Tag Archives: seeing/feeling

Aperture

[This poem is #1 in a series dedicated to revisiting poems that were written by me as part of my participation in a collaborative and experimental poetry blog: IMUNURI.blogspot.com. Aperture was written and first published 31 December 2014.]

 

These that are things and not things both
They pepper the landscape
The landscape that is so and not so both
I walk amongst them
The I that is not an I after all, yet somehow is

It’s not that I wonder about this apparent conundrum
As in feeling troubled or some kind of loss
Rather it is there or with it that I belong
Nothing of this casts me aside
All things that I am and am not Rest here

Whose favor would I garner
To look upon this any differently
Seeing is a communion after all
That each and every one of us
Has within the very fabric of being

Ultimately there is no such thing as compromise
And yet how often is there a sensation
Of All of This somehow tangled
Around my ankles that I possess
The I that has no counterpart

As we see through this aperture
Closure is a function of clarity
Focus celebrating the visual spectrum
Saturating this field in the unseen
An exposé of brilliance and crystallization

Book launch this week ~ 15 March 2016

I have special news this week to share with you all. Please join in my excitement as I announce that two works of my poetry, a visual poem and a collaborative poem, are included in One Way to Ask, an unusually delightful and innovative book of poetry and art by poet Daniel Ari and his 67 artist collaborators. (Norfolk Press, San Francisco 2016)

One Way To Ask book cover

The innovation in this book is many things, but a prominent and specific one is a new form of poetry created by Daniel called the queron. What is queron, you might ask?

Queron is a form that emerged from my poetry practice to match the way my creativity dances, curiously and deliberately, with my experience. Querons have seventeen lines grouped into three quintets and a final couplet. The rhyme scheme is ababa bcbca cdcdb dd. I prefer subtle rhyme.” ~ an excerpt on queron from the book

• • •

My collaborative poem (with Daniel Ari) is called “What Experiences” and the “artwork” that accompanies this penned collaboration is a visual poem in its own (w)right: “Where is the line drawn?” Daniel included these works as the end piece, as we delved into a unique level of collaboration, for this book, inspired by our years of writing together on a group blog of Daniel’s called IMUNURI. (I have posted/published many innovative poems on that blog, some of which I have linked to here on Contemplative Fire.)

Kudos, Daniel Ari!

And congrats to all the artists/illustrators included in this unique book of #poetry!

• MORE •

See a preview of the book or purchase a copy of this cool book for yourself, both on the Norfolk Press website.

Check out One Way to Ask on Facebook to see posts about the launch.

Check out Daniel Ari’s blog: Fights With Poems.

Or if you’d like a special author signed copy, let me know and I’ll put you in touch with Daniel.

• • •

“Reading Daniel Ari‘s poems, juxtaposed with artwork by an impressive roster of talented graphisticators, is like entering a cultural Whirlpool washer. Set to the final spin cycle. Everything comes out clean at the end, but your underwear and your socks may have switched identities.”  -Bill Griffith, creator of Zippy the Pinhead

 

inter

-weaving
as we go
unseen character
infuses lesser known
gods of titration
and arbitration
snow crystal
monument
just under foot


Interweaving ground:sky

Offerings

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

The Land of Clouds

The other ‘land’

A new land was visible, as well as undeniably felt today. This land was a land of clouds, in perfect synergy with the geological, earthen land masses that appear so permanent and reliable. The cloud cover was ever changing today, reliably so. The play of light and shadow cast exponentially greater than the day or two before when I took in the simple play of afternoon light and shadow on the slopes of the Adams Gulch trail north of Ketchum (where I’ve been communing with animals for the last three weeks.)

It was as if I had arrived in a wholly new place. The clouds joining with, marrying, in a deep interplay with the curves and slopes of the mountains and hills and creek valleys everywhere around me creating a new order of scape. I was drawn to capture the shapes and the light and the feel of these ineffable contours again and again and again. Everywhere I turned, yet another land to move with, to be wafted by, lifted up while my feet remained with the ground below.

Dwelling place in the clouds

Where is it we dwell, truly? There is only one small portion of ground that our physical form rests down, touches down, meets contact with and makes real that place. All other aspects of space are perceived, even if they can be mapped, recorded, seemed to be held real ~ all these are simply a pointing to. Such is the magic of the cloud land or cloudscape, no maps are made of these.

Hiroshige Homage

In that way, clouds are akin to so many other changing thus not permanent things, not expected to remain the same. What is it about cloud nature that our brains so resonate with their phenomena? Are we not so much closer to cloud than steel or glass or even wood? We are so changeable by so, so many aspects and factors of life that shape us, constrict us, show us off, dissolve us, heighten and sometimes perturb us.

Permanently Changeable: Sky Dance

I will meet you here

We are at home in the sky

There no ladder climbs

On the Journey Between Two

Relax. Into this. And this. Relax is something that permeates into an aspect of self and being where there is no longer two. Most of my thinking seems directed by a self, a will that the self identifies as its own and yet      … and yet there is another mind or one who experiences thinking within as the very nature of space receives all things. I have been treading this ground of late, this ground of seeing and seeing and feeling into.

This ground seems pocked by hot spots, surges of energy or activity where there seems to be a discourse and nearly a battle. But the battle only appears to be a battle and is actually an incredible dance of forces merging into themselves, realizing and actualizing the potential within the not-two or between that which appears and that which is without appearance.

To have such definition on this road, the road, in actuality, of space, the misconception so easily made is to give precedence to appearances and their seeming positions and volition. This take on what simply is is often a mis-take. What can seem to be one of the self primarily, the aspect of self that is organized around identifying with, may separate out the one from the two. In effect this separating out is saying ‘I direct this and you direct that’ and in that excluding virtually all the richness of what simply is existing or co-existing, using that word to not exclude the mind’s dualistic nature here, in unconditional space.

For the self that I have so often identified with seems to be one that has a capacity to direct, to parse out, to refuse, to orient to or not, to find difference with, and therefore identify with one thing over another. I sit with the energy of this all now, the energy of it as pure space or of it existing in unconditional space/time. Something else occurs there and then (funny references really, the ‘there’ and the ‘then’) for those very references or reference points drop away or no longer serve anything of truth.

The something else is relax. Back to the first utterance, at least of this blog, and pointing to, relax is in a sense no where to go, nothing to define one thing against another. And this relax may be different from within my view or perspective from another person’s individual consciousness. And even that difference is included here. Such a unique liberation for that self that I have been identifying with so strongly. Self continues on its journey even in the relax. Self doesn’t need to identify with, it just is.

Even the way the writing is happening today seems to have relax in it. Arriving without arriving, in a way. Not making or creating a position, just seeing now as seeing is happening and allowing a writ of that. Even the words that come are fascinating as the arising, in their arising. Writ large of the Relax.

event horizon

as i sit to write i source the event horizon of what emerges

just enough to gather the energy into expression and

i discover there are images there instead of words

there are moving energies in my heart of hearts

that simply don’t want to be put into words

left to the pure beauty of the energy

itself breathing arising alighting

within my awareness

and sourcing

itself as

itself

ahh

ah

a

from the shadows

this morning   it felt better to sleep   and to stay asleep

yet as the moment came to awaken

my heart    found rest     in the shadow light

and the dormancy within    had a new voice

the body calibrated for the light   of day

while the heart in wait   exploring opening with

the shadows all around and layered through

now   shadows welcomed and resting

the softness   calming nourishing inside

deep in shadows i am   like you   like we

but tasted on the tongue   as clear medicine

takes a whole other pause   breathing into

surrendering to the weight and the lightness

of the mastery of what is held   complete   within