mercredi

QUADRILINGUAL MADRIGAL



    AMANTS DANSANTS

    Comment danserai-je?
    Je laisserai mon coeur danser

    Comment chanterai-je ?
    Je laisserai mon coeur chanter

    Mais tu, comment te danseras?
    Il laisse voler ton coeur au vent

    Je descendrai du bleu -
    Et tu viens à danser avec moi
    Ici à la lumière

    Tous les amants dansent
    ensemble sous le soleil
    et le coeur de ceux qui
    ne nous joignent pas
    est tourné à pierre
    et puis écrasé

    DANCING LOVERS

    How shall I dance?
    I’ll let my heart dance

    How shall I sing?
    I’ll let my heart sing

    But you, how shall you dance?
    Let your heart fly to the wind

    I shall descend from the blue -
    Come dance with me here in the light

    All lovers are dancing
    Together under the sun,
    And the heart of those who join us not
    Is turned to stone and then crush’d

    AMANTI DANZANTI

    Come danzerò?
    Lascerò danzare il mio cuore

    Come canterò?
    Lascerò cantare il mio cuore

    Ma tu, come danzerai tu?
    Lascia volare al vento il tuo cuore

    Io scenderò dal blu -
    Vieni a danzare qui con me alla luce

    Tutti gli amanti danzano
    Insieme sotto il sole
    E il cuore di coloro che non si uniscono
    S’impietrisce e perisce

    NAACHTE DEEWANE

    Main kaise nachoongin?
    Main apne dil ko naachne doongin

    Main kaise gaongeen?
    Main apne dil ko gaane doongin

    Par tum...tum kaise naachoge?
    Apne dil ko udne do hawa ke paas

    Main us neele aasmaan se utrungan
    Aao, mere saath is roshni me naacho

    Saare deewane naach rahen hain
    Is ssoraj ki roshni mein
    Aur jiska dil hamare saath mil ke nahi naachta
    Woh pathar ka ho jaayega...aur fir choor choor ho jaayega

mardi

~ RISE ‘N SHINE

Waking up early in Rome


Cries of defiance
Rise from the Aventine
In a sparrow’s glide
And break the blue sky
Echoing ripples of memory
Then falling swiftly from the air
The fragments of this fragile image
Ring on the choiring cables
And jangle gently in the wind
Like a quiet piano string
The waking blood
Now floods the apprehensive silence
Fearing the heart may quicken
And start to romp against the rib
Soft and insistent as a secret bell
Under a latinate cupola
Then life will have to begin.


lundi

~ APPRAISING HOME

    Through stalled air,
    Unshadowed light,
    A few leaves fall
    Of their own weight
    My woods oppressive,
    The sky gray.
    It begins in mist
    Almost at the ground
    And rises forever.
    The poplars file silent,
    Almost natural
    But not quite,
    Almost eternal
    But not quite.

    Here is what
    Has always been.
    Here is what
    Will always be.
    Even in me,
    The eternal quest
    Returns in rest,
    Even to the slightest of
    My interrogations,
    A brush of wind now
    Licks my face and answers.

    My head is loud
    With the labour of words.
    My tongue hungers
    For the sweet of speech.
    But it is in silence
    That my hope is,
    And my peace.
    A song whose lines
    I cannot make or sing
    Sounds Nature's quiet
    Like a millennial root.

~ RETURN

    As I feel myself reappearing
    From the profound rapture
    Of the core,
    I question, momentarily,
    The value of returning.

    For an instant
    I am tempted to remain
    In the place of infinite beauty,
    But I begin to think of the interest
    That life in the world holds -
    Music, books, art, people:
    A different kind of pleasure
    Than the other,
    And I let myself rise
    To the surface of consciousness.

    What would happen
    Next time
    If my joy in the world
    Is not quite so strong
    And I yield
    To temptation?

~ 2 DEDICATIONS & 2 CONSOLATIONS



    ECOSSE
    click to enlarge
    Hail in spring
    Turns my mind
    To calm lochs and
    Patched fortune

LEONARDIANO
click to enlarge
Magical hand
Celestial mind
You generate
The longest solstice
For man’s ephemeral
Stay


    INTENSITY

    Sitar stroking
    The fibrils of my
    Sensual indulgence
    Deep


PAST WEEPING
click to enlarge
On a glass pane
Dried droplets of
Lacrimal salt

dimanche

~ I HAVE BEEN WATCHING EVENING ARRIVE

    I have been watching evening arrive
    The shades of black and blue
    Cover the burst of flames
    The sun has left behind
    And some vital part of me
    Being sanctified.

