this time

Tags

trees, passing, time, identity, Charlotte, houses, openness, driving, 2*, fields

                this                time

                in the back seat
                driven by Dot
                houses through trees
                open fields turning

 

 

 

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

Charlotte wormhole: love and precision
identity & time wormhole: dream I // dream II
openness wormhole: such such potential
passing wormhole: pass and / fro
trees wormhole: a nice grey woollen picnic blanket

 

such such potential

Tags

2013, 5*, branches, breeze, brick, corridors, doors, future, labyrinth, mist, oesophagus, openness, potential, realisation, shadow, time, tired, walls

                tired

means that even the branches that reach bold into a future
only cast shadow on a brickwall
that all the doors of all the corridors stand open wide and reveal
the misty labyrinth
gusty and oesophageal
                                as they forever are and will be –

                                such such potential

                                              only as long as it is unrealised

 

 

 

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

branches & breeze wormhole: do I
doors wormhole: that comicbookshop … // … in dreams
mist & shadow wormhole: landscape of cloud over London / with differing depths of grey
openness wormhole: the goldilocks stance
realisation wormhole: the // orange rose
time wormhole: walk from Castleton to Hope
walls wormhole: too greedy

 

the goldilocks stance

Tags

2013, breathing, eyes, frog, openness, seeing, shoulders, sitting, writing

                                the goldilocks stance

                you sit straight with back and shoulders
                but not too straight like a mission rather
                just enough like a                          frog

                and you plant your eyes softly in front
                but not too soft that they close rather
                open enough to breathe              evenly

                then you hold your pen over lined paper
                but not too thoughtful like a prerequisite
                rather naïve enough to see          unto

 

 

 

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

breathing wormhole: breathing
eyes wormhole: brown corduroy shirt / and dark redwine tie
openness wormhole: strain
seeing & sitting & writing wormhole: in the / Citadel / Park / a leaf / new / ly fell

 

strain

Tags

2017, 7*, breakdown, career, identity, music, nude, openness, retirement, sound, vinyl

                I’ve lost the needle that settles
                between grooves and plays the circling music

                on fluff the arm skates across the ridges
                making awful rip of a career

                it skints along a ridge edge – wedges in,
                bounces out – a scratch to repeat

                against all reasonable hope that it might not;
                I cannot hear the pops and crackles,

                the greeting space before the
                opening strain, awaiting nudity

 

retirement #7: Virginia Woolf’s first novel was ‘the Voyage Out’; she wrote much of it as she experienced two breakdowns and a number of stark bereavements; this is not a trip to venture and return, this is a discovery to venture and change; so much changes between generation, within and across lives, the further you travel the deeper you stay where you are; read the whole sequence: in and out / the Avebury stones / can’t seem to get / a signal …

 

 

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

breakdown & retirement wormhole: what wounds have you got?
career wormhole: seen but not heard
identity wormhole: brown corduroy shirt / and dark redwine tie
music wormhole: within
openness wormhole: 1968
sound wormhole: ssreet chak-chak

 

1968

Tags

1960s, 1968, 2014, 5*, air, avenue, blue, breeze, buildings, Burt Bacharach, bus, city, Dionne Warwick, direction, lemon, life, lime, mauve, mist, morning, openness, possibility, roads, sky, white, years

                      1968

                      the rear of the bus
           moved out of the scene – whitened blue

                      the wide open spring air
           reached between buildings – to grimy lime

                      and avenues rolled down
           in every direction – through flash lemon

                      bolts of mist and haze
           across each intersection – and ankle mauve

                      and slightly too little
           worn – for the morning shift of breezes

 

promises promises – more Dionne Warwick and Burt Bacharach sustaining another burst of breath-takingly open and naïve possibility from the later 60s

 

 

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

1968 & Burt Bacharach & Dionne Warwick & mauve wormhole: 1968 – orange sand and mauve mist
air wormhole: faintly apricot air?
blue & life wormhole: to rescue something
breeze wormhole: the bench
buildings wormhole: Open – All – Ours
bus wormhole: finding my own true nature – Plumstead, Woolwich, 190915
city wormhole: the silent night of the Batman
lemon wormhole: that comicbookshop … // … in dreams
lime wormhole: magnificent salad
mist & sky wormhole: vastly
morning & white wormhole: pine // gladioli // [&] wisteria
openness wormhole: breathing out
roads wormhole: Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters] – moment
years wormhole: 1967

