“The Body”

“The Body”

The body, yes! in yet another form,
A deliberate repetition of the last, and yet
With slight but noticeable difference in the set
Of eyes or angle of the nose, the warm
And friendly miles between a nod to right or left,
Positioned on the floor or on a bed,
Apparently a casual sitting, or instead
About to rise beyond the ceiling thence to its collapse, bereft
Of any given posture or position in relation to the light.
The body, yes! the body, and the view
And close consideration to the slightest clue
Implies perfection, a flaw in finite grace caught in beauteous flight
Between the lines, and open to the naked stare,
And what else can one do, when one just happens to be there?

“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

“Happenstance”

“Happenstance”

Happenstance and glory of a measured breath, the sun and moon
And distant scintillating light deranged and rearranged
To suite the insignificance of magnificence of a single scene and page.
Another sentence, a paragraph in which I find myself within a backlit room
To mark the hours the Doppler shadows all misfortune casts.
I have revelled in these signs, these periodic tedious monotonies,
Their very rising at once the thrall before the fall, monopolies
Of time and times again that only now appear to mask
Because when all that is has come to pass I happen to be standing here
A witness to creation’s synergies newly birthed. In the cold stare
Of noonish sunlight I sense with fragile accuracy the beneficial glare
Of all my peculiars, entities and particles that occupy the ear,
Delight the eye, and not so subtly remind me that I am,
And need not doubt the ground on which I stand.

…painting by Catherine Manchester…

“What Peace of Mind?”

“What Peace of Mind?”

What peace of mind can find a living here?
Pundits’ fantasies will not stop the tears, the midnight cries,
Incessant lies, and still the public yearns to know what we despise
From commentators and the late show comics. Do we fear
The truth and turn the other way when asked
If what comes down the pipe is truly past
Our tacit understanding? Reasons? Seasons? Are there tasks
Beyond endurance here, or is it always first and last
A matter for the courts, the press, the cold realities
That simply digest information and ingest lucid cosmic facts:
There’s them that’s got, and them that’s wracked,
The rich, the poor, the lack of morals backed. Atrocities
And blessings rank as equals, ours to fricassee, ours to fear.
There’s them that’s got, all right, and them that no one hears.

“Suppose Evolution”

“Suppose Evolution”

Suppose evolution the ablution of time as revelation, but gather why
We migrate. All know, of course, or should, what land
We live in, what the borders to the dream, the strand,
The stream of all acts, axioms, atolls of sanity sealed in wax. Try
Reason cupped in raw emotion in the Courts of History, ours
To bend and cherish in or out of season in the time
It takes to be or not to be the first and possibly the line
Drawn in haste in quicksand in the briefest span in feeble hours
Of loss and victory. L’Chaim! A toast to fine
Distnctions drawn between the posse and the Law!
Repeat the gaze, Govinda, and if you see the flaw
In personal salvation, seek penetration through strength of heart and mind,
Hubris in negation and his sibling’s futile crops–annihilation in rage and greed―
While Abel lies silent in the eye of Cain’s infernal whining in the weeds.

“Transitions”

 

“Transitions”

Transitions, troughs and floodgates
Swell before the crops are in;
Appointments rough-hewn begin
From centuries’ wealth in soils. He hesitates.
Lamentations of the classic farmer’s touch
Bestowed on something that was expected
Neither to outlast the seed nor tip the balance but once elected
Audit landscapes from the past and serve the sudden rush as much
As circumstance permits a well to gush and choose another path.
He was a teacher; was, and no doubt
Will continue to apply the torch to oils of souls
Whose mission is to lance the boils of youthful wrath
And freely prime the wells of mass miscalculation of the myths,
The babbling and cursive powers of hubris and its shibboleths.

 

“Allow a Little Contemplation”

“Allow a Little Contemplation”

Allow a little contemplation; mind the rising curse;
Give some room to commitments—
If a little late—distillations of a sundry ointment
Fit for open wounds. For now, we’re just a little worse
For wear and lacking poise, but in this happenstance,
What rests in all this noise? Tomorrow
When the mildew from sorrows
In the news has dried and circumstance
Permits, I’ll take the sun and leave the news,
The erudite reviews, the blues in mood and pulchritude,
Indictments of the way we rush to witness multitudes
In soundbites consume themselves in lewd
Proposals that what is alien is natural to the native;
What’s not been touched, somehow evocative and obliquely dative.

…photograph by Michelle Duerden…

“And So On”

“And So On”

 “And so on and so forth…,” quoth the sage—an age

Demands allegiances, some sundry chit

To pasts to please their living ends, so be’t

To bind their futures’ to history’s wages

A feral wood that has its day,

And then some; burnt along the boreal wedge,

As fantasies aligned with revolution’s edge,

A void of fortune’s ceding thoughts of yesterday,

Inverse to the obverse of “now” with “yet again!”

“So, let that pass,”he says, and thus another reign

Of clowns and food for fools who cast their blame

Of righteous bastards who’ve lost their way,

Repeat the sentence, please, that all ears may hear

Should auld acquaintance be forgot to wipe away their fear.

“Their Summer’s Stroll”

“Their Summer’s Stroll“

Their summer’s stroll from rage to rage,
And they beget a bygone slight that as a child
Was not forgot, that from a strength were mild
But grew in time from childhood though to age.
And far beyond its slotted term their lights boil freely
Within a goal not steeped in wisdom’s nests
But gnarl’d, mishap’t to suit some moment’s tests
In  fruitlessness,  and doom’d because t’were seemly
That a child should bargain with his fathers’ sight
Nor rent a sire’s station for such gifts’
Revisions as rest in infants’ yearnings for the stars
Or worse, the adolescents’ endless swollen charms.
Do not tempt the agèd with a young man’s goal,
My friend, nor mistake a stallion for his honoured foal.

“Catwalks”

“Catwalks”

Catwalks above his life’s pavilions, sidewalks in a decent neighbourhood,
And nursing homes dot the landscape while all declare,
“You know, the Devil made me do it!”
Who denies the processes of thought, the fine idyllic conduits
From “Why not me?” to “All I am is what I should
Be,” whispered while whistling down alleys and paper routes. The avenues
Conjure images and constructs preserved en bas relief in two dimensions,
Melting icecaps in an ocean of invention and intervention at the mention
Of a third: “To whom and what for?” He wonders at the news,
Fresh-formed deadlines, spinal taps and tallies, and reams of “Things to Do”
And all before the door is closed and locked, keys deposited at the wicket.
Who’s survived to say that winter’s haze might raise the need to buy a ticket
To some gilded paradise conspicuous on the fridge, or a cruise for two
Along the coasts or toward the navel of the nation
As he remains at home inured of all such thought and aggravation?