    My eyes nailed to the dark
    I melt into a murky sea
    And some part of my soul
    Tears its flanks apart
    As I lay down alone in regret
    And consume the night.

    My fishing heart
    Has craved itself vain
    Its thumping folds cracked open
    In hunger until they became
    Two wings and held up
    An ocean of longing.

    Yet I can scribble invisible words
    And perhaps you appear near
    The night forcing an embrace upon us
    The smell of our communion
    alluring every sense and
    Sweetening the sinews of this life.

samedi

~ MIND'S SURPRISE

    I am the wind that blows o'er the sea;
    I am the wave of the deep;
    I am the bull of seven battles;
    I am the eagle on the rock;
    I am the tear of the sun;
    I am the fairest of plants;
    I am a boar for courage;
    I am a salmon in the water;
    I am a lake in the plain;
    I am the word of knowledge;
    I am the head of the battle-dealing spear;
    I am the god who fashions fire in the head.
    I am the thought.
    --Amarigen, a poet of the Goidelic Celts


    Word within the word,
    The unheard melody,
    The spirit ditties of no tone.
    The spiritualisation of the senses,
    A restoration of the unsullied
    Sense-activity of man in paradise.
    The word in ecstasy,
    The void in creation,
    The ecstasy of nothingness,
    The creative word.

    Get the nothingness
    Back into words.
    The aim is words
    With nothing to them;
    Words that point beyond
    Themselves rather than
    To themselves; transparencies,
    Translucencies, empty words.
    A word constricted as a Black Hole,
    With infinite gravity,
    Attracting time, light and speech,
    Corresponding to the void in things.

    Through the word of words,
    To dissolve the solid meanings,
    And find the true significance.
    To dissipate the empty gravity
    And enter the total gravity,
    To let the light not on but in.
    To illuminate and ventilate,
    Let words be filled with Light and Air.

    Let there be Light,
    Let there be superconsciousness
    Through creative ecstasy,
    The spiritual, noetic, pneumatic,
    Airy body, filled with nothing
    But ecstasy; takes flight,
    For heaven, for the Universe.
    A pregnant emptiness.
    Object-loss, world-loss,
    Is the precondition for all creation.

    Creation is in or
    Out of the void; ex nihilo.
    Creation is out of nothing:
    The unreal awakens me
    Out of the sleep of reality.
    Imagination is a better artist
    Than imitation;
    For where one craves only
    What she has seen,
    The other craves what
    She has not seen.

~ TRIPTYCH

    1. STORM DAY BREAK

    Thunder clap
    Rebounds sharply
    And the wind tussles my hair.

    Sultry silence.
    Arteries of lightning
    Run down the charged sky.

    And when the heated dawn
    Sweats the rain
    Out of my drenched shirt

    However many rings of pain
    The night has welded round me,
    The opposing pull is now stronger -

    The passion to break away.




    2. ÉPREUVE BABELIQUE

    I lodge
    My thinking
    Within the folds of
    A language
    So much older
    Than I am
    That I cannot master
    The meaning of it
    Brought back to life
    Nevertheless
    By my insistent
    Speech




    3. MIMESIS & MÉTHEXIS

    The ephemeral
    Can hope
    To manifest
    Some truth
    By sharing the
    Immutable,
    Imitating
    It,
    Repeating
    It,
    Letting itself be
    More or less
    Haunted by
    It
    As I am haunted
    By the ephemeral
    Me
    In the immutable
    It.


vendredi

~ HYDROGEN CRUCIBLE

...OPEN YOUR ARMS AND TAKE IT ALL IN!


Why do the nations rage,
and the people meditate so foolishly?

--Psalm 2:1


    Stranded on the shore of my inventiveness,
    I'm feeling the strain.
    Have I peaked my life,
    From now on descending?
    Unless I expand
    I may fall in on myself.

    All that is created
    And is therefore individual
    Has a beginning and an end,
    But there is no universal
    Beginning and end.

