February 19, 2007

Tidings: Soul can flame like feathers of a bird.

We have been together long enough to have reminded me a second time (my, how time flies) that it is time to write a note for Tidings, and so I will try. What follows is an architectural endeavor as I think of the flight of birds.

It's Lent (or, nearly), and I've been thinking about this born again stuff. And I have also been thinking about what is to be said on Ash Wednesday, and I've also been thinking about what is to be said on the 1st Sunday of Lent upcoming. There is a relentless demand for words. And so I think of bird song as an alternative, and I think of one of the characters named Bear of a story I am reading by Charles Frazier (of Cold Mountain) Thirteen Moons. Bear believes that the written word kills the spirit of language, its flight. And of all the birds, I think of the thrush, or of many of them that have the most beautiful bird songs because like most all birds they have a syrinx for song, whereas we have a larynx for words; but distinctive to their own species, many of the thrushes have two syrinxes and hence they sing the most beautiful and complex of bird songs. Ah, the morning chorus, how jubilant, how refreshing, and how soon the spring that will have us rise to it, its morning prayer.

And this is what comes to mind: In the beginning was Word, and Word was with God, and Word was God. Somehow I want my words to conform to that Word, to be the eerie song of the dove: I want to speak the truth about the way and the life. I do get a funereal sense, though, as I write of a dying spirit of language as it is put into print, so like a pinned butterfly in an insect collection, an Audubon bird on his canvas. Yet, I know of the demand on the 3rd generation Christians (those who knew a very old person who knew someone who knew one of the apostles as a very old man) to produce a canon of Christian scripture...words, written words, that would delimit the deterioration by word of mouth memory. My, how fabulistic the stories would have become (did in fact become by then)! A canon of words to safeguard the remarkable person of Jesus, Word made flesh, the embodiment of Word, lover of fish and story, and fishers and fish stories.

(And so the not so new insight: we live by and in word. How fragile and conditional is this being! this human being, and Jesus was one of us, these beings, and he died...puff...but his Word was not puffed out, but became a bird with wings.)

We, people--our artists, poets, and saints--represent all things spiritual with wings. And so Jesus bestows upon us his Spirit, and it is something like a dove, and my, what a haunting song is the dove's song. And I think of the feather pillow weight, the smothering weight, of those (flightless birds) who would insist that this Spirit filled Word is just this one thing, and no other. Ah, the polymorphic metaphor: so like the flight of birds--the departures and arrivals--at the bird feeder whose chaotic non-pattern defies logarithmic reduction, yet points to the Strange Attractor originator or word(s).

Here's a few words for you: Abram -- Abraham & Sarai -- Sarah. It's only through the spoken word, not the written, that the aspirated life and significance of these name changes is formulated: God promised to them..., and their very names became inspirited.

I think of James, the epistle, the Straw Epistle Martin Luther called it not overly impressed by its meek moral demands. So also is the tongue a small member, yet it boasts of great exploits.

And so for Lent I now know that I am giving up (that is, I will try) all defamatory and derogatory words, all dirty words, all cynical words (that is, words of death, flightless words), all words that narrow and limit flight, life, and imagination; and I will speak (that is, I will try) only words of renewal and rebirth, words that soar and affirm, life giving words, aspirated words, and the song of the dove for the soul can flame like feathers of the bird.

February 8, 2007 : The Subjunctive Mood of Things



Every morning more or less
begins the same. I brew
the coffee that I have flown
in; USPS delivers it, but its
flown from Kailuha-Kona
where it’s grown 1500’ above
the Pacific, and roasted, bagged,
vacuum sealed, and mailed…
to me: a box with five
one pound gold bags of Estate, Kona
Blue Sky Coffee, medium roast.

Usually the prior afternoon while
preparing dinner, I fill the brewer
with water and the grinder with beans.
(Sometimes I forget.) At 5AM I brew the coffee
and bring an insulated cup of it to Pat,
and pour my own in a mug with the logo
of the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, and I sit
and read and brood. I sit: a hung
jury, sequestered, forced by a judge
to reconsider the facts…to ponder
the fates…to weigh again the evidence…
to reassess the testimony.

