“The Phrase”

 

The phrase transcends the pen withdrawn
And so, too, the movement in and of itself.
The notebook’s filled, volumes line the shelf
And there upon a winter’s night, the low straw
Wins and he reviews the lot and finds the flaw
In each. Perhaps a word crossed out, a gulf
In time allows a light to objectivity less the self.
And when the wheel stops, the law
Of averages condemns the thing to sit there
Once again, forgotten, anonymous as a star
That far away, explodes with fireworks
That would consume a galaxy—matter gone berserk—
Ignite and what had no energies now amassed, a pregnant flare
Until at last, one starry night, a whisper reaches earthly ears.
Just so, the incomplete, the Word to words and back again
Traverse the gap as the task of phonemes
Aspires to ascend to higher stations, morphemes
Honoured in this natal happy path. Observe:
Throughout the zodiac of conscious meaning
Stars that matter to velocities in galaxies
Reborn inspire genitive ignition in the gravity
Of natural wisdom’s past and present leaning
To fruition in what was always meant to be.
The moon, in its phase; the sun, its angry season,
The poet writes within a pendulum of forces, reason
Bound, but nonetheless eternal mysteries
Revealed as the Ancient of Days calls behind the present hour
Words from phrases only time, distance and the pen can devour.
As the audience is eternal, so, too, what will compel
The heart and mind to ideal calligraphy; the wordsmith’s nod
Secure. And as “the source of all learning is the knowledge of God,”*
So, too, the gravitas of the nib cannot be silenced, nor the muse expelled.

*Bahá’u'lláh, Words of Wisdom, Tablets of Bahá’u'lláh

…pieces of scupture by Hazel Reeves…

“Diversions Mount”

Diversions mount, but decisions are determined
And timing in celestial spheres and signs
Are not paused for dilatory motives nor do the blind
So easily blot out the sun. Some there are who enter
Darkness seeking the mercurial stations of the tongue, the move
From where they are to where they divine they must
Be without so much as limb or wing but straight through the dust
To strike pavilions over what is not and never could be a truth. Note all who’ve
Owned a cause to glorify the effects of blows to obfuscate, to conceive a sure
Obstruction of all evidence, nothing more. “In My Father’s House
Are many mansions,” written plainly in orchestrated independent clauses;
The caveat in escrow, the final contract awaits the ink *and “If it were
Not so,” He would have writ the mystery of galaxies and stars
as when polemic balances mark the seasons’ endless cosmic scars.
Simplify the matter, choose the either, consult the ether, pick one,
Be, and it will be! An avizandum is no match for public exhibition
And the journey never really satisfies the abyss of timely erudition
Further than a fortnight nor the rule of planets beyond a single sun.
And if the moon’s the object in the search,
Winter’s clouds will override the story
If they speak at all in apostrophes of midnight glory
While the appetite for fear what must follow the zenith. Dirty shirts
And all the king’s fine laundry’s better left
Unwashed if the pawn neglects the very lint of ragged pockets. Socks
Are so easily separated, so inevitably lost forever. High tech stocks
And clever use of futures are stuff of much the same in strategies in what’s left
Of patience or detachment, or verisimilitude when the trend in toys is moot
or confidence in leisure time exacerbate so strange a shrinking;
Ships and stocks are never stronger than the thought of either sinking.

* John 14-1-9

“A Splice”

A splice–a thinnest notion
Separates the light from fire, determination from desire
Without from something swimming deep within.  Awesome times admire
Uncertainties of dangers in the undertow, the swelling of the ocean
As it seeks the moon–no hope of union
There, above,of course–a subtle breath of mitigation by disaster, mists
And darkest moulds in what the night sky insists
Is yesterday’s irrelevance, contaminating illusion
Of the present smiling on the past: we must move forward.
Notwithstanding, neither more nor less, in spite
Of evidence to the contrary and well beside the point. Insight
Dictates needs that lean towards or leave behind rewards
Of unknown futures veiled, obscured, preferred at last
Above the sanctions of the status quo and the energies of the mass.

…thanking everyone in advance for sympathies, best wishes and prayers before the storm…

–New York City

“In the Meantime”

And, in the meantime, what?
If the requirement is the sun
And in the hour, none;
If patience swells but in the rutting cuts
No clearance, no escape from paths
To howling destinations; if the moon
Must hide behind the earth, the cry of loons
Is heard no more for lack
Of seasons in the ether;
If the house depends on creosote,
And vessels pine for tides; the coat,
The autumn’s lack of warmth and wintry blasts recuse nor
Will they join demand to orderly confusion, what then?
The egg exacerbates the vigil not within the cock but in the hen.