    My universe may fall in on itself,
    The red shift change to a blue.
    All universes may be like
    An expanding and contracting heart,
    With the spores of humanity
    Growing in the cool spaces
    Between stars
    Then withering in the autumn collapse;
    Or they may expand eternally
    A phoenix infinity or
    An infinite expansion.

    Suns must grow in heat and
    Finally consume
    Their planetary systems.

    Look out of the window:
    Everything you see
    Is frozen fire in transit
    Between fire and fire.
    Cities, equations,
    Lovers, landscapes:
    All are hurtling towards
    The hydrogen crucible.

    If a cosmos is infinite,
    It has no end.
    If it has no end,
    There can be no end
    It is serving.
    Its only end must lie
    In its means.
    It exists in order to exist.

    Only one process allows
    All conscious beings
    To have equal importance:
    An infinite one.

    If there were any end
    To which evolution was tending,
    Then you and I would be
    Slaves of a pharaoh,
    A builder of pyramids.

    But if there is no end,
    And only in an infinite universe
    Can there be no end,
    Then you, from whatever world or
    Age you come, And I
    Are equal.
    For both of us the slope
    Is the same,
    And reaches as far ahead
    And as far behind.


~ CARRIER OF SPIRIT

    I come into being
    As a slight thickening
    At the end of a long thread.
    Cells proliferate,
    Become an excrescence,
    And assume the shape of a man.

    The end of the thread now
    Lies buried within,
    Shielded, inviolate.
    My task is to bear it forward,
    Pass it on.
    I flourish for a moment,
    Achieve a bit of singing
    And dancing, a few memories
    I would carve on stone,
    Then I wither, twist out of shape.

    The end of the thread now
    Lies in my children, extends back
    Through me, unbroken,
    Unfathomable into the past.
    Numberless thickenings
    Have appeared on it,
    Have flourished and
    Have fallen away
    As I now fall away.
    Nothing remains but the germ-line.
    What changes to produce
    New structures as life evolves
    Is not the momentary excrescence
    But the hereditary arrangements
    Within the thread.

    But I am the carrier of spirit.
    I know not how nor why nor where.
    On my shoulders, in my eyes,
    In anguished hands
    Through unclear realm,
    Into future unknown, unknowable,
    And in continual creation,
    I bear its full weight.
    Depends it on me utterly,
    Yet i know it not.
    I inch it forward
    With each beat of heart,
    Give it the work of hand, of mind.
    I falter, pass it on to my offspring,
    Lay out my bones, fall away,
    Am lost, forgotten.
    Spirit passes on, enlarged,
    Enriched, stranger, and complex.

    I am being used. Should not I know
    In whose service?
    To whom, to what, give I
    Unwitting loyalty?
    What is this quest?
    Beyond that which I have
    What could I want? What is spirit?
    Spirit rises, matter falls.
    Spirit reaches like a flame,
    A leap of a dancer.
    Out of the void
    It creates form like a god, is god.

    Spirit was from the start,
    Though even that beginning
    May have been an ending
    Of some earlier start.
    If I look back far enough
    I arrive at a primal mist
    Wherein spirit is but
    A restlessness of atoms,
    A trembling of something there
    That will not stay
    In stillness and in cold.

    Matter would have the universe
    A uniform dispersion,
    Motionless, complete.
    Spirit would have an earth,
    A heaven and a hell,
    Whirl and conflict,
    An incandescent sun
    To drive away the dark,
    Illuminate good and evil,
    Would have thought,
    Memory, desire,
    Would build a stairway of forms
    Increasing in complexity, inclusiveness,
    To a heaven ever receding above,
    Changing always in configuration,
    Becoming when reached
    But the way to more distant heavens,
    The last... but there is no last,
    For spirit tends upward without end,
    Wanders, spirals, dips,
    But tends ever upward,
    Ruthlessly using lower forms
    To create higher forms,
    Moving toward ever greater inwardness,
    Consciousness, spontaneity,
    To an ever greater freedom:
    Superconsciousness.

    Particles become animate.
    Spirit leaps aside from matter
    Which tugs forever to pull down,
    To make it still.
    Minute creatures writhe
    In warm oceans.
    Ever more complex become
    The tiny forms which bear for a moment
    A questing spirit.
    They come together, touch;
    Spirit is beginning to create love.
    They touch, something passes.
    They die, die, and die, endlessly.

