From Late Summer into Fall

Part I: August 2020

Contents
1. In memory of a tiger
2. Search for poetic form
3. Summer’s peak in Montana
4. Silence before dawn
5. Dawn breaking

6. Sunday afternoon
7. Evening warmer than usual
8. Thoughts near midnight on a hot night
9. Awaiting Apollo
10. “Thank God I’m free at last”

11. Precious the evenings
12. From classical Japanese haiku
13. To a new friend, Mary
14. On urinating outdoors
15. To some newly planted trees

16. To one unnamed
17. Sunday before dawn
18. Notes to Walt Whitman
19. Feeling the heat
20. Fragment of an interrupted thought

21. In the stillness of night’s ending
22. Song of the stars
23. Portrait of a writer as an old man
24. “Receive the Holy Spirit”
25. Something is brewing
26. Puzzles
27. Fear of death
28. Zarathustra’s knowledge
29. Poetry: need for noetic control
30. Mythical imagination
31. Its Moment
32. Novus ordo seclorum
33. Why mourn?
34. “To a god unknown”
35. Giants in the earth

36. Not sleeping
37. Self-transcending
38. The call of death
39. Sitting
40. To Jaroslav Seifert

41. Pornography in space
42. Rustlings
43. On the slopes of a volcano
44. We meet
45. The scratching of a pen

46. Incompleted love
47. The urn of love
48. Still nothing
49. When would you die?
50. Dissolving

51. What is to be done?
52. On rising and bedding down
53. Being smoked
54. Discontent
55. Question

56. Violent Cities
57. To Walt dying
58. Aurora
59. Stripping
60. Each

61. My path
62. Between
63. Ash
64. At the end of August

1. In memory of a tiger

Tyger, tyger burning bright
In the forests of the night
His rash ﬁerce blaze of riot cannot last
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo
What eagle look still shows
Thou still unravished bride of quietness
In the great calm of death, and if you still want me
Stand on the sea-ward dunes and call my name
Thou art the grave where buried love doth live

After years of aimless wandering
I have at last come home
Now I know why the monk who seeks repose
Frees his heart by ﬁrst shaving his head
Be gentle when the heathen pray
To Buddha at Kamakura
The little birds keep silent in the woods
Only wait, soon you also will be still.
And may there be no moaning of the bar
When I put out to sea

In vacant or in pensive mood
The soul in paraphrase, the heart in pilgrimage
We paused before a house that seemed
A swelling of the ground
And my soul from out that shadow
That lies ﬂoating on the ﬂoor
With the tolling, tolling bells’ perpetual clang
Had we but world enough, and Time
To see God only, I go out of sight
And the ﬁre and the rose are one

—01 August 2020

2.   Search for Poetic Form

Long beyond my summer and autumn’s cool
I’m falling into winter all too quickly.
If spring will come, it waits beyond New Year’s.

Whatever sanity I had has gone on holiday.
I’m quite alone, but hardly all one—nor two.
Perhaps a multitude of mysteries unresolved.

I am searching for forms into which to cast
Words that arise in ﬂeeting consciousness
Here on the border between life and death.

The rhythms of English, as we speak it now,
May not be well suited to tanka and haiku
As Japanese does not accent words as we do.

Still, I enjoy the exercise of writing in brevity
Constrained by few syllables to communicate
What one feels or thinks using simple brush strokes.

Perhaps I should try not ﬁve and seven syllables,
But three and ﬁve stresses in each line
Bending tanka and haiku to poetic English speech.

With iambic pentameter I’m long familiar,
Aware how it suits our spoken language
Like walking through Westminster in the rain.

“A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse.”
Some form, good form, my eﬀorts for a form
Into which to cast the movements of my heart.

At least for a while I shall experiment
With free verse, with blank verse, with tanka,
Perhaps with tanka and haiku bent to English stress.

Appendix:

A sample Anglicized haiku based on numbers of stresses (3, 5), then on the traditional
Japanese number of syllables. First, 3-5-3 stresses per line, as may beﬁt English:

Lonely is the night that falls

Within and without my silent sounding world
Promising only stillness.

Now, the same idea expressed in Japanese form (5, 7, 5 syllables):

Lonely is the night
Descending silently
Promising stillness.

Preferring brevity, I shall keep the Japanese syllabic form:

Haiku’s brevity
Drawn in crisp ﬂuid brush stokes
Awakens the mind.

—01 August 2020

3. Summer’s peak in Montana

Jupiter will shine
Into me as I retire,
Venus on waking.

A hot August day
Begins and ends in coolness
High in Montana.

Grounded in nature
How far can a mortal stray
From reality?

Not seeing the stars
Man forgets his littleness
To become a star.

Summer’s sun burns bright
But its hour swiftly passes
As winter draws near.

Yesterday saw spring
Today summer dominates
Tomorrow winter.

To feel summer’s heat
Is like standing near a stove
In a winter storm.

What I thought was rain
Was wind rustling poplar leaves
Leaving us dead dry,

I’ve not felt rain here
Only angelic splitting
Drying on contact.

I treasure these days
Knowing how ﬂeeting they are
Followed by death’s night.

I’ll not curse the heat
For soon it must yield to cold
As do you and I.

I’m on my death bed
Gazing at the silent moon
Until my eyes close.

—01 August 2020

4. Silence before dawn

Each sacred morning
Long before the sun appears
Hours of cool darkness.

How strange it would be
To begin a day in light
And not in darkness.

Coyotes are howling
Beneath a full golden moon
Hungry for their prey.

Silence soon returns
No sounds jarring consciousness,
The spirit is bathed.

Cool cold Montana
Refreshing in emptiness
Freeing the spirit.

Prayer hears nothing
But restful divine silence
Drowning all fancy.

O YHWH our Lord
How great is your awesomeness
Mirrored in the stars.

Venus praises you
Even while stars fade away:
Night’s beauty naked.

From an unseen source
Light slowly displacing night
All still before dawn.

—02 August 2020

5. Dawn breaking

Summer is peaking
Predicted to reach ninety
After morning’s cool.

Chilly mountain air
Until the ﬁre reappears
Burning cool away.

The world grows lighter
Well before the hidden sun
Climbs over mountains.

Cooler air blows in
Awakening those who sleep
Without a blanket.

Why are crows calling?
Why is a rooster crowing?
Why is dawn breaking?

Twelve hours of heat
Increasing as the sun heads west
Ceasing at sunset.

—02 August 2020

6. Sunday afternoon
(August 2, 2020)

Blazing afternoon,
Blazing sun and scorching heat,
And a blazing ﬁre
On Mount Baldy with white smoke
Filling the sky overhead.

All windows are closed
Since the heat intensiﬁed
Shortly before noon.

The dogs ate cold steak;
I prefer some whole grain rice
In sweet and sour sauce.

My dogs circled round
Drooling as I ate some rice;
They devoured their share.

My weight decreases
As their weight keeps increasing--
Dogs are man’s best friend.

Outside to water
Newly planted trees and shrubs
Bearing summer’s blaze.

Elijah played ball
Panting beneath Apollo
As Moses stretched out.

Sunset in two hours.
Then the blazing sun withdraws
Until tomorrow.

The heat enervates
Sapping energy and will
Leaving one half dazed.

Everything I see
Is dried up, nearly lifeless,
Stunned by the blazing sun.

—02 August 2020

7. Evening warmer than usual

Every summer day
Has aspects of spring and fall
Preventing despair.

Who could bear such heat
Unless each night brought relief,
Each morning carried hope?

Rattlesnake weather
Reigns from morning until night
When snakes take shelter.

I doze oﬀ waiting
For the sun to fall away
Allowing one to breathe.

***

We hit ninety inside
With no shading trees, no clouds,
Naked desert sun.

Now the sky-ﬁre ceased
Until dawn. The dogs are zonked.
Darkness aroused me.

The full moon returned
Again of rare gold herself
Burned in high desert.

Mountain air blows in
Slowly cooling our quarters
Most welcomed cooling.

Why people lived here
With no trees to shade the house
Truly baﬄes me.

Trees are signs of life
That shade, protect, house wild life,
Refreshing beauty.

At ten o’clock high
My home remains near eighty,
Too warm for deep sleep.

And yet, air breathes in
My open windows, cool air
Slowly triumphing.

Come, life-giving breeze,
Blow into my sun-baked house
Allowing time for thought.

***

Sheridan summer
Means blazing sun, rattlesnakes,
Rainless, cloudless days.

The heat brings fatigue
Felt even by Elijah
Whose youth has melted.

The moon’s gold pales
As she climbs to Jupiter
Himself silver bright.

Fire is visible
On Mount Baldy to my north--
Becoming balder.

Not far from my house
Some coyotes scream, howl, bark, yipe;
Why, I do not know.

With a cooling breeze
Now I can read til midnight
My eyes ﬁghting sleep.

—02 August 2020

8. Thoughts near midnight on a hot night

I rarely reﬂect
On my years of active work;
Those years have all passed.

Thankfully I’m free
From politics in the church,
From religious show.

I enjoy freedom
From working for a living,
From any public role.

I bought my freedom
Through buying and selling stocks,
Not selling myself.

I didn’t compromise
Truth, justice, right, or myself
For church beneﬁts.

Many sell themselves
And do not know it clearly;
They just play the game.

Thank God I am free--
My soul neither soiled nor sold;
I climbed no ladder.

—02 August 2020

9. Awaiting Apollo

Mount Baldy’s ﬁre’s gone
No ﬂames, no visible smoke,
No volcanic ash.

Slowly It grows light,
The Sky preparing to greet
The Lord Apollo.

No trumpets are heard
But coyotes and roosters sing
Their God-inspired songs.

Before human speech
Before daylight’s busyness
It prays silently.

All the world is one
When we humans are sleeping
Not running our mouths.

Apollo draws near
Behind the Tobacco Roots
Beyond our eyes’ reach.

Lighter grows the day
Cool breezes whispering life
Refreshing the spirit.

I can breathe again
Cool dry air reviving me
Respite from the heat.

Oh, that Apollo
Would spare all earthly creatures
His wrathful blazing.

Sky, gather some clouds
To cloak Apollo’s blazing
Sparing us mortals.

Clouds must be elsewhere
For Sky here is clear pale blue--
Cloud poor Montana.

It grows still lighter--
The whole world simply called “It”--
Beyond all naming.

Tiny cirrus clouds
Tinged with a hint of light pink
And fading away.

Over the Highlands
To the north of Sheridan
Clouds are appearing.

Looking far west
Towards the tall Pioneers
A bank of clouds!

Now I want to dance,
For clouds will protect our people
From Apollo’s rays.