“The Balm of Blame”

…painting by Kyle Ragsdale…

The balm of blame relies on shame
While fools amass in cloisters; clowns, their terrors
Grouped in choirs as with fires sired in hell. Errors
Come as natural as breathing, while their eternal flame
Afflicts the every man, and cannot be concealed.

How, then, does the crown not fit
As when in the thick of smoke and mirrors bells peeling
Not from above or from the side but fulgent, sealing
Heaven’s signs in record time, the eyes, the gait, the every gesture
Bold prophetic witness as the Eastern Prophets’ Word is echoed in the West,
Their lights snuffed out in increments that underline the tortured tests
Of wills and structures of the Occident in bulging bank accounts–sequestered,
Belching fallacies–metered by the hour that all but scream for want of closure?
Yet, the line is long and longer for ambient mists of deft exposure.

They will not hear the key left limp at latch–the entrance
Or the exit; they cannot see the rising
Or the setting of the complaisant star, its restive analysing
Of the land and sea at midnight, the telling glance
Of creatures who stalk their prey in the foyer of the edifice;
The temporary seating exceeds the number of the tombs is evidence
Enough that in all creation few defy the mirage; the fence
That must divide the space above a phantom’s presence
Of this planet from the gaping hungry star-filled void
Of all that passes for imagination.
Connoisseurs of matter taste
Nothing but the venom of the fang in hours of self-defeating waste:
That posits purpose in pursuit of the outrageous, they speak of decoys
And photographs in place of simple memory and obsolescent joy.

Weep for they whose righteousness consists of lawlessness and celluloid.
The sardonic moon signs mayhem and havoc to the eyes
At rising, a potent rift between what is and what only seems
To be; and we, its tools allow for fancy as it deems
Fitting to be in the mystical early patterns of the evening skies.
How meet and seemly even for the dedicated mind
To allow such flights of visual savagery to arrest
All logic, moving as it does to attest
What truly isn’t there at all. How like denial, refined
Anticipation in the night of our modernity
To grant such majesty, so great an urgency
As the behemoth moon of our imagination cedes
Nothing to the truth but flaunts its strange lucidity
In increments that must eventually crown itself the liar.
Fully risen, there it is what begun must in turn expire
shedding neither light nor fire.

“Solace in the Courtesies”

…just a note to say that about a year ago, I posted the following sonnet induced by having seen the Moon and Jupiter in their full glory together; they’re both back, and contrary to public opinion, so am I; for the mind, “the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to:; for the heart, time is conquered, thank God… —Once, 23 July 2011

Solace in the courtesies of the constellations, Jupiter
Surely there at sunrise, the brightest star,
Visible while the jealous moon, scarred,
The closest audience; apt, significant. The irony. Her
Dwarf, yet here in circumstance; the bond a quiet perpetuity.
The mighty planet rests for moments in the night,
And we regard the larger aegis the greater light
And think so little of her smaller celebrant; so great an inequity
In vision we’re wont to dote upon from such a station as this.
It is just so with all luminaries of perspicuous wisdom and guidance in the night
That they are worshipped in coal black skies, but preludes to the dawning light
Because it pleases the eye see none but them and rest awhile in ignorant bliss.
Yet with the rising of the sun, all former brilliance must surely fade,
Withdrawn by force to honour greater virtues than the night has made.

I wonder why it is that knowing consciously the identity of what that star is that shone this morning just before the sunrise and has been shining every morning so significantly in the southeastern skies makes so much difference. Tonight it was joined beautifully by proximity to the moon.

