—After Diane DiPrima
Listening to words is what we do,
so poems are done in the normal course
of what’s already being done
before any extra doing need begin.
We step out, each of us,
and into our very own cosmos
with the so many words
that have come, doing their work
like they’ve always been there,
tracing the outlines
of our being’s presence,
its perceived needs,
and scratching at the reach of edges
of questions they haven’t met yet
—endless human imagination, home-
country to the poem, parent-place
of every possibility…
**
Orion lays out
along the ridge in the west
in night’s naked cold,
steady reminder of firsts:
constellations known,
measureless distances touched,
timeless intimacies held.
**
—Thresholds…
The time too, when young,
in the pass—12,000 feet—
the whole world unveiled.
Is it not the same, old age,
in “the cusp between”
life and its death,
looking out, knowns
and unknowns,
so vivid.
**
The door opened—she
walked in, children unfolded,
from there, grandchildren.
**
A word—the bud-push
flowering of linguistic
attention-making,
deep-source call-response-
touching
or, cognitive manifestations
of cosmic conditions,
oral or not, lighted intellect
lightening the situation
by virtue of what is
lighting it.
**
This life, living us,
even at rest never rests—
earth turning says so.
**
It could, it might, be called
conscious subversion, the intention
to not father the same as the force
with which one was fathered;
but the real work there begins
with that same force that’s found
in one’s own heart—the real work
is that attention, that subversion.
**
—Report back, early 2022, age 78
I’ve been preaching to myself lately
of change, the cosmic, eternally
regenerative energies at the heart
of it all, feeling when I do, my eyes
light up with glowing thoughts, while
all the while secretly waiting near
the darkened backdoor of the heart
I hold to be singularly mine, left ajar
for some sure-to-come calming
to arrive, some certainty that doesn’t
slip back out again—the voice, mine
in this case, is the danger preaching
carries, for it can, it may, drown out
for you, your own words—
the sought-for calm comes, if at all,
in seeing there is none to obtain—this
disquieting unevenness known as old-age,
accentuates for us, if we hear, if we listen,
how the cosmos is holding us right now,
how it’s holding us, now, which
can never be wrong
and it even, the cosmos,
leaves the door to our hearts ajar,
so we know it’s always right there
with us.
**
Harvesting the greens,
winter garden offerings,
left by slugs and snails.
**
Bulbed flowers heave
out of the earth, meet with the sun.
Glad of it, like me.
**
Don’t get me wrong,
I learn from the resonance
of the deep-thinking ones, the breadth
of their reach has touched me
even in the days before I could tell
what it was, touching me, even when
the range of thought, the allusions,
escaped the edges of horizons allowed me.
And I do cherish that touch, what it brings,
what it brought—but in the end it’s not
me, and the older me’s less inclined
to linger such visits—oh, I’ve ego,
to be sure, and even though it’s tried
to trick me into thinking it’s not there,
the really “great ones” in my eyes,
who speak to ears like mine, are those
who’ve learned to trick that sense
of self-importance to take its cosmic place
and, with all else, to simply
come along for the ride.
**
—Marco Pallis: “…it is in intelligent humility
that a truly human greatness
is to be found.”
**
The patter, softest
drops in morning’s dark, signals
rains passing hour,
wet muttered kisses
a’kin to high canyon mists,
quietly lingered,
the obvious limbo
of a hovering lover
breathing just once more
before light breaks full
and day makes all seeds its own
—passing through is all,
there is no more and
no less than impressions left
in that passing through,
each drop, every brush
of breath and skin, words uttered
on the winds, all press
—presence passing through
counts, every presence each time
counts forever more,
each noticed in whole
in the whole as taken in,
eternity’s work,
cosmic notice taken,
cosmic value given each,
just because it is,
is reason enough
to notice and wonder,
to ponder and praise
and to care to be
the difference made
—present, as we are,
makes the difference
only our presence can make
and does every time.
To loose track of this
is to be lost—to remember,
is to take our place.
**
—March 2022—Kerouac Centennial
It’s important I think: to recognize
teachers become teachers by bringing
us all that was needed then to bring us
closer to who we’ve now become.
Our fullness now doesn’t erase
the reality of the emptiness then, maybe
accentuates it—we may move past
the teachers who’ve moved us,
worthy students do, but what’s been learned,
really, if we remain foolish enough to think
we’ve left them behind, blind enough
to think we can, or want to?
Thank you, Jack.
**
The rush, the excited-purposeful,
ebbs with the curb of the car’s engine,
window open to leaves and limbs
on waved shadows, dappled sunlight
and birdsong, peripheral playground musics,
all holding an embodied silence,
an un-produceable, un-predictable embrace,
a calm come center of its own, a grace,
of stroked shoulders rendered still.
**
—word dharma
I don’t know how I know
or even what is thought known
is so
but of words and their working,
watched…that, this,
is something attuned and un-claimable.
I don’t know but to watch the words,
wonder at their working’s telling
what can’t be said of knowing—
words, at work—the very nature
of the working discounts divisions
of sense and sound and source
so emphatically implied in intellect,
it’s so limited usage—
words, their working evidencing
human reality seamlessly true,
so readily connected as to be as
easily missed, as readily underrated as
our next breath—
their work, our life—each a part of the flow
of which it is a part.
**
—March 18th
At the bench David made
in the upper reaches of Buckeye Canyon
in and among the live oaks,
looking west and south, shade
dominates the restless sleep
of abundant plant life—over the valley,
in sun-bloom, crows circle, a hawk
shrieks and songs sing—iris, lichen,
bee plant; humming bird sage, poison oak;
blue blossom, bay and buckeye.