Rejoice, Mother Earth,
Rejoice, for the Sky gives birth
To cumulous clouds.

Apollo unseen
Is tinting the clouds pale pink
Planning their demise.

Clouds are crawling east
Towards Apollo’s chamber
Over the mountains.

Clouds are tinged with white
Marking the arriving Sun
Claiming his kingdom.

Crows and mourning doves
Call out more excitedly
As the Sun draws near.

Over the mountains
Apollo spreads his glory
Then reveals His face.

His glory’s so bright
That none can gaze on his face
Without being burned.

He is reﬂected
In the clouds, on the tree tops,
Even in the street.

Spare your people, Lord,
The full blaze of your glory
Lest we all perish.

Brighten sparingly,
Give growth without destroying,
Moderate your heat!

Morning Apollo
How great your glory is seen
By each and by all.

Some see blindedly,
Some see your presence without,
Some also within.

Bringer of life’s light,
How awesome your radiance,
Both seen and unseen

—03 August 2020

10. “Thank God I’m free at last”

I rarely reﬂect
On my years of active work--
Those years have all passed.

Thankfully I’m free
From politics in the church,
From religious show.

I enjoy freedom
From working for a living
From any public role.

I bought my freedom
Through buying and selling stocks,
Not selling myself.

I didn’t compromise
Truth, justice, right, or myself
For church beneﬁts.

Many sell themselves
And do not know it clearly;
They just play the game.

Thank God I am free
My soul was not soiled or sold;
I climbed no ladder,
I stayed on the ground.

—03 August 2020

11. Precious the evenings

Precious the evenings
Of a sultry summer day
When ﬁre yields to breath.

Clouds illuminated
By the late declining sun
Over the Pioneers.

All the world is still,
Quietly settled and still,
Free of restlessness.

Gratitude wells up
Freely in a peaceful heart
Grateful just to be.

Clouds reﬂect colors
Of the westward setting sun
Constant subtle change.

The mind and body
Are one whole with everything
Even with the clouds--
With the passing clouds.

—05 August 2020

12. From classical Japanese haiku

Note: All these poems were found in Haiku (ed. by P. Washington), and
translated by R. H. Blyth. I altered them here to ﬁt the usual haiku form (5-7-5
syllables) as a literary exercise. 6 August 2020

A single swallow
Flew out of the round nostrils
Of the great Buddha.

—after Issa (p. 21)

How lovely it shined
Through the torn paper window--
The vast Milky Way.

—after Issa (p. 27)

Enticed by the voice
Of a lone uguisu
The new sun rises.

—after Chora (p. 43)

The skylark is singing
In the midst of the vast plain
Free of everything.

—after Rokuto (p. 46)

The pheasant’s choked call:
How it ﬁlled me with longing
For my dead parents.

—after Bashō (p. 48)

As daylight darkens
The shooting of a pheasant
Near the spring mountains.

—after Buson (p. 48)

In the forest’s depths
The sound of a woodpecker
And a chopping ax.

—after Buson (p. 59)

The snake slid away
But the eyes that stared at me
Remained in the grass.

—after Kyoshi (p. 70)

As one becomes old,
Even the length of the day
Is a cause of tears.

—after Issa (p. 88)

The temple bell fades;
The evening scent of ﬂowers
Still tolling the bell.

—after Bashō (p. 102)

How admirable
Not to think `life is ﬂeeting’
When lightning ﬂashes.

—after Bashō (p. 123)

A clear waterfall:
Into the sparkling ripples
Green pine needles fall.

—after Bashō (p. 127)

The still quietness:
A serrated chestnut leaf
Sinks through the clear water.

—after Shohaku (p. 129)

After the butterﬂy
Disappeared, then my spirit
Came back home to me

—after Wafu (p. 130)

My hut is so small
But please practice your jumping
Happy ﬂeas of mine.

—after Issa (p. 135)

All calm are these days.
The years swiftly ﬂown away
Are now all forgotten.

—after Taigi (p. 150)

You are departing--
How long the journey ahead,
How green the willows.

—after Buson (p. 156)

Autumn’s beginning:
A lamp shines from someone’s house
Before darkness falls.

—after Buson (p. 164)

An autumn evening:
Happiness is also found
In one’s loneliness.

—after Buson (p. 167)

Walking in the night,
Snow is falling silently
Farewell to the year.

—after Shara (p. 189)

I had intended
Never to grow old myself,
But the shrine’s bell sounds.

—after Jokun (p. 189)

Colder even than snow--
The winter moon reﬂecting
On a man’s white hair.

—after Juso (p. 193)

Winter seclusion
As I listened that evening
To rain on Fuji.

—after Issa (p. 202)

First day of the new year:
I remember a lonely
Autumn eventide.

—after Bashō (p. 210)

First dream of the year:
I kept the dream a secret
And smiled to myself.

—after Sho-u (p. 214)

The Great Morning;
Stirring winds of long ago
Blow through the pine-tree.

—after Onitsura (p. 214)

13. To a new friend, Mary

I met you reading a collection of poetry,
your words speaking directly to me;
you drew in my attention and my heart.

I had just read the poems of two men on composers,
Baudelaire writing on Beethoven, Wallace Stevens on Mozart.
Both left me cool, and puzzled. Neither engaged me.

Then I read your brief poem on Robert Schumann.
You understand the man and his music,
Illuminating both succinctly and sympathetically.

For you are no detached observer, dissecting a specimen.
You are a human being relating to, thinking about
Your fellow human being, whose suﬀering you share.

By imagination you followed Robert “through madness toward death.”
“His music explodes out of itself, as he could not.”
Such an insight comes from what Max Weber called Verstehen

An attitude of understanding that comes from the openness of love.
Fittingly, you conclude your poem by imagining the day Robert met Clara,
and his heart soared in joy—the joy of falling in love with the beloved.

—07 August 2020
In honor of Mary Oliver, 1935-2019

14. On urinating outdoors

Do you know the joy of urinating
outdoors, with no one else present,
no eyes or ears or noses--
except those of a dog or two?

Do you know the feeling of freedom
not to have to hit the toilet bowl
or to squat or sit in shame on the can?
(While sitting, a man cannot fully void his bladder.)
Ah, the peace and ease of letting go outside!

Like a dog, I have my favorite spots
protected from anyone’s strange eyesight--
down by the raised garden, behind tomatoes,
A lush wall towering over my head.

—7 August 2020

15. To some newly planted trees

Prairie ﬁre crab apple, you’re disappointing me
like a son who’s not panning out
the way Mama or Papa want and expect.
No new leaves? Six weeks planted in the ground--
six weeks on our ancient alluvial fan--
and no new leaves except perhaps some tiny leaﬂets
crawling cowardly along a few old branches>

And you, my lovely Russian girl, my heart’s joy,
Russian olive, perhaps Olivia or Natasha Karenina,
such hope I have for you, my growing girl--
labeled a “noxious weed” by some obnoxious bureaucrat
somewhere in an air-conditioned oﬃce in Helena.
May he or she discover the beauty of your form,
the loveliness of your green-gray leaves,
the wizened roughness of your aging bark.

In the southwest corner of my yard, there rises
my pride and joy, a real success story
of nature’s grace of good and timely growth--
a Canadian red cherry, prepared to bear
subzero temperatures even down to -40 Fahrenheit.
How you reach into the heavens so tenderly
With your new freshly green and tender leaves.

And you two beta grapes, ever stretching out,
searching for higher ground, for a place in the sun,
struggling to climb up a lifeless cinder-block wall.
Near you, between your meandering grape vines,
a rather pathetic, freshly planted apple tree--
A few twigs, a few new leaves, and nothing more.
I do not come looking for apples from one so young,
but could you not make an eﬀort to grow up a little?
As things stand, you may be headed for the morgue.

My faithful Jennifer Juniper, ﬁrst tree I planted here,
perhaps in early May, now half a foot taller and fuller,
not needing or demanding much care to live well.
Are you the tree under which Elijah took shelter from Jezebel?
Your sacred power is in your restfulness and endurance.
Not far from you, our newest planting, a European mountain ash,
Chosen to replace the ﬂowering plum I planted and had to bury.
The mountain ash, a rowan tree, known by your leaves and berries
That will ﬂame orange-red in autumn’s pléroma.

And so it is in my backyard that had been a rustic patch quilt
of native and planted grasses, laced with diverse weeds,
eking out survival on the rock pile under an inch of dirt.
We shall see if you trees and grasses, the voluntary poplars,
Silver maple and silver poplar, Saskatoons, honey berries, buﬀalo berry,
Many lilac bushes and colonizing irises will endure to next spring.

—7 August 2020

16. To one unnamed

The form beneath your clothes
And the clothes informed by you
Took my mind captive.

Your eyes caught my eyes
and some deep-down ﬁre ﬂamed up
Melting my resolve.

Do you see desire
When I calmly speak with you?
Are you stirred at all?

I could name your parts
That my hands desire to touch
And my mouth to kiss.

Your body calls to me
But my hands remain empty
Dangling at my side.

One kiss on your lips
And I would become breathless
Longing for your love.

You bring youth to mind
When desires moved to action,
Actions fed desires.

Fire of late summer
Burning in life’s winter chill
Setting no blazes.

What use is yearning?
Why yield to mental burning
For what cannot be?

You will content me
When I behold you naked
Beneath your clothing.

—8 August 2020

17. Sunday before dawn

Both here and out there
One is conscious of within
And of what’s other.

Everywhere I look
In every act of looking
The awesome unknown.

Whatever is known
Is known within the unknown
Unbounded mystery.

Is Presence within
One with Presence that’s without?
One, two, or many?

“One God” has its truth
“Many gods” has its truth, too;
“No god” has its truth.

How to symbolize
How to express in language
Beyond experience?

God as symbolized
Can become no god at all
Without experience.

The divine that’s known
Is really not so divine--
A ﬂattening out.

Those who claim to know
Do not know as they should know
But pretend to know.

Unbeknownst you come;
You abide in unknowing;
And you disappear.

The moment you speak
I turn silently to you
And words drift away,

—9 August 2020

18. Notes to Walt Whitman

Such a singer you are,
Voice of ﬂowing ecstasies,
You mockingbird bard.

You heard America singing
And now I read and hear your songs
Echoing down through time, year after year,
Past many sunrises, sunsets, moonrises, moonsets.
Through many false starts and some missed understandings
Now ﬁnally, perhaps, you are unchaining my tongue
By ﬁrst opening my curious and inquiring mind,
Then by enﬂaming and ravaging my solitary heart--
You, my wandering friend, my fellow wandering friend,
And your broken-hearted, love-starved mockingbird
Somewhere by the sea, on the shore of Long Island.

