A Bedtime Story

The lamp beside my pillow drives the shadows back against the midnight rain's dark persistent tap. While condensation rises on the window glass, I sip hot gensing tea, from a ceramic demi-tass. A little bamboo thicket is dancing in the rain, just outside my window, where I dug its roots in vain, on long hot summer days, with my pickaxe and my pain. This cold winter night, it is growing back again. The book that I was reading, lies open on the floor. This house pops and creaks at night, in the dark beyond my door... Alone, I pull the covers close and tight, and shiver, as I reach up to douse the light.

These Roses

From Nature's bounty, freely grows the small, abundant, wild rose. These true and humble mendicants depend in love on providence. The convent garden also grows, each year cutting back the rose; from gnarled stump and twisted branch, springs love defying circumstance. The gardener from long habit knows, the cutworm feeding on the rose, so none may in this garden dance, but butterflies of providence. The horrors of this world disclose the fragile beauty of the rose; was rosewood used to haft the lance that pierced His earthly circumstance? Within the soil, movement flows, the roundworm loves to feed the rose, for gardener's work, along with chance, depends on timely providence. This convent speedy time may close, and weather wither every rose, consider then, dear penitents, the wild rose's circumstance. Her hips have virtue, wounds to close, infused, her essence rivals cloves, though convent blooms have elegance, their fruit yeilds less of providence. His way passed through this world of woe, in natural life true roses grow. Retirement's rosy eloquence, disguises deadly circumstance. When convents from Dame Nature grow, retreat may help all roses know; nor wild, nor tame, their circumstance, will be secure in providence.

One for the Eremetic Tradition

One comes to the mountains to research the empty mind, turning over very slowly the sound of whales laughing. One spies out the true recluse, not amid the pines and chill, but languishing in university, a scholar sounding in the night. One returns home full of nothing, ceaselessly revels in the internal outside groping with change in the sea; the tide is a weal of destiny.

Walking the Shore

Walking the shore of the bay, sand, mud, looking for a gem, some tangible evidence that the feeling within is reliable. Feeling reliable, released temporarily from the grip of thought, convinced through the sound of lapping water, that truth lies just beyond the reach of the senses. Looking for that special confirmation, finding, rusted almost beyound recognition, half a pair of pliers and three old bolts, along with bits of broken bottles, masqurading as gems on the mud-dusty shore. Then, two pair of discarded panties, awash on the tide; all these, little obscenities of mechanical and synthetic engagements. Shells on the shore, somber clouds, indefinite horizons, my myopic phantasys. A pelican floating rare on the water, I sit, he flies away. Seeking magical confirmation, I am surprised to find that this moment of spiritual perfection only lets me move a little above the dusty potatochip bags, crumpled beside the waters that each Ulysses must traverse anew. Little birds, little snails, little waves.

Night Math

Outside; the wind. Rustling leaves in the night. Air charged with dragons, holding back their songs. Poor students, full of undefined forboding, only the teacher believing in simple, ballanced equations. Full moon, due over the horizon, eggs nesting in ovaries of doubt. The cry of the killdee. Cattle, prone in the fields. Perhaps an earthquake, biding it's time, in the deep wheels of the ground.

The Eighth Month

Eight times the eye of the
White Goddess has opened and closed
on my ignorance of your visage.
Winking to entice,
or turning blankly in a coma,
restrained by almost uncountable laws?


Eight times the rabbit has
hopped clean across the heavens,
striking the affection in my fingers numb,
with a cold breath of night.
Fecund hare,
or snow glazed figurine,
frozen novice in a deadly snair?


Eight times the old woman has
rocked her chair to and fro across the
fields of night, while I sat
tending the fires alone.
Dreaming up stories for grandchildren,
or prepairing a reciept for a
potion of eroticide?


Eight times the haggard man has
rolled his face from side to side
on the ebony platter,
obscuring the light that drips from my seeds.
Waiting for the harvest of starlight,
Or passed out in drunken
neglect of Pan?


Eight times the silver dragon has
apread the blood of maidens across
the holy meadow, leaving me in
innocence of your touch.
Gaurding sacred treasure,
or disporting most unseemly
with that old wanton, time?


Eight times the god Sinn has
provoked my inner longings,
leaving my yearnings dissatisfied.
Teaching temperance,
or the cobwebbed duplicity of
the passionless vice?


Eight times the unicorn has
pranced through the turning gate,
carrying the messages of my desire.
Delivered to the lap of
good nature,
or lost along some fruitless
trail of waste?


Eight times the High Priestess has
passed through the doors of her
four alters, wrapping your voice in her viel.
Sighing for gentle penetration,
or the cold dry void of
material silence?

The Sound of Whales

The pressure of the deep distorts the solitary quester,
elongates fragile skeletons
upon which the spirit flutters
down in the primary darkness
where inches are measured, like British wealth,
in the thousands of heavy pounds
that no human ear membrane,
diaphanous as translucent silk,
could support the push of.

