trying out a new catalyst to convert natural rhythms into poems.

the substrate was two points in time:

11 1 08 10:35 65 (degrees F) 53 (% hum.)

&

11 1 08 11:08:15 66 (degrees F) 53 (% hum.)

&

the product:



A Wild West Posse

Ah- What a quest! To capture a moment!
How?

Can an instant be dreamed or drawn?
Or are these words 'damned' to hold naught but past
and future?
What once was is not,
and (hope&fear)'s
projections are not;
tho some may come to be.
What crime has this Now,
that to a cage we
condemn it?

If in this life on a time line we're found,
then:

Each eternal, cosmic Now is
a pearl there strung, showing us that the hourglass
grains we're so oft buried under
can, like White Dwarf Stars on a great galactic necklace, shine forth.
And, as the [bulb:) brightens
the (darkness] surrounding
with one point of light,
[Moments:Time]






Seems like it could have potential...

Whataya think?

11/2/08 12:33:24 68(F) 65(%) 29.41inHg

In a backyard cove, in a hammock swinging,
with a
group of birds and chipmunks singing,
and the pages of time, bright with the hues of fire
falling as
the first, soft,
scattered drops of a storm.

The color wheel's rim here
is complete, with honeysuckle
Yule scenes of red & green;
burnt umber oaks and
cherry maples framed in chrome yellow; and a
bright, clear, azure backdrop blending
into the deep dark purple of space.

Rapture
by: James Tate
from

"If you sit here a long time and are real
quiet, you just might get to see one of those
blue antelope," I said to Cora. "I'd do any-
thing to see a blue antelope," she said. "I'd
take off all my cloths and lie completely still
in the grass all day." "That's a good idea,"
I said, "taking off the cloths, I mean, it's
more natural." I'd met Cora in the library the
night before and had told her about the blue
antelope, so we'd made a date to tey and see
them. We lay naked next to one another for hours.
It was a beautiful, sunny day with a breeze that
tickled. Finally, Cora whispered into my ear,
"My God, I see them. They're so delicate,
so graceful. They're like angels, cornflower
andels." I looked at Cora. She was disappearing.
She was becoming one of them.

               

Reaching the end of Tate’s impressive tome, ‘Rapture’ overtakes me and with nowhere else to go, I pursue a vision of the “blue antelope” for this week’s response. As a practitioner of the spiritual arts, the title strikes immediately a deep chord and demands absolute attention. Simply by staring into the single, boldface word, with its central truss, a sense of placidity washes my soul free from fear and sorrow, and I float on the inlet shallows with their pool-like calmness. It’s amazing, the story starts up without setting or simile introductions, there’s just a quoted place: “here” and an invitation to sit quietly, patiently waiting for a mythical animal whose color, according to the Cherokee tradition, represents the North, which is also correlated with wisdom. The blue too mirrors the sky and the sea, two expansive, mysterious realms whose fluidity holds a subtle power capable of turning mountains into valleys. Then the woman Tate dresses in as much mystery as the sea and sky combined speaks: “I’d do anything to see the blue antelope” and suggests that baring all and laying “in the grass all day” naked literally and metaphorically, as social restraints fall away with the cotton sensation barriers. Tate’s reply to this is quite “natural” indeed, concurring with a “That’s a good idea” then clarifying himself just in case another idea slipped in during the interval. Then we’re presented with some biographical condensate, first flashing back to their initial meeting then coming right back to the poem’s present with imagery that hearkens the recurring Eden-esk scenes throughout Memoir. It rather reminds me of California in the middle sixties, before the somewhat disastrous post summer of love escapades. I can almost see two college students in the stacks of the campus’ main library, where? UC Berkeley? San Fran? It’s hard to say, and doesn’t really matter. It would probably be naïve to think that the poem contains the whole conversation, but i find it elegantly surreal that any conversation with discussion about searching for a “blue antelope” could lead to such a beautiful moment where two souls, innocent of doubt and judgments, join in boundlessness. And then “Cora whispered” so as to not disrupt the vision, for it’s “so delicate” like “cornflower angels,” not bleached and powdery corn flour, but the intricate Centaurea with the cyan petals like feathers radiating from a cobalt pom-pom. And as Memoir fades, Cora too starts “disappearing” wrapped in a blanket of sky, laying on an oceanic pillow, witnessing life from Love’s highest peaks; Bare, Beautiful, Beatific.

