I rarely walk beyond that tree
That is home to birds —
And air — too close
To the undermined
Riverbank.
I’ve tried holding
The tree — hands uncertain—
Taking a step —only one —
A test of courage —
A test of foolishness.
Even at flood height
The water invites —
And seems — at times —
To flow in reverse — back
Up between its banks —
I follow from here.
The mask doesn’t reach ear to ear.
It has one eye through which to peer.
(Not all you see is pure and clear.)
It does not change how you appear,
Or turn you into a seer,
Nor prevent you being a hearer.
It will hide an impolite leer
And a few, not many a tear.
You must lift it to sip your beer,
But not to look in the mirror.
Someone will say to you, My Dear,
There’s nothing in your life to fear.
As if you are blind, they will steer
You off the end of a pier.
Is the word a tautology?
It seems to mean “if less, less.”
Or is it, as in theology,
Tinged, like faith is, with a guess?
What will happen is contingent
On (an unless) what might not be,
Should the past or future invent
Some unclear possibility.
We use the word every day.
Are we afraid to speak the truth,
To even believe what we say
(Old, we say it — less in our youth),
Nor mean to understand unless
We think unknowing to express?
Like a sty in the nation’s eye,
He’s a hiding-in-plain-sight guy,
A cataract of the blind lie —
People still believe him, though why
Is as mysterious as Pi.
A carnival barker, though sly,
And a connoisseur of the small fry
He munches either moist or dry.
He beckons the bucks from on high.
They all trot up to him and sigh.
He has a mantra: I am I.
There’s no disputing that, just try.
There are some who think he's a spy.
We know he’s set the world awry.
Note: The number Pi is considered
mysterious due to its irrational and
transcendental nature.
If you dare to tell him he can’t
The monster starts his dancing rant.
The noise blasts an half-empty House
Where nothing stirs, not even a louse.
His legs lift just so high and pound
And pound the ground like myriad rounds
Aimed to shell the foundations
Of once allied loyal nations.
(He makes of enemies his friends
For obvious and evil ends.)
His confused shrieking grows louder,
Anger eloquent as gun powder.
When dance and rant become one
The work of dictatorship’s done.
There is an universal tendency among mankind to conceive all
beings like themselves...We find human faces in the moon and armies
in the clouds. David Hume
The anthropomorphic follows me around —
In carpets, tree bark, and abstract paintings.
“If I am the figure, what is the ground?”
Each face whispers, “or am I just feigning?”
Or am I the pretext for pretending,
I reason, a message I am sending
To cohere around the inchoate
Only I can look at and recognize?
These flickering (blinked) images sate
My comprehension, if not my eyes.
“My face will melt if you don’t look at me,”
These ghost images say repeatedly.
I too unseen uncertainly erase —
Though an unreal painting could take my place.
Zen tiger — imaginary,
None living in Japan — just pelt
From which to construct a kitty —
No sharp claws and jaws, no fear felt.
It slips between stands of bamboo
On silently pillowed paws,
A denizen of our thought-zoo
Who will blink out science’s laws.
It rubs against ungiving grass
And under the shoots’ fingers purrs.
It hides as other animals pass,
Having no taste for flesh-filled furs.
Like time the tiger emerges
And as quickly all things purges.
No, it’s the beginning that is beyond
And the ending is already here.
No idea nestles inside a sound
Like a resting invisible deer.
Surprised, she’ll try to outrun your car
As if she knows just who you are.
She is not afraid or even shy,
And does not know how not to die —
Only the free are hunted and chased.
She can hide but she cannot escape.
What is that word again, that soughing,
Shortness of breath, then a coughing
That betrays not presence but intent?
She’s always known what beyond ending meant.
The structured residue of brilliance,
A layering of the lesser or least
Into a visual and mental feast,
Or, gestures, moveless, the dimliest dance —
Paint rules the kingdom it created,
The painter’s invisible intent, fingers
Drawing on experience that lingers,
Slowly diminished, subtly ablated,
Of null paintings seen or contemplated.
(Or call them conscious unconscious singers,
For all music without words is abstract,
The furthest thing from an idea or fact.)
The painter has brushes to think or say.
He motions — his eye makes or takes away.
Thanks to Jeffrey Strayer for posting the Marden painting
and for suggesting two lines of the sonnet.
Can only the human think abstractly?
We do not perceive things exactly
As they are, but as we want them to be,
And often render the senses free
Of a connection with the universe,
As if meaning’s impossibly perverse.
A bather steps in an inky river
Where no light shimmers and snakes slither.
These movements set like Toltec stone
Without muscle, sinew, skin, blood, or bone,
Exist nowhere but on canvas, gesso
(Not even in the artist’s mind, but mine
And those willing to look inside a sign),
With no relationship to what is so.
The sound of time is the sound of light,
So the morning sun would seem to say;
But now, when it’s either soon or late,
Is silent, dark, when any shade of gray.
Infancy (now in its shroud of amnesia)
Saw a thing as it was there to hear
With ecstatic nerves of synesthesia,
Or like a planet without an atmosphere,
Naked to the bombardment of the stars,
Spun from space. That memory, stored
In our synapses, fights a prolonged war
To glimpse what our mind has barred;
A light the color and the sound of time
We know is not a product of the mind.
I’ve always seen the world as quivering,
Motes in my eyes, random as Brownian
Motion, more than sight, but delivering
What has been awaited for an eon.
Even rocks I find on Michigan shores,
Which crowd memorabilia on my desk,
Tremble in the dimness the light abhors.
(Rocks have too many answers, so don’t ask.)
Living things are a different matter:
Trees, cats and birds shudder even when still,
And when they move they pretend to shatter
Within a blinked tear that’s started to rill.
What’s not dead is my electricity,
Motion grounding my own haecceity.
Note: haecceity (hakˈsÄ“É™dÄ“/) means “the property of being a unique and individual thing”
I see that cold red dot
At the center of all,
As I stand, myself a spot
Not round, not flat, not tall,
No more than open eyes —
No zenith on horizons,
Just air as thick as sighs
Repeat seeking orisons.
The red dot draws on will
Until I disappear
With nothing to fulfill,
Nothing to find or fear.
At the center of pressure
I can’t take its measure.