A few weeks ago, I learned from a friend that that bright, unusually vivid star was in fact the planet Jupiter. Not that the news was astounding, but in some quiet way it was comforting because as I looked out from my balcony in the early morning hours always just before sunrise, when the skies were clear I had seen that star and wondered just what it was. Somehow I wanted some confirmation as to just what that thing was. I wrote to my friend who was kind enough to confirm its identity for me that it is true that it’s Jupiter and it is very visible in the skies during the whole of June into July. Now, then, this silent delight in knowing consciously that I have seen with my own eyes this “other world” that shares our solar system in some subtle way pleases my soul. These are the signsof God, my friend, as if the moon and sun, the inevitable revival of the earth at spring, and countless spectacles of greater and lesser significance were not. Did I need another confirmation of the majesty of this Creation? These days, for me at least, even breathing is a sign of God and becomes more obviously so with every passing day at my age. —Once, July 2010

“Nothing’s Censured”

Nothing’s censured, everything’s gained they say
and choice is all there is and all that’s human.
Cycles shift as do devotion
and commitment and we are glad and sad
As fits emotion and the glory of the stars;
December’s fads
are gone by February, January’s gains illumine
What’s to come in cloistered gusts
that blight the staggered laughter of a spring’s reality.
As autumn’s indiscretions rush to judgement of the past
Occluded by the soul’s embarrassed need
to face the present last,
And yield a future’s wanton wastes
in raw October’s costs and call it natural morality.

Of course, all the world’s put right within
a pale Pink Moon’s delight and we are here tonight
And know damn well we’re gone tomorrow from the diaries of the estuary;
Dawn’s first kiss–the eternal pardon–will arrive behind the execution day,
Delayed a single hour for the sake of show and mere appearances, flights
Of angels sprinkling  spores of wonder in the newly pollinated skies. We’ve lied
Again  and while we ponder why it matters only heaven knows we tried.

“It Is a Consolation”

It is a consolation as well as a curse that none
Of us lasts within these bodies past the grave;
While here, we have no choice but to mark the moon’s phases
And it is the sun that tells us that we have passed another day.
Still, insofar as all of us are eternal, once created, what honours could
Exceed this single blessing? It takes a thousand years for a sunbeam
To reach the surface of the sun and eight seconds from that portal to the earth,
So we are told.
What we are not told is that once created, the sunbeam never dies,
Nor does it remain with us for long here
Among the living nor there
Beyond the last hotdog joint on its way out of town,
And we are left to guess whence it came and where it’s going
And what the hell it was doing here.

“Though the Rising of the Sun”

Though the rising of the sun knows nothing of its setting,
It is for the earth and moon to wonder at such treason
As witnesses to this truth above translucent skies and seas, the season
And its recipients, homilies of bounty; whose,
the onus on the needle’s eye, t the periodic letting
Of the blood of lambs with only yards between the finite poles, forgetting
Nothing, revealing nothing but an urgency
to emergency and back again? The heathen
Knew no more than synalepha in their call to prayer; pagans even less, elisions
Fossilised, putting thought to marble and fervour to the page, betting
Time against the pharoah’s death that few would ever live long enough
To find the tragic flaw. Comes the Man from Ur to move the heavens
And the earth to wakefulness from slumber, to realign the eyes toward the Star
That transforms a  common phoneme to the station of a Holy Morpheme far
Beyond the Alif as the Alpha, the Word, Itself;
so the story goes and just so the stuff
Of legends leading to Omega born. Of the Twelve,
one chose time; infinity, the remaining Eleven.

“I Do Not Own the Day”

I do not own the day;

What lights I see are always there

And even in the darkest night, the glare

Of redundancy reigns like lightning strikes in everlasting reason. Some say

I’ve signed the lease and now they own the night.

True enough, they see their own reflection

In the briefest prayer and genuflection

To the idylls and the idols of their transcendental rites.

Stalagmites seek stalactites; weighty particles in flight

As shadows formed of certitude of sight

In solitary moments in some slight

Of hand, the deft applause of synapses, a gemütlichkeit

Born of static sparks and all that comes of friction.

In the sweetness of the ambergris, the lubricants of predilection,

No phoenix dotes nor lingers long. The quail need fear

For nothing in the night, no delay pedestrians the day

In precocious hours while incidentals speaking interactions say

Whatever comes to mind, a finale of raw anticipation in arrears .

There are in any year those misnomer festivals, ferial seasons

Cut adrift by aimless circumstance and accidental chance,

A shameless perversion of the odds while a glance

To right or left reveals clarity and reasons

Raised beyond the calculations of malicious minds.

Eagles discover indolence and periodic indifference outright.

When the winds gesture favourably in arcs of artificial light;

Above the immediate, pleasure will surely seek its kind,

And well within the breech, parameters of careless joys soon

Dilute the fearsome images of bloodstained wolves and owls,

beneath a panoply of nocturnal props and playthings of the moon.