All day I am sitting. On that bench. There is some wind nearby I recognize, or maybe it is this: a dove has flown through the doorway? The sky I mean. Two timbers and a lintel in my mind, and the clouds that are playing house upon the ocean. A dove has formed from the sky and my heart trembles because it knows of such things, and also because all day I am sitting on […]
(This post is a continuation of the previous…) What’s a teckinal discussion, Hafiz? the child asked. Well! Hafiz replied, sitting down beside the little one, that is a very tricky thing, you see. That is when we try to identify what each thing is all by itself with such great precision any confusion in it will be squeezed right out. Sensing immediately God was an idea that would break apart beneath such pressure, the child turned […]
One time when Hafiz was balancing on one foot atop an intriguing round stone the size of a small house that was sunk into the sand beside a very fine sea and dimpled by the impact of ancient particles of dust from outer space, with his arms crossed, or flapping like wings against a blue beyond, or hitched to his side, and his other leg folded up yogically– alternately very stork-like beneath him– or resting […]
This is the part we’re at. This one. We want to ask if we’re there yet, but it’s not clear who we should ask. Who should we ask? These days it feels a little like if you’re asking the question, you’re probably on the list of people most likely to give a decent answer. And what do we mean by there, anyway? Anyone? My favorite part of all this is that we know exactly what […]
However it happened—none can really say. I only know that I was standing in a pasture filled with mirrored boxes, like disco saunas, and that people were lined up in front of them in silent repose. We were like a host of jet-lagged arrivals waiting to get our passports stamped—or our eyes examined, or our opinion surveyed, or our future turned upside down and shaken out, its contents inspected for contraband bits of the past. […]
The place itself, the physical structure, was built to produce a return. It’s all right angles and flashing from a tube, inoperable windows, and two-tone exterior panels of artificial masonry. But it’s where we do it. Each morning we drive in from all points of the compass to the center, gathering together as befits us, to produce work. That’s the key, really. To produce work. To offer something up. The flimsy walls don’t matter. The […]
This writing has undone me, peeled away my knowing and my nonsense, and led me way out way out from the edge to where there are no shadows, to where the clear light is visible in every direction, to where the wind is always scented by the horizon– in hues of timber and sunlight, in copal, cedar, and jasmine. Some days flowers fall from the sky, but no matter. What would it matter? I remember […]
When I say Jesus in these poems, I hope you don’t think that I think that I know with any real precision what I’m talking about. When a stone says yes to one day returning to the shimmering heart of a star, and the star says yes to beaming that stone’s endless heart through all of space and time, and the gravity inside of every pebble, rock, and speck of sand becomes a continuum of Meaning, […]
A film lies over the world, a distortive coating– a difficulty that has been sprinkled throughout the realm. Somehow we let the powder escape from the bag: the dust that causes permanence to fracture and dissemble into half-lives, the dust that causes recognition to thicken and cloud into obscurity. The wind blew it in all directions. Now everything is a strange, skewed cinema of what it once was. Now fading has become natural, and youth […]
High up in a cathedral of sky, in an alcove sunken into a sheer face of towering stone where few sounds dare to reach, where first percentile vultures congregate on weekends like a caste of the chosen and on whose sunbaked ledge adolescent mountain goats dream of one day standing motionless but for the waving of their beards in the icy winds and the steady chewing rhythm induced by a mouthful of snowbells, there is […]
Embracing Forever 