There he comes alone,
far from the thick percolating soup of light and the
miniscule ocean mines of photo and zooplankton,
questing for the sustenance of bull whale,
of brave sperm whale---
massive thoothed, frame of passion,
hold of belly-fired entrails
and solitary, solitary mind---
questing for the sustenance that can be found
only in the hours-long soundings of the huge, vasty
and mind-blinding deep.

Kingdoms of ferocious looking wide jawed minnow fish,
gape eyed blackfish, all belly and mouth fish,
blink their eyes like beacons and schools of dappled
wierlight spin through the eternal cold night
like Lucifer's own stars;
there are the secrets of the soul encountered!
Down where the squid grow mammoth to behold,
down where mystery pervades all things,
so far down, that anything can become primal grist.

Where little food filters through the living
ocean net of saltblooded feeders far below
the halls of streamered light,
into the cathedrals of the night, he comes,
here the old bull spermwhale dives for combat with the squid,
and more than this, floats massive in the ink of
breathless ecstasies,
down where lantern fish bio-luminesce
in schools for the souls of whales.

Eyes of whale peer from his immobile tons,
ears listen to the sounds of heartbeat,
body warmed by flesh straining on the edge of self
consuming primal fires.

Three thousand feed down, below the day,
with lungs compressed, stove-in like cartons,
he feeds a mind
that partly counts the atoms of oxygen
screaming in his blood,
partly sniffs with his skin at the smell of the rapturous,
almost unbearable pressure,
but mostly, lost in the endless reaches of the divine,
observes the oracular movements
of bioluminescent minnows.

Angler baits glow the way to finy coffin-mouthed bodies,
lights that deter the hungry,
blinking bright beams of yellow haze,
glimmers of meaning that dance like searchlights
from the very eyes of the gossamer
angelic demons of the whale's soundings.

What dark mysteries do they perform,
before those full, round, sad and sentient eyes?
Mind without hands that soon must rise,
moving to the glassy seatop heights,
up from inverted mountains of the sea-deep descent,
up to the chambers of the whale tribe.

Old solitary bull,
even he must come to the surface to breathe
and to roll in the heat,
moving up through rooms shaped by cold and warm currents,
by detrees of density, and shades of light,
first blue and then higher into millions of pulsing,
wave dancing beams of green and white,
that ride down at angles into the liquid organism
inhabited by you, leviatian,
living pipes of a divine and strange organ of being.

What do you bring up with you, form the treasuries of
Neptune's fairy nymphs?  What insights
and rarefied understandings?  What nourishment?
What illuminated passions of the tormented
and ecstatic
souls of whales?

suggested reading list

Only Yesterday......................................................Frederich Lewis Allen
A Journal of the Plague Year.................................Daniel Defoe
Drinking the Sea at Gaza.......................................Amira Hass
Babbit.....................................................................Sinclair Lewis
The True Believer..................................................Eric Hoffer
How Green was my Valley....................................Richard Llewellyn
Alice in Wonderland and the WTC.......................David Icke
The Development Dictionary.................................Wolfgang Sachs
Nostromo...............................................................Joseph Conrad
At Night the Cats...................................................Antonia Cisneros
Fleshing out Skull and Bones................................Kris Millagan
America's Secret Establishment............................Antony Sutton
Fire From the Mountains.......................................Omar Cabesas
Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon.............................Jorge Amado
The Shock Doctrine...............................................Naomi Klein
Pity the Nation.......................................................Robert Fisk
Peace not Apartied.................................................Jimmy Carter
Triple Cross...........................................................Peter Lance
Our Man in Havana, The Power and the Glory,
The Heart of the Matter, The Quiet American.....Graham Green
Vanity Fair............................................................Thackerey
13 Bankers............................................................Simon Johnson, James Kwake
The Arabs..............................................................Peter Mansfield
Paris in the Terror.................................................Stanley Loomis
The Tin Drum.......................................................Gunter Grass
Enemy Combatant................................................Moazzam Begg
Pride and Predjudice............................................Jane Austen
The Good Earth....................................................Pearl S. Buck
The House of Morgan..........................................Ron Chernow
Titan.....................................................................Ron Chernow
The Iron Heel.......................................................Jack London
The Open Veins of Latin America......................Eduardo Galeano
Dubliners.............................................................James Joyce
Night Draws Near................................................Anthony Shadid

wall pattern

Hafiz Based Derivatives

Treasure

Hafiz carried
the
toothache of
love
around
for
forty years.

One day
a certain dentist
filled that tooth
with gold.

The words
of Hafiz
all
became treasure.


A River

Hafiz was a
river
that rose from
the ocean,
fell from
the sky,
and ran
into my glass.

I drank
and he became
my tears
which flowed
downstream,
watered the crops,
and sank into the Earth,
only to rejoin
the river, and
enter the sea.

Like a shiver,
down the spine
of the world.


Love Play

Oh you
who fill my heart
with song,
know that
you are the
beloved
of that one
deep inside
who whispers
in adoration;

"Wake up toys,
and we
will play."


RSVP


The Infinite
is having a party.

Even though
marines are
blowing the brains
out of the heads
of nine year old
girls,
and splattering them
on the walls of
homes in Baghdad.