And you, Lord, through whom we all
have eyes, and who sees souls,
tell us if we all one
day will see your face.
(Antonio Machado)
I will make your overseers peace
and your taskmasters righteousness.
(Isaiah)
Some one is gone.
There is dust on everything in Nevada.

I pour the cream.
(William Stafford)

Visiting the moon is customary to feel
the metaphysical tug of things
toward one another. The white of
young girls crinolines in the late ‘50s,
puffing out their dresses like mini
Victorians. Dark sky lightened by
Celine’s last quarter and high pale
clouds, thin and racing from the west
bring thoughts of menstrual huts
of the Cherokees near Etowah north of here.

Like a botched hanging, there’s still life
in the hung jury, not totally disheartened,
and breath. Irony lightens the mood
as cream is poured into coffee. There is dust
motes everywhere as morning light streams
its rainbows through the sash. The face
of David Lynch, his strange hair, his cinematic
vision, his Hindu profession: a Unified Field,
his implicit connection….The subjunctive mood:
If… descends and settles: Yes.

February 7, 2007 : Suffer the children

Suffer the little children to come unto me for such is the kingdom of heaven.
And so the day begins with an implosion of innocence.

First, out into the Bony moon of the Cherokee past its ripe prime though still a gibbous pale in the midnight blue predawn, soft as a selenite heart.

Trees shiver not as cruelly as yesterday under the Moon When Trees Pop: It was colder then; that was the Sioux north of here.

To a Vulture
What do you make of death, which you do not cause, which you eat daily?
I make life, which is a prayer, which is clean bones.

Why even before this the eye of the blackbird was envisioned and with it an opening sentence of Emerson, The eye is the first circle, and the second is the circle of wonder that it frames?

I wonder if Iraq is a vultureless land where death has no clean bones and all the rooks are seen departing.

Palaces
of countless rulers
now but dust
Empires rise:
people suffer.
Empires fall:
people suffer.

Suffer the children to come unto me….
Innocence, such a lean commodity, so hard to find clean bones, pure hearts, spirits of the uncontaminated.

We can only dream of the regime of tenderness with the soft selenite heart
knowing God is no Puritan, to live is to soil and be soiled.
Suffer the children to come unto me….

February 6, 2007


Asleep with a river nymph~~


Up from a night of beautiful dreams and deep sleep

There was a river with beautiful water, and a furrowed riverbed and a woman, a naiad (not a Palma Vecchio version, but lean with long dark hair and a flowing sun dress; [I found her picture on line*]). On my knees I wanted to move through the river, down or across I do not know. She warned me that the water was more treacherous than it looked. There was a passive desire to be dissolved into the river, a dream of non-being. I recognized the river and have dreamed there before or so I dreamed. And so in dream I gain as much as I lose in sleep: the beauty, the ephemeral pure presence, the taste of adventure (salt?) that is constancy. And I wondered after seeing the picture if I dreamed I was a merman.

When I woke I read of salt and of fire.
For everyone will be salted with fire.
…
Have salt in your self and be at peace with one another.

The reverie of fire is an attempt to inscribe human love at the heart of things.

Having ended her confession, she throws the string into the fire, and when the god has consumed it in his pure flame, her sins are forgiven her and she departs in peace. This happens as the men are searching for the cactus that will en-thuse them, enthios: put them in god, a dream of non-being.

The river is dangerous but good and beautiful; there is no surrounding terrain: there is nothing else. The woman is ephemeral and pure, the fire purifying, burning away the excrescences, leaving the salt and peace in the non-being of God.