From Pennsylvania through coastal Maine to Montana
And many places in-between, during, and after--
From fertile dairy hillsides, orchards, and an old casket factory
To graceful palm trees and the urine-warm Paciﬁc of Oahu;
To the oaks and old houses of Crestwood, New York, and P.S. 15,
With inspiring, beloved teachers, Miss Bradley and Miss Stevenson;
To a year at Walt Whitman Junior High, happy home to hoodlums;
To collecting insects for biology class in Salt Lake City,
To the pulp mills of Missoula Montana and Hellgate High,
Ending after graduation at a kegger on Blue Mountain.

And then began my wanderings on my own, alone:
To Seattle for undergraduate years—those painful yet fertile years--
To the rolling hills and limestone of southern Indiana for graduate studies,
To my beloved Santa Barbara on California’s South Coast
There to study political philosophy and classical Greek,
To research and to writing my doctoral dissertation,
Studying under Professor Schrock and befriending Judy;
To many years, many hot long years, in the Nation’s Capital
Teaching, writing, and seeking God in a Benediction monastery,
Receiving spiritual formation under the saintly monk, Fr. Daniel;
To serving as a chaplain with Marines in the First Gulf War
Stationed on Okinawa and bivouacking on Mount Fuji;
To San Diego where my sister, her husband, and my brother lived,
Ministering to the sick and dying at the Naval Hospital,
And my all-too-brief but intense friendship with Joe Condon;
Back home to Montana, to the disturbing politics of the withering church;
To suburban Washington, DC, where wealth and power fornicated,
And where I befriended some good human beings, including Sara;
To years of living and working in the rich farmland of O’Brien County, Iowa,
Where I served as a priest, photographed, gardened, and loved Rummy;
Then to Yankton, South Dakota, to teach philosophy and theology,
And to discover and love unforgettable Zoe and docile Moses,
And to tending and befriending my widowed mother;
And ﬁnally back to Montana to live, to work, to retire, to die--
Unless I heed the ocean’s early and late call to die at sea--
To die in the boundless, ever unchangingly changing sea.

Perhaps I have not heard America singing,
But then, perhaps I have—and America crying, and raging,
And making money and taking extravagant vacations--

Where in this tapestry of American places did I ﬁnd my voice,
A poet’s voice—perhaps I never found what I do not have.

If any experience, set of experiences most formed me--
Most impressed itself into my consciousness, my impressionable young
consciousness,
It was the year or so we lived in coastal Maine, a block from the ocean,
In old, very old, York Harbor, near the Marshall House, on U.S. Route 1,
On the rocky, sandy, ocean-beaten shore,
But especially in the thrilling, chilling, killing ocean.
I heard the sea gulls calling each to each
And I smelled ﬁsh guts rotting on the wharf, and on the beach,
And I watched a home burn and fall crashing to the sea,
But most of all, the ocean--
Tireless, restless, moody, threatening, enticing,
And calling me out to come away and die.

—10 August 2020

19. Feeling the heat

The mountains look dead--
Especially the browned out Tobacco Roots.
Hot, burned up, waterless, lifeless.
Perhaps they are merely sleeping.
Without their royal ermine mantle of winter,
Or their lush green ﬁnery of spring,
They look uninvitingly dead
A haunt for rattlesnakes and lightning ﬁres.

On an August afternoon, before ﬁrst frost,
Even the Sheridan Cemetery felt dead to me.
Customarily it was quiet and still,
But today, rather than comfortingly peaceful,
The place felt entombed under the incessant sun,
Under the dominating, penetrating, pornographic sun.
By some standards, it would not have felt hot,
But it was for us, a land dried up and nearly cloudless,
Dominated by the painfully intense burning sun,
But accustomed to cold winds and snow,
Now remembered as a welcomed relief from enervating heat.

—10 August 2020

20. Fragment of an interrupted thought

Death is the ever-approaching god.
When it arrives, you will not know it,
Nor will you know its manner of approaching,
For it will seize you unawares.
Death

—11 Aug 2020

21. In the stillness of night’s ending

In the stillness of night’s quiet ending,
Before daylight burns into consciousness,
The waxing Moon and Venus, the bright morning star
Speak visibly and nobly in their stillness:

No dreams of far-oﬀ heavenly perfection,
No illusions of a better world or age to come,
But divine order of beauty and goodness here and now--
Whether symbolized through the cosmic myths of gods,
Or known or thought to be known through science--
The world is experienced as ordered, as structured,
And most wonderfully as beautiful beyond speech’s reach;
And as a beautiful cosmos, a well-ordered whole,
It makes sense of itself, is mysterious and yet intelligible,
And most delightful to all except to the illusionaries.

There is that which was in the Beginning
whose presence is experienced indirectly through the cosmos,
known in and through that which it causes,
the Invisible known as unknown through the visible;
And there is that which is ever present in the ever-changing,
ever mysteriously unfolding,
and experienced as divinely present;
And the Whole is both felt and understood as a beautiful home,
even with its imperfections, eruptions, explosions.

All that is seen and experienced in any way
is the embodiment, the carrier of its own beyond,
whispering and hinting and gently moving
Beyond itself, beyond even its wonder-ﬁlled goodness,
Back to the Source from which all comes forth—
whether unendingly or not unendingly
no one knows--
To the End that is the end unendingly,
Beyond all that ceaselessly changes in its order and beauty,
as one gazes into the cleft between massive rocks,
into the spring unseen
but out of which ﬂows all that ﬂows--
A sacred river enlivening, refreshing, cleansing, and healing,
And leading one after another, being after being,
back into Itself,
into that which simply is.

—13 August 2020

22. Song of the stars

A sudden chill breeze woke me
If I had been asleep--
I do not know--

For my mind had been with Theodore Roethke
drowning in his pool--
And I pulled on socks to close the deck door
And trotted down the hall

And they were there--
Many, many shining stars
Singing in their nocturnal beauty--
And clouds of creamy Milky Way
Ribbon across the heavens--

I recollected Augustine’s famous words,
“Tell us of your God!”
“He made us,” they shouted back,
Speaking in their beauty,
I do not hear the stars sing, “He made us,”
except in memory.

What I hear the stars sing is,
“We are because It is!”
The stars are not a product made,
Not even fellow creatures,
But fellow beings in being--
Things that stand out in that which simply IS.

Why do I rise so early,
long before sunrise?
I arise to behold IT with awe.
IT arouses me to come and see.
How can I not arise, see, and write?

—13 August 2020

23. Portrait of a writer as an old man

As Kent confronts King Lear, so now I also hear,
“What are you doing, old man?”
And so I ask myself, “What are you doing?”
In writing in a way that may outwardly resemble poetry
Am I trying to play the poet in old age?
To paraphrase Eliot’s Prufrock,
“No, I am not a poet, nor was meant to be.”
But it may be true that, like aging Prufrock, I can be
“Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous--

Almost, at times, the Fool.”
And as Lear’s Fool tells the self-defeating man, Lear,
“Thou shouldst not have been old till thou hadst been wise.”

One who writes words on pages could be a writer.
As I see it, I lack the imagination and the word sense to be a poet.
Nor do I enjoy writing idiosyncratically, as some “modern” poets
seem to do--
Trying to outdo each other in being “original” and “creative.”
(I much prefer plain truth to creative nonsense or pretense.)
Do not some of these self-styled poets come across as odd-balls,
Delighting in word-slinging and in concocting clever phrases?
I’m not a poet; I’m just a wanderer in the night or in twilight
Taking considerable delight in seeking, perhaps discovering,
and telling the truth,
as best I can.

So why do I write thoughts in seemingly poetic forms?
Usually I write to clarify my thinking:
in marginal notes as I read, in memos to myself,
in letters to friends, and in these late love songs.
For I am writing to explore reality as it presents itself
to my wondering mind,
and, if possible
to assist a willing reader in his or her thinking and soul-life.
Further, I write in these various forms to encourage insight
and brevity.
Prose is often prosaic, prolix, unnecessarily detailed;
Poetic forms invite a concentration of the mind and of thought,
As well as freedom to adumbrate and perhaps to penetrate,
Without requiring sustained discursive thought or argument.
I’m well past the age of having time to explain much.

If not broken or tarnished, a mirror tells the truth:
I am an aging man, by common standard an old man;
According to society I’m a “senior citizen,”
And according to governmental social policy,
This fellow is old enough to be a recipient of Social Security
and of Medicare;
So I must be “old,” eh?
Given the likelihood that few years remain for me on earth,
I choose to write in a form to compact my thoughts,
To express myself intelligibly, to explore reality and consciousness,
Without being overly pedantic or windy.

Perhaps one day one of my little thought pieces will be a swan,
And I’ll wonder if the swan could possibly swim in the lake of poetry.
Possibly some of the tanka and haiku may swim in that lake,
But even in these Japanese forms, I lack the masterful touch
Of a genuine poet, who can say so much with simple brush strokes.
Rather, I’m painting quickly in broad strokes,
using the kind of brush for painting a barn door,
and painting quickly before the old barn returns to dust.

In short, I’m not interested in being a poet or in writing poems
to be published, anthologized, eulogized, or euthanized.
I seek to be a human being in search of truth --
Truth about the mysterious and beautiful Whole
in which “we live, move, and have our being.”
I write because I must give back before slipping away.

—13-14 August 2020

24. “Receive the Holy Spirit”

I must share before I die.
I need to give to others some of the goodness and life
Breathed into me, kneaded into me,
Over these seventy years.

If only I could share a special gift
That my Italian beloved called
My “senso estetico,” my esthetic sense,
A love and sensitivity to beauty.

The beauty that opens my soul,
Opens my heart and mind,
And often opens my eyes to tears
Has often been in music.

Bach. Johann Sebastian Bach.
The name brings tears to my eyes now,
Perhaps not quite a stream of tears,
But a welling up of liquid gratitude and love.

How moving, humbling, life-aﬃrming
To realize the great wealth this man gave to the world,
And hence to me, as a part of humanity,
A recipient of such masterworks.

A great composer—a Bach, Mozart, Beethoven--
Needs other talented and well-practiced musicians
To play their music in solitude and for others;
And Bach needs a solitary soul to receive his music.

Bach has a wealth of outstanding musicians
To play, to sing his music through the years.
Such a gifted woman as Midori plays for me right now
On a solo recording, in speakers, here in my living room.

At least three are present: Bach, Midori, and my listening mind,
And the technicians who recorded and produced the music.
And with Bach his extremely gifted family of craftsmen,
All brought together now as I listen.

In us all, I sense the movement of the Spirit
That brings forth such a pléroma of beauty in the world,
Which prompts those who play and those who listens
Uniting mind with mind in a community of the love of beauty.

