“Strident Moments”

“Strident Moments”

Strident moments come as uninvited as
The telephone―those halting motions―stop.
Listen. But, must it ring?  He stands among the pines atop
What Easterners call their mountains, a willing witness held fast
By what he it is he sees and aware, somehow, of cold
Hard knowledge locked in granite thoughts. Awake, there is no place,
No haste when he is here. Here it is, the smell and taste
Of elusive space joined naturally with old
Odd familiar feelings that have no business
Being here. Hearing everything, he negotiates no streets
No alleyways, no place to park; no pavement meets
His feet, but there’s a kind of dizziness
In all this air that almost laughs at breathing.
He’s nowhere in particular and has no plans for  leaving.
He’s made the miles and truck stops all across the state
To feel the blessing of the eyes, the risen voice
Of one who cannot be moved; the choice
Is always his, oh yes, of course, and he’s arrived, and late
Enough each time to bear the weights of witnesses that his
Are not the eyes, nor his the sacred words
That anyone can use. He’s created nothing here and so he’s turned
The car around and while it may be circumspect, he’s heading home.
Then comes the once again, the call
Is always there, that Tennyson and Frost in all the walls,
That albatross of restlessness that bleaches clarity in tones
Of sepia and bronze and clothes the nakedness of all
Past memories perfumed in ancient rhyme. Silences make every room
A canyon trussed by random thoughts of
“Yes?” “Tonight?” or “Soon?”
His dreams define the miles within his skies, but goals
Are drowned within the pits, the bottoms, deadly dregs
Of what this world seeks to meet the eye; the festered eggs
To what in nature all become; foals
To what dark stallions then are bred?
He need not strain himself to know the truth of this,
And in his several steps he leaves no trace
Of what he’s become to mark his leaving of  the place.
Specialties and exhibits, the inner lining of the kiss
That one day brings up bubbles from the depths of every cauldron;
Progeny and circumstance, my friend! Mortality confirms in
No uncertain terms a many-hidden hydra and remorse
For what a man must abdicate when incident has run its course.

 

 

…what’s this?  Yet another image [the one just above and not the pinecone...] filtched from Louvain95…?  Yes, it is, and yet again, an expression of admiration and thanks to this lady and her site for visual experiences. 

 

“The Age”

The age, the arc, the spectre of unspeakables
And contention; a single strike will kill, but with the honeybee
Comes purpose by the lot and ensured harmony,
“Do not disturb!” and “Multiples; Invincibles!”
Reluctantly, to be sure,  but timely come the constables,
Harbingers of an hour’s solemnity
And stark reminders of inevitable uncertainties—
“A step too far!” is heard, and while the intruder’s able,
The antidote comes in hosts, swarms
And spirits in the multiples and in the interim
Kindnesses in part to save the whole.
No bellicose delivery here, no spectacle of effort to console
The soul but simple missives bearing news of certified afflictions warn
Of death: “The hive or thee, my friend: the hive or thee; attend!”

“Leave Me?”

“Leaving?”

Leaving? His, the dreams? His, these choice and tender tones, all
Too little too late for those who will be sooner told what is
By those who cannot hear His melody, His
Several Announcements, yes! The heart turns not to the call
For walls but to creation in itself, as scribbled on the slates
Signed upon the obverse in sundry  geometric redundancy. Obliquely seen
We spy the models, traces, outlines, former dispensations, the obscene
Graffiti of the worldly scribbled in  a clay-bound plate.
This? Not He in This, no! but That; the earth
Born in caul, the offal left, his mother’s goal is realised, her manifesto declared.
The promise of penultimate breath echoes in the Text with nothing spared.
Patient in patience, lover of all present laughter, the child, eternal mirth–
Of course–is etched in slates and scales beyond the present worried worm;
As from the womb, to this He comes so far; so too, to that He must return in Spiral motions, springs, and in the riverlets of natural seconds, tiny buds
Aligned within themelves with all the other benchmark orbs
And gentle points of sweeping reference. Our symmetry absorbs
The oddity of growth in worldly and arbitrary minutes: as the muds
Decree, the hills agree and we are of course its sands and random beaches.
Numberless and unadorned, emerging abstracts form our concretes,
Limpid liquids recreate themselves as pliant canyons, sculpted palaces; discrete
Particles mustered in battalions to address themselves as crystals, breaches
In the granite veins that will allow the light in time to pass on through.
And as we stand disarmed in deaf amazement, we ponder
What natural majesties must certify the ruby and the emerald to wander
Disingenuous, impervious to cost through sapphire dusts in cosmic spectacle too
Wondrously created to be seen with contaminated eyes
As all arrive or nothing comes to mind and our own sweet surprise.

“Look To It, Friend!”

“Look To It, Friend!”

Look to it, friend! Some call it time,
Others less than seconds, others, singularity,
And at the least a mystery, perhaps an incongruity
Within the maze of observations and variations on the rhyme,
Some weathered moss-lined steps ascending forest temples
and the sacrifice of wine for blood in isolated shrines.
Argue, then,  what it means to be an onion or the teapot’s spout.
They say, “Speak more plainly, flesh it out!”
And scarcely is the thought expressed than a paradigm, a scion
Of the times declares, “Not at all,…it’s in the wrist!”
Setbacks scatter as sands of many mountains
Leveled by long forgotten storms; something close to fountains
Swell from everlasting hotspots, springs, and lethal mists
Of natural fraud and tragic truths misplaced, misguided, and disgraced
By mortality set to music while eternity’s forgotten or left to waste.

“Sonnet in Honour of the Feast of Kamál or “Perfection”

Bahá’ís throughout the world gather today within the First Day of the Month of Kamál [Perfection] to celebrate the first day of the Bahá’í Month of Kamál.