 

String Theory

The meter for this piece was derived from the following data:

11-5-08 11:42 54(%) 68(F) 29.12inHg 39^o 11’ 11.53” N 86^o 30’ 56.39” W elevation: 798ft

 

 

 Bless the physicists! For their love is thankless.
They peer into things,
(&not things?), exploring until
some click, some twirl, some plummeting marble shows
the inner works
of this
cosmic Rube Goldbergian device.
They seek to corral chaos, harnessing wild mustangs with
a quantum language of seemingly random
strings of bizarre, abstract symbols; spinning them all
together,
weaving the tapestry of the stars.
Their art is of a purest kind: rooted in
truth, producing multidimensional fruits
of aesthetic inspiration.
On the fringes of their movement
stretches a thread tagged as
‘String Theory’
that may unite what’s known and yet to be so.
So, in the Spirit of One, i weave this thread through
the fabric of my love too;
drawing on Nature’s graceful patterns,
embroidering my thoughts in time.

It’s all really rather amazing: the synchronicities that seem to slip into a moment here, a moment there and then back to the here and now. It’s interesting to watch serendipitisness build on itself until second and third (and so on) order phenomena start to emerge. For instance, how astonishing is it that: the last poem I wrote on, being the last poem of the last section of the Tate Memoir, seems to directly correlate with the first poem now being written on from Hicok’s Animal Soul (being too the last poem, tho of the first set)? Not only are the titles and subjects the same (tho not the situations nor the forms) but to boot, Hicok’s ‘Rapture’ shows signs of Tateian influence.

            Hicok’s “blue genitals [that] look like cave paintings… only less articulate” seems to be a kind of hieroglyph reference to Tate’s “blue antelope” painting that probably would look right at home in Lascaux. As Wild Bob Hicok leaves the room he was driven to by reminders, he enters a world of “present tense,” where for a moment memory breaks through into something closer and more real; but before the bar in Sarajevo materializes too much WBH slams on the breaks, like a grand prix driver late to the realization of the upcoming hairpin turns, with an “Even though I’m not.” And we see that what’s going on is, as Jamiroquai might say: traveling without moving. As Hicok maneuvers the S-curves, breaking as he enters then accelerating through each vertex in space and time, one might be inclined to say: Golly g-force-wilikkers! What just happened?; but then the poem opens up into a straight-away of revelation, where “the events of [the poem’s] lives compress to singularity” and the barroom so far away (tho true), and the room with a love topped desk and a man of red and blue become not two but “one room” on “one night.” And as the traveler’s whispers echo through time, as if “one word” was a cork in the barrel of “all words,” the glowing bridges between raptures once again become visible in the “soul reborn [as] a hawk” and “powers of invisibility.”

AHHHH!!   The last assigned poem for the w203 workshop.
(now its re-vision time in prep for the final chapbook :-)

Acrostic Animal Anthology

Branta canadensis

Calling from the sky, a V’s voice comes,
announcing that the chill is on its way.
northern winds blow flocks towards tropical climes,
and the sky’s filled with classic bird shapes
done in the Monet fashion, where
animals are drops of paint.

Godspeed, frequent fliers,
on your journey, and
on the one anon:
soaring free, not thinking
even once of border lines.

 

                            Sciurus niger

                            Foraging for nature’s nuttier kind
                            of meat type food; some to eat, some for
                            xanadu, (a warm place to sleep

                            Serenely through winter’s cold)
                            quick, fur clad battalions
                            investigate the
                            rising tide of leaves,
                            rummaging around in
                            every nook & cranny ‘till,
                            leaping onto the trees, they play.

                                                             Odocoileus virginianus

                                                             While gazing through a pane of melted sand,
                                                             honeysuckles add a splash of green
                                                             into a scene whose colors are
                                                             thinning. Morning’s stillness is
                                                             everywhere, but oH! what’s
                                                             that, moving so slow,
                                                             and blending so well
                                                             in with the barky brown?
                                                             light fills shadow, and i see:

                                                             Does and yearling young ones too, an
                                                             entire family of wilderness
                                                             experts enjoying a berry good meal.
                                                             rightly so, for winter’s not a fast’s break.

 

 

                This second safari through the Animal Soul has me thinking ‘Finally I Buy X-ray Glasses,’ which will hopefully add to the understanding of the “moment’s text,” for: time passes subtly through this poem and the length (for Hicok) is a dance with brevity. The start seems reasonable enough given the title; with a thirteen year old peering into the potential of a “supercharged glance.” And hints at (maybe) a Catholic^? (or some other guilt based faith organization’s) upbringing, for the speaker’s sight ends with the “scowling mask of God” who apparently finds it necessary to vengefully chastise the youth for fancy. The delivery is right on, with “this” pause at the end of the first line, as if even then “seeing through” into at least language, the realm of imagination, where (nearly) anything is possible and one need not actually wear glasses from “the Johnson Smith Company” to “pierce to atoms” or to “pierce to [the thought] of atoms.” Truly, if one were to be wearing the “x-ray specs” would one need to question “when it would stop”?