    Who shall know the spawnings
    In the rivers of my past?
    Who shall count the waltzing grunion
    on the shores of ancient seas?
    Who shall hear the unheard poundings of that surf?
    Who will mourn the rabbits of the plains,
    The furry tides of lemmings?
    They die, die, die, but have touched,
    And something passes.
    Spirit leaps away, creates new bodies,
    Endlessly, ever more complex vessels
    To bear spirit forward,
    Pass it on enlarged to those who follow.

    Virus becomes bacteria,
    Becomes algae, becomes fern.
    Thrust of spirit cracks stone,
    Drives up the balsam fir.
    Amoeba reaches out soft blunt arms
    In ceaseless motion to find the world,
    To know it better, to bring it in,
    Growing larger, questing further,
    Ever more capacious of spirit.
    Anemone becomes squid, becomes fish;
    Wiggling becomes swimming, becomes crawling;
    Fish becomes slug, becomes lizard;
    Crawling becomes walking,
    Becomes running, becomes flying.

    Living things reach out to each other,
    Spirit leaps between.
    Tropism becomes scent,
    Becomes fascination,
    Becomes lust,
    Becomes love.
    Lizard to fox to monkey to man,
    In a look, in a word, we come together,
    Touch, die, serve spirit
    Without knowing,
    Carry it forward, pass it on.
    Ever more winged this spirit,
    Ever greater its leaps.

    From primal mist of matter
    To spiralled galaxies and
    Clockwork solar systems,
    From molten rock to an earth
    Of air and land and water,
    From heaviness to lightness to life,
    Sensation to perception,
    Memory to consciousness -
    Man now holds a mirror,
    Spirit sees itself.

    Within the river
    Currents turn back, eddies whirl.
    The river falters,
    Disappears, emerges,
    Moves on.
    The general course is
    The growth of form,
    Increasing awareness,
    Matter to mind to consciousness.
    The harmony of man and nature
    Is to be found in continuing this journey
    Along its ancient course
    Toward greater freedom
    And higher awareness.

samedi

MEDITERRANEAN SONATA

...dedicated to the beautiful women passing through my life...


    ~ WEBBING
    To Renu

    There are strands of light
    Spreading like a web
    Woven by the spider
    Crawling over water
    Fastened to the flesh
    Covering your eyes
    Light is like a spider
    Crawling over water
    Insinuating under tissue
    Spreading its web there
    To the skin and bones of you
    And the meshes of the web
    Cosset a palpitating heart
    Now injected with the venom
    Of the light’s tremendous
    Want.






    ~ ITALIAN CLOTTING

    My conceit tonight, amatissima
    Is modernist, voracious
    And ingrained Italian.

    You will undress
    Before the mirror of my eyes
    And conceal your fine head
    Beneath the mask of a wild beast,
    Your heat untamed.

    I will not move,
    Congealed by pulsing Eros -
    I will not scream
    As you slake your thirst
    With my enamoured blood
    And I become irrevocably
    Part of your essential lymph.






    ~ ALTAR OFFERING

    I sacrifice you
    To coppery, avid demons
    Serpentine
    And feathered,
    At the top of a pyramid
    Made of streaked sins
    Surrounded by teeming,
    Impenetrable runes.






    ~ GRECIAN PAINTING
    *** To this woman, my kallisteia...

    If you love me
    You will cease to be yourself
    And metamorphise now into Hellenic myth.

    If you truly love me,
    You will have a tail and talons,
    You will spread your pointed wings
    Coming to my heart and my desire
    From the legends of Greece.

    I will find the diadem
    For your silken brow,
    The topaz necklace,
    The girdle of gold and precious stones,
    The rubies and other gems
    Paris cannot retrieve from Troy.

    These I'll offer you
    As my token of adoration
    and reverence -
    A lover at a distance,
    The restoring painter of
    Your identity,
    Your waking dreamer.

    You'll bring joy to my senses:
    Velvet skin, aloe saliva
    Delicate unwithering elbows
    And oval knees,
    Soft gracile breasts
    With ruddy nipples
    All living beings would
    Beg to suck.

