cutting grass after rain 4-2-11

8/7/2019 Cutting Grass After Rain 4-2-11

1/26

OLD AND NEW POEMS

2011 The Village Philosopher 1

CUTTING GRASS AFTER RAIN (2006)Even after all these years

everything I write still seems a lie.

Nothing on the earth appears

convincing to my tired eyes.

Nothing I can summarize

fulfills my need to speak.

I would have chosen silence

if I had not been weak.

The new cut lawn sings in the sun.

Gunmetal wasps settle in to fan their wings.

Ten thousand things adjust themselves

on every side to make use of the One,

yet I cannot fathom the smallest face of anything.

She has a favored way of thinking.

Her lovely eyes turn up and right

for just a moment and holding brightness there

they smile, then she declines to speak.

My thoughts rush up demanding air,

spending wildly as if there is no death.

From week to week, regular as the moon

she makes investments in her face,

banking thoughts to feed some future race.

We make no headway here.

Mind chatter has no claim to make.

The sweetness of the yard can mend the heart

or tune the mind more truly than the art of thought.


2/26

OLD AND NEW POEMS


ETERNAL RETURN (1980)Stories we once loved

Are stories we love now.

And all we love

Is what we have loved,

And our inner eyes tie us

To other times.

This means that somewhere

Not easy to locate

We recline in the screening rooms

Of our particular fate

And barely say Ah! Um hm or some such,

But have never imaginedA higher darkness than this,

Or that we are delivered

By ideas of deliverance

Vast sets of them

In sympathetic resonation,

All finally ripped out

And thrown away,

Unneeded.

Gift after gift,

Falling into place

As an ordinary world.


3/26

OLD AND NEW POEMS


THE FIERY THUMBS (1986?)Oh, dark soft and deep

I shall fly straight and wild

into your sweet treasury,

crooning my fears up your sleeve:

no walls, no walls! The bliss falls

everywhere, killing us (in dreams).

This is your terror, your blessing,

your ancient devise:

If I see You, I see all things

conjoining, all meanings pierce

my heart to breaking.

If I yearn, run down the hall slaveringon all fours, burning, begging, singing

I see all things are

mad with mindless partnership.

This is what You offer, this piercing

clarity, that no one knows anything,

that the world is only to adore.


4/26


5/26

OLD AND NEW POEMS


THE ALCHEMISTGold, save this darkening mixture.

This heat has burned for days,

and the rude lump boils and dries,

flakes and melts again, endlessly.

They say this lore is filled with anagrams;

the search set me back a day:

I started, threw the book aside

No fire glow glinted on the vitrine bowl,

the lapis huddled like a shrunken toad.

The maker of this art

knew this peace of heart

would hold me like a manacle.

FOR WALLACE STEVENSHis third eye

was a poem.

All objects scanned as lines

of it, that is

he was a man possessed,

needing a touch of the most outspoken page

for cure.

A swaggering abstract,

the mere style of belief

referred to,

any cartoon of relief

proved the poem, that eye, intact

in the heart of things.

That eye loved;the Hartford Company, the ocean,

anything.


6/26


7/26

OLD AND NEW POEMS


LAPIDARY HYMNAll rocks have green cores.

They beat in silence,

hearing the worm turn,

the thunder of woodsmen armies

or the roar of burning.

Fire breaks them

and they go blind.

But in that split second,

they see the wild body of the universe.

VISIT THE HEART, SEE THE TRUTHDarling, your excess of mind

caught me out of love again.

Never consign me to the dust

of speech.

The coil of your heart's my armature.

In that sweet cradle of attention

down where the names are born

no one says lover or lovelorn;the current streams uncovered.

You may not know

all lovers freely rise there

like the air in chimneys,

unhindered, born of light.


8/26

OLD AND NEW POEMS


CABALISTIC THEOREM"Each point in superspace stands for an entire three-dimensional geometry."John A. Wheeler in American Scientist, Spring, 1968.

Everything refers to everything else,in the best books, the best worlds.

Really, she too knows all the worlds

turn back on themselves.

This is the fundamental theory

of romance, the old one,

the soap-opera fate

in which we each become speechless darlings,

shining in bliss, and losing our edges.

