hipbone's poetry and more

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Differences


If I'm out and about in the countryside
there's a landscape, and a horizon,
and I understand that if I went to the horizon,
I'd have a new perspective,
I'd see another landscape, with
a horizon of its own: but here I am
looking at my own idea of the world,
and it too seems to have a horizon, and

my problem is that you seem to be
standing somewhere on the far side of my own
horizon, perhaps even two or three
landscapes away -- and here we are, talking.
We are agreed, too, that apples
are apples and oranges oranges. And yet...

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The Why of Painting


Get into this Chinese painting: huge mountains
busting into huge sky, okay? Somewhere,
you'd have to look to find it, a ledge
with a couple tufts of grass, what looks like
a cave, and -- yes, someone sitting there, sitting.
Get into this sitting. Now look closer,
there's a monkey on a branch from nowhere,
chattering away the way a monkey might.

Okay, identify the monkey. Not by eyebrows
or tail -- by his stream of chatter. You, he's
on about you -- on and on about you:
you are apparently this and that, stupid, bright,
unworthy, always always right, a failure.

Let monkey chatter, get deep into this sitting.

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Have been very busy guest-posting at Zenpundit recently -- one piece a snippy rant about trolls in the comment section of a blog I follow, and one a bit of my life story, centered around an amazing set of volumes called The Eranos Yearbooks, which Joseph Campbell edited.

And I just sent Zenpundit 5,000+ words about soldiers (of various nationalities, political views ans religions) who feel they need to obey orders from God and their commanding officers -- and what happens when the two sets of orders conflict. I'm not sure when that will see the light of day...

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Of myth


If she has a mastectomy, it helps
to have been a devotee of Hippolyta,
not in this life perhaps,
but down in the roots, where
what matters most dwells unseen,
where the only movement
stirs in the only shadows darker
than those of our exposure to sun,

there where you have not yet
been born yet have already passed,
here and hence, in a forgetting
whose surface is memory:
and if she be woman she moves
in that element, past, future and now.

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The Wind that Shakes the Barley


A map, you know, of a country, a good map
printed on linen, I know it'll be tough, but
take it, take it in both fists, bite it if need be
up at the top, at the edge, and tear it, rip
the thing in two, it'll be rough, some of the
thatched cottages will be torn in half, the
families ripped apart, don't worry, keep on
tearing all the way down till there's two

countries, shake off the dead, you'll need
to sweep up later, but for now, set the
two nations down on the table, just a little
apart or one of them atop the other here
perhaps, and let the menfolk have at each
other -- the women, women, let them watch.

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the british in ireland, 1920s, not something to be proud of

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Time Drags


And so the emotions, like British schoolboys
in v-neck sweaters and school ties who
clamber one on top of the other to climb a wall,
huddle together as anxiety and mount up
in me, until I can no longer think to write
except to say "the boys are coming, -- in two
days I shall see the boys again -- just
two more days, and my boys will be here".

And so I thought, perhaps I could sleep now,
splice time, wake almost as they arrive.
What's time without them? Why wait, why
drag the minutes round the hours three
whole damn nights and two more days? Time
bites its nails and stops at times like these.

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A harmony of this sphere


The roar of oncoming trains in tunnels,
hiss of hydraulic brakes, voices
modulated by machine, symphonic noise,
that's it -- I mean, the list gathers
to that conclusion -- glass
under foot, or pub noises, wiping,
bar girls drawing pints and comments,
the whole chatter and traffic of

life a symphony: don't deny it,
let it conduct itself, the brute sounds of
steel, rubber, plastic, acceleration,
sex, Mozart -- it will ring on
in God's ear, whether your aesthetic
favors it or not, long after you have gone.

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After Action Report (AAR)


Mistaking wedding festivities for an ambush
on account of the gleeful firing of rifles, or
for that matter, confusing an ambush with a wedding --
both false positive and false negative
cost lives, and thus generate statistics. Lives
also figure in other lives, though -- and
since any and each life story is a river that keeps
overflowing its banks and spilling into other

stories, and since stories are liquid
and of the mind, while bullets are all fire
and flesh, the wounds in stories, the gaping
holes where an aunt or child was, just a moment ago --
these break the fragile dams of statistics
to flood families and entire populations with grief.

I borrowed the idea for this poem from PW Singer's striking turn of phrase, "...upon hearing a burst of AK-47 fire, an infantry patrol leader might mistake a wedding celebration for an ambush, taking the game down a far more dangerous pathway..." in his article, War Games, in Foreign Policy.

I should perhaps add, for those who don't know me, that I monitor religious violence (and thus jihad) and blog about it on Zenpundit, and that I am also a strong proponent of the use of stories rather than statistics when trying to understand the complex and often violent world in which we live...

So that last poem weds two keen interests of mine. And that makes two distinctly anti-war poems in the last few days, eh?

Catching up with the last few days:

Take care


I think much, and
require little: this thinking
must be good for me.

I also pause
between thoughts.

Take a deep breath.

Allow them sabbaticals,
give them sabbaths.

That too seems good.

I use thoughts to open
windows, sometimes doors.

I look,
more than I leave, go, do.

Take frequent naps.

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[someone asked...]

Bless you


What's a blessing? At first I thought:
blessing is everything -- show me what's not
blessing, it's everywhere.

But then again, it comes down, I'd say.

You can't work your way into it,
worm your way in -- but play will get you
there fairly easily.

A blessing might give money,
but cannot, no, no, no, no, be bought with it.
Blessings are given -- not for the taking.

Blessings seem cruel at times, remember that.

A blessing is whatever grows you --
Rain and sun, two great blessings for plants.
Whatever nourishes, heals, lifts you.

