How Far Does Seeing Too Much— Or Too Little—Distance Us from Our Selves?

 

Whom do eyes seek to see,
To size and seize?

Do they ever care or wonder
What becomes of them,

And whether little or much
Will remain of them at the end?

For seeing too is a thought,
A thought that moves

Whatever its aim aligns
With something better,

Or with what is worse—

And thus it moves the soul.

Among those we meet,
More and less,
We begin to spell them out,

While scarcely comprehending

Where and when and to what degree
We and our minds are made

Of such seeing and its light,

Which claims the lit
As part of its authored script.

O Arachne with Ariadne’s Thread, For Whom Did You Dim Yourself In Such Wild Nyxian Abandon?

 

O Arachne, the sun
On curving strings,
Its orbits cast out wide —

 

How well you play your harp!

 

So on that breast you bared,
Beads — your strung-on spheres —
Rise through surface sunsets

 

In harmonies of loosed sound

 

Which you plumb with a plucking heart.

 

And on those apogees you drive
Even pious, serene bells
Toward madness,

 

So that they cannot help but nod and sway,

 

And plunge into your lap
As you lightly thread the diadem
Of your fluent golden sweat.

Still in That Form the Good Is Bound

Do wonder what women are
If not a flame that lives
By learning how to hide,

Even as it strains and vies
From the innards of the dark
To search and dye the outermost sky

In red and orange like sunset dusk.

Yet the blaze, so searing to the touch,
Likes to rest and bide its time,

So smooth and soft in all its bounty
Within beauty’s listless liquid cast.

Still — in that form the good is bound.

Mountains away from Mountains Are Like Love away from Love

In June orangeries of daybreak
Early faces bathe themselves,

And the quietude they enter
Is a fine and stunning place,

Made to return and render
Life’s unseen tender sense.

And the light, the first and gentle,
Comes touching all that is,

Like the wonder of an adroit painter
Who elicits, wings, and quickens
What is to live and linger

In you and me as luminous kind
And gilded kin, briefly relieved
In semblances time blends and kindles.

Goodbye to Hudson Springs Park

Something halts at the water’s edge,
Beyond which the lake is churned
Into aroused wisps of exalted mist,

While on the meadow running by the bank
Trees strain sudden sunlit alleyways
Trimmed with early morning shade,
Still holding their inlaid chill.

I know — must always have known —
That at cockcrow time itself
Quietly cracks,

And the countryside draws nearest
To some hallowed shrine
Meant somehow to persist

And ever abide,
Even if sealed away and lost
Amid the outer rush,

Like those last diminutive violets
I found there on the grassy shore:

So easy to miss in their modest
Yet immaculate harmonies,

Harmonies that flute marble temple columns
Just as surely as a lover’s wave-like knees.

Why, is there not in all this
An ever-welling presence,
Though often deeply hidden and locked —

A keening pre-sense
Behind the mind’s each living sense,
Or within every presence

For which we glibly borrow
Her own proper name?

Just as daybreak’s aquatic stillness
Cuts a marble statue-moment
Out of thought and time and space,

Staying what would otherwise flow away —

And just as waters embrace and fête
The sky above as the mien and métier
Fit to haeremai and cradle in their midst
What stuns and transcends their given selves.

So too this morning Hudson lake
And its magical ēlektron of sublime fifths —
One part silver and four of gold —

Shimmered with dots of milky light.

And then, upon the road back out of town,
Along Main Street, I passed the white church
Upon the little hill,

Shining like a fresh new page
In statu nascendi —
So pure, so naked,

Awaiting the illumined stillness
Of a coming verse.

Morning Valley Silence Strings Beads of Lucid Thought

Silences at their utmost lucent
Brim with glazing rifts and rimes,

As happens when morning arrives
To clear the dazing mists of dusk —

And where a nothing used to tarry
In guise of the yet unthought,
Unknown, unheard, and unseen,

A thought — a see-through stunning —
Hatches and flies to perch
Upon one’s shoulder even.

And a heron in the pads of Beaver Marsh
Has just caught a fish and raised it, pinned,

Up and out of its own element
To be swallowed whole
Beneath steady eyes of blazing gold,

As though the bird were but a snake
With risen legs and coating wings,

Careful enough not to disturb
The ring of natant calm
Among the yellow bead-like lilies,

Some unbuttoning their bulbs,
While others still stay clasped and buckled.

And then hyacinths come to mind
Entering the irises of mine —

Their beautiful and brazen heads
Hovering and floating, ever tight
Within their clustered throngs,

Like sunshine above the lilies’ scattered gold.