From Late Summer into Fall
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
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
“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