 

breathing out

Tags

2014, 4*, ambition, breathing, daily, emptiness, non-doing, openness, self-compassion, sitting, talking to myself, time, words, writing

                I must take
                the time

                to sit with
                an empty page

                each day

                without guile
                or ambition

                completely
                and openly

                and let

                the words write
                themselves

                with compassion
                as if I were

                breathing out

 

 

 

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

breathing wormhole: writing: // in turn
emptiness wormhole: this aching // and spacious dichotomy
openness wormhole: con / sum / mate
sitting wormhole: pocket
talking to myself & writing wormhole: No
time wormhole: open window
words wormhole: ah … // oh … // meanwhile … // … // tha ya ta …

 

con / sum / mate

Tags

2014, 7*, awareness, being, defensive, funny, identity, line, openness, page, palimpsest, presumption, seeing, skin, space, sparrows, vulnerable, white, writing

                onto the white space
                between the lines

                who is writing
                why is writing

                not loose because defensive
                not inspired because presumed

                (palimpsest from the previous page
                 provides grip from prequel (funny –

                 a sparrow tries to land on the bonnet
                 but cannot grip to stop flapping)) but

                there needs to be a cut-through
                down there, between the lines,

                to find the sense of writing about
                something

                other than just filling space,
                a plain seeing pared

                from between skin and pith
                vulnerable and recognised

                in all its citric fragrance
                that opens eye wide

                to test the membrane
                to taste the flesh run

                                con
                                sum
                                mate

 

how to ‘hold your seat’ (Pema Chodron) when driving a pen

 

 

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

awareness wormhole: returning home handsome
being & writing wormhole: … swap round
identity wormhole: this aching // and spacious dichotomy
openness wormhole: magnificent salad
seeing wormhole: travel
space wormhole: Clea
sparrows wormhole: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J Redford – Snow
white wormhole: Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters] – snow

 

magnificent salad

Tags

2016, 5*, acceptance, Alhambra, almonds, apple, being, blue, brown, coffee, colour, custard, embracing, Granada, green, holiday, lime, morning, oil, openness, orange, peach, prunes, red, salad, table, time, walking, yellow

                magnificent salad

                you take diced red and yellow apple
                and sliced melocotone flesh
                a few dark-shredded prunes and a
                sprinkle of roasted abrezia nuts

                a lightwood table top to eat from
                in the lo-fat custard (with hint of lime
                from the pulled curtain) apartamiento
                and the blood-orange shirt discarded

                from the morning’s walk, in the burnt
                orange street of a constant 30º Granada
                of a currently perpetual 2 pm, then
                just a twist of no-tickets to the Red

                Castle all week; a cup of milky coffee
                waiting, but not before I drink the
                run-off olive oil and soy sauce from
                the green and bluely leafed plate

 

 

 

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

acceptance wormhole: and smile / like a bud
being wormhole: cut while you’re ahead/cut while you’re a thread – poewieview #35
blue wormhole: hello, luvvey, do you want a cup of tea?
brown & red & yellow wormhole: Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters] – … as the new town marches in
coffee wormhole: quick inventory after coffee
green & walking wormhole: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J Redford – A Sign of the Times
holiday wormhole: Granada holiday …
lime wormhole: AT-tennnnnnnn – waitfrit waitfrit – SHUN!
morning & table wormhole: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J Redford – Safe Home
oppenness wormhole: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford – A Precious Moment
orange wormhole: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J Redford – Simon Upon The Downs
time wormhole: moment

 

The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford – A Precious Moment

Tags

1967, 3*, air, answers, beauty, being, bells, black, breath, breeze, brown, bull, cause and effect, childhood, clarity, clouds, cows, curtains, dancing, dawn, dew, doing, dusk, earth, east, Einstein, elm, energy, evening, field, freedom, grass, green, grey, heat, hedge, hills, horizon, identity, Jupiter, leaves, life, light, logic, meadow, mind, moment, months, moon, morning, mother, mouse, nature, night, nightjar, noise, openness, order, owl, questions, quiet, rabbit, rebirth, scarlet, September, silence, silhouette, silver, sky, slow, space, stars, summer, the Boats of Vallisneria, thought, time, truth, ultimate reality, uncle, universe, valley, velvet, white, wind, wings, woodland, words

