; but if you let it be, everything takes on a different tone
For that time when things look as they do in between
.
The poem appears, it comes into its own, and recedes as if it has breath
[those reading and writing access it equally yet different]
It cannot be said even which comes first, the one who reads or what writes
.
And being is like that, too –am I myself or something else
What moves this now, not such that it is a hall of mirrors
But the something else continuously speaks itself as if I were the pen and paper
Thicket along the watercourse; San Cristobal, NM
Down by the thickets of willows making their place where waters sometimes run (as a trickle or more.) This wayside is where the heart has its home, the air naturally cooling in this weave on a very hot day.
I’ve been here “on the property” for a little over two weeks but clearly haven’t arrived until now. This is my first day here in the grasses, on their way to tall, the filtered light in nuances more than I can count, the old bowing willow branches remind me of the ever present inspiration to the eye of an artist, perhaps the other way around. To draw this place or just to be and see and be touched by this wild order? The kind of beauty that can go so easily unnoticed, much less the amazing feat of interspecies communing, even those without voices, but textures, color, integrity take me over. The air is not the only element that is renewed here.
I want to say “on the other hand…” as I contemplate the contrast of the places that have been denuded (a stone’s throw from here) or stripped of their natural dignity by the use or appropriation for something we call “living our lives.” What I love about this wilder place by the draw behind the house is that life is already living here fully and I simply join in. This grand beingness of it all!
It’s not that this place is any better than someplace else, it’s just that it is THIS place and can be no other place! And how so very different it feels here than just fifty or a hundred yards away. What a gift this place speaks of my own nature, which sometimes seems much less human than just Being alive, sentience itself, able to be touched, penetrated by the exquisite weave of interpenetrating life, of consciousness. The magpies have their squawk and the mourning doves their cooing calls. The breeze, now at my back, stirs the green life alive into motion and sound. Is it the motion of things that we hear or is it something just a bit more illusive than that?
This up close visitation to the green of the thicket next to the seeping wallow brings me right to the taste of my own heart. They are not like the wider vistas of mountains in the distance with fields of sagebrush laying out before them, not like the open, open skies with all matter of clouds and blue in their ever-changing atmosphere-scape. Here things crowd in without any feeling of density or overbearingness. Here is intimacy, did I say that already, of brush and bower, of grass and twig, of every kind of insect and butterfly with the light ever shifting amongst it all. I become part of a nourishment cycle; bathing in spirit of thicket and this very place.
14.5″ x 18″, in pencil and filtered light on paper
Life Being Life 