Generations before I was born, there was Bach;
After I die, there will be Bach and Beethoven,
And some other masterful geniuses who compose
To communicate beauty in such noble forms.

It has long seemed disappointing to me,
Even a kind of human waste and tragedy,
That so many human beings devour pop music,
And neglect to nourish their souls in the best.

Even to share such a thought with many today
Brings scorn and ridicule for being “a snob”
For daring to think that not all musicians are equal,
And that some achieved greater works than others.

How does one ﬁnd the best?
Consult those who study and perform music,
And listen, listen, listen with rapt attention
And discern for yourself straw from gold.

I still listen to some popular music, and can enjoy it.
I hear a great voice in Ella Fitzgerald or Patsy Cline.
I can appreciate the poetry and songs of Hank Williams,
But soon I return to the late Beethoven, to all of Bach.

If I lay dying one day in a hospital or care facility,
Let me hear Midori play the andante from Sonata #2
Of Bach’s unaccompanied violin sonatas and partitas.
Let me listen over and again, and to other music by Bach,

For he more than anyone raises my soul towards God
On wings of intellect, of soul, of beauty.
And if I cannot listen to Bach, please give me silence,
Silence in which I can hear in my mind the Master singing.

—15 August 2020

25. Something is brewing

As I’m throwing a ball to Elijah
While walking among graves in Sheridan,
Or reading a book or writing an email,
I often sense that something is brewing.

Something is stirring within my spirit,
But I have not yet discerned what or who it is.
It is too indistinct yet to take shape or form.
It may not be a single it, but a number of its.

There are moments when some thought or ﬁgure
Heretofore out of mind, out of consciousness,
Suddenly arises; and although I sense its ghostly presence
I cannot discern its essence, origin, or purpose.

What I sense may be a hidden pattern or purpose within
And behind the particular moves of consciousness.
And whatever it is, it would somehow lead me
And is leading or drawing me to I know-not-what.

Particular thoughts or images arise into consciousness
But inwardly I sense, “This may be part, but it’s not the whole,
It may be a manifestation, but it’s not the thing itself,
The “tip of the iceberg,” far more remaining unseen.

In the incoherent, mysterious process that rises and fades
I have a sense of being moved or drawn,
Lead from where I am now
To where I am not, or have not been.

Ultimately, I am being lead to death.
Every being that comes into being moves to death,
To its own non-existence in the world of space-time.
But I also sense that before I die, I have a task.

What is it that I ought to be doing?
To what am I being drawn before I die?
It may be that I and each are being drawn to the divine
And that drawing gives one a sense of expectancy.

Or perhaps it is not to God that I feel moved
But to complete some tasks before exiting.
What am I not doing that I need to do,
Or what have I begun and not completed?

Does any human being leave the world
Having fully run its course, completing its tasks,
Fulﬁlling its duties or potentialities?
Perhaps the surpassing duty is not here achievable.

It may be that what I sense brewing within me
Is not primarily and essentially for me at all,
But a movement of the Whole within a part,
Of the cosmos in the mind or consciousness of man.

***

Last night I stepped outside for a moment just to look
And there were many stars, yes, and mighty Jupiter.
But it was what I heard that arrested me this time:
I listened and heard, or thought I heard,
wind rustling in the poplar’s leaves.

I hear, but indistinctly; I do not know what I am hearing.
Something is reaching out to me, into me,
But I do not know it’s name, nor clearly see its presence.
I merely hear sounds whispering in my mind.

But why some sounds, some words, arise, I do not know.
Occasionally, a word arises into consciousness:
“Zarathustra.” No, I will not play a prophet like Nietzsche
Or like so many false prophets, come and gone.

Or my friend of many years, Plato, comes to mind
And I feel some shame for having neglected his search for wisdom.
But one gradually learns ones real limitations
Realizing that the way of philosophy demands more
than one can reasonably give.

Having breathing outside my window arrests my attention--
Darkness hides whatever is making the sound.
Coyotes are howling, darks barking from the same direction,
And then a single, solitary “meow,” all beneath Mount Baldy
(or is it a night on Bald Mountain?)

There is something within me, stirring beneath consciousness--
Something I want to express before I die.
I struggled to articulate the hidden way
For I am wandering in the dark to ﬁnd it.

***

The allure of writing as I do is not to play a prophet
Nor to play games with masks and equivocations.
Nor is it the highly noetic and analytical work of philosophy,
To which there is some kinship, some fellowship of spirit:

The human mind desires to make sense of the Whole
in which it is ﬁnding itself;
And the search for truth may take, does take, various forms.
The insights and questions that arise while one is writing
Are forms of being guided and moved towards what is.

Homer wrote within and against the background of the gods,
With a sense of the mysterious Whole moved by divinities.
Dante had a Christian-Plotinian sense of the oneness of the divine
Moving all from itself and back to itself beyond death.

The words they used, their myths and allegories,
Were means to communicate the truth of reality experienced.
In reading a poet, one may often discern beneath the text
The mind and inﬂuence of one or more philosophers or thinkers,

As well as particular beliefs which opened or closed their minds
To the awe-inspiring, unbounded Whole in which we exist.
“It is the Spirit that gives life, the ﬂesh is useless.”
And it is the Spirit that “blows where it wills,” and when.

—16 August 2020

26. Puzzles

What caused the sound of heavy breathing
I heard last evening outside the window by my study chair

I will probably never know; it sounded like a large animal.
Nor will I likely discover where the coyotes live that I hear nightly.

My life has been a puzzle within an unfolding series of puzzles.
Far more do I not know than I know,
And many things that provoked wonder in me remain obscure.
As I age, I must accept not knowing far than I know.

Some puzzles get resolved, but a resolution may entangle one
in more puzzles.
Late last winter I lost two Chuck-It balls in Sheridan Cemetery.
One was wedged a few feet higher in a ﬁr tree than I could reach;
Returning in two minutes with a long stick, the ball was gone.

I searched everywhere, even into the spring, and never found it.
And then in March or April, I hurled the same kind of orange ball
Over to shrubs near the grave of Mutti Steiner and her children.
Elijah went to retrieve the ball, and found nothing.

We both searched for that ball on diﬀerent days, and I wondered,
More playfully than seriously: did some ghost arise from a grave
And carry oﬀ the attractive orange Chuck-It ball?
More seriously, I was again dunked into the sea of unknowing.

And then this morning after I threw an orange Chuck-it ball
Near both that ﬁr tree and the Steiner graves,
I stood watching as a mature owl swooped down,
Tried to grab the ball, wings spread out, was prepared to ﬁght.

Good retriever that he is, Elijah was not distracted by the owl,
Quickly pounced on the ball, and brought it back to me.
Could this owl—three of which I’ve seen in the cemetery--
Have been the one who had stolen our orange balls?

Perhaps a puzzle has been solved,
or so I thought.
But the mere resolution raises other questions:
What would an owl possibly want with a Chuck-It ball?
Would it be carried to the nest for the oﬀspring?

What caused the sound of heavy breathing I heard
Outside the window of my study last night?
Does it matter? “What diﬀerence does it make?”
Does it matter that I know almost nothing of science?

My mind swims in a pool of ignorance,
And is often trapped in a thicket of unanswered questions.
This much makes sense to me:
It is foolish to think one knows what one does not know.

—16 August 2020

27. Fear of death

“Of all the wonders that I yet have heard
It seems to me most strange that men should fear,
Seeing that death, a necessary end,
Will come when it will come.”

Not only Caesar, but his literary creator, Shakespeare,
Was puzzled by the human fear of death.
Tales of what transpires beyond the conﬁnes of time
Surely are among the reasons many fear death.

In truth, who knows what if anything awaits consciousness
When the bodily processes cease their functioning?
It is foolish to think one knows what one does not know
And more proﬁtable and salutary to fare forth in trust.

The death of a being is part of natural life processes,
As parts are dying or changing continually to give rise to others;
The body gradually wears out as do all things physical,
And consciousness changes and dims as the body breaks down.

What will be will be, and that which Is, is supremely good.
“And all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.”
Tales of resurrection and of existences beyond the grave
I willingly leave to tellers of tales and to those who like answers.

I shall seek to discover the questions that need asking
Before assuming that I have any answers worth keeping.

—16 August 2020

28. Zarathustra’s knowledge

Thus speaks Zarathustra:

“Night it is: now speak louder all springing fountains,
And my soul also is a springing fountain.

Night it is: only now awake all the songs of lovers,
And my soul, too, is the song of a lover….
Light am I, ah, that I were night!
But this is my aloneness, that I am begirt with light.”

“I teach you the Übermensch:
Human being is something that ought to be surpassed…
The Übermensch is the meaning of the earth;
Your will says, Übermensch be the meaning of the earth!”

The old man has not yet heard of it, “dass Gott todt ist,”
“That God is dead.”

***

No one knows the future,
Not even Zarathustra.
Indeed, let us take unknowing to the limit:
Not even God Himself knows the future,
For the future does not in any way exist,
And the divine knows only itself
And what exists, for it is in God.
Philosophy can make sense of the past
And it can discern earth’s movements now--
But what shall be remains an utter mystery,
Unknown and unknowable, even to would-be prophets.

29. Poetry: need for noetic control

Having read thousands of stanzas of poetry in recent weeks,
I feel as one who entered a candy store,
And just glutted himself on all of the sweets.
I have read and reﬂected on some ﬁne pieces of poetry,
But I have also tasted too many that either I do not understand,
Or which seem to try too hard to prove their poetic value.
Perhaps I need to concentrate on the best poets I ﬁnd,
And let the other ones drift downstream.

After Shakespeare, I still know no greater poem in English
Than T.S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets,” and to it I should turn.
This set of four poems is profound, mystical, challenging,
And magniﬁcently expressed by a real craftsman.
Keats has a tremendous word sense, but died at twenty-ﬁve;
Of his truth or profundity I am less convinced.

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty, that is all Ye know on earth,
And all ye need to know” sounds frankly sophomoric.
Beauty can also deceive; and truth may not be so beautiful;
Beauty and truth are not identical, as beauty and goodness are not.
Have you never met a beautiful person who knows how to con?
Whitman is spiritually problematic—to be explored--
But has composed some beautiful masterpieces,
Including “Out of the cradle endlessly rocking,”
And “When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d.”
I still have much respect for the so-called “Metaphysicals,”--
Donne, Herbert, Vaughn, Marvel, and others--
Who oﬀer profound reﬂections on life and death,
And do so with a good and refreshing command of English.