A Precious Moment

As after the heat of a summer’s day the face glows in the mildness of evening, so the face of the countryside glows in the mildness of early autumn.   The summer months have infused the merest suggestion of brown in the deepening green of the foliage and the face of the earth gives up its warmth to the stars above to see them dance.   It was into this calm that I walked one late September’s eve.   The evening star cast her unblinking eye across the heavenly dome to Jupiter in the darkening east and the nightjar echoed its song above the empty fields.   I stood at the end of the stack-yard and returned the disinterested gaze of a cow in the field beyond.

It is during these slow hours when the pace of the day has declined, that the smaller noises of the land become apparent.   The bull, who was tethered a full two hundred yards away in the next field could be heard to rattle his chain and blow down his nose at a particularly juicy clump of grass he has found.   Behind me in the ‘maternity’ box, a freshly calved heifer mooed huskily yet very softly as its offspring raised its head suddenly at a strange sound.   Perhaps it was the sound of ancient timbers creaking under the weight of centuries, or that of the leaves above whispering to the bowed stems in the hay meadow below.   Or maybe it was the very silence that enshrouded these small sounds that attracted its attention, for silence is so startling in its rarity and its beauty.   Dusk gave way to night and I became aware of the immense depths of space, the dizzy height of the mackerel sky, and although it was the clouds that moved, it seemed they were stationary against the clear black silhouettes of the elms and that it was the motion of the gibbous moon behind the clouds that alternately blackened and silver-plated the night.   Even at the tender and romantic age of sixteen I was aware of this quietude, and in one enlightened moment jotted down these few words on an old envelope:

         Soft, soft, the bell that tolls the evensong
         Across full summer’s empty fields serene.
         And slowly draws the scarlet cloak, the hem’s
         Black velvet, diamond specked, communes me with
         The white barn owl, who with his noiseless wings
         Doth glide and swoop upon the luckless mouse.
         Selene set within the lap of dusk
         Transmutes the living green to silver plate,
         Enshrouds my world with immobility.
         And with a quietude that frees the mind
         Of bondage from the peering eyes of day,
         I fain become the earth, the sky, the all.

But it wasn’t until my late teens that I realised there are two times during the twenty four hour cycle when such a quietude exists. One is just before the dusk and the other just before dawn.   Although both seem to be divisions between day and night, the prelude to dawn seems to me to be the more startling and more satisfying to experience.   In the evening the mind is released into a reverie bound by personal conscious thought, but during the morning pause one experiences a freedom and profundity of thought that is rarely to be found in any other part of time.

It is barely half past five in the morning when I start milking, but often I arrive at the cowshed half an hour before in order to experience this precious moment.   Although at this hour the ‘Stone that puts the stars to flight’ has yet to be flung, I can sense the great spaciousness of the valley before me.   Again the trees move softly and the long grass in the hay meadow sifts the breath of night, and I wait.   I wait for that incorporeal beauty that is the union of soul and nature.   It begins where the breezes end and the rustling leaves are stilled.   A serene stillness envelopes the woods and meadows and even I am not conscious of breathing.   I am drawn into the quietude and become part of it; become part of the very earth on which I stand; part of the universe through which I move.   I have become part of each blade of grass in the valley before me, part of every hill.   I feel myself part of the earth, feel its very movement through space.   Unfortunately mere words can no longer be the conveyance of the emotions involved (and I use the word ‘emotions’ for want of a better noun) for they become so expansive and so personal.   No longer can mere words impress the reader’s soul with such profundity of emotion that this experience releases within me.   Each must go his own way, search alone and experience it first hand and with an open mind.