Even though
they are annihilating
her old mother,
raping her teenage
sister,
destroying her dad's
existence
in the street.

Even though
Mujaheddin are
sending
rocket propelled
grenades
flying into the
market place;
exploding
thousand pound
bombs
outside
the mosque.

Endlessness
is having a party,
having sent out
invitations to
everyone,
marked,
RSVP.


Gossip

I told them the
secrets,
all about your
love affairs, Krishna,
but they did not
believe me.

They whispered to
one another,
'consider the source.'

And so I must
continue to
gossip
about you.


Vacancy

When a house
stands
vacant,
curious people come
round
peering in the windows.

My solitude is
proof
that the idiot
who lives here
has not yet
moved out.


Rumi Was Here

If i speak of
the unconditioned,
will you know
what I am saying?

When there is no
time or place,
no matter or
creation,
then I must
only refer to
a vast nothing
in my song.

So why do I
shiver when
memory of
that
no thing
kicks in?

Endlessness gives
gifts of finitude,
so vast they are
beyond
comprehension.

How can you and I
be expected to
remember this?

When Hafiz
stumbled into
the walled garden
of truth,
scrawled on the
tiles, he found
this graffito:

Rumi was here.


A Puzzle

The greater infinity
of the universe
is contained in the
lesser infinity of the
individual mind.

The greater infinity
of the
individual mind is
contained in the
lesser infinity of
the universe.

As if a jug
fallen into the
sea,
was drawn up
in the fisher's net
and all the sea
was within it.

The puzzle is
even that from
which all infinities
spring,
might be known
in some way
by nothing more
than a man or
a woman, while
doing the
dishes
after breakfast.


Indecision

Ramie the cat,
his love
motor
running,
cannot decide,
whether to
curl up in my
lap,
or lie atop
the book of
verse by Hafiz
that I have just
laid aside
as he
approached.

A Brief Image

"God created man in his image;
 in the divine image he created him;
male and female he created them."
--Genesis

There are no poppies blowing in the little breeze
that flows across the smooth clean white cloth
wrapped around these simple contours
with such perfect grace.
Each fold, made with trembling hands,
blessed with love, with tears, with loss.
Every hope ever placed, in years that will
no longer come, caressed in prayers
to a silent God;  this last remnant of desire.

In a quiet that strikes the eye with the
force of abiding rage, of sorrow,
the broken continuity
of a wish that was stolen in it's
first becoming; a mother's travail,
a father's sweat, a grandparent's solace,
of a breast emptied of its precious gift,
the treasure gone from an inmost heart.

This face, burned, eyes vacant, a dark
nativity proclaimed in death's swaddling,
the tight cold hand of an infant
clings to the debt laden account of
cowards in the sky,
of criminals in the chambers of the law,
of councils in the halls of power obsessed with
insane processes of a diseased and degenerate rule.

All this once radiant wonder,
resting here amid these crumbled stone walls,
now to be interred,
lowered into some mute and ancient clay,
recalled only in the anonymity of
a sister's heart, a brother's soul,
in dreams that cannot escape the darkness,
bundled among the martyrs to an
enemy never known.

Every war a siege on innocence,
Every soldier a burden on the
conscience of a weary world,
every slain infant an investment
in the accounts of the damned.
In the background the dark music
of exploding cluster bombs,
the light show of white phosphorus
and con trails of Israeli F-16s, all marked
"Made in America".

From the warm wet pink womb of love,
this pure white bundle in green embrace,
has transited through a too brief passage of
wind and light, here below the whirling stars,
long before the proper time,
into the eternal dark cold of the dry earthly night.

What random intent to carelessly destroy,
what false projection of quivering anxiety,
what glut of unsatisfied, quenchless greed,
the calculus of what cold trajectory of hate,
has wrapped this small bundle in the grief of an
unexpected glory, uncomprehending,
unknowing, forever still?

A brief image, flashed across a high density screen,
that flies so briefly, like a stone from a sling,
straight to a trembling heart but can not awaken any words
oh you masters of finance, and kings of war,
In your "Liberty's" deaf ears,
or sight in your "Justice's" blind eyes.

This miracle undone,
whispering savagely
with his silenced mouth,
from temple in Viet Nam,
from a blasted mausoleum in Gaza,
from an inferno at Auschwitz,
from Babi Yar,
from the Black Hills,
from Hulegu's dusty roads,
"I was your child, Oh Jerusalem."

This small, broken, unmoving, silent bundle,
this bombed out mosque,
this unique tabernacle of love,
soon sliding forever into the cold mouth of the ground
and yes America, and oh yes Israel,
this, this too,
was your own soft child.
was your own soft child.

Canyon Road teahouse

Chai latte
awaits you
at the tea house
on the river road.

Warm after cold
when first snow
flakes,
tiny as gnats,
melt swiftly on
the beard.

Bright yellow
flames,
happy voices,
the best Maya
Samsara has
to offer.

After Bimbi

All that darkness
and then,
splashes of color
here and there.
Memories floating
in a sea of
forgotten crimes.

Bright light
stark shadows
and the human
parade.

Flowers in the
dusk,
mingling faint
aromas.