“You Own the Year”

You own the year and years before you
As I the year and all that’s passed;
Your signs are rising; eternity is steadfast.
Quo vadis, then? I who serve eternities am overruled
By sheer numbers, countless previous dispensations viewed
In retrospect and circumspect as vast
And spacious notions of impermanence and impasse.
I see before the fact in part— imperfectly at present—pursued
By spoils of  wars and rumours coupled with a dubious acquired taste
For bitters, acerbic memory gained close at hand or lost at sea.
Nothing in this world is or is so stable
That it is not utterly dependent, created, removed and recreated on the table
Of bounties throughout creation; what God has willed to use or waste
Shall be not be more or less than what it is, and what is not shall never be.*

***

* “Protect me, O my Lord, from every evil that Thine omniscience perceiveth, inasmuch as there is no power nor strength but in Thee, no triumph is forthcoming save from Thy presence, and it is Thine alone to command. Whatever God hath willed hath been, and that which He hath not willed shall not be.

There is no power nor strength except in God, the Most Exalted, the Most Mighty.”

–His HolinessThe Báb, Selections from the Writings of the Báb, pp. 190-191

“Gandhi’s Truths”

Gandhi’s truths are motionless beneath an image born,
A version’s accent that only seems to change; perceptions lie.
The eyes, the ears, the touch, all senses testify
Before the centre. Memories, chattels of the intellect, are torn
Between the ëgo and its mirror. He will board that train,
And see his own distinction — one-way ticket bound
Zephyrs tell him what he only thinks he knows. Hounds
And adverbs pursue him, winds he cannot name remain
constant comments as he moves through distances
That never crossed his mind. The earth is twinned,
The gears are jammed, yet breezes, golden prayer wheels, spin.
The pinnacle not the single shot of infamy―not the sun, but suns―an incident
Within a galaxy’s corruption far beyond its crucibles, hopes and cosmic excess:
Energy and matter never tire while circumstantial certainty leads destiny to rest.

“Oh, He Knows”

Oh, he knows, he surely knows that pain,
And in the morning of his life he drew
Himself from deeper wells he knew
He could not fathom, nor did the rain
Object, no rival to his tears, and all he did was dance.
Departing early, Venus rising in the mists of cold Nebraska dawns
Found sweat and pleasures in his skin as he was drawn
To deeper paths beyond the last and lasting chance
To turn aside; but, no! He did not return. And neither
Did he stop till he was well beyond the sleeping town
And found himself the audience of a thousand feathered clowns
Atop the ocean rows of corn and maize and high above the purple ether
Of the shallow island’s edge. The vanities that irrigate his endless thoughts
Were rivers then, and there he danced until he dropped.

…painting at top by Alan Reynolds…

“I’ll Not Wait”

I’ll not wait till dawn to praise the sun;
Shadows follow closely where I sleep; this night must end:
I’m guaranteed as much. What, then? Tomorrow? What? Again
A word’s delay a world away is all, so, patience me. The midnight trains still run
Their course–stampeding to the east to crawl back westward–and catch
The rising or the setting cosmos all along the local milk run. Coaches
Matter not, jettisoned or newly recreated in the Milky Way, we approach
Our destinations, dusks or dawns in proper times; passengers dispatched,
Who only seem to arrive at destinations previously booked
And so we do not blithely cease to live because we wait
Upon a final station or dream of tracks not even built. Medusa guards the gate
That turns all nightly plans to stone, and we her momentary shades that looked
To make the journey know the Night Train only claims a means to ends
Through mirrors while season tickets mark what joys the daybreak sends.

“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.

“Summer Like the Lion”

“Summer Like the Lion”

Summer like the lion has so little time;
Reflections on horizons only seem at rest,
Refractions, hungers in the higher grasses are at best
A blind, a routine introspection, attest to sun and pride,
Alike as natural season’s slightest change rewards the prey
Of both with perspicuous signs and insecurities but nonetheless
Concrete enough to cause a wonder in the every power; less
Than single clouds occlude the sun, the slightest hint of grey
Upon the main, both signal gain and loss. Clearly crowned,
They have no equal in selection’s schemes
Save Death, itself, yet each pays out in measured penalties. Extremes
In greatness and renown sustain but reasons, diadems and crowns
Subject to circumstance of cycles in the main—in means
A certain end—in cosmic tragedies beyond the need of seasons.