Some Must Have Been Adept Musicians and Painters Who Could Have Competed Against Heraclitus’ Knowledge and Art of Measure and Proportion

 

—How many times (and lifetimes) are we

removed from the true Universal Medium?

 

Embellished with riddles’

adornments of the ever,

deemed flowery and rare,

pure and rich, femmes enter

give-and-take ringlets

of well-polished speech,

 

measure by measure

kindled and kindling

what they hint and offer                                                            

and thus quietly gripped

in reedy tongues

of ever-living flames,

 

themselves so delivered

then as creatrixes of melts

side by side with solids

with grades of lightning-flash

by which earth is liquefied

and what went down

 

begins rising back

till it cools again

into lucent drips

or pearls hardened

in the clasping shells.

“Is this how the cosmic

 

binds and interacts

with the matter

on this earthly plane?”

perhaps only the naïve

or some with a keener sense

could be made to ask.

 

But the key is “measured,”

and to measure is to ally,

align, array well—as if

in accordance with a God

who taught: “No excess,”

since going past would

 

corrupt even those immortals;

and thus women who know

open and weave the ways

of thinnest of the highways

for presence that is always

into beads of such here and now.

Why Would Anyone Want to Barter Beauty and Soul for Anything Else?

If all’s radical flux
and cyclical exchange,
what can what ever is
swap with anything else?

Maybe in part this is
what it is: what doesn’t
stand by timeless laws
becomes its non-being.

But where would this leave
mankind the way we know it?
Note how much it labors
to raze the soul and tear

its own heart and being
in a frenzied race
to win much for much
of great nonbeing,

as if death itself were
our chiefest master.
But when it comes to beauty,
does she ask of us in turn?

A bow — a proof, a pledge
that, coming face to face,
we stop holding on to
what is false and base.

Poetry’s Eons Needed to Make Out A Cosmic Premonitory Hinge or Point

 

Just as it took years,

years of consistent training

to master the art of Shui Xiu (水袖)

or Water Sleeves that had them flowing

so that on the air they would paint

singing grace and joy or sadness,

it’s far more unknown, oddly, this:

 

without lifetimes of arduous trying

poets won’t win either their white silk sleeves

to move speech and voice

where other form may not reach—

for isn’t this how poems come and gift

shoulders, elbow, fingers, wrist

to each other’s soul:

rippling water, drifting clouds—

 

or how love of mortals

is divinely sculpted

when one strikes her

with a cosmic,

premonitory hint?

Of Gilding Filigree Adoration (That Doesn’t Flee)

Like the Heavens mesh
when cast on the face of the deep
that, numberless, teems with life,
the yin is coupling with the yang,

like a shroud with eyes wide
open, that so tightly latch on
all they see and lean to grasp,
la gloire de l’âme chez les femmes

conceives l’éclat du dessin:
“What is better — to see or
to seek being seen
and, in that masque and mesh —

rolled and fixed,
to clear — to net — those
prying eyes — like sequins
on peacock widespread plumes?”

Yet does it matter how many
of these have been gleaned?
Or whether any — of those
who come by —

is of gilding-filigreed damask,
a calligraphic thread for life,
after life even for another life,
ask the eyes entwined,

those ones that care & think —

Doors Unbarred to Mountains (On Thymos, Psyche, and Eros And the Figures Which They Cut)

Μῦθος is a memory — othered
and uttered in word and sound
like a dewdrop gleaned
from a vanished night

that left us of what was
emblems, only misted signs
from which a poem or a chant
then reaped and mixed

washed-out pearls and shells
garnered side by side,
not unlike what μῦθος meant
to Aristotle and his poetics:

“arrangement of the incidents” in tragedy
that needs to include something
that is stray, ill, deceptive, false —
the cause that brings about the doom.

And, in this, μῦθος mirrors the spirit,
its own consanguine twin — θυμός,
conscience-free Odysseus’
daemon-goad and inner voice,

the seat and throne of anger (orgē)
of the unjust, apt for a tyrant or a king.
Just as in the tale of “the best and most
beautiful city in speech (or argument),”

πόλις τῷ λόγῳ, θυμός is inserted,
similar to the “noble lie” — like a wedge,
a bar, a separating cut — between
logos and eros — as if to join

the two or to cross from one
to the other, one has to pass
through the thymos’ gaping jaws —
not unlike, in Symposium,

with thymotic Alcibiades trying to
insert himself between Socrates
and Agathon (“The Good”): Θυμός,
a “rising vapor,” sacrificial smoke

and offering for the favors of the powers
of the dark — and that’s also why,
in the Republic, in the “Apocalypse”
of Plato’s opus, Socrates unveils at last

the deepest feud behind all the other feuds,
“the ancient rivalry” between tragedy,
the poetics of thymotic infernal smokes
and its Eros-Thanatos, and philosophy

that, in this war over the soul of our self,
reads θυμός and its θυμοί, tales
and “poetry” — making of deadly
tragedies out of fates for men.

For, as the Bhagavad-Gita says,
“there was no death and nothing
to set off things apart till all
was obscure at first — dim

and dark in the dark — and all
but an endless, formless ocean —
the heart of nothingness which took
on being — born of severe heat.”

Donner et recevoir, un rapport marin (Une étude sur la magie sympathique)

On and on the waves are coming
to play what they played before—
the whiteness of the clouds above
is now manes of rolling foams.

And there, in the self-same color
flowing from the waist below—
someone’s standing on the shore,
anew avowed, an act of kinship

by a marriage of the air and the sea.
Sans fin et pourtant, enfin—affinity
has been found—dans le blanc

des gémissements et de la glisse
qui est sensible, plus ou moins,
là... tellement ornéé de nuages.

Fresh from Innocence Long Time Ago

As they let mirrors
dress them up,
surely quite a few of them
cannot help but wonder:

“Truly is this how gods
made me, and for whom?
And if so and if the god is he,
how else or with what else
do I need to help him?”