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Either way


Holy Land: you might not think words
could take you some place so fast, but that's
language for you, a key to more
doors than a house can decently have,
instantaneous transport any place
you have been before, any combination
of places, any theoretical place that speech
can conjure for you, metaphysical

places -- a row of windows on other people.
Drop Jerusalem into the quiet hum
of traffic in Los Angeles, of crickets out
in the country, of high music
in the musing mind, and you are there:
at the Wall, praying -- or in al-Aqsa, praying.

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Paradox


The guy with the leaf-
blower blows his leaves from his
yard into ours, while

the zen monk rakes snow
while the snow is still falling.

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Here's how it happened


The monk was sitting there, empty,
so you just climbed right on in:
a little to your surprise, you found empty
was full of pine cones,
sea fog, and things Japanese --
but those things empty
themselves quickly, and then
there's really nothing much until

the next fog rolls in. So
that's what must have happened: you
were just sitting there,
and I must have happened by
and seen you sitting there
empty -- so I just climbed right on in.

.

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Zeroing


There are way more zen
masters than zen masters and
they move in on you.


*
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Mist and cliffs


The mountain again --
yet it's not as though the no
mountain went away.


*
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A koan for our times


How do we convict
a man we've tortured without
torturing justice?

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Stripping clean

The monk within -- David Steindl-Rast


The monk within -- that's it!
Peel off the business suit and the business
of business and the business
of feeling all businessy and even
just busy and all the rest of importance
and you'll find the monk,
within, perfectly calm and quite
zen about the entire business, and he

(or she) will if you're lucky begin
to peel off his robes and his enlightened
attitude and his zen
this or that and his damned
perfection and peer
deeper inside to look for a human within..


*
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Possible -- how should I know?


Dying was a great liberation for him,
though he didn't notice.
His mortal coil, you see, had pockets in which
such things as memories
and grievances were stored,
and no sooner had he shucked it off
than the entire web of meaning,
of the importance of this and particularly that

vanished poof! into a general purpose
unlimitedly enthusiastic
light that was in the fascinating process
just then of creating
from scratch out of its own glorious
self reflexive glory the entire blessed universe.


*
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Metaphorical, metamorphic


They do our thinking for us, the poets,
for we are busy with other things
and have no time for it, time being taken
to change a tire, bring home
bread or ensure that packages are
correctly sorted by zip code: therefore
the poets find themselves thinking on our
behalf, forgetting their shoelaces,

to ask what is behind the stars -- not
taking the black depths of night
for a "heaven of fixed stars" literally, but
as a koan, an invitation to pass
beyond what all telescopes can reveal,
through to the far side of the impossible.


To show us what grows there

of course, we do the thinking (and the sweating) for the poets, the thinking and sweating that provides them with such things as roads, phone lines, airplanes going to Bali, and so forth, when all they need is a pencil and a paper napkin.


*
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Tidings


Old earth has her meridians, and most maps
ignore them -- lines of force
that have the authority of winds,
and the whorls those winds cause at human birth
which we call fingerprints --
breaking and rejoining lines, fluid
as flow itself, glistening as glisten waters
tumbled over rocks, lines

like those found on the shells of tortoises,
themselves creatures of the great
dividing and rejoining flow we know
as a world. We may see, then, in the lines
broken and unbroken on the back of a tortoise,
or in the book, traces of the Great Tides.


*
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Mystery


A sheet of paper versus a bath:
the sheet of paper appears to have no
swirling point, whereas
there's a place where the water
spirals on out. Happily
or otherwise, the poet stares
at the blank page long enough to see
a vanishing point. And this

world? It too has a vortex,
all its dualities spinning into mystery
if you peer closely. But try
telling that to the people
who read poems, try
telling that to the piece of paper.

It seems I'll be leaving Forestville and the Santa Rosa area this weekend, and if anyone is going to Sacramento and would like to exchange a ride [with luggage] this Saturday for gas money and a bite to eat along the way, please email me at [email protected] ...

And if you find yourself with a spare room near here where a quietly aging poet could huddle with his books and English accent (and a few pennies in rent) a few months from now -- let me know.

Otherwise, I'll try to drop in some more poems from time to time -- and I envy you one of the finest places to live on God's green earth. I've loved it here!

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Well, I've been away in Chicago for a few months now, and it looks as though I might be headed back in the general direction of Santa Rosa in a month or so.

Here's a poem I wrote for a friend who had a birthday a couple of days ago:

Happy Birthday


I just saw a room filled with night sky, Chris:
as usual with rooms, one wall was behind me, so
I couldn’t see it -- but the two side walls and
ceiling seemed to be bulging slightly, space is
vast and there were myriads of stars, all
wrapped up in this one room -- vast space in
such a small place -- but it was the small place
that felt cramped, not the vast space inside it.

The stars seemed more densely packed towards
the center -- this wasn't astronomy, just a
blink or glimpse of the non-real to refresh
the real, a touch of dream for our waking lives.
So that's my wish for you today -- a galaxy
or three, gift-wrapped in a small room, in words.

I'll try to drop a few more poems in here over the next few days, and then see if I can find a suitable place to park a bunch of my books and live -- somewhere in the Santa Rosa - Sebastopol neighborhood.

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Ruin


Once the cathedral
roof falls and the walls crumble,
the doves can get in.

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There, and here
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I cannot know the heart of that African boy,
only that his father's words,
Have you no shame? shame him.
There is no food today, his mother says.
Life is not equal, from here to there,
and yet it is equal. One boy Hutu, the other
Tutsi, life is equal, yet it is not.
That one boy has a mother, and a father.
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Over here, the mind has no such simplicity.
The heart, perhaps, is simple.
Film allows us to see each other,
from here, to there, somewhat, but
life there and here, it is not equal.
It may be, in the heart, we can find the simple.

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< thanks, sara -- i appreciate the appreciation >