Journey

Tags

2018, 8*, birds, blue, breeze, Buddha, city, clouds, day, death, departure, eclipse, evening, fire, flame, form, Ganges, gold, grass, green, hills, horizon, India, Kusinagara, life, looking, morning, night, salvation, sleep, sound, speech, stage, step, stone, stream, teaching, time, town, trees, Vaisali, valley, voices, walking, wandering, wondering

                        the evening before when at length he’d departed,
                Vaiśālī no longer glowed
        like some future city –

                        recent stones of monument
                seemed already unaligned,
        boroughs swallowed by evening hills;

                        we walked wide by the trees across the Gangetic plain,
                robes flupped with each step,
        we lost form as we wandered

                        and we wondered ‘born but to die’,
                still wanting any intoxication
        before the execution;

                        but he looked, always bittersweet,
                to the next horizon – this
        vast and empty stage;

                        in the morning he’d said
                ‘always bite and heat your gold’ and ‘never
        hold the sword by the blade’;

                        ‘I shall lay between those two trees’
                he said in the evening – forks
        around which the whole of time tuned;

                        I prepared grasses about
– I never usually made particular preparations for the night, he would end the day sitting by some copse or stone, away from where we slept glowing like embers,
        as we turned through the night –

                        but he pillowed his head on his hand
                that night, the grasses
        preened green and blue

                        the birds stopped
                as if there were eclipse, the trees ignored
        the breeze,

                        and with shaking headdresses
                dignitaries came to visit from the town
        supplicating –

                        but he spoke with a voice like a cloud, both proximate
and spanning valleys, yearning and teaching to lay down this dried and splintered weight, ‘salvation does not come from the mere sight of me’,
        ‘control the mind’ –

                        and the flames of the fires were low
                as they returned to Kuśinagara
        as if against the stream

                                

Postface Overduction: end of life of the Buddha; narrated by Ananda, close attendant; itinerant life teaching from town to town, area of a few hundred kilometers around central Ganges; left Vaiśālī last, stopped just outside Kuśinagara, town dignitaries came to honour him, had known him before; ‘two trees’ are ‘sal trees‘ tall trunk, no branches until the canopy, northern India, 6th-5th centuries BCE (although there is dispute about this);

        

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

birds wormhole: threshold to behold
blue & city & horizon & morning & time wormhole: under the blue and blue sky
breeze & clouds & valley wormhole: here today and …
Buddha wormhole: eyes like petals
death & speech wormhole: travel // when I die
evening wormhole: nowhere / that can be seen
grass & life & trees wormhole: sweet chestnut
green wormhole: ‘she shook the sweets …’
hills & sleep wormhole: Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters] – valley
looking wormhole: looking hard enough
night & sound & stone & walking wormhole: meanwhile
teaching wormhole: c’mon – keep up
voices wormhole: travelling / back

        

Advertisement

THE ATTIC WHICH IS DESIRE: by William Carlos Williams

Tags

1930, 7*, attic, day, desire, light, night, poem, roof, streets, William Carlos Williams, windows

                THE ATTIC WHICH IS DESIRE:

                                the unused tent
                                of

                                bare beams
                                beyond which

                                directly wait
                                the night

                                and day–
                                Here

                                from the street
                                by

                                   *   *   *
                                   *   S   *
                                   *   O  *
                                   *   D  *
                                   *   A  *
                                   *   *   *

                                ringed with
                                running lights

                                the darkened
                                pane

                                exactly
                                down the center

                                is
                                transfixed

 

from Poems, 1930: the word becomes the poem, nothing beyond the word itself – cf. * SODA * – but everything in it just the same; WCW was an atomist, a catalyst and maybe, even, an alchemist, but he was not a dogmatist or a fantasist and definitely not a rhapsodist, although he was a poet, and very often-enough, didn’t know it

 

 

^{————w}(O)_{rmholes________________________________|—–}

light & windows wormhole: window
night & william Carlos Williams wormhole: 11/1 by William Carlos Williams
roof wormhole: Cote des Bœufs à l’Hermitage, Pontoise, 1877
streets wormhole: Great Bridge, Rouen, 1896

