One Note

In the night he played the organ of sorrows whose vast pipes spanned continents and whose music was time, the sea in which he swam and dissolved to become a wail sounding the deep where beginning and end are one note...

All At Once

The cat licks her paw   to a Beethoven piano sonata   then lowers her cheek and goes to sleep   I sit and wrestle with my strangeness   I am and am not all at once   and the piano keeps on...

An Undeclared Mystic

Strange anything at all exists.   What is, is!   Profound tautology, but I can’t find a curtain to pull to let me see behind “is”   Wittgenstein snorts like an impatient horse,   “Haven’t you ever heard of getting snared in a language game?”   This is the form fashionable in the West of what in Indo-Persian lore once was called a “tilism” * a magical landscape that can pass for real and hold you for a very long time, even your whole life.   A substantial part of the beam of my attention, is always held in wonder that a pen can be, that I am, that a green shirt can be, that light and robins can be…   I’m dazed by what other people take for granted.   I’m a child or a fool or both mixed up together.   The wonder of water and palm trees and the blue of sky   And dark and stars and the ever unrolling scroll of dreams.   I admit it: I’ve been lost all my life and this is where I’ve lived and this is who I’ve been   An undeclared mystic       *See the “Adventures of Amir...

Bare Bones

too much to read, much too much to read   I watch the leaves falling from the trees   like words from the pages of books the sun has written   I, too, am a book that the sun has written   winter will be soon and white and cold   I’ve lost track of what I once may have known   I’m like that oak becoming naked   I’ve lost track of most of my questions   they’ve fallen from me like leaves from a tree   I keep on reading my way beyond me   I am the bare bones of who I once...

Enantiomers

Don Quixote and Sancho Panza enantiomers of a single compound   the right handed version and the left handed version   the same in chemical composition but breaking light differently   Myself, I’m a racemic mixture, Don and Sancho,...

Words For Waves

Words For Waves     If I were to compose words for waves, I’d wander the shore, mile after mile, month after month year after year as I changed ages, letting the sun set on me and the moon rise on me sometimes a scimitar, sometimes a golden eye, and the stars stick their fierce pins into the sky, letting the sun rise pink again on my pink flesh   I’d wander the shore and let my feet be familiar of the wear of sand and of rock, listening, listening, listening, for I’m certain that the waves have a language all their own, a way of speaking and making themselves understood and I have always aspired to be their translator. the importer of their ancient virgin truth   I’d leave the clouds to others, even though cloud and waves are intimately connected as both are water I’d leave the land, too, its vast barrens, and strange hewn grotesque overweening ranges of mountains all to others I’d keep my feet walking, listening, listening, listening for the hint of a word in the thunder rumble of huge breakers minted on the open ocean   Or perhaps it would be the fan of surf spray that betrayed a clue in a random moment, a first word confident of what came after though yet without form the waves are connected to the deep, to the hidden skin of the earth that was once surface, perhaps, then dove deep into a soothing darkness, an immense quiet, a place to wait and keep on waiting for whatever might come next   But suppose, after all...