    Descend then from Olympos,
    If you really love me:
    I want you now
    As the thirsty traveller
    Longs for the watery mirages
    In the desert of his mind.

    Once together,
    Scornful as the gods
    I will struggle for our fate
    Ignoring the coward voices
    Of men poisoned with mediocrity.





jeudi

    ~ COCKTAILS

    Active potential, passive potential.

    I can understand,
    Feel,
    Experience,
    Be changed,
    Suffer,
    Love.

    Man’s sensibility:
    I can make, act and modify.

    Man’s action:
    Possibilities mixed.

    I can remember:
    My voluntary reflex.






    ~ MY ILLUSION


    I open my book
    I look at my familiar things
    I stroke my beard
    I compose this piece.

    All this passes without impediment,
    As if freely, as if these were
    Separated and independent events,
    Isolated in the void,
    And without interaction

    And my book
    Now lying there
    And my hand
    Now resting here
    Have no interconnection.

    Then I suddenly see quite otherwise,
    A full volition:
    All these things are cogs
    Of a single engine,
    Jigsaw pieces.

    Each displacement is
    Inescapably
    A substitution,
    A liquid molecule
    Moved by another.

    Now nothing is casual,
    Nothing is alone:
    The independence of objects
    Is now only an appearance.
    Their apartness, their noncontact,
    Are appearances.

    Where is my book?
    Where is my hand?






lundi

FUGITIVE PIECES


    ~ BOUND SENSUALITY

    Like an invisible rope
    That binds us
    And the more we writhe
    To free ourselves
    The more
    Our knots tighten
    And dig into our flesh -
    So the secret we share
    Deeply mars
    Our suffered humanity
    In a tangle of borrowed excuses
    And isosceles pubes.







    ~ STANDING AT DAWN

    The moment
    That counts most
    For me
    Is the one
    That precedes
    Sunrise
    When my gaze
    Eats the horizon
    To discern
    What is outlined
    In the distance
    And perceives
    The Sun
    But only sees
    First light.







    ~ WAR WOUND

    I tense my limbs
    My shoulders lift
    And as I strain
    To raise my head,
    The weight of nausea
    Descends on it.
    I reach my arm out,
    Seeing a wild sight -
    A thin white sprite
    Sucking up my life.







    ~ READING LOVE

    Lovers reading
    Each other's bodies
    Differ from
    Reading the written pages
    Of a Lover's book.

    Not linear,
    It starts at any point,
    Skips and repeats itself,
    Goes backward,
    Insists and ramifies
    In simultaneous and
    Divergent messages,
    Converges again,
    Has moments of irritation,
    Turns the jasper leaf,
    Finds its place,
    Gets lost.

    A route to an end
    Tending toward climax,
    It arranges rhythmic phases,
    Metrical scansions,
    Recurrence of motives.

    But climax is not the end:
    It is the race to it,
    Contrasted by another drive
    That works in the opposite direction,
    Swimming against the moments,
    Recovering time.
    Every episode
    Is a three-dimensional model,
    Perhaps four-dimensional
    Or no model at all:
    Every experience
    Unrepeatable.

    Lovemaking and reading
    Open within magical
    Times and spaces,
    Yet deviate from measurable
    Time and space.

    In the confused improvisation
    Of the first encounter,
    The possible future together
    Is read.
    Today
    Each of you
    Is the object of the other's reading,
    Each reads in the other
    The unwritten story.
    Tomorrow,
    If you are together
    If you lie down in the same bed
    Like a settled couple,
    Each will turn on the lamp
    At the bedside
    And sink into his or her
    Book;
    Two parallel readings
    Will accompany the approach of sleep.

    Returning from separated universes,
    You'll turn out the light
    And find each other
    Fleetingly in the darkness
    Where all separations
    Are erased,
    Before differing dreams
    Draw you again,
    One to one side
    And one to the other.









    ~ OH EAGLE, I HURT SO BAD!

    Crudities
    Under duress
    Prepare the soul
    To cope with veracity
    Yet offending beyond
    The normality
    Of pain…

    No -
    Stop philosophising,
    No meandering!

    I hurt so bad:
    I feel like breaking
    My heart is rending
    And my spirit
    Burns.

