BALANCING MATTER

Things balance
in a smattering of matter
and a smattering of antimatter
does it matter?
Yes, for the universe balances
its orders and disorders
its restings and energies
its visibles and invisibles
its symmetries and asymmetries
its matter and antimatter
so it matters
in the balance of things

PARADOX LOST

Lose yourself in so-called real life
and find yourself and Self there
---great faith
because the loss of yourself
---great doubt
is the finding of the Self
and when we find what we find
that's a gainful loss

If we could but see
---our mind a mirror bright
that myriad things happen in paradox
---let no dust alight
because paradox mysterious
is the wondrous paradigm
---illusionary is the mirror bright
though paradoxically
 there is no permanent paradigm
---where can the dust alight?
except, perhaps, the Self
who is seeking to lose and gain itself

WAITING FOR GODOT AT THE NO-SHOW

I'm waking half-up from the 20th century
in that I have half-overcome the sense-
traumas of deep childhood. Forgetfulness
is the ultimate stagecraft. But, then, where
is the main stage floor on which to build
the primal scenery?
Who knows?

Perhaps there is no stage floor upon which
to build anything at all. In which case,
there is also no actor and no plot. If so,
I can sit in the audience of shadow people
and watch the no-show performance
on the non-stage.
Or not.

Or compose my own half-meaningful script
of the half-forgotten sense-traumas of deep
childhood that I have half-overcome.
Or else.

Because a senseless script is being written
by shadowy figures off-stage with their own
sense of drama. Their scripting may be senseless
and shallow, but it does present some dramatic
elements: absolutely absurdist, idiotically ironic,
innocently entertaining.
Or, what?

Because the non-script is still in the
writing-stage, half-written;
while the un-actor waits in the invisible line
at the tryouts.

BATTLE IN OUR SECRET GARDENS

In our Secret Gardens we celebrate 

the dawn of a newer century 

always spawning somewhere
while overhead the White Dove circles 
dropping useful feathers 
to whittle into quills 
to pen about a peerless pax 
or placed onto passing peace pipes
or feathered into fleches 
for the barbed barbarities 
that always battle against 
the peaceful Dove who settles
and celebrates sometimes 
in our Secret Gardens

SAILING FROM THE SHIRE TO THE FAMILIAR SHORES OF THE SHIRE

Trying to wish myself back to the time now forty-five years
that summer before I read the Trilogy to end all trilogies
before Bilbo left the Shire before I walked the Shire
and we birthed on Adventures unknown with Frodo and Pippin and Merry
that called forth living Elvenkings and Elvenqueens and ancient trees
who talked and walked Middle Earth over the Misty Mountains
and we were regaled in the mirth of mountain dwarves
with mead goblets raised to the ancient stories
of everlasting Gandalfian wizardry and the hidden truth
that we will finally embark on the grey ships
sailing to cross the Silver Sea to reach
the always-close and deeply remembered White Shore
at Journey's End where we rediscover the Shire of Home
bathed in the familiar empyrean light
of the most ancient of enchanted Suns
whose stardust sails in our very selves on this shore

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shdiTRxTJb4

TREES BREEZING

I believe in cause-and-effect;
so when the trees decide to dance
and sway, I have observed that the
Wind gets whipped into breezes.

I am not sure why Wind wants
to cooperate with the trees;
I guess it has some kind of natural
pact with them to get it breezing.

The effect on me is to cause
me to watch the dancing trees
and feel the Wind breezing
in sensual effect-and-cause.

OF ROCKNESS AND TREENESS

Planted another tree today
dancing/hopping 'round the tree
to tamp down the soil

Tree will return the dance
when it catches the breeze
with my silent watching

Tree will be a tree partly
for me, but mostly for its
treeness lasting long beyond

Set down another rock today...

FIERCE DREAMTIME OF THE MOUNTAINTOP PROMISE

"We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy."
                       --M.L. King Jr., 28 August 1963


Now is fiercely the time
to make real the always
urgent mountaintop dream
of helping America
keep its palace-of-justice
promises that were built
on the unfulfilled content
of the City-on-the-Hill
character that cries
My country, because of thee
I sing let freedom ring
in an always timely
and timelessly raging
and ringing dreamtime that
America some day will fulfill
its promissory promises

Lovely Sunday morn
finds me in haiku space
--thoughts flutter like leaves

Mid-winter haiku:


Begins here at home
cosmic religious feelings
--tree ice brightens me

MEANING CENTRAL

Like a rotating hoop
powered by Universe
and by us its co-authors
Meaning is creating
with God at the center
enjoying the stories

LENSING EFFECT OF DOWNTOWN MEMORIES

As with any illumination pattern, say the scientists,
some shine brighter than others.
The same with memory.


The lensing effect of light
reflected off a curved rim of any size
collects at a point on the surface--
of coffee in a cup or water in a pool
or even intergalactic rays
of spacetimelight
reflecting off the edge of a galaxy
and focuses and distorts in cusp-curve effect
onto predictable places in spacetime.
So it is with memory.


The relative dimness of some places
is precisely balanced out
by the relative luminosity of other places
with memory balancing the same way
in a Universal Memory Principle
in which some placetimes are recalled brightly
while others remain dimmed or uncollected.