Perfections and brief mortality tarry for moments in a guarantee
Beyond the waiting grave; even in the womb, fluctuations
At the departure gate defy instinct and extinction in comic reproduction
Of the maelstrom. Carnivores in chaos renew the glaring tragedies
Of immortality as does sleep, a nightly purgative to all dreams.
Propinquity reviewed in bold idyllic matter turns matter to energies
In physical perception, penned at the pleasure of humanity–
The beverage curious and exotic–the poets’ ink ensuring every species’
Flourishing beyond the naked flesh of bodies in the simple rite of birth.
Apoapsis and the periapsis of the peoples’ need from the outer steppes
Of gravity and evolution to the thing desired,
re-created, wild and sculpted blossoms
Of the promise of ends in all beginnings,
millennia, themselves but steps
beyond the fallible suspicion of man or book,
the good shaman’s vain and futile search.
Yet even here, the contemplation
of a bowl of hemlock, perhaps to think:
If I fast forever, so will I dream as long;
and if I thirst forever,
Then, as surely I will someday drink.

“Who Tolerates the Touch”

Who tolerates the touch of palm and fingers
Triggers of the tympanum’s lover’s voice,
The involuntary arch of eyebrows, that choice
Of recognition dresses doubt that lingers
Yes a while on what once was until it reconfigures
Long enough to serve the summons, reaction’s invoice,
Undesired but necessarily what is required; a void
Is not an option to the unbelieving mind. Ligatures
Every particle seeks are sealed with audience, weight,
And purpose in immortal cycles that begin and end
In memory, its regeneration suspends
Its own belief and use within its measured time.
For him who wills cannot resist nor hesitate.

“What Objects Loosed”

What objects loosed throughout a greying room
Serve better than a last brief chapter’s close;
And what, then, follows closing thoughts; a straight-shot dose
Of extreme unction, what is left of memory festooned
As salutations strung on lamps along a street of dim-lit dreams.
Expectations, Mr. Dickens? No, none greater nor none more often
Conjured than the wonder at with whom I now share a coffin,
Hours spent prayerfully collecting what I deem
To be remains of me as seen through eyes that are not mine.
Tell me, what’s the pen, and what the chair on which I sit?
These mortal couplets obfuscate the sight grown dim with wit
Less dedicated to passages than passing thoughts
encompassing eight o’clock or nine
that might have been less a catalyst
than blindness, another light perusal
Of a page within an evening’s oversight
and looming prospects of imminent removal.

“Such Delecate Issues”

“Such Delicate Issues”

Such delicate issues are discussed
Within an audience of convalescents,
Denizens of halls and lobbies, adolescents–
Ex officio of do’s and don’ts–the musts,
De facto traffic in the businesses of healing
To and from their weighty tests; appointments
While peculiars in the interim, ointments
And prescriptions dormant in the seething
Daily incidence of purity in sterility. No one lives here
Really, all are guests of grand inquisitors at the pace
Of medical residuals, portals to individuals spaced
At equidistance from the terminus dear
To those who’ve early learned to cope,
The elect gain gurneys; others merely hope.

“The Underside”

…dedicated to the many who wonder what’s become of all that is and where the bottom is…

“‘The underside’ … it’s not just in tandem, ‘Once, it’s everywhere! … sigh …’”
And she was right. It seems the predilection toward
The animal appears where there is none; the tsunami’s force is froward
Where there is no place to go but straight to hell for all but those who fly
Or settle for a second-rate mortgage off the high road’s endless traffic.
And we along the shores of what’s become the greater sea who sit
And sign within ourselves no higher there, nor lower here, are aware of it:
There is no real rest from those who foment
Condescension to Creation, laced with lies
To trap the innocent, and revel in the vanishing point
Below the picture, well beneath the edges or between the joints
Of slender bones and tissues in the body politic; cries
Will rise for them and for their victims and their families,
The “taken”, “took” and “broken for which poets scribble homilies.

—Once

“The tree outside the window taps very gently on the pane … I want to think quietly, calmly, spaciously, never to be interrupted, never to have to rise from my chair, to slip easily from one thing to another, without any sense of hostility, or obstacle. I want to sink deeper and deeper, away from the surface, with its hard separate facts. To steady myself, let me catch hold of the first idea that passes … Shakespeare … Well, he will do as well as another. A man who sat himself solidly in an arm-chair, and looked into the fire, so a shower of ideas fell perpetually from some very high Heaven down through his mind.”

The Mark on the Wall
Virginia Woolf
[1882-1941]

“Wife, child, brother, parents, friends…We come only to go apart again. It is one continuous movement. They move away from us, and we move away from them. The law of life can’t be avoided. The law comes into operation the moment we detach ourselves from our mother’s womb. All struggle and misery in life is due to our attempt to arrest this law or get away from it or in allowing ourselves to be hurt by it. The fact must be recognized. A profound unmitigated lonliness is the only truth of life.”

R. K. Narayan
[October 10, 1906 -- May 13, 2001]
(shortened from Rasipuram Krishnaswami Iyer Narayanaswami)
The English Teacher

“Perhaps Too Obscure”

“Perhaps Too Obscure”

Perhaps too obscure, absolutes, prerogatives, profits,
Relatives, feathers of the phoenix–costly downs for pillows,
Materials for bedding–indeed the silhouette
Of controversy in the bower prohibits
Poesy from kneading souls and seeding requisites
For immortality with mortal flaws and fatal shallow
Pools designed for poets such as these that wallow
In the larder oblivious to dangers, intrinsic
Natural blinds to tar pits where only fugitives
Attempt to flee from what is evident in destiny.
Notice neither freedom for the bird nor fish
To feed them gather here; unheeding species. Lavish
Ignorance and wanton lust are lost on adjectives
Whose ontogeny merely seeks but life and progeny.