Although I have read many inspiring poems recently,
I shake my head at some who just seem to babble,
And do so in ways that cry out for attention,
“Hey, look at me! Am I not a clever boy (or girl)?”
As I wrote in my twenties, “Poets are drunk on speech,”
And a ﬁne embodiment of this addiction is G M Hopkins.
Unfortunately, he is not alone. Many poets seem strange.
Why do so many eschew noetic control for their imaginings?
Good philosophy comes across as chaste, modest, genuine;
Much poetry seems promiscuous, wanton, pretentious.
Not all, from Homer and Dante to Shakespeare and Goethe.
But then, philosophy also has its philodoxers, doesn’t it?
It has the likes of Locke, Rousseau, and Emerson,
Not to mention doctrinal thinkers and magicians,
Such as the brilliant Hegel and his complete Gnostic system,
Presenting itself as “true wisdom” and “Science;”
Or Nietzsche’s costly gnosis and the hatred of divine reality.
Are their Gnostic poets? I see traces of gnosis in poetry--
In Emerson, Whitman, Nietzsche, and their epigones,
But I leave that problem for another time.
For now I’ll conclude and say:
The ﬁnest philosopher I know is also the greatest poet: Plato

—16 August 2020

30. Mythical imagination

Which would you prefer to have,
Truthful words, or falsities beautifully expressed?
(Or mere banalities that say little about life?)

I much prefer truthful insights into reality--
Which often challenge and disturb before refreshing--
To ﬁnely crafted phrases that may taste delicious
But leave the eater malnourished and withering.

Philosophy is the love of wisdom, the search for truth,
The explication of experiences of transcendence.
I know of no philosopher to compare with Plato,
Or with Aristotle, his student of twenty years.

If one studies, for example, a Platonic dialogue on love--
The Symposium or the Phaedrus--
One may gain true insights into the meaning of love,
And its role in the ascent of the mind into God;

Reading Plato, one savors the most remarkable example
of poetic genius, of mythical imagination
From a philosopher who composes “truth myths,”
Philosophical myths, intended to communicate the truth of reality.

Similarly, in studying Shakespeare, absorbing him,
One may gain much insight into the human condition,
In part by encountering a cast of highly diverse characters
All serving to display the heights and depths of humanity.

I marvel at the power of intellect and imagination,
Of reason and its articulation through communicative symbols.
But the mind that can understand is also the mind that can distort,
Or misperceive or misunderstand the originating experience.

***

Philosophy and its oﬀspring, science, are limited tools
For exploring the full range of reality.
Rational speech grounded in concrete experiences
Are necessary but insuﬃcient tools for exploration.

Neither philosophy nor science can explore the ultimate cause,
That which causes all else to be and which guides and sustains
The processes of coming-to-be and passing away.
Philosophy can carry the mind only as far as the intellect sees.

Beyond the range of intellect and reason, Leibniz’s questions,
His two great questions, stand:
Why is there something, and why not noting;
And why is the world as it is, and not some other way?

—17 August 2020

31. Its Moment

This moment that now is,
is now and now is gone,
And never will return.

It can be recollected
Or it can be forgotten,
But never will it return
Existing as it was.

—18 August 2020

32. Novus ordo seclorum

A wish, a desire, a belief, a hope,
At worst, an intoxicating illusion--
The new order of the ages--
Unless it is understood
That whatever begins, ends,
Whatever comes to be perishes.
Time allows for no perfection,
And for no lasting endurance
Against Time’s blind, impartial seasons.

Societies that come to be in time perish,
Usually leaving residues behind,
Some of which become building blocks
In yet another society, for another time.
Like all things that begin in time,
We the People will be submerged
In the waves of Time,
And disappear.

—18 August 2020

33. Why mourn?

We all have known the loss, the painful loss,

Part II: September 2020

Contents
1. Songs of September
2. Words
3. Outside-Inside
4. Cosmic consciousness
5. Knowing unknowing
6. The emperor of ice cream?
7. Ms. Potato-head
8. Recollecting
9. Sea-wanderer
10. A song of early evening
11. Wind into nothing
12. Going down
13. Arising
14. Du temps perdu
15. From a hillside
16. Death thinks of you

1. Songs of September

“August, die she must,
The autumn winds blow chillin’ cold;
September, I'll remember
A love once new has now grown old.”

“It's a long, long while from May to December
But the days grow short when you reach September….”

“By all these lovely tokens
September days are here,
With summer's best of weather,
And autumn's best of cheer.”

“Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness;
Close-bosom friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run.”

“Yet could we turn the years again,
And call those exiles as they were
In all their loneliness and pain…”

“All is serene tonight along the banks of Antietam Creek….
Bloodied ground was hallowed on this dire September day.”

“Between you and me a new door opened
and someone, still faceless,
was waiting for us there.”

“Entre tu y yo se abrio una nueva puerta
y alguien, sin rostro aun,
alli nos esperaba.”

2. Words

1

Words expressed not for everyone,
Perhaps for some, or for only one.
Words for everyone may be heard
But no doubt with many assumed meanings.

“I love you, dammit,” he shouted.
She knew that he meant it,
That he wanted her to trust his love,
And that she wanted to love and be loved by him.

What do I need to say to you before I die?
Suddenly, there will be only silence between us.
So speak and listen now, while you are able,
To words spoken from heart to silent-listening heart.

What do you want to hear from me
Before a stroke or seizure silences me?
What do I want to hear from you
Before your mind or mine floats out to sea?

Some words are better left unsaid.
Do you truly need to know, want to know,
Every thought I’ve had about you?
Words spoken or written do not retreat willingly.

2

Words arise into consciousness,
But why, and whence do they come?
Long have I wondered, finding no satisfactory answer.
Words arising move to some kind of action—or inaction.

There are those who slavishly seek perfection
In words they read, write, hear, or speak;
But genuine truth lies beneath the level of language;
And words can never exhaust or do justice to truth.

If I insisted on finding perfect words before writing,
Nothing would be written, could be written.
At best words approximate, point towards,
Being half-blind guesses groping in twilight.

“I never wrote,” he explained, “because I did not want
to make any mistakes.”
Such a statement arises from self-deception or ignorance,
From a naive belief that one could find the perfect words.
What statement is simply, unequivocably true?

3

Formulating words is a step to the chopping block,
A step towards the grave or the burial urn.
“Speak now, or forever hold your peace.”
Speak now, because soon you will be muzzled by death.

I believe that it was said of Camille Saint-Saëns
That he composed music as a tree bears fruit.
Well, perhaps I write these little non-poems
As a tree bears fruit in September,

Or then again, as snow descends silently in December,
As I enter the winter of my temporal existence.
The time for words passes quickly into silence.

4

“Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness;
Close-bosom friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run.”

Keats’ “To Autumn” scales the height of poetry,
Displaying how poetic the English language can be,
Combining beauty of expression with deep meaning,
As beauty and truth nurture a joyful appreciation of existence.

Poets such as Shakespeare, Donne, Keats are exceptional.
Why is it that so often those who write poetry
Sacrifice or sublet their compositions to beautiful sounds,
Or worse, to being imaginative but loosened from reality?

From Homer to Goethe, poets beautifully sing
Without sacrificing meaning for pretty sounds,
Although the Bard at times may wax a little too poetic--
For those preferring straightforwardness to clever words.

Language (words), consciousness, and reality
Are intimately related in the human condition.
Bodily, intellectually, emotionally they dance together
In the human conscious of being in the Whole.

  —September 2020

3. Outside-Inside

Why would a human being confine oneself inside
When he or she can step outdoors
And see and feel the cosmic whole, reality?

They called me outside several times this morning--
Selene, appearing full, retreating to the western horizon;
Venus, rising in the east, visible with a star tucked beneath her;
And Mars, riding the ecliptic, traveling west.

Hanging in the eastern sky is Orion, silent hunter,
A nocturnal friend since childhood,
With his bright stars, Rigel and Betelgeuse,
Appearing not far from each other—but in reality?

To live where the night sky is poorly visible would be painful.
To be able to see the night sky, and not look, seems penitential.
What keeps our human smallness in right proportion
As much as watching the real stars, not Hollywood pretenders?

Often I recall the words of Emmanuel Kant,
That “two things awe me the most:
The starry skies above, and the moral law within.”
I, too, am awed and humbled by the heavens above.

It is not primarily “the moral law” that I find within me,
Although it shows up in times of trial and testing;
What I often sense within is more complete,
More mysterious, nameless in its boundlessness.

“I do not know its name, but if required to name it,
I call it the Tao.” Or Logos, the One, the divine.
The name for the nameless does not matter, does it?
Attentiveness to its presence non-existently is essential--

And free, ever available for one daring to seek.
What is present within awes human consciousness
As do the starry skies above, realm of the gods,
Home to the alluring wandering gods.

—September 2020

4. Cosmic consciousness

1

Cosmic consciousness undergirds poetry
That’s grounded in reality, not untethered imagination,
Nor mere recounting of singular experiences of transient being.
The greatest poetry of whom I’m aware--
As in Homer, Hesiod, the Hebrew prophets, the Bhagavad Gita,
Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe,
All relate the experiences of particular beings
Within the mysteriously unfolding Whole.
What are the Iliad and the Odyssey without the gods?
What is Shakespeare without nature and the super-natural?

2

Every it, every you, every I shares in being,
Is a partner in the whole of reality,
From particles and atoms and elements and minerals
To life—vegetable animal human
To mother earth and father sun,
To wandering planets and more stable stars,
From the material world into the realm of spirit--
Of consciousness, of loving, of knowing--
All that is, is a part, a participant, a hallowed partner
In the song of creation, the story of reality,
In the process of all flowing from One, returning to One.

3

Is the whole of reality living or unliving, neither or both?
Is the divine part of the whole, the whole itself, neither or both?
Is the divine personal, impersonal, neither, or both?
Does the whole itself originate and pass away?

4

Wind to the aspens, wind in the aspens,
Wind winding through the aspens,
Leaves quaking and shaking in bright sunlight
patterned in shade;
The aspens move and yet seem to remain in place,
A growth out of mother earth, the engendering earth;
Wind wafting smells of cooking food, burning grease,
And carrying the tingling sounds of wind chimes
Chiming in and singing with birds,
Singing with the blowing, blowing of the wind,
And the ceaseless rustling of summer leaves.

All that I see and hear and smell becomes me here and now
While remaining itself, distinct, unique, and all together--
Each together in all yet uniquely alone in silent solitude.

To what extent are these words true,
Rendering a reasonable account of reality?
Is each tree solid in its solitude? Am I?
Mere breath, winding in, winding out.

—September 2020

5. Knowing unknowing

1

Being conscious, that which is out also comes in;
Knowing presents the known in the knower.
Neither consciousness nor what is known is complete;
Consciousness is ever in flux between knowing-unknowing.

