“Leviathans”

“Leviathans”

Leviathans suffer willingly the wastes of lessers with the spoils
Of forage in awe of their minions’ rout. Leavings
Of forests—minutia in the seas—objects in multitudes of breeding
In billions lay as quarry; breathing only halts the intake, precious oils
And storage founts in awful majesties as but bubbles will numb the foils
Of the deep with little thought of being prey; no other path is possible as to seek
Escape evaporates in the stupor of the stampede and mindless feed,
Ephemeral images of affrighted numbers and omnipresence. The serpent coils,
As consternation’s measured to the length of ineffectual peers
And in the chaos and confusion, venom—the elixir of a momentary sun—
And mere instinct lights the way for both hunter and hunted, in tandem
For the hunted, “In sæcula sæculorum,” say the hunters
In deft detection; great ones of the kelp and boiling seas remain true,
The enemy of few, so much the reward, relentless, so limitless the purview.

“Well Met this Thing”

“Well Met this Thing”

Well met this thing, a solace
To the whole as in a natural rhyme, a seedling
Leaning deftly, sifting energies, a grace note from the sun, breathing
Freshly gathered light, a sacrifice of self to self to manifest largess
By choice;  a certitude robed in servitude, sweet volition made
Weathered, shrunk, and wedded to the greater or the lesser daylight gains.
Swelling actions often stagger in the night’s timed shadow’s pains
As simple growth, or guided by the healing spade
And shears—a graft, perhaps—something more substantial
Than what nature had bestowed and then some; a fertile
Gift of place to place and thus in time, itself, beyond the servile
Sum of all its parts; a mortal substance thus a circumstantial
Harvest of perception, there because it’s seen, a simple story
Asking nothing but an audience in brief pedestrian glory.

“He Delights in Convenient Signs”

“He Delights in Convenient Signs”

He delights in convenient signs: the sun, the moon, the stars
The universe, and through illusion his eyes declares the day
And night are one. His view will see its way
Through symbols. He sees all points of value from within or far
Above their azure prison bars of graphs, these atmospheres
That parent all the earth, extending parts per million through to voids
Above, below, and far behind the splay of asteroids,
And solitudes in comets, sunspots, suspect planets, clear
Blue skies, and all twelve scions in the heavens and this
With ease and loving faith with no regard for certitude. Who
Is not taken with parades, grand processions,
Multiples of keen perception spliced with clear impressions,
Curtain calls for universes, wholes in which the paper defines the clues
To occupy the crude sophistication of our many-billioned eyes?
And after all, these cosmic nosegays raise all souls, and take us to the skies.

…at top, photograph by Jesse on deviantArt.com…

“Yes”

“Yes”

Yes. So much as I can see
staring Eastward across the waters
that later touch the Holy Land,
still, in the early briefer hour I cannot remember its equal.
Standing here alone in endless fields of wheat and corn
from where I feel an overweening rage Westward, miles
between those twin skyline cauldrons, and swells upwelling heat and sweat
in anxious presage: something coming! sweet release.
My body aches. I cannot stop the prayer beyond the syllables―light and lightning, cheaper thrills, the instant comfort and relief
of ice-cold waters of an irrigation ditch.

Nebraska! To ease the sweet pain,
I cannot wait. I know what’s coming. I’ve always known.

I should not be here, but am I, and nothing in this heart could be disarmed, alarmed or warned to cede to what appears and never once makes sense.

No. I see them, righteous boiling mountains
not of rock; no trees, no streams, no mirage―
no poetic soul’s terse natural verse here while there,
but two whirling dervishes from the West, floods
of supra-natural flotsam, mitred clouds
with stains of seed in florid green
to punctuate potential, a pure
perspicuous majesty
and they stare at me…

Their hour is come. It is their mercurial summons I hear,
its first flush reaching for me and I have no fear.
And in this empty plain,
a place where I’m forgotten,
my early exile, this beside the point
as I stand here, within the hour,
I’ll breathe, I’ll cry, I’ll laugh,
and damn the lightning,
I’ll survive!

“A Pilot’s Flame”

A pilot’s flame and ambergris, fire and smoke, these privy orizons
As dews appear upon the sight of buds along an early summer’s talk
In the blind behind the backfields; still there is the chill,
a brief Nebraska morning’s walk
Through the shadows’ tides’ abiding shallows
in the breath of dawn; the garden
Path because we share so little
of the masters’ growth in blossoms’ bargains’
Fruits within us both and spare none, no idle chatter,
indeed a pittance of a fee for angels; pillars, cornstalks,
Arm in arm—so much can lead the way to joy within a cosmic room—locked
To one to yet another and another in the repetitious staid negotiation
of noxious clouds and dark but sterile clods, the feeble vain
Attempt to mask indignity in stride until desire’s destination’s
Reached—we know by stealth to find a symmetry in solutions,
Solace in respite from the others at the solstice
of that brief but potent spot.
A proper pole to pierce the continent,
a place we’ve never seen and always sought;
I need nothing more to see your face, to read your book
to savour proctors for procrastination
For the sake of pleasures found in greater prisms
for a lighter thought than pure imagination.