*my.opera.com/I_ArtMan/albums/showpic.dml?album=4993&picture=50596)

February 5, 2007 : The fast I choose



Is not this the fast that I choose: Is it not to bring the homeless poor into your home? (Isaiah 58: 7)

And so my thought turns to Billy not heard from for 6 or 7 months. Homeless and maybe (likely) dead, not incarcerated, I checked. Last he called, he was as desperate as he ever was: on the street, seat of pants torn out, police seeking him (or so he claimed; even Billy loved a fish story to fill out his meager life). Billy was brought into many homes, the only one that could reliably hold him without bringing ruin on itself was the Georgia Department of Corrections, that and under a bridge somewhere (where, I suspect, he died). And thoughts turn to the poetry of Milosz away from his Book of Luminous Things (though Billy was a luminous thing, not many knew) and to his poetry of an alcoholic at the gates of heaven:

Not suspecting you had picked me from the Book of Genes
for another experiment altogether.
As if there were not proof enough
that free will is useless against destiny.

And so it must be, that those who suffer will continue to suffer,
praising your name.

His voice is heard only in the psalms of the exiled, alienated, and disenfranchised. His voice is not heard in the Book of Laughter and Forgetting, though he is forgotten by all but a very select few). His name is listed only in the Bible of Sad Things. Billy had a son. One wonders knowing this if this son has quoted from the Book of Genes.

February 4, 2007 : Metaphysics of Dawn (again)





All mornings are appointed psalms and so too today (93 & 96) and the morning’s psalms both say the earth has been made so firm it cannot be moved, yet Matthew’s enthusiasm is contrarian: If you have faith … and say to this mountain, “Be lifted up and thrown into the sea,” it will be done. The juxtaposition of this dawn: a word that reassures brings to mind a word that shatters the reassurance. Sitting in a chair wondering: can both be true? (Sitting in a chair knowing: the mysticism of the fixidity, a Zen, is surer than the faith of transformation, a physics.) Can the juxtaposition be related to the invisible traces of bird flight, movement without markers, and that’s why there are birds, movement without movement?

Across the east the luminous clay path of dawn: and I stand out, face the dawn, arms outstretched, thumbs skyward, northward and southward, and say to the Light, Rise, rise. And it rises like a mountain spewing forth its hot magma, as the dense unity of night shatters into the multiplicity of day.

Justice is found in the hoped for certainty of the balance of things; mercy is tendered in promise of transformation. Justice is political; mercy interpersonal.

The Albatross






Tried to write about birds and mountains but the only thing that came to mind were the same old words about wrens’ songs piercing the crisp morning air and mountain top transfigurations with haze and tents, and old bearded and wizened men, and stories about albatrosses nesting off the British coast along with those white birds the gannets that belong there. O well, it’s cold. The mind can only do what it can do and there have been no reports on the status of flamingoes in Florida in the wake of the statewide tornado that befell them yesterday; but they live south of there, mostly, I suppose. And so in the face of disasters such as rogue storms and ruined war policies there is the answer to the question put to Jesus, Some things can only be accomplished with prayer. In truth, this is resonate with Zen koans: Two hands clap and there is a sound; what is the sound of one hand? The sound of one hand is the mysticism of silence that is the wind, a brooding over the waters of chaos before there was beginning. Jürgen Moltmann says there is no problem if we are life centered rather than people centered: life will go on despite the sinking of Manhattan Island: What’s good for the nesting and lost albatross maybe what’s good. I remain, with respect to this, agnostic.

The End


It has been a long several months...since May when the thing was first identified. I guess it matters little that the survival rate is up over 90%; there is still the anxiety associated with the diagnosis; the two surgeries; there is still the scourge of the treatments: 2 courses of chemo followed by 32 radiation burns. (My sister asked if the radiation was contagious, that is, would I glow in the dark from sleeping next to her? I don't.) This morning by 8 it all or nearly all became history, something to be remembered and talked about. The treatment is basically past. There will be Herceptin drips every 3 weeks through August but that is a different thing. And there is still the threat of lympodema developing, but it has not yet and with each passing day the threat wanes. And there is the peripheral neuropathy in the feet that can last years...nerve damage as a side effect of the curative of the poison...drip...drip...drip. But it's over. There remains the gifts of the black Mustang GT to sex up her life a little, the big screen TV, and the IMac computer, and all the little touches, the boys care, etc. But it's over though the left breast is as red as fire engine. But it's over. Tonight we celebrate. The end.