2

Especially in beholding a heavenly body
One realizes the presence of the seen
In the act of seeing, and hence, in consciousness--
Or, if you prefer more thingly talk, in the mind.

One may ask, “Is what I see really there?”
One may also ask, “How is what I see present to and in me?”
In looking at Jupiter, something becomes—to some extent--
Present within, known within, one with you.

3

Mutual participation of one in the other
is the pattern of existence--
Not separate, isolated being-things that do not,
cannot, know each other.
Hence: you are you, and you are you to me;
I am both myself and as I am to you, in you.
In knowing, in loving, in all activities and things.

4

The love of the beautiful draws one to behold what is beautiful.
The love of knowing draws one to inquire into what one knows.
A love of beauty is the origin of poetry, of music, of all the arts;
And love is the origin of philosophy and her off-spring, science.
A sustained delight in the beautiful opens one to mystical union.

Moved by a sense of beauty in the whole of reality,
And wondering about its nature and causes--
“Why is there something, why not nothing?”--
Gives birth to philosophia, the love of wisdom;
And seeking to know the particulars within the whole--
“Why are things the way they are, and not some other way?”--
Gives rise to science, knowledge of what things are and their causes--
Rationally discoverable processes of coming-to-be and passing away.

The search for truth is endless
Because the Whole is endlessly boundless;
And because all knowing comes forth
From the vast sea of unknowing,
And is known only in tension with unknowing.
“The perfect is the enemy of the good.”

—September 2020

6. The emperor of ice cream?

“Let be be the finale of seem,” Mr. Stevens!

Sometimes it takes years for life’s puzzles
And long-pointed muzzles to clarify themselves.

The title for this poem came first to mind as a question,
Admitted lest I steal too brazenly from Wallace Stevens;
And to that puzzling poet I owe the origin of these few words.

Last night while mindlessly cleaning up the kitchen,
I was just as mindlessly talking out loud to myself--
As I am wont to do, an elderly man living alone--

But not really alone, am I? Alone with Moses and Elijah.

Among muttered words, I found myself mulling over
A strange phrase first read during high school years,
And never understood, so it provokes wonder
Like a thorn or thistle seed in my sock:
“The emperor of ice cream.” Sounds good, eh?

Well, I said the words aloud, and that sufficed
To draw Elijah, napping in the back bedroom,
Running into the kitchen because I had spoken
The magic words, the enchanting words--
“Ice cream.” That’s all he needed to hear to get activated;
What I actually said, “The emperor of ice cream” didn’t matter.

Since teen years, I’ve wondered what Stevens seemed to mean
By such a strange phrase as “the emperor of ice cream.”
Now I know what the words mean in reality--
Even if they seem to have nothing to do with what the poet meant.
(For as Socrates remarked, often poets don’t understand their own words.)
Elijah, my white-yellow Lab, is the emperor of French vanilla ice cream.

  —3 September 2020

7. Ms. Potato-head

The queen of mean
Vents her spleen
Mrs. Potato-head
Hiding under the dead.

“No dogs allowed--
“The dead are too proud
For animal smells,”
She shakes and yells.

Lying beneath the ground,
Unseen, unfelt by her,
Worms and snakes have found
Bodies that cannot stir.

Ranchers, kings and queens
Having plenty of land
Neither feel nor understand
Townies without their means.

Walking dogs among old graves
Dishonors not the dead
Despite unhappy raves
From Ms. Potato-head.

—3 September 2020

8. Recollecting

1

Are they words I will summon from an unknown land
Or whatever gives rise to speech within the mind?
Thoughts are dressed in words, often scantily clad,
Although at times more fittingly robed for action.

These thoughts, fragmented and broken as they are,
Are not that which the heart is seeking;
Perhaps they are mere distractions, or perhaps
They bar the way into another realm, still unknown.

Something or someone presses into consciousness,
Remaining on the fringes, off the stage,
Moving quietly and gently, present without pressuring,
And quietly awakening wonder at what or who they are.

To whom do I call to get a fitting response?
To one unknown but known as the source of all that is?
To whom else could I justly turn for guidance
If not to that from which each and all flow forth?

Who am I, lone and quiet one, to disturb your silence?
And how do I stir myself to seek your assistance?
Perhaps if I still all thoughts, and wait like you in silence
You will speak or act, whether in words or without.

2

I stand on a precipice, perhaps the escarpment Eagle Rock,
And look out at layered mountains or hills in the distance,
Heavily clothed in trees, bathed in non-distinguishing light,
With small ledges and jagged rocks down below my feet.

The possibility of death is ever before my eyes.
Easily I could fall, much less easily hurl myself down.
I may take a path down the back slope of the mountain,
Or drop downwards to my death; here I cannot remain.

It is this image that has arisen into consciousness,
Born up on the wings of a distant yet distinct memory.
Here I cried out in anguish, no mortal mind for miles,
And here You spoke through words to your Jeremiah:

“LORD God why have you abandoned me?
I gave you back the life you entrusted to me,
And now am I to be turned away, unwanted?”
With intense anger I spoke, yelling into the abyss.

No other thought intervening, immediately you spoke:
“I am with you to deliver you, says the LORD.”
Heard within, but with authority not of my making.
I heard your words, nothing doubting, firmly trusting,

With joy long unknown, and feeling alive and free
I walked down the sloping side of that mountain,
Dancing in body or in heart I do not know,
But heart and mind flooded with joy and gratitude.

3

“I am with you to deliver you, says the LORD.”
Heard on a single occasion, but less valid now?
Nothing has altered the will of the Unalterable.
You are as you were: with me to deliver me.

—September 2020 (unfinished)

9. Sea-wanderer

Waves crashing and washing over the wanderer
Seeking to return to a home real or imagined
Trial after trial calamity after calamity
Always journeying wandering still seeking
With a steady straying sense of homewardness
Undeterred by the phantoms of imagination
Hindered undeterred by gods and goddesses

And all that they cause or permit to arise
Assisted by timely concocted divine interventions

A strange tale of a stranger in a strange sea-world
Yet familiar and more like home than home
In a world of drifting self-embodied self-seekers
Foreign the world oddly strangely familiar
To one who poured out libations unknowingly
In unknown ways to a god unknown
Fertile ground for a most fruitful harvest
In a barren land bereft of good soil rich crops
A harsh land scratched for little engendering much

The salt-bitter sea-brine pouring out of nose and mouth
Brawny baked skin taut-stretched beneath a burning sun
Dashed and bashed by log-beams broken lose
Arms flailing to find that to which one may grasp
Even as being buffeted and ripped from place to place
In a sea of turbulence churned up by an angry god
Seeking to hinder if not destroy a lone wanderer alone
Wondering if and when he’ll attain his home again
If and when returning endlessly to rest at last endlessly

—September 2020

10. A song of early evening

1

Light is falling dimly, vision is failing, so I call on you,
late-singing Muse
To open up the inner eye that sees what others neglect,
And allows itself not to focus on what others deem important.

Light is falling dimly, clouds obscure the heavens above
And old age beclouds the mind of a living-dying man
Still standing still somewhere on the shores of time and eternity.

Light dims into the secret darkness of long-forgotten night
And the mind within the mind begins its journeyings
From here to there, wandering and wondering, and seeking.

“How quaint, how out-dated, to call upon a fictitious muse,”
Says one cowering in a corner behind an electronic screen.
“Those days are gone, forever gone from our advanced world.”

2

Still is the most sweet voice of the silent Muse,
Allowing one to muse on what may be possible,
Allowing one to let pass into darkness
the noisy quarrels of the day.

The heads are bald, or white, or dyed in disguise,
The mouths speaking calculating cliché all-too-quickly;
The hands taking whatsoever they can grab passing by.

Theirs are the screams and maneuverings of a day
Catching flies on their daily droppings of fetid news,
Deceivers and themselves deceived by deceptions.

3

Late sunlight pierces through evening clouds, shining
Onto a barely washed desert landscape, burned out
Visibly as souls and cities are burned out
to those blind enough to see.

It is passing, day and age, town and country quickly
Passing into wars of words, disintegrating into an abyss
Of mental-spiritual emptiness, generating little of value.

She will sing to me when I rise and gaze before eyes
Start scanning screens for the latest bubbles from babbling Babylon
Or peevishly peer into the fathomless pit of puerile Hollywood
productions.

—Sept 2020

11. Wind into nothing

A strong wind was blowing, beating hard against me--
If it was indeed me at all, I do not know--
Blowing me or who it was to known-not-where
And there was darkness, as on a moonless night,
So that nothing appeared to eyes that peered.
No sight, no sound, nothing to be touched or felt
Nothing present to nothingness within or without
Not even the wind that had been blowing nothing.

Then a question arose from nowhere into no place
What is here when nothing is present in darkness?
What is it that brings forth a question in emptiness?
And to where can a voiceless question proceed?
Not to feelings, for nothing is felt;
Not to senses, for nothing is sensed;
Not to thoughts, for nothing is thought.
Then from what and to what?

—Sept 2020

12. Going down

I went down, I will go down, I am going down

1

The veil becomes thinner, more diaphanous
As she walks through the descending darkness.
Wasn’t she brought forth only recently, a few years ago?
She was clothed when last we met, and now?
She’s not naked, is she? No robe to spread over her?
Very thin the chemise, thin the skirt, her nakedness showing.

Do you mourn for your mother as she lays dying,
Or only after she takes her last exhausted breath?
What am I doing, standing by her bedside?
What does one do? Drug her up and end her life?
She is groaning and writhing in pain, isn’t she?
Call the attending physician to issue the death report.

2

Tell me, Thomas, if you know, what will come to pass?
I neither see you nor can I touch you, and now silence?
Have you nothing to say? Why do you keep your peace?
What is remaining that has not become wounded, fetid?
Are there any limbs left fully functioning? Now amputated?
The putrefying gangrenous tissue smells horrid, sickening.

He appeared for a brief moment, sliding by, gliding by
Touching nothing, without glancing to meet my wondering eyes.
Perhaps you told them all that you had to say then
Before you went down before we went down
Sinking as in quicksand, sinking without a foothold,
Grasping nothing on the way down gasping for air.

3

I went down and came back up as empty as I descended.
Perhaps one must fully die to discover uncovered truth.
I will arise and I will go down before the sun has set
And the world is bathed in the blackness of liberating night.
If you can keep it—as if there is no tomorrow and tomorrow--
If the way up and the way down are one and the same.