A thought is born and from that thought comes two more.   The two are made four and the four made eight, a self-multiplying chain reaction of thoughts has been set in motion that flows with great haste through the mind; in fact a torrent of thoughts in one brief second, and yet each one is startlingly clear and leads the mind one step nearer the truth.   The heavenly dome is vast above the valley and the stars, thrown into their mythological patterns by the great cosmic hand, impress their presence on the mind with unusual brilliance and time is no more.   Now the mental hosts are converging, and step by step I am racing towards that vertex which is the ultimate truth.   The questions are being answered at an ever increasing rate, the startling, brutal logic disclosing the result of a preceding reaction which itself, reveals a cause.   So through to the highest plane the mind soars upon an ever accelerating reversal of the law of causation. But the pace is too much.   The mind flags and begins to flounder.   At this juncture the mind can be likened to a water skier who, while the pace is kept up skims along the surface in the sun, but immediately he slows down he begins to sink, until at length he finds himself floundering with no forward movement.   Now the mind has become weak and cannot comprehend the unfathomable thought.   But I have brushed the grey curtain; I have seen a light faint though it may be and both my physical and spiritual selves have been revitalised and my cup runneth over.

For most of our lives we are lost beings out of tune with life around us.   Only during such precious moments as these do we fit into the great harmonious chord; all things round and above have their special place in it, from the fat brown rabbit throbbing in the cornfields to the fleecy pieces of golden cloud that sail upon the pale green skies of dusk.   Worries, anxieties, tensions, all are reduced to their proper size in relation to life, and as the imperceptible ‘Left hand of dawn’ lifts the veil on the eastern horizon, we are cleansed and reborn with the stripling day.

It is only during such periods that nature can be reduced to anything approaching order, and that there is an order I am in no doubt.   Einstein’s inquiring mind was working on the universal equation when the workings of that very same equation stilled his physical being; perhaps now he has solved it, we in this life never shall.   The perpetual motion of nature is the perfect machine and we are part of that machine.   It is complete within itself, recreating its own new parts from the debris of the old.   No energy is wasted or lost, just charged in form.   Nature permits us a marginal tolerance within which we may make one or two adjustments to suit our needs and requirements, but beyond this we dare not go for we merely create more problems than we solve.

         So does she pass, the gentle night,
         Slow seeps the dawn upon the scene.
         Dew sparkling in the first light of
         The new day shows where she has been.
         The eyes of day now open on
         The dewy sward and gossamer
         Bows low beneath its pearly load,
         And hedgerows faintly scent the air
         With green along the unused road.
         And I am born once more and see
         The day as I once first beheld –
         A child within his mother’s arms,
         Another, within its mother’s arms.

 

read the collected work as it is published: here

 

 

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

air & field & morning wormhole: Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters] – autumn
beauty wormhole: the policies came to nothing
being wormhole: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford – Introduction
black & wind wormhole: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford – A Bowl of Gourds
breath wormhole: inbreath
breeze wormhole: and that’s where I are
brown wormhole: Michael Redford: triptych
childhood wormhole: 1964
clouds wormhole: reaching branch
evening & silhouette wormhole: tired
green & space & uncle wormhole: Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters] – the soft canticle of the gourds:
grey & horizon wormhole: being in love – poewieview #26
hedge & hills & life & light wormhole: tag cloud poem IX – haiku is awkward / the more that is left in / like uncombed hair
identity wormhole: with endless love
leaves & mother wormhole: The Boats of Vallesneria by Michael J. Redford – Autumn Thoughts
moon wormhole: don’t look / at her eyes – poewieview #18
night & silence & sky wormhole: a crack of lightning / in the dark of night
openness wormhole: ‘on second thought …’ – poewieview #27
silver wormhole: Jon
thought & time wormhole: inbreath
white wormhole: mauve
words wormhole: bloogying

 

‘on second thought …’ – poewieview #27

Tags

1971, 2016, Andy Warhol, Bowie, identity, mind, openness, thought

                                                      on second thought
                                                      I’ll keep my mind
                                                      with open tunings

 

I’ve never ‘got’ Andy Warhol, and I still don’t, 1971

Read the collected movements in David Bowie: Movements in Suite Major

 

 

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

Bowie wormhole: being in love – poewieview #26
identity & mind wormhole: Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters] – introdepthion
openness wormhole: balancing // with a whole lot of deft
thought wormhole: The Boats of Vallesneria by Michael J. Redford – Autumn Thoughts