When I think of my hometown
the memories traveling
as timethoughts
focus in lensing effect
on the once living downtown of the 1950s-’60s
concentrating memory rays there
when a vibrant downtown was filled
with the lifelight of people
traveling to town to do business
to ambulate, congregate,
recreate, inebriate
and drink coffee with timelight
in focus on their living surfaces
and bloviate with friends and strangers
on the corners of time
where few remember to stand today.


I might get a haircut and buy the latest comics:
Superman, Batman, Archie
or watch several movies at the State Theater:
Flash Gordon, Red Ryder, Hopalong Cassidy
and eat chess pie at Winnie’s Grill
and shop for toys at the five-and-dimes
and later, as a teen, play pool at Central Pool Hall
hiding from the supposed-to-have-been-working
at the small-town newspaper in my town
which had a real downtown
when its lifelight flourished
for a time.


And in the past-future time of now
my collected, luminous mind-images
of past-light not yet entirely passed
focus in lensing effect
on lifelight memories
flashing in from the edges of the galaxy
onto a downtown
yet remembered.

Haiku

Darkness awaits light
while Earth orbit in motion
prepares springtime flower

COME AND GO THE SAD LAUGHTER

What kind of world is it that a woman births
a son
and then must sit in a high chair in front
of the casket
to greet all his
friends
who number in the hundreds
alternating laughing
crying that laughs
and laughter that cries
with sad glads
and glad/sad remembrances
of hellos goodbyes
swirling around everywhere
the tears, the tears, the tears.
What kind of world is it?
The kind that laughs and cries
in the finality of the comings and goings.

DENDRITIC CONNECTIVITY

Bare trees, wispy limbs
like dendrites connecting sky
to moon moving by

HOOP OF MEANING

A metamorphosis
casts a time-warp 
of memories of the past
into a rewriting of narratives
metamorphosing in the present

In reality instead of theoretically
we can comprehend 
that rather than an arrow 
hurtling through timespace
Time is more of a curvature 

A circuit closing on itself 
in the future-past-present    
curving into spherical spacetime
writing stories as it goes
with prologues rotating into epilogues 


Like a rotating hoop 
powered by the Universe 
and by us its co-authors
meaning is creation
with God at the center enjoying the stories

TACTILE FACE OF SNOWSCAPES PAST

They say that complex feelings 
of visceral affinity
one feels 
for one’s native place
rarely develop again 
in another landscape


If summers were verdant symphonies
of vibrant aliveness
winter snowscapes were spare melodies
of mesmerizing starkness
embodied in remembrance
of blizzardous bare-branched songs 


As a boy waking up to big snows
and tracking out into white deepness
those soft sounds of crystallized silence  
have now transformed into permanent 
memory crystals of snow dreams
of my remembered native place


A slow snowfall of sublime silence
unlocked me to go outside into the
timeless mystic atmospherics
of fluffy water-crystal pillows
floating down 
sashaying out of the sky


A hard-falling snow
found me gazing 
upward into the skylight 
where the flakes seemed to materialize 
out of the very fabric of the eye
making tactile the crystal face of Creation

PLUMING AND FUMING

On TV I see oil plumes under the sea
Washing tar balls over the booms
Competing with soccer balls kicked
Into nets; and netted birds with their plumes
Oily as I step outside breathing the fumes
On the Coast once again kicked
Toward the next tarring and feathering
By the storm always approaching
From the drilled and greased behind.

MELTING-CUSTARD WORRIES DURING KENTUCKY CICADA SUMMERS

After slow Sunday-night church services

during 1950s' Kentucky cicada summers

and rolled-up rock-n-roll teen-jean jive,

my mom would drive us out for ice cream

twenty-five cents--15-cents for littler kids--

to get us a two-fisted frozen custard cone

too meltingly big for lickety-split small hands.

There was the Brown Derby chain

of frozen-custard stands, available in
my Cold-War hot-summer countryside

which dipped the cold cream-in-the-cone

in liquid chocolate, making a thin tectonic skin

that fractured and slid off creating a delightful
problem--Jim Dandy to the rescue!--
for a jively baseball-capped kid

while the grown-ups were fracturing themselves

over nuclear-custard Sputnik worries
of air raids, bomb shelters, and McCarthy Red-ism
 --The Warden said, hey, buddy,
don't you be no square!--
and spindly TVs and polio and the devilry
of hip-swiveling rock-n-roll--Be-bop-a-lula!--
but the jively baseball-capped kids
wanted Beethoven to roll over to make memories
for those dipped-chocolate frozen-custard
Kentucky cicada summer Sundays






 


 

SIP THE SLOW REALITY

I'm off to a good start to the morning, year, decade
actively practicing slowness for a slower life
listening to Garrison Keillor read poetry
slowly sipping honey-lemon-ginseng tea
then listening to a Trappist monk speak of contemplation
and his conception of God as Ultimate Reality
while gazing out window at my severely frost-nipped plants
--slowing down to ponder time
--slowing down to contemplate life
--slowing down to behold the Real Ultimate .

We could benefit by creating a slower-paced life:
slower, healthier selves,
a slower, healthier Planet.