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Sense impressions intermingled
With a coruscant intellect
Create vivid imaginings – connectedness

A thousand flashes of memory
Rest stops, fragments of homes
The smell of mountains
I cede these visages
Imagery sung by loquacious tongues

In the shadowed corners
All the fears, debts, atrocities are piled up
There’s no escape from responsibility
We’re all complicit, culpable

Our wellspring of shame
Familial bonds and human failings
Mythologies reveal the hidden dangers
Of archetypal activism as we lose ourselves in
Over-identification, righteousness, or doubt

Each moment of conjunction
Reciprocity – when my embodied self
Ameliorated the suffering of another
Or my own is a gift
This rare moment of communion

Intertwining insights
Deeply held convictions
Passions of the mind
Emotive effusions of art
Papered meanings
Visual striving, resolution
Melodic companions
I weep, overwhelmed by sheer beauty

These offerings, sacrifices pointing toward
Divine grace and awe
Genuflections and contrition
All lead to promises of an immortal soul

“If they’re so holy,
where are their books?” *
She said
biting and frustrated
after too much coffee
Wrestling with the perfect sentence on an empty stomach

I say, dogs don’t have books because
They don’t need time and space
To separate them from experience
To manipulate their emotions
Feed their addictions

We’re caught up in yesterday
or a string of tomorrows –
Avoiding our psychology
sublimating our desires
curbing our impulses

“Moralistic” animals
Live, sleep, feel, act
Without the labyrinthine intellect
the tangled threads of suffering.
In the here and now

They have little call for nostalgic recollection
But to live life anew
Each morning is cause for celebration
Each breath a blessing

Only we have fallen
Requiring crutches to walk in this world

Now she says, “we shouldn’t feed
moralistic poets!”

Never fear, we cannot earn our bread.

* From The Writing Life by Annie Dillard

http://jinglepoetry.blogspot.com/2011/07/poetry-potluck-week-43-life-in-free.html

Lamp Bearer

Lamp bearer, have you been ahead
into the recesses of the night?
Have you seen beyond the veil?

Your vision of our imploding star
inescapable causality in an infinite universe
share it with me so I may
rehearse loss, practice terror

I want to feel the anguish
to savor it, anticipating
an inoculation against the flood
of unbearable and horrific scenes

About the pain –
you must burn me
a bit with your lantern
here in the night so sparing me
consumption by fire in the coming encounter

Stay close, but always in front
I pray for you to feel before me
relay your scarred wisdom
that I may walk under the illusion
of seeing the encroaching void

Help me feign naïveté
to believe I’m never alone
not truly alone
within the small circumscribing glow
of your beacon
a shadow but breathing just the same.

Variegated

Eternity imprinted in the spiraling twist
Heritage of pain and love
Your unique expression
Dark flowers in winter

Half glimpsed illuminations
Survivor of the crucible
Soul polished by hard rock

The patterns the same
Look closely
Deep into the variegated petals
The glory of its art revealed

Yes, mother, I will seek to understand
You have given me sight-
Breath-
A living heart…

Liminal Spaces

Crossing the threshold
Between dream and reality
A hypnopompic state
Orienting to a more stable country
Yet still present to resonant images
Of the internal space

The artist is a liminal being
Caught between the muse and a self
Venturing out even in daylight
An avatar in a virtual world
Disoriented by its double life

Artists require apotropaic magic
To make it back intact
Whole and capable of translation
Dangers faced by mystics,
Long lost in ecstasies –
A logorrheic tongue
The dreamer never wakes

Phantom Rendezvous

We set a time and place
Compass points in
an unending universe

It seems an easy thing
Finding you
Finding anything

The key is to be specific
Terra Firma
Objects in space
An embodied individual

But perception tilts,
The round world spins
What if string theory is only a beginning?

The shifting known
The ever present unknown

I believe in this future
One event after another
To keep a fragile mind fixed somewhere

They tell me there is no central intelligence
No consciousness observing,
overseeing the multifaceted psyche

No woman in the theater of the mind
Watching the movie of my life

So limited by my senses –
On second thought, it may be a miracle to meet you
On any road, anywhere, at any time

If I rejoice you’ll forgive me
These simple, containable plans
Go marching into the wild
To the deepest unknowns.

Protostellar Phase

We were standing in the
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Here are painters who want to communicate
They show up on their canvases
Emotive, sensual, engaging,
Pouring over the edges with ideas

They are Hydrogen, capable
Of the complex chain of reactions
Required to fuel a galaxy
Rauschenberg, Mitchell, de Kooning
All Hydrogen molecules
Dancing, spinning, arguing
Contrasting the inert gasses across the hall
Nonreactive as Krypton,
From kryptos, “the hidden one”

It is actually a skill,
This art of invitation
Creating works capable of fusion
Viewer, artist, and painting,
Conspiring toward explosions
A dangerous, naked,
And frightening proposition
Can you blame the countless artists,
Hiding behind flat surfaces,
Incapable of combustion,
Unable to make the invitation?