 

then

Tags

'scape, 1819, 2019, 6*, anchor, apricot, day, drifting, east, looking, morning, port, reflection, sea, ships, sky, society, spire, sun, sunrise, time, town, water, William Turner

                                                                                earlier,
                before the sun suggested the apricot immensity of coming day
                                fill up the sky and

                                                                                deep within
                glazed waters, the hulls drifted anchored, spindly masts
                                like antennae

                                                                                only port towers
                of decades stood still and reflected, later, jetties of planks and
                                posts tied onto

                                                                                the sea
                like ripples, there were centuries of town and spired symbol, then,
                                to bounder playful sky

 

prologued from S. Giorgio Maggiore, Early Morning, 1819 & Looking east from the Giudecca: Sunrise, 1819 both by William Turner; did you see the sunsets that morning, was anybody else there …?

 

 

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

apricot wormhole: I don’t need to go out / onto the balcony to see behind me / to know what’s going on
looking wormhole: The Atlantic City Convention: 1. THE WAITRESS by William Carlos Williams
morning & reflection & sky & sun & water wormhole: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford – Rain
sea wormhole: slight sneer
society wormhole: quietly in my quiet house
time wormhole: Sujātā

 

early // Minoan & Mycenaean Exhibitions in the British Museum – diptych

Tags

2018, 8*, action, being, black, body, British Museum, civilisation, clouds, column, concepts, crane, day, fields, gap, Germany, glass, Have, horizon, horse, Jamyang Khyentse Chokyi Lodro, jar, Jon, language, life, lintel, liquid, London, looking, message, mind, mist, morning, movement, passing, pediment, plane, reading, rooftops, settled, sitting, speech, stone, sun, sunlight, tertön, text, Tibet, time, train, travelling, Uckfield-London line, vertical, world

                                                early

                the sun
                blankets flat across the fields

                a glint
                wipes along the banking plane;

                the terton,
                settled and comfy in the deepest

                mind, enough
                to reach down a text in an

                unknown
                language and read it with ease;

                60 mph
                on the lines into town, one long

                finger of
                cloud between the sun and train

                ever not
                moving; he said he saw no need

                to burden
                the world with yet more babble

                from a
                conceptual mind; even now

                looking
                sharp forward through the glass

                approaching
                London there is a ripple in the

                glass makes
                the cranes on the rooftops

                twitch

 

                -\\O___~~                                                                ~~___O//-

 

Minoan & Mycenaean Exhibitions in the British Museum

                there was
                mass of body the length of recline

                the height
                of seat and stone bath the end

                of time,
                but the keep of store and brim

                of handle (the
                maximum bulb upon impossible base)

                were lithe
                of all action scratched into blackest

                liquid
                despite all the belts of mist between

                each day;
                and those lintels planted in weight

                upon the
                lip of each column and across all, the

                heavenly
                pediment; having was being,

                transcendent
                of bound, the message leapt from

                behind,
                across the impossible gusts of gap,

                the wrap
                of robe, loose and sun-dried to the

                crease of
                agitation, there, O beast with power

                standing
                over me, will you take me from

                here

 

early: my son was moving to Germany to live with his girlfriend, he was spending the last week or so with his parents before leaving; there was a sense that this was a Major Life Move both for him (and for us watching a child move to another country … even though he is 31 years old); he wanted to do a ‘final’ trip up to London and took his old man with him, we went up early – I watched the horizontal morning sun over the fields become vertical up London’s sandstone buildings; a “terton” is someone who has developed his or her mind to be subtle-enough to find and decode Buddhist teachings hidden by Guru Padmasambhava in places or in minds so that they will be ‘discovered’ in time when the conditions – and minds – are right: I had just finished the biography of Jamyang Khyentse Chokyi Lodro who was a renowned terton and teacher in Tibet who declined to publically reveal many of his found texts because, as he commented, he didn’t want to clutter up peoples’ minds with yet more babble from a “conceptual mind” (although seasoned ‘readers’ of life in Tibet at that time would have ‘understood’ this statement to mean that the prevailing karma of mind in Tibetan society at that time was not up to appreciating them – Jamyang Khyentse Chokyi Londro died in 1959, the year the Chinese seized control of Tibet and the religious infrastructure of Tibet was decimated); the Minoan & Mycenaean Exhibitions in the British Museum: we spent most of the time in the British Museum, Jon wanted to have a final look at the early Minoan and later Mycenaean Greek exhibitions … I haven’t fully worked out how these two pieces are joined as a diptych, but present them as such nevertheless