                But whom, or more rightly, who’s when “was a literalist?” The early romp has the speaker “invad[ing] walls and blouses and” such, suggesting a more outward focus. But the thirteen year old speaker may have been the one (already) seeking “secrets[‘] sol[utions]… inside” with the world outside as a mirror, imagining what it would be like to see through the mirror, into the medicine cabinet (&beyond^?). It’s hard to say, for the next sentence frames what feels like a significant time period passage (if not geologically, in the course of the human experience, and most definitely in the course of the Drosophila experience) and the ‘Finally’ of the title suggests so, and the transition between tenses nearly paints it in safety orange with “that was before” but there’s no real indication as to how far distant the poem’s now is from “13.” It may not matter tho, maybe x-ray glasses are like Stephen King’s Wizard Glass from The Dark Tower series that fuzzifies some pieces of the puzzle while (sometimes unpleasantly) magnifying others.

                The conclusion begs the question: if the literalist “was before” is the speaker then (now^?) treading the sometimes dusty (sometimes muddy) road of figurative language; with the box and the specs and the mystery’s description of “Zeus-power… check[s]” and balances? Whether they nucleated the “laugh [that] became kisses” or not, it seems that Bob did ‘Finally… buy [some] X-ray Glasses’, ‘cause they’re on the cover of the book. 

what if:

past='treeofknowledge' : NOW='gardenofeden' : future='treeoflife'


?

I find the distinction between the Sambhogikakaya and the Nairmanikakaya very interesting and would like to discuss it further here and now. Amongst the most intriguing aspect of the distinction is that there aren’t any qualms (doctrinally) towards affirming that no real distinction exists, for both are seen to represent “manifestations of Buddhahood to share its knowledge and liberation with beings.” So, more rightly, the distinction is real only in as much as the perception of the rupakaya is differentiated based on the capacity to understand of the perceiver. Those who find joy in wisdom and the journey there to find joy in the exposition of wisdom and the journey there to; and those who, due to the obscurations of greed and fear, struggle to maintain a sense of familiar continuity struggle with exposition of wisdom and the journey there to, for onto it projections of confrontation are placed in defense of firmly held beliefs.

                The Nairmanikakaya, being often translated as ‘body of manifestation’ or ‘body of transformation’ doesn’t by its etymology suggest a mode of perception, for: “it can appear as whatever is most salvifically  beneficial in a particular case.” This leaves perception to the karmic derived capacity of the observer. It may appear rather paradoxical for one dedicated to relieving suffering to act such that suffering ensues, but for one adjusted to darkness even a spark can strike so eyes never used. The Nairmanikakaya tho, in this context, too leaves open the possibility of non-emotional acceptance that may not fulfill the formal conception of the Sambhogikakaya.

                The Sambhogikakaya, being often translated as ‘body of communal enjoyment’ does implicitly imply a mode of perception. It also suggests a connection to the first stage of Bodhisattvahood, known in the west as ‘the stage of joy,’ where one not only accepts but embraces self-realization, wisdom, and the journey there to. Makransky brings up that “Here we see Sambhogikakaya defined as that which ‘brings enjoyment of dharma to the circles of assembly,’ not that which only enjoys dharma for itself” which implies that Buddha ‘enjoys’ dharma. This is supported by the fact that, as a foundation to the Bodhisattva’s ascent, joy in the dharma would likely be deeply rooted in Buddha’s Nature.

Ah-

What a way to start the fall break: finalizing mera spring schedule.

ita goes sumptin like dis:

INST-H 250          Hindi semester 4                              Mon-Wed-Fri 10:10-11am
ENG-W 303         Writing Poetry                                   Mon-Wed       1-2:15pm
REL-R 300      Studies in Religion: Tantric Buddhism   Tue-Thu          9:30-10:45am
BIOL-L 321          Principles of Immunology                  Tue-Thu         1-2:15pm
BIOL-L 490          Independent Study                            In betweens and gaps there too


should be pretty darn fun;

the L490 project is moving along nicely,
like a chloroplast in a solar tracking leaf.
may have a paper close to being ready
this time, one revloution 'round the sun hence