soulweed

              in the
                kernel ball spitwad seed
            of my systeminstructions aka soulweed
                       there is no jealous yammer. not even a hum. kneel
              ing lightly before liftoff, between breaths, i feel the curve of death
       slice me in frozen airpuff in between. a guillotine of clarity. earth curve launch
es me to spin. before that. in the space between. my fingers float for nano. in deed,
all i am is this no-hum freeze. something keen and queer about the nobreath
nohum scene. you could not tell if i were faltering or in a state of piquante grace. i
brace for life, the way each breath is a womb, each lungfill a birth, launching me
out to life, a crisis of motion temporarily animating this ice queen sheen. i wait to
be returned to my originary still and silent clarity. i wait to be returned to what has
passed before this birth and what will spin my sky after i die, this serene. until
then, i keen in a quiet, elaborate parody, of living. underneath, beneath the breath,
sense it still, this still silent ellipse into which everything vanishes and from which
all arises. and returns. this no-rhythm rhythm of gift and release, i crawl back now,
in silent revery, returning too as a windless kite to deathless earth, a long smooth
slide back to birth. and before then too, before the big bang clang: the waveless
sea, the mirthless dearth. The emptiless reptile, the eyeless peak.  The grouchless sunken path to breach. Before all motion, before all time, before thunder and
cloud and red dawn sky. Before all this, and after too, I swim in a waterless 

eddy of leaking peace. Sweltering in tuneless shrill. Amorphous fog without any sense. I 

lurch in the no-words-now-for-what-is-not

Early Robin

Within 

Mt. Tamalpais

amphitheater

An early robin

brought word

“God has pardoned us”

&

angels lifted our shame

Allowed us to taste

purple huckleberries again.

Fisherman's lull

Fisherman’s lull

Days with no waves

when

content

to play out there

to float

to rock

throughout

daylight

without talk

in the fisherman’s lull

even surf given

gravity tug
- blue color all -

coot mute.

Once on the way to see god

It takes, sometimes, medicine, to know the world's hall

lifting sunwhiteyellow architectures in shadows of light,

reconstructuring amber cells of un-self, oinglebundoincy—

a funny puppet tongue bounding from an infant's laugh-roar

into the place where my hungry, poor bodies come to camp

and await meeting this or that or the goddish who.

 

Now sit patient in presence of sun, light, trees, bugs who

welcome staying, make this grassy path one such hall

where a poor, hungry body might sit until tired, camp

until arrived at dusk, sink flat until will-o-the-wisp light

lifts away into the infinite architecture's acoustic roar

to a song that first kissed my brow, oinglebundoincy,

 

oingboincy aardvarkaroo. Orange argle kangabull. Oinglebundoincy

some loving one sang to some me, sounding the letters who

crescendoed head-bump cuddles into some solid roar,

steadied into some mature sense—straight-walled as a hall;

who constructed the all-chitecture and steadied the light

when, once upon once, everything was spontaneous camp.

 

Now I circle barefoot around sun, light, trees, bugs where I camp,

I myselfslide conversing argyle sweet-the-sound oingleboincy

with the green air, interviewing wavelengths of green light

to uncover the self of green, its rainbow, its essential who.

Speak, tree, on behalf of green. Say, path and sapling hall

about the light that lifts from soil to upward roar;

 

how it transmorphs to the red ruddy bloody roar

of cellular body dust aardvarkaroo cloud in which I camp!

The nostril of Tao is some ancient pyramid's funerary hall.

I finger-walk inside humming oinglebundoincy

through its darkness and filaments, into the nostril who

beams its finger-intersected face—the tendererst light!

 

And in the ear, and the shapes of hands, the blood light,

the maroon architecture, brown movement, black roar

of proof we come apart from a loose argle-bargle of who.

The darkling cuddles the light, trees, bugs, camp,

swaddling all the secret funny whisper oinglebundoincy.

Now I walk in boots back from the all-storied hall.

The goddish emissary lights my infant heart similar to camp

memories. Memory’s roar now hums a bouncy, cool oingleboincy.