 

 

“The Cello Hours”

The cello hours born in satisfaction’s flowering
Struggle for the taste of sunlight’s ambered
Quotidian pause between yellowed evening song in embers
Of any passion’s flames, the body’s needs, so immediate, so towering
In the vertical for lack of space to run;
Steeper slopes too raked; some desperation’s blotting out
What memory’s suns’ refuse to yield–the stout
Resolve, the countenance of all volition’s fruits undone
By now and all but totally forgotten in the dying folds of coals.
We rush from one safe haven to another.
Absurd, but on this earth tectonic shifts that smother
Linger in the soul and while all the world’s aglow, the body sees but single goals
In search of yearning for the satisfied in every earthbound swarm:
“Touched or touching, now I tell you friend, I must be warm!”

 

“An Elemental Spool”

“An Elemental Spool”

An elemental spool of being; a natural stroke, a natural song,
Alternative of the physic. They’ll dote on her. She changes,
Rearranges the image sacrificed, the hue estranged with age
In time minutes, hours, days, years along
An atavistic rhyme that begins with mother’s sweetest mystery.
She does not rest here; she gathers swollen powders till her end
Is just beyond within an arc of growth. The colony ascends
To her through ordination, acquiescence thickly veiled in delivery.
The waxen sacrifice of a madonna of the thousands’ mesh—
Annunciations in the ancient paradigm— together compromise,
And here descends a separation: a Gaian gift apprised—
The pupa must be cloistered, amber honeyed flesh
Is bound, an all within the geometric space  transfixed in thrall
And while the queen is dying, yet another even now perceives her call.

“Sonnet in Honour of the Feast of Núr or `Light'”

Bahá’ís throughout the world commemorate tonight after sunset and tomorrow before sunset, the first day of the Month of Núr [Light]. To each and all, a beautiful Feast!

He is much more than what He attracts; refraction of it all,
In lucid words these polished mirrors,
This luminosity in splendourous waves
that soothe all blatant latent fears
Within spheres of objectivity;
smartly uniformed, high-buttoned, tall,
Erect and unembellished,
capital of some fine handwriting
Scribbled there along the temple walls.
Script, the random code found
Wanting notwithstanding bolder strokes
of solace and credulity crowned
In serifs; lightest lightning
strikes a newly seated summer’s sighting,
Calligraphy to the eyes, herald of eternity…
…to the beholder; what? there
Upon the Holy Cliff, His brow–
the spring from stiller waters, golden pools;
Yes, clues. Siren and alarm
made moot above the spools
and threads that agitate creation’s needles’ dance
and aggravate of what remains where
Once there was a void. He leaves His mark
and we remain the ghostly detail of the lace;
I need not tell you Whose the eyes,
Whose the illumined brow; I’ve seen His face.

Rumi
“Light and Shadow”

…Thou art the shadow of divine Light.
We are Thy shadow in this world.
Who has seen a shadow
separated from the Light?

Sometimes the shadow stays next to the Light.
Sometimes it disappears into the Light.
If it is next to the Light,
Light and shadow are equal to each other.
When it disappears,
it merges and unites with the Light…

When it realizes it’s disappearing,
the shadow grabs the Light tightly
with the hand of desire.
In order to have God’s radiance,
this desire takes him to God.

The story of the union and
separation of light and shadow never ends.

“Sonnet in Honour of the Feast of `Azamat or “Grandeur'”

Bahá’ís throughout the world gather this evening after sunset or tomorrow before sunset within the First Day of the Month of `Azamat [Grandeur] to celebrate the first day of the Bahá’í Month of `Azamat.

As if we can not be denied nor satisfied, we never quite say enough.
Spoils, the pain of living fêted, foils in which we grope and grow
As serious as honeybees, as laborious as ladybugs indifferent as they know
Their daily bread and signs depend not on commerce but industry. Rough
Terrain, yes! but praise no matter what may be the trappings.
The cause is paramount, practitioners partition tracks of land
And sacrifice themselves in the finding—as do mountains inevitably to sand
Or are simply swept away in time along the delta seashores lapping.
Random landings shoulder makeshift homes with open arms
Along the scores of symphonies, a little high amid the treble, alarming
All that’s bass—too many notes, perhaps—but not for the proud volcano.
Gifts in memory or dreams, men now somehow reign in stars and haloes.
Even so, it’s not so much the harvest in files but humanity sheds a light
On God’s humility in grandeur’s breath that gives all that blossoms life.

“But, Gardens Flourish”

“But, Gardens Flourish”

But gardens flourish with the healer’s touch,
As beauty sees the soil and is well pleased.
And who does not delight his God with ease
In humble planting, and in the tender care of so much
Bounty shared within the house beyond its door that
Shares in plenty for the harvest of a glance,
Effortlessly, and then some. Growth and substance
Between the fallow ground and the loving farmer’s cap
Provide the essence of returning routine rapture.
Yes! and more. A man plants the seed
Lives without his gathering and all his needs
Are satisfied as he stands within himself; he captures
What is blessed with anxious gratitude in the hand
That feeds his multitudes from recreated spoils in the land.