You,
brother
in solitude,
seated on a lotus
with the moon in your hand!
Coward I must have been
before my body got me
and made it palpable
in cling of flesh
to life brink of Samhadi,
its swift drop downward
into timeless all and nothing
which I dare not know
and yet desire.
A heft of longing
leans to it, yet tenses
to neural probe.
I would be brave
under the splendid swing of arc,
beneath the keystone,
under the curve of arm and lifted thigh
of Nataraja
frozen to stance of mudra
in the eye of noon,
yet could not,
with the wrinkling of this fear
beneath my skin
maintain it and be safe
as long as gnat bite.
Safety locks me up,
casts me in bronze, immures me.
I would be done with it and send
the remnants of its sheath
in droplets, shedding
globules of grief in token of my being
down aching curves of wanting
into God who waits,
but never reaches me quite nearly;
away from God who calls
from shelter of my flesh for contact
with that against which flesh is barrier:
the all consuming Self.
I must not be uprooted, yet must fall.
I fear the plunge and petrify,
run through with veins of screaming gold.
You,
brother
in immobility, refrain
from reaching out to help me,
for my fear of God
who leaps to sunburst from your touch
will be that one decisive
and most wanted shock
that must unlock my terror
and release me, the one
decisive and most wanted shock
that must unlock my terror
and release me, the one decisive
and most puissant fear of all:
its outcome in desired disaster.
You,
brother
in solitude,
seated at fulcrum,
can you understand the ways
of God who slits the iris
of the eye of noon
through which I see you
and defend me?
Here he comes tinkling
with a bell snarled in a chain
from which a crippled Crucifix
competes with a medallion
of Yin and Yang, the Mogen David
and the thick set sledge.
He thinks a jingle of loose change
and keeps his eyes obliterated
by the snake on stilts. Nimble
his finger on the long loop
of his beads, slack abacus
that tallies up his prayers.
Quaint storm wit flecked with rain,
a windy will, now here, now there
among the curious, among
those whose bruised hope dangles
from their crooked crosses, hangs
from the sly grin soaring
through the tufts of trees:
a moon quirk of a mouth that moulds
the mantra mount of dollars,
multiplies, dots decimals on gainful nights
when squalor sold for hundreds
and the weekday mind
squirmed in the wooly cubicle
and sloughed its meagre pay.
In crossworlds caught at crisis, timelessness
of two dimensions deepening to time drives words beyond
the flatness of a photograph between
the start and full stop of a sentence caught
in an onwardness continued through eternity.
We meet the crux of crisis on a warehouse shelf
kept in an endless speaking and persistent motion graded
throughout successive grays beyond
prohibitives of surface for no ear, no eye,
no motive lifting stillness from the distances.
How shall we share with others in the voice that calls
from cubic growth of breathing, peeling plane from plane?
Lens, light and sound have caverned up a firmament
and no one is allowed to know how vast it is.
Foghorns bring the loneliness of seas
up the empty street and leave it there
hung out to catch you.
These poems first appeared in 1968 and 1969 in the little
magazine Sanskaras,
published by William J. Matthews and Ronald Hobbs. Thanks to Ronald
Hobbs for providing the copies.
GO BACK TO THE POET’S PRESS MAIN PAGE