So that these mere events,

and these verbal forceps

always graze each other but

unawares, by mirrors

endlessly facing into clearer and clearer

like the glass pores of space,

Indra's bubbling vacancy,

the space around you, in you

of you.


9/26

OLD AND NEW POEMS


THE LOCAL GROUPOur hearts are like

that hulk buried in Australia

waiting for neutrinos

indescribably battered,

by ancient, invisible news.

Hard against the membrane

of belief, through sheer

remembrance, they clock

the pulses, and await the rain

of final adoration.

THE MECHANISMThe determination to be born

formed in the vaguest turn of thought

as warm breeze that keeps blowing

in the same direction

minute to minute, year to year

feeding the fires of discourse

through each disconnection, untilthe thin flame inside fear

bends, and directs me to the source.


10/26

OLD AND NEW POEMS


OLD MAN ECHOSide by side

on the limestone stair

two grackles peck at lichen.

It tears silently

like antique leather,

green dust on the snow.

It is December.

The sun burns cold.

Few thoughts.

Straw whistles

in the crosswind.

Wyomissing Creek has shifted

twice since I was twelve.

Icy rain falls on crabgrass now,

where crayfish hung suspended under ice.

Once, during June flood days

deep under the borough,

breathing fog

we peered out, sun-blinded,

through an iron screen:the sun rode trembling,

mirror slick and green

on the roaring cataract.


11/26

OLD AND NEW POEMS


LET'S SAY WE COULD TALK ABOUT ITThis slice of time

is fat with puissance when I start;

I cant sneak up

before the forms are all laid out for questioning.

Lay back and rest.

Im already seeing everything that shows.

The parts hold all the parts;

the seeing knows what can be seen

right at the heart of things,

before I ever mention witnessing.

HOW WE SEE

Language is the ocean,

My head swims.

Verbs, adjectives, gerundives

School, feed, mate

And dart away into

Abstraction.

Great white conceptsRoam for the lost and bleeding.


12/26


13/26

OLD AND NEW POEMS


FARTHER INLAND STANDS THE OAR

These days I reflect upon the pains

The demigods have taken to hide beyond the worlds,

All of which exist to exhaust our human wishes.

If we can stay awake and creep beneath the layers,

Lay open the birthing place of the sayable forms,

The ontic crucible parades its metataxonomic shocks,

Knots inexplicable, too fast or too reluctant to be resolved,

A continuous mummery held in place to mask the disconnecting forces

And the horrors of disturbance lying just beyond the gate

All to allow our shallow little world

To lodge in semblances of slow wholenessTimed to the plodding of our reconnoiterings.

There is a falseness by the door of this world

Where all our visions and intentions are thwarted by design.

Looking out, in the usual way, moving to understand

No eye survives the legerdemain, the distracting thuggery.


14/26


15/26


16/26

OLD AND NEW POEMS


LEHMAN HALL

In this dim space

Lit by distant crystal chandeliers

The light is scarred

And vague in places

As the language of it is,

But intimate,

Warm as this soup du jour,

Soft as the alphabets

Overlaying clarity.

MOYERS HILL

A dark, thin line

crosses the brazen wheat,

sun and air complying

with geometry.

The stepped fields bristle

like gold wire, then bow

towards the fire trail.

Wind passes intothe next valley,

lifting Paulas chickens,

dimming the creek

by bending the young beeches.

Where I lie

pollen drifts down the rock face

without touching


17/26

OLD AND NEW POEMS


ELM STREET, READING

Above the flint-soled, wing-tipped shoes,

ponderously crunching street grit into flour,

swings the olive golf-sweatered

bulk of the old, vertical

Negro gentleman,

one of those with hands like paddles,

slowly threshing air,

lips frozen into grim 20s elegance

under the carefully considered hat:

caramel straw threaded with black leather,

forever headed toward the station

and the Pullman car.

HOW IT GETS DESCRIBED

Bayberries shake, so

partridges of thought

fly up, knocking, turning.

Seagulls tack eastward

over dunes. Look, Hopkins,hindquarters of a cloud

darken, and rain

slows drifting sand.

Waves closing on the beach

feed mental fires, mine,

and presumably

the girls down the shore

where black grit and broken shells

form a crescent beside her.