I shall go down in the motionless stillness between two waves
Down beneath the roaring crashing lunging crunching of the waves
The sea upheaving seemingly to everywhere at once
Struggling to hear the song of nothingness under the sea
Descending into the murky darkness of the unremembered
The long-forgotten abysmal beginning of the encompassing sea.

—Sept 2020

13. Arising

“Why do you get up so early?” I am often asked.
Why not? The alternative is to lie in bed, either awake,
Or lie lingering somewhere between wakefulness and sleep.
And then there is my old man, Moses, who comes to me
To take him out to behold the stars, and to relieve himself.

I arise long before sunrise, 0200 or so, especially now
Just past the autumnal equinox, in the dark half of the year,
Weeks that keep descending into the abyss of darkness
Surrounding the winter solstice, and frigid cold,
Surrounding the soul with reminders that all is ending.

When asleep, am I asleep dreaming or half awake
With Odysseus descending to the realm of the dead?
What is sleep, what is wakefulness, and what is dreaming?
One blends into the other as life ebbs and flows away
The body bending downward to mother earth.

   Odysseus’ wanderings grip my wavering imagination
More than Er’s arising from the realm of the dead--
Although his experiences down under reach into me
As one must choose one’s fate, and every action is sealed

At the spindle of necessity, fixed forever.

“I must arise and go to my father,” the ever-present cost
Of living as a man among human beings wandering.
Er and that young man had to learn through suffering,
Arising to return to the realm of the dying-living,
Not lingering in the shadows of resentment and jealousy.

How will I exit the scene, how will I make my exodus
From here where existence is fading to where I know not?
The time and the hour and the way are ever unknown.
Now one must arise towards the border of death
Allowing its purifying stripping to have its due effect.

—September 2020

14. Du temps perdu

Decisions are fixed beneath the spindle of necessity.
There is no return, no reversal, no going back,
And as each one growing up must learn to aid maturing:
There is no returning home to the home you thought you knew.

“What if I had…” And what if you had never been?
And what if one did not waste time with “what if’s”?
It is what it is, and you are as you are,
Forged in purifying fire by the choices that you made.

Even if you could return to yesterday, or yesteryear,
It would feel strange to you, and you strangely out of place.
For you have changed in the process of living,
You who would return to yesterday are not who was there.

The stream of time flows on, rushes on, and washes out to sea.
The stream of life flows on, rushes on, flows and ebbs away.
You are not now as you were then, nor as you will be;
You are, and you are not.

Are you proud, are you contented, with what you have done?
Are you shamed of things done, or things left undone, unsaid?
In a sense, it does not matter either way, feeling pride or shame;
In neither case can you change what you have done, or did not do.

It is not only yesterday that has passed away, but every today.
What you felt, did, said, read, thought just today, an hour ago,

Has already drifted away in the uncontrollable currents of swirling time,
And you stand alone in the present, withering as you are.

The past lies sealed and buried beneath the spindle of necessity,
The future is no more real than a dream or an illusion;
The present, now, this moment, is all that you have
And no one has the present, more than he can grasp a ghost.

The past that matters to me is the past that forms me now.
Whatever was, when brought into consciousness, in some ways, is;
Whatever is in consciousness is present and alive, to a degree;
And what is forgotten lies buried under the icy-blue snows of death.

Here, now, always. Each moment autumnal-rich in possibilities
Until that moment has passed, has withered on September’s vine.
Whatever you are, whoever you are, you are as you are
Here, now, always: you are, and you are not.

—September 2020

15. From a hillside

1

Late yesterday afternoon, about an hour or so before sunset,
I climbed up in the foothills of the Tobacco Roots
To see what lay before me, spread out across the Ruby Valley,
Beneath the dissipating smoke from fires burning, burning
Somewhere, some wheres, over the Pioneers;

I was alone as usual, or more alone than usual,
Having left Moses and Elijah to wait quietly in the car
For I needed silence and solitude in which to survey
And to search below, gazing on the world in which we live
Things as they are spread out visibly before the setting sun,

Before night descends on our little piece of earth--
A land of high desert, a few small streams, irrigated fields,
Scattered small towns, and ranches, and houses here and there
A land divided or broken up by range after range of mountains
Mostly running in a general north-south direction.

Late afternoon towards the end of September are rarely hot,
The furious fevers of summer’s intense naked sun
Having burned themselves out after burning us out
With forest fire smoke still smoldering and smothering
And tourists having departed with the summer sun.

2

Looking out at what lay before me, I also looked in,
For what looks out is ever formed by what lies within
Smoke and its residue haze both within and without
Products of a world that is ever partly on fire,
Partly freezing and thawing, with seasonal rain and draught.

I gasped for breath as acrid smoke stung my eyes and throat
Not so thick as to hide the towns and ranches below,
But foul enough to congest sinuses and cause a cough
Making me woozy and dizzy if I but turn too quickly
Reminding me to move carefully in this hazy valley.

“It is passing even before my eyes,” I thought, seeing houses
Being built on one foothill or another, and on flatter land below;
“An extension of Boze-Angeles, old cow town turned metro,”
I said softly out loud, knowing that no one could hear me,
Distant as was this hill from the land of the living.

“Big money is moving in,” demonstrated showily by Mac-mansions
One after another distant from each other, but similarly pretentious,
Each claiming the attention of anyone who carried to notice
What big bucks can do in a rocky-poor land
Of cattle and sage brush, rattlesnakes and roaming deer.

3

What caught my attention more than lumbered Mac-mansions,
Single-family homes in Sheridan or corporate-owned ranches,
Was the human context displayed and unfolding even in Montana:
The landscape and the world that gave us birth and nourishment
Is not only changing, as ever, but is even now passing away.

Montana, and America, have for generations had our wealthy
Who build gilded mansions to impress the laboring masses;
And we have had thousands of ravenous and exploiting Fat Cats
Accumulating enormous wealth from low-paid subsistent workers.
Greed and proud displays of wealth are neither new nor unusual.

Corporate ranches and ostentatious houses are part of America,
In some ways disgusting but in themselves not destructive
Of what we the people have long loved in our way of life.
But much has changed beneath the surface, not visible
With bodily eyes surveying an insignificant Montana valley.

Refuges from wasteland cities and impoverished farms
Are the stuff that American dreams have been made of.
And greedy urban elites and strutting cowboys in hats and boots--
Nothing new in such phenomena, nothing worth beholding;
Much has changed, is changing, beneath the visible surface.

4

Looking down on the high desert valley, I thought, “A wasteland.”
Seeing the expanse of brown grass under the scorching sun
Brought our country to mind: “America is dying, even as the Republic perishes.
Far worse than the money-grabbers have been the power-obsessed
Who dominate and control virtually every aspect and activity of America:

They brain-wash our children in schools and universities,
They entertain to manipulate minds and to promote corrupt `life-styles.`
The power elites in America recognize and humbly submit
To nothing and to no one that is not under their willful control;
Their goal is to rule, to control, to dominate every mind,

Every activity of each and every citizen in this `one world,’
In which Humanity, Knowledge, Science, Society, and Self
Are the highest being-things in the entire cosmos,
And nothing is of value that is not humanly created—and wanted.
All this to ensure a “free life” in a `human’—Godless—world.”

“No,” I realized, “they have their gods: money, pleasure, success,
Entertainment, “stars,” “sports heroes,” “stuff,” and above all, Self.
America the land of the stuffed Self, the Ego that asserts itself
Over anything, anyone, from the moment of conception to death.
The “land of liberty” has become the wasteland of dominating Selfs.”

5

My attention returned to the drought-ridden waste beneath me.
“There is a beauty in this land, even though for now it is lifeless,
Desiccated, burned out. There remains a chance that rains may come
And bring some renewed life to this rattlesnake scrub land.
But what is a little rain from above on so much barren waste?”

I straightened up to begin my descent back down to Sheridan.
And I sighed. “Why do I remain here? Why not seek a living land,
A place with rain, lush green growth, a milder climate, a clothed sun?
Where would that be? Where in this country can one escape
From the godlessness of the spiritual wasteland we have become?

The people here are no worse than elsewhere in America.
Have not we as a people forgotten and betrayed our national destiny,
Our calling to be “one nation under God,” one humble people?
Have we not forsaken our calling and become a heathen land?
If so, to where could one go, and escape from the spiritual void--

Our rebellion from common sense, right judgment, humility--
Into the nightmare world we made of our great inheritance,
Into what we have made ourselves by the choices we freely made?”
I see the dried up wasteland below me, and shake my head.
“Soon I shall make my exodus from this Egypt into God.”

6

Perhaps add a turn: is this view of the wasteland wrong? The desert and the
dying culture? That is the question for the final section.

—September 2020 (left unfinished for now)

16. Death thinks of you

1

There it was, and catching sight of her, I had to look.
I stepped outside onto my deck, gazed upon her,
Large and yellow near the western horizon, and said,
“The moon. Selene.” Suddenly I heard a stirring,

Sounds of a creature quickly running came to my ears.
Was it a deer eating my trees again? Was it a cat?
“Is that you, Elijah?” I called into the hiding night.
Hearing no response, I returned my attention to the moon.

Words written to me yesterday drifted into consciousness,
For they had surprised me by being so unusual.
An elderly man in failing health with COPD assertively wrote:
“The last thing I care to think about is death.”

After about twenty minutes I stood up to see the moon;
But she was gone. Not a trace of her remained.
Visibly present, then suddenly vanished from sight.

“The last thing I care to think about is death.”
Words arise: “Because I did not stop for death…”
Why anyone would not choose to think about death--
One’s own death, death of loved ones—I truly do not know.

2

Like the setting moon, I too shall soon vanish from sight.
Each of our departures is part of the process of nature,
The mysterious, unexplainable way that things are,
That everything coming into being also passes away.

It is not only my pending death that often comes to mind
But the death of our country, our society, our civilization,
And the death of those whom I love, who now are living and dying,
And the deaths of so many I love, who have already died.

Sudden dissolution of consciousness, of all one loves,
Of all that one has known in any way, all suddenly dissolved.
Every function of living, every life force within,
Gone in a moment like the moon slipping behind the horizon.

You are ever approaching, o death, face of the hidden God,
A faceless face, neither flesh nor fleshless, seen nor unseen,
Yet ever drawing near, present even now in thought,
A power liberating from the mirages we call our life.

3

Are you dead, or alive? Neither one nor the other, or both?
You are not living in a body as I am, and as you used to,
But that does not render you beyond communication,
Beyond all attempts to know and to love you more truly.

I choose always to love you, my parents in this world,
I choose to remember you, to cherish you, to think of you.
You have sunken beneath the horizon of eyes and mind,
But not beneath the horizon of love and winged imagination.