 

 

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

being & looking wormhole: blister on me thumb
black wormhole: THE LONELY STREET by William Carlos Williams
clouds & travelling wormhole: space for probing thought
crane wormhole: that
glass wormhole: SPRING & LINES by William Carlos Williams
Have wormhole: you
horizon wormhole: we held cold hands
Jon wormhole: Mark & Jon at the coffee shop IV: right angles
life & sun wormhole: ‘… plane is upright …’
London & mind & speech & time wormhole: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford – Trees
mist wormhole: BLUEFLAGS by William Carlos Williams
morning wormhole: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford – With Pigs
passing wormhole: THE GREAT FIGURE by William Carlos Williams
reading wormhole: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford – With Cows
rooftops wormhole: PASTORAL by William Carlos Williams
sitting wormhole: allowed all gain
stone wormhole: only
train wormhole: A Solitude by Denise Levertov
Uckfield-London line wormhole: mother and daughter
world wormhole: Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters] – both fawn and grey

 

blister on me thumb

Tags

2018, 6*, being, breathing, cold, day, distraction, finding, growth, hope, inspiration, looking, money, need, not knowing, notebook, purpose, shelf, step, talking to myself, teeth, thrill, walking, windows, zip

                blister on me thumb
                so I did the zip right up

                to walk around the cold day
                to look for finds that I

                knew I no longer need
                nor even the thrill of find

                what I hadn’t known
                was there let alone the

                inspiration that I think
                to hold the day worthwhile

                while yet the outbreaths
                follow the in- without

                step or hope under my
                very nose, and I make

                from window to shelf
                distracted the while by

                tugging the zip back down
                over the separated teeth

                before I can reach for
                wallet or note-pad

 

 

 

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

being & windows wormhole: ‘… plane is upright …’
breathing wormhole: Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters] – pigs
distraction wormhole: JANUARY by William Carlos Williams
looking & walking wormhole: THE LONELY STREET by William Carlos Williams
talking to myself wormhole: only

 

only

Tags

2018, 7*, beauty, commentary, contrast, day, heat, land, landscape, language, lava, living, love, night, orange, passing, people, perspective, phone, profile, raspberry, sand, silence, sky, sound, speech, stone, sun, talking to myself, twilight, violet, voluptuous

                                only

                from the point of stand
                the dunes are sharp
                against speechless sky

                in passing they rise
                flatly up and up in
                broad brush of land

                blistering from a distant
                sun, in approach they
                are voluptuous cleft

                and hip – raspberry
                stone in orange – the
                Venusian ring-tone

                doesn’t interrupt the
                commentary skip
                across three languages

                                –O___

                OK, the contrast
                between the profiles
                of lifeless heads of lava
                and the twilight-violet sky
                of no day and no night
                is beautiful

                but I could
                have spent the day
                amid peoples’ peeks
                and primal landscapes
                open for to behold
                instead …

 

excursion to Timanfaya National Park on Lanzarote, Jan 2018

 

 

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

beauty wormhole: good going into / that gentle night
living & talking to myself wormhole: THURSDAY by William Carlos Williams
love wormhole: we held cold hands
night wormhole: TREES by William Carlos Williams
orange wormhole: TO A SOLITARY DISCIPLE by William Carlos Williams
passing & people & speech wormhole: A Solitude by Denise Levertov
silence & sun wormhole: What You Are by Roger McGough
sky wormhole: coterminalism – there is nothing happens by itself, / 070118
sound wormhole: Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters] – both fawn and grey
stone wormhole: `whappn’d!
twilight wormhole: letting them go