I forget its meaning, but I know in my amber who fills the hall.

 

Reprieve: Song to Sestina

Happily going along, I find this,

unbeknownst to me, the sestina form

A new puzzle for the resting of mind

Chartered territory long ago laid

By Daniel historic and Daniel now.

May I have this dance? I say to myself

With nothing to do, I rest in myself,

the structure wafting me along in this

Arriving, pausing, backing up, and now

discovering, climbing into this form

that innocence, that's always been, is laid

bare, nothing to do but enjoy free mind

What comes is what comes, penetrating mind

with that which effortlessly is myself

Form and formless interweave, nature laid

before itself as the seed carries this

code, its modifying of subtle form

reminiscent somehow only of now

That which springs forth is the What Is of now

Here again, nothing to do, freeing mind

offering no thing to the empty form

giving everything to empty myself

Reminds me of walking one step, just this

then the next, each open, empty, each laid

As itself, but not distinct, again laid

as itself, but not apart from each now.

To speak of the whole seems trivial in this

kind of insight, as cliches work the mind

dry and so tired. To refresh myself

again, I climb up this jungle gym form

Surrendering without collapsing form

The formless emanates like gold leaf laid

in the thinnest of sheets over myself,

bathing me free of I, me, mine. And now

this reprieve sings the song empty of mind

to the chorus of Sestina. Just this.

An Empty, Empty form is Happy, Happy now.

Only need is to have laid out the table; mind finds its own nourishment. I find myself in This.

Imunuri Prompt: Roaring Silence

cjw

Write a poem from the roaring silence.


 
Tags: loud-silence, epic-earth, poet's moniker, poem



 

NOTES & QUOTES

From Annie Dillard (1982), Teaching a stone to talk: Expeditions and encounters...

About silence:

"it is difficult to undo our own damage, and to recall to our presence that which we have asked to leave. It is hard to desecrate the grove and change your mind. The very holy mountains are keeping mum. We doused the burning bush and cannot rekindle it; we are lighting matches in vain under every green tree. Did the wind used to cry, and the hills shout forth praise? Now speech has perished from among the lifeless things of earth, and living things say very little to very few. Birds may crank out sweet gibberish and monkeys howl; horses neigh and pigs say, as you recall, oink oink. But so do cobbles rumble when a wave recedes, and thunder breaks the air in lightning storms. I call these noises silence. It could be that wherever this is motion there is noise, as when a whale breaches and smacks the water—and wherever there is stillness there is the still small voice, God's speaking from the whirlwind, nature's old song and dance, the show we drove from town. At any rate, now it is all we can do, among our best efforts, to try to teach a given human language, English, to chimpanzees…" (p. 88)

"The mountains are great stone bells; they clang together like nuns. Who shushed the stars? There are a thousand million galaxies easily seen in the Palomar reflector; collisions between and among them do, of course, occur. But these collisions are very long and silent slides. Billions of stars sift among each other untouched, too distant even to be moved, headless as always, hushed. The sea pronounces something, over and over, in a hoarse whisper; I cannot quite make it out. But God knows I have tried." (p. 89)

"At a certain point you say to the woods, to the sea, to the mountains, to the world, Now I am ready. Now I will stop and be wholly attentive. You empty yourself and wait, listening. After a time you hear it: there is nothing there. There is nothing but those things only, those created objects, discrete, growing or holding, or swaying, being rained on or raining, held, flooding or ebbing, standing, or spread. You feel the world's word as a tension, a hum, a single chorused note everywhere the same. This is it: this hum is the silence. Nature does utter a peep—just this one. The birds and insects, the meadows and swamps and rivers and stones and mountains and clouds: they all do it; they all don't do it. There is a vibrancy to this silence, a suppression, as if someone were gagging the world. But you wait, you give your life's length to its listening, and nothing happens. The ice rolls up, the ice rolls back, and still that single note obtains. The tension, or lack of it, is intolerable. The silence is not actually suppression; instead, it is all there is." (pp. 89-90)