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?”

Epiphany of a Woman by a Well

A classic scene: a woman by a well.
But how many ages do we need to pass
along with many passings-away
before someone steps in and stops
to ask: “Which of the two is deeper?”

But to know the answer, there’s much
one must remember: underneath
the stillness of the well
there is—there still has to be—
yet a deeper bristling spring.

A spring that cracks even the hardest
and the highest of the mountains
to prove that its clarity takes
after light and speech,
and many steps past

any mortal counting
it takes to attain one day
at that one step
when at last what the soul
wants you to hear, she puts on your lips:

“Are we deep enough
for one another—or at least
as deep as a well that goes
as down as where
water bearing a life’s gift

is as pure as gold may ever be,
and clarity and knowing
emerge as the arché
present and, therefore,
truly present for us within?

And if so, can we be to another
like that woman and her well,
ever as before and ever after,
even past this timeline’s
narrow rim—

almost as timeless as a temple,
a garden’s image set in stone,
both nearby and outside
some forgotten tomb
like those hermae may crown?

For if we meet, isn’t each
and every such one moment
a temple, garden, well,
never meant only for
a rush of walk-through,

but just for this—to step in
and stop so that love
and our soul grow deeper;
and no, no arrogance may enter
and savor such delights?

Or isn’t it written: we ought
to learn love as does a musician
or a thoughtful poet, since only thus
one can enter the sublime and its interval
the ages and more have conferred—fated?”

In Those Hands Divine Thunder Cracks

Worshipers in Japan bow and clap to gods,
and, in the clap of meeting hands,
entrance into the divine
is turned to sound,

and the sound, the air’s crack,
reaches from one’s heart
to the below and into the above
where the deathless hardly ever tapped

forks and curves to our fates,
their chartered path,
whereupon a thoughtful note

may come and melodically pulse
to pass — into the sheet of light
for fans of arms to sieve delight.