“Oh, the Moment, Yes”

Oh the moment, yes. Movement
Owns them both–stillness
In evening’s fire’s thought and witness
To a change. Cycles are but rudiments
Along the way as if cosmic paths were condiments
To reasons for it all, seasoning enough
To accent all eternal syllables and possibly a word; the stuff
Of endlessness in verbal arguments
That pause to take a breath and form an action–mind the road!
Delicate digressions vie with natural hesitation
To embrace the midnight hour as circumspection
In the minor chord and prelude to the code,
Anomalies in the nexus like pearls of depth and deepest night
That birth a blinding light as moths, those sycophants of dawn are drawn in flight
To mark a resurrection in the properties of death and blend
With all things living. Disappearance–
All that is in splendour’s reappearance,
Redesigned to bind all broken hearts–is sent
To comfort both the faithful and the lost.
Seek confirmation, then, within the mind or soul,
but look to it in the end! as the beginning never folds
Nor those who look for solace in the costs
Of faith and knowledge; but losing teaches search
And then is gone. Certitude rises in the East,
With eyes held skyward. Fortitude abounds in inward feasts
Of broad intention, tone and pitch and blessed with inspiration reach

For patience in the present, memories of the past,
And perspicuous signs held in escrow from first to last.

“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

“The Cells”

The cells call out their scholarity,
Mighty spires reach for skies
That live seasons in the earth’s penumbra and expire
Forever, so they say. Turn, then, to odd peculiarity,
Particulars in ornate stone formations possibly deliberate
When once they housed a single evening’s temple
Built by want and ignorance of what is simple,
Worshipped by multitudes within, immediate
To some, an intimacy of bodies petrified
And sprung from some light’s supple
Flight that had a need for nuptials–
She, the goddess; he, the priest. So sanctified,
They possessed a night that launched a myriad cliffs
And in that blackest of shadows, its oceans shifted.

–Once

“The poem… is a little myth of man’s capacity to make life meaningful. And in the end, the poem is not a thing we see – it is, rather, a light by which we may see – and what we see is life.”

~Robert Penn Warren
[April 24, 1905—September 15, 1989]

“So Easy to Feel”

So easy to feel, to seem to be, to know at last propinquity
As if the light declares the coming glory of the sun at daybreak
Redundant. But as that disk cannot be seen for more than seconds, I take
That certainty of coming morning within me,
Knowing that midnight’s richest prize in ivory
Is forever fixed as is the station of the sun; the moon an intimate
In someone’s flight, perhaps, but even so, as she reveals herself in states
And phases never hers, agitation gains nothing in the motion save in memory
And affectations of the sea within me–force upon another force,
Measured consequence of a functionary that renders boundaries
Of continental pride and the ocean’s doors
Cast aside in the riot of the tides, a natural stampede, no more
Than thresholds of natural accident, the stream and river’s course
Now rising, now again a swelling to apostrophes, eternal inertia born of gravity.

“Lest We Despair”

Lest we despair, there are always wondrous souls
Who do not merely feed the ether, drain abundance,
Neuter actions, waste the oneness
In common bounty with dalliance in quotidian goals.
So where lies the dignity of despair, the drift, the all,
The strength, the constancy, the very point
Of light save in these special souls adroit
In what it takes to make the least at nightfall?
Benchmarks that mark a life of thought and inspiration,
Luminaries allowing shelter in shades of night are not at all
Deterred or long delayed by the earth’s rotation nor do they stall
As prey to some glorious thrall but follow through to consummation.
The globe abounds in cycles, seasons and the daylight vulgar hours,
Kenotic moons to drown the noise of madness as the midnight flowers.

“Bethlehem’s Hours’ Mourn”

Bethlehem’s hour’s mourned, furtive glances northward toward Nazareth;
Veiled her expectations as soon enough her promised Son survives.
She knows that somewhere in between this king contrives
Within himself to build a wall. He practices precision; he does not guess.
He knows exactly what he wants, and from the East come
Three who only recently made queries round the campfires
‘Neath the skies beyond the Jordan. Casually they’ve inquired,
“What are these walls, and what the genesis of guns
And orchards plaited all along the shepherds’ run? Whose images are these,
And what is it they disguise, the vulgate for the people?”
Yes, they come, these three, adrift once again stalled between the steeples,
Barred, forbidden. Then again, their passage isn’t what it used to be.
They ask in vain and find the answers come as no surprise.
The king’s awake tonight; he’ll not fool the wise this time.
You’ll find King Herod’s tomb beneath it all, and Caesar’s not far
Behind buried in debris not hitherto imagined nor have the Magi ever seen
As much though restless centuries’ search, redux; reckon countable as has been
Adjusted by the market honed of hubris born of Ptolemy’s predilections,
Dwarfed and all but swallowed in the squalid malls of all economies; schemes
Asserting prescient views in years despite their slumbers
Solvent in the past and future well beyond prognosis and the numbers
Used to fund their offices and humour all humanity. Their smiles seem
To reach for meaning in the fireplace, they sift the ashes of the kiln
And pyre and dote on what they think they’ve found as if confirmed
Not least by carbon’s ancient age and not at all by what is earned.
Admire the Chinese while they rise, ballast for the Pantheon of what will fit the bill
And never mind the smoke and sacrifice and all that slavery, monuments to reigns
As numberless in catalogues as blood stains
in a Holy Land of boiling clouds and endless pain.