    The eagle approaches
    Her talons out
    She claws my lungs
    I lift away
    I scream my joy
    And halt my sorrow
    I soar to Elysium
    Until tomorrow.









    ~ Poetic perfection
    For Daubmir

    by seekyoursoul (14 May 2006)

    combining spheres of love, to form my woman

    Beauty at your core
    I am transfixed
    On your shine
    Words
    Strengthen my inspiration
    My soul drinks it in
    Love and Unity
    Filled with passion
    Of poetic perfection







    ~ For Gianluca
    For the unforgettable soul who crossed my path

    by naiad (11 May 2006)

    Naiad and Hylas -by John William Waterhouse, 1893
    ~ Naiad and Hylas of the Argo crew... or Naiad and Daubmir of Arcadian dreams...

    I dream of you Lover.
    I feel the symbiotic
    pull that melts all reason.
    And in my dream, swirls of
    fire and water dance
    the dance of impossible harmony,
    made real through
    knowing you.
    So you’re the Sun then
    I’m the moon and if
    like Artemis who pays me
    ritual homage I remain alone,
    I am forever haunted
    by the brief eclipse.






    ~ Mujhe nahi pata ki pyaar kyaa hai?

    A Hindi poem from a splendid creature... The Wanderer in Love

    Singing to the Gods
    Mujhe nahi pata ki pyaar kyaa hai?
    Agar dil me ek garaj
    seene mein ek cheer pyaar hai...
    to yahi pyaar hai
    Par yeh pyaar to dil mein hi rahega
    Ek gehre baadal ki tarah jo bas bhatakta rahega dar badar, saal pe saal


    I don't know what love is
    If a roar in the heart
    And tearing in the bosom is love
    Then maybe this is love
    But this love will remain a secret in this heart
    Like a dark heavy cloud which keeps on wandering year after year








CUTTING JEWELS

If
It
Is
True
That
In
Every
Stone
Sleeps
A
Crystal
Then
In
My
Grey
Boulder
Slumbers
A
Sun




~ OCEANO MIO MARE ~ ~ ~ OCEAN MY SEA ~

[bilingual composition: Italian / English]


breaching humpback whale

To the Ocean God, who populates my dreams and has always been
a passionate motif in my wandering life
...




    Alazati!
    Surge!

    Onda magnifica
    Magnificent wave

    Fino a toccare
    Until you touch

    Il cielo
    The sky

    Del mio efflato
    Of my efflate


    Levati!
    Rise!

    Flutto immenso
    Immense ripple

    Della mia vita alata
    Of my winged life

    Tra gli spruzzi di fredda
    Among the spray of

    Brina salata
    Cold salty brine


    Cavallone pulsante
    Pulsating breaker

    Del tormento interiore
    Of my inner blaze

    Spacca con la tua
    Part with your

    Forza oceanica
    Oceanic force

    Il mare del mio stupore
    The sea of my wonderment






    GOD'S THUNDER IN MY SOUL

    I annul
    All that is Me
    In order to become
    The All that is
    In God

    Everything I Am
    Is Nothing -
    Nothing I want to be
    Is in Everything

    God, listen!
    I Am That I Am
    Because
    You Are

    And I cannot comprehend...



    LAST ORDERS

    I stand alone
    On the core
    Of the earth
    Transfixed
    By the lightning
    Of metaphysical planes

    And it’s suddenly night.







    I think people mainly want to look at my terrene shadow, and fancy I listen to their basic problems

    But I only harken the humming of my Will…and offer results to those who can react in kind…
    (…solitary synaesthesias, n'est pas?)




DRAGONFLY RIDDLE


Inside the Pentagram

Of my dissolute thoughts

Hovers the word

Of universal
Amor


Outside the circle

Of my selfish wants

Thrives the root

Of Tetragrammaton










    EPHPHATHA!

    Splitting the Logos
    Into a million
    Concepts
    Engenders pain
    Through the semantics
    Of Life:

    Speak one Word
    And create
    The Universe.




Mark 7:34 (King James Version):
And looking up to heaven, he sighed, and saith unto him, Ephphatha, that is, 'Be opened'.

  • It is that sigh which astounds me...













  • Emily Dickinson's axiom
    Emily Dickinson's Axiom...