18/26


19/26

OLD AND NEW POEMS


FRAGMENT

Very long ago, I drifted on unerring light

Through the slit of dreams

In search of my true earth.

Nothing less, nothing more.

Now doors open on another season,

But we choose to remain here

Locked in a fading year.

AT CIBONIS

You cant sit down

and dont touch the cheeses:

Salmonella.

We use this halberd

for the mammoth gouda.

They say our cheese

killed King Farouk.

The blond barrels are of some thin

Near Eastern wood,waxed, sweet and stringy.

They bulge between the staples

when rolled, trailing cedar sawdust

in red arcs.

You are very close to goats

when you lift the long, cold braids

up and out into the light of

Bostons Oldest Cheese House.


20/26

OLD AND NEW POEMS


SUMMING UP

So this is the little self.

Is it any wonder, dearest,

That we keep talking here?

If, out of fondness, I rejoice

In all your mindless foibles,

Whos left to give a true account

That sings and dances over time

Above my poor and sheltered views,

That tells with joy the little choices

I could never ascertain,

That held at bay the proof of everything?


21/26

OLD AND NEW POEMS


I WANT TO THINK ABOUT THE PECULIAR HONESTY OF THE RISHIS

Id hoped that Id be thinking useful thoughts

By the time I was to go.

Some part of me clings on to this, reluctant

Although the answers no.

Shes trim and breathtaking

In her Chinese silk shorts

Wedged upright upon her zazen barley pillow

Taking in the inner sights

Just as she was told on Friday.

People yearn for pictures

Of themselves in meditationAs proof theyre making progress

In the spiritual realm.

People want to see reflections

As they vote for other races,

And wear the purest clothes

As proof theyve made real progress

In the virtuous realm.

They never want to know

There is no progress and no realm,

No proof through some external check,

Or that the checking kills the virtue and the spirit in one blow.


22/26

OLD AND NEW POEMS


AFTER THE SATISFACTION OF THE WINE

Someone has now assembled

A portion of the world, but

I am not persuaded

By my minds cartography.

When each convincing frame

Has been paraded,

And in turn each has faded,

And you stand within this lantern self

A-burning in the frail glow

Of your brief autography,

Nevertheless you note

How irresistiblyStage rear a single trumpet

Yearns romantically in D,

And you must ask

Who chose the valved glory of that key?


23/26


24/26

OLD AND NEW POEMS


THE AIR IN THIS HOUSEThings are as they are (ah me, that godly state)

and summer light continues to approach the shade

where sun projects the Forms for children's eyes

but also in this house

I feel the currents pull along the closing door

and picture how they tour the space

finding paths in need of freshening

and though one breath breathes it all

like an old friend approaching

known by his August breathing in the halls

the fronts admix invisibly

they slam the bathroom door upstairs,and creak the cellar door

pass through my knuckle hairs

and draw bread dust into the table crack

pushing, pulling on the fennel leaf

these sundry tiny waves

that swell to cool my windward side

to merely sit and feel the winds at play

can enforce my sleepy happiness

connecting me to spaces everywhere

and so the larger portions of the house


25/26

OLD AND NEW POEMS


OUR PLACE IN THINGS

Our little band of self-sustaining sensors

making little villages and art

simple meaty darlings

doing our part

endorsing recursivity.

With deep infatuation

for the tricksome space we say we live in,

we take our readings,

make our findings

to the deep command,

assert our play,

surround ourselveswith storytelling, kings, and death,

the look of joy,

bowers of hope,

beguiling artifacts and axioms

and lies we love believing

for a timetales much like this

thinking all that there must be

is where we are, and looks this way,

and things are what we say,

until the blue syncope.

Is there a full report,

the full disclosure

of what we're calling purposes,

what was enshrined

beyond our scrannel compass,

beside our verbal envelope,beneath our rapturous decline?


26/26

OLD AND NEW POEMS

LATE JULY

All morning

the big flat-bottomed clouds

slide east along the Appalachian chain

while down below

in their slanted shadows

damselflies flash red or blue

among the spatterdock

landing for a second or twoNo need to knock

no patter mars

the open spaceabove this collar,

just the bubbling

of the doves.

cutting grass after rain 4-2-11

Documents