And who are all these I find in a similar condition--
Who died in the body, and yet are so much alive?
Some of these men and women abide intimately in my heart,
Dwellers in my thoughts and memories, rich in blessings.

Death does not lie as a veil heavy between us;
Rather, dying lifted the distancing veil of space and time
Requiring me to think about your actions, sufferings, words--
You, born and deceased centuries before my birth.

I’ve been listening to your stories, ancient singer,
And soon I’ll mediate again on the tragedies you inspired.
They enriched my forming mind and life many years ago
And still nourish me as I re-enter the unfolding dramas.

Death is no barrier between us, my friends.
Life can be a barrier, if in busyness I neglect you—and me.
Attending to your words, you are more alive and real to me
Than nearly anyone is or can be who lives on earth now.

—Late September 2020

End of Part II, “September,” of “From late summer into fall.”

Wm. Paul McKane

Part III: October 2020

Contents
1. Journey to here
2. A quiet
3. Temptations of great beauty
4. The whispering
5 Not Andrew Wyeth
6. Season between
7. From beneath the pall
8. Taps
9. Autumnal Skies

1. Journey to here

Each word and phrase, each thought, each choice
and deed
Begins anew what journey life unfolds
Whose end transcends the limits of the mind
Unless it’s death and what may lie beyond.

For death’s the end whose breathless breath you feel
The terminus of all you’ve known and been;
Each action that you take or fail to make
Brings death’s extinction nearer near to you.

Each spoken or unspoken word advances
The mind towards the mystery called God,
Or else immerses in what flows away,
In ever-always-flowing-finitude.

2
Various the ways that death presents itself
From moment now to transitory then.
Many the ways that You are present now
And these two ways may both be felt as one.

If You were not, I would not be;
Because You are, I stand and think--
Mais non ‘Je pense, donc je suis’--
Parce que Vous êtes, je suis en Vous.

What we call death, the end, extinction
Can be the soul’s release, surrendering
Oneself into the unseen depths of God
Alone abiding here and always now.

3
Before the search begins the End is here
It presses in, informing every now
Each now is both Beginning and the End
The truth seeker seeks that which is, presenting itself,
And the seeker’s ever at home because It is here.
The journey to here requires no money, no things,
But a single desire to become in truth who one is.

Leaves are dying and withering, beginning to fall
And soon our barren world will be clothed in white,
Earth’s nakedness covered with a wedding-funeral shroud
Blanketing each and all together under heaven.
—October 2020

2. A quiet

There’s a quiet coming suddenly
Arresting your attention all at once;
Then a silent still cessation everywhere
That penetrates the shadows who you are:

A single glimpse, a word that’s heard in solitude
One phrase that’s aptly staged among those read
That breaks upon the mind or is remembered
From yesterday or distant dark December

Instilling in your spirit profound peace
That cleaves and leaves you lingering
Stretched out somewhere familiar-unfamiliar
Between these living—and those supposèd dead.

This is a moment hallowing and arresting
Defying chatter scattering the mind;
At once you’re sated and elated—inundated
And swept away from ordinary thoughts.

My late belated friend, you’ve captivated me--
My breathing, feelings, morning’s mental gaze;
You placed among a scholar’s chosen phrases:
“The temptations of great beauty.”

No need for you to utter more to me
To rouse my drowsy heart from mental sleep;
Apparent truth has brought your mind to mine
And wakened me to test your insight’s worth.

At sea in silent solitude we sail
Both you and I, Odysseus, strapped
To hear and be seduced by beauty’s power
Forestalled to dive to death beneath the waves.

—October 2020

3.  Temptations of great beauty

You shutter at a momentary glimpse,
Or voice or sound that captures you;
Your concentrated consciousness awakes,
Your spirit brought to life apart from thought.

Recall when beauty suddenly broke in,
Bring back to mind what may have washed away
Beneath the waves of inundating time;
Remember beauty’s strong effects on you:

A lone magnolia blossom captured you
Revealing beauty’s boundlessness at once;
A striking face that suddenly appeared
Compelling you to seek that beauty out;

A voice was heard from someone in a room
And all at once your heart was set ablaze;
Someone displayed what clothes do not disclose
And you were seized and bound to long for more.

And you are overwhelmed despite yourself,
That sight or sound of beauty’s all you know;
You’d sacrifice your everything for this:
Becoming one with what or whom you’ve glimpsed.

A restlessness arrests your waking hours,
And floods your soul in dreams you can’t escape.
The beauty seen or heard obsesses you
And tests the limits of your self-restraint.

O beauty beauty beauty I am yours!
You leave me nowhere else to get away.
You dominate, intoxicate my mind
And yet I must resist your powerful pull.

There’s more to truth than beauty dares admit,
There’s duty to oneself and to the Whole.
The soul that feels no beauty’s not alive;
And one abandoning to beauty sinks.

There’s that which is supremely beautiful
And can tempt one to many adventures;
It is no Lorelei who most tempts me
But Beauty itself, the unbounded Sea

That human beings call divinity.
The Tempter of tempters is God himself,
Whose beauty, filling and surpassing all,
Draws not to death but lower into eternity.

  —October 2020 [may edit later]

4.   The whispering

No voice, no sound, no word is heard
But one feels a sudden soundless nudging.
One can cease doing what one is doing,
And wait attentively on the silent whispering,
Or one can let it slide silently into oblivion.

Listening, I now begin to write
Not apart from, but tuning to the drawing.
Writing and wondering “What do you say?”
Am I truly, aptly listening,
Or have I subtly, shamefully turned away?

“What are you doing here, Elijah?”
Words from memory arise into consciousness,
Making explicit that this experience
Is not unique, occurring in continuity
With a long and living spirit-led tradition.

“Speak, LORD, for your servant is listening.”
Silence without imagining, without knowing,
Confirms the authenticity of the drawing.
Better than writing might be sitting still,
Yet occasionally one may verbalize the moment.

It comes unexpectedly and seemingly from nowhere:
It comes without knowing the experience’s cause,
But aware that it began uninvitedly, im-mediately.
I do not know its nameless name, nor why it acts;
The human task is to attend and lovingly to respond.

Empty of all content, yet quietly satisfying
(Without the sorry aftertaste of diet pop)
Not prompting one to take particular action
For “they also serve who only stand and wait.”
There is a time to act, and to time to keep still.

I responded to Elijah’s pleading, gave him a treat
(Choosing to refrain from silently attending),
Returned promptly to my living room seat
But the state of alert sensitivity had dissipated,
The mind returning to the movement of thoughts.

—October 2020 [may edit later]

5. Not Andrew Wyeth

One can be drawn to attend to silence,
And one may be drawn to speak words--
Or to break out in song or exhilarating dance!

In seeking to explicate the effect of a single phrase--
“The temptations of great beauty”
My word-colors were not subtle and delicate, but bold.

If painting, I would lack the understated coloring of Wyeth;
If writing poetry, I would lack the cleverness and depth of Rilke;
If composing music, I would lack the refined touch of Haydn.

Each one has gifts that need developing.
One who writes should not imitate someone he is not,
But be as true to his vision of beauty and truth as he can be.

Subtle, skilled, polished, elegantly dressed up I am not,
Nor do the words I string into non-poems have such qualities,
Nor do my strange and dissonant poundings on a keyboard.

The burned out landscape of Montana summer lacks beauty to me;
Lush greens, and blue seas, and rainbows of irises—these speak;
And yet there is a sweeping gentle beauty in barrenness.

The poems will continue until they cease,
The well drying up from inner barrenness,
Or some senso estetico screams, “Basta!”

  —October 2020

6. Season between

Season in-between nature’s extremes
Of blazing burned out summer
And seemingly interminable winter.
Autumnal October, after the equinox,
A moderate and temperate transition
Lurching between extremes.

7. From beneath the pall

A dark and dangerous shroud
Like dense thick fog rolling in
From the ocean’s great abyss
Invades my heart and mind
Immersing in waves of despair;
A heavy funeral pall traps my spirit
Beneath a weight of darkness
And of death.

My body moves, not my mind,
Filled and flooded with hopelessness.
No light, no joy, no sense of good to come,
Not so much Angst or dread as sheer despair,
As I see and feel a world dissolving,
Everything of value being crushed,
Nothing exempt from poisonous hate
And the boundless lust for power.

The good that was America is gone
With the dying of our young regime.
Mistakes were made even at our Founding,
Many intensified by years of foolishness
Most of which is not worth rehearsing.
And yet, our people are not all bad,
Many showing some goodness locked inside,
Despite wave after wave of killing corruption.

“O my people, what have I done to you,
And how have I offended you, answer me!
I lead you up from Egypt, that house of death,
And you lead me, your Life, to the cross.
O my people, how have I offended you?
What have I done unto you? Answer me!”

Give me words, LORD God, and I shall speak,
For primarily for myself, but for my people.
We have abandoned you, the faithful one;
We have betrayed the good you’d instilled.
We’ve squandered so many benefits,
And killed the infant, sacrificed for what?
We’ve gone to war after war,
All in the name of peace, science, liberty.
We have polluted and sickened the minds of our youth.

Death death death—destruction and more death
The killing of the spirit and the mind
A culture steeped in deceits and propaganda,
Often for greed, more often for power.
Death, murderous and destructive lies,
Forgetting neglecting betraying our God
The one who gave us this land as heritage.
Rejecting you, our God, we’ve destroyed ourselves.

I, an old man, stretched out beneath the pall
Covering my casket, a black walnut casket
Soon to be carried off and buried
As We the People are carried off
To the morgue of the spirit,
To the graveyard of history.

  —October 2020

8. Taps

Sun has set
Day reclines
Bodies rest
Hearts take flight
All is still
Day is gone
Comes the night.

Because our land is bloodied,
Our people torn apart;
Because old bonds are sundered
And many bewail our death;

Each still must do his duty,
Not shrinking into despair,
For no one knows the future
Our task is at hand now.

  —October 2020 [first draft]

9. Autumnal Skies

Refreshing change from the blank-staring summer sky
Unrelieved bright blue enlivened-killing by the sun,
Monochromatic, non-variegated sea of royal blue,
Beautiful at once to see, lacking balance and subtlety.

Turning season’s vast reaches of dark grays and shaded blacks,
Interrupted with unexpected fields of intense blue,
Illuminated white clouds tinged orange golden yellow
With the glory of the setting sun low down in the restful west

And winds, powerful breaths and blasts, setting leaves a-flying,
Clouds gathering together in their vastness overhead.
Scattered, shattered, fractured polychromatic beauty
Of light-dark stark threatening-promising autumnal skies.

—October 2020

End of “Part III: October 2020”

This concludes the collection, “From late summer into fall.”

Wm. Paul McKane
End