[fire and air] brighid

                near imbolc, a fire festival

tonight, leave out the white flags for her blessing

ancient flight, firelight, moonlight cresting

Imunuri Prompt: Elemental - Conflagration

scribe an offering 
inspired by the element of fire, heat, conflagration

what blazes in you, what moves you QUICKLY, what transmutes, and what are you warming with your flame? what, if incinerated, would grow from your inferno's ashes? write conflagration.


Tags: conflagration, epic-earth, poem, <poet's moniker>

*****
Epic-Earth on Imunuri: An ongoing series of earth-related prompts as part of an Imunuri experiment to dwell repeatedly on a theme and its riffs, and/or the possible poetry challenge, bit by bit, of producing an epic or body of poems...

Image source: Firestorm, Mirror Plateau, 1988, National Park Service, Public Domain on Wikimedia Commons

Lives of Knives

from Homer (about the chariot race)

"at the .... keep from being dragged in case of accident, they carried a falx, a curved knife. ... to the Zephyrs, the Greens to Mother Earth or spring, and the Blues to the sky and ..."

***************************************************************************************************************************

                                             Lives of Knives

                                      Thrust into world of commerce
                                      Knives begin journey
                                          to be handled
                                          to be sharpened
                                          to be dulled
                                            broken, loved and thrown
                                      Mishandled
                                        lives of knives
                                           stuck in targets
                                           stuck to racks
                                           stuck in sheathes
                                           peace tied or not.

After the wreckage: The torrential questions

1. Where have I offered my slander of another
    When I was feeling the most desperate for connection
    And all that was available was an allegiance
    Against a "common enemy" ?

2.  Where have I divided or fractured what
     Knowing it's best and most beautiful truth
     Would remain whole ?

Massive Supersymmetry

decoding

natural as breathing

unseen sight

Higgs boson

unanswered question

(s)

a = morning

b = afternoon

c = evening

d = day

does a + b + c = d

(?)

apparent passage

of time

walks all over

everything

we think

($)

without time

the space

between

things would not

contain monies

(!)

as if those

spaces

did as we think

dark matter

anti matter

(*)

IT previously

not conceived of

not seen

electroweak field

strong interaction

(10−22)

of a second

disassembles

Standard Model*

shaking in its

spin-parity

(¡)

little

do we know

yet beautifully adapt

(we = cognizant)

as/within all forces

(<3)

*the so-called Standard Model of Elementary Particles

Gathered at skirt's edge

from: Lawrence Durrell’s “Pope Joan” this passage on page 24:

“Tell me daughter, he would say, “What is tongue?”

“Air’s whip.”

“What is air?”

“The element of life.”

******************************************************************

Gathered at skirt’s edge

breeze westerly brings

foggy drink to redwood lips

 speaking Muir language  

   scattering

      seeds, blast effervescent

        

squall speaks

“What is sung?”

(near tempestuous bark)

   Miwok!

 “What is sown?”

    air’s hem

  “What is air?”

(gathered at skirt’s edge)

  “The element of life.”

Zephyr

   "What's What? If I knew that, I'd be a sophomore at Purdue." 
         —punchline from an old joke


As deeply as I might dig,
there's deeper digging below.
As empty as the space is,
there's substance in the hollow—
parley of vacuum and wind,

rhythms and their air echoes.
I am not here just because—
at least that's not why alone.
My flight of pitches and yaws
enrolls me, falling, twisting——

So I walk. I sit. My jaws
open gates of sound vectors,
my body of precious flaws,
my brain of texts of lightning—
and only this great wind blows:

to breathe what will happen next,
then to taste how I connect.

Imunuri Prompt: Elemental - Zephyr

scribe an offering 
inspired by the element of air, squall, zephyr

what blows in you, what moves you INSISTENTLY, what breathes, and what are you pushing with the force of your air? what, if lifted in cyclone, would be transported by your vortical spire? write zephyr.


Tags: zephyr, epic-earth, poem, <poet's moniker>

*****
Epic-Earth on Imunuri: An ongoing series of earth-related prompts as part of an Imunuri experiment to dwell repeatedly on a theme and its riffs, and/or the possible poetry challenge, bit by bit, of producing an epic or body of poems...

Image source:  Occluded mesocyclone tornado, Oklahoma, 1999. Public Domain, NOAA

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)

oldearth

for a friend, after getting the email from genetic testing from relatives never known

Who is today's dweller of that cave house?
...
Destiny has brought us together
        from all corners of the world. 

From Crossing Hangu Pass, by Zhan Shichuang, translated by Charles Q. Wu

in one generation, it can be a family riven
later, a minefield, avoided
in a later generation, it can be a missing tooth
finally the time ripens to reach out
and fill the heartmountain with oldearth


 
sometimes, we don't know we had holes
til whole again, uprighter, spacious
we begin to dance

 
the body starts to move in ways unknown
pivoting then leaping from origins
finally known, sturdy earth everywhere underneath us
now: contact, knowing, sensing

 
we can only leap from contact

    oldearth   provender

               dance

Snail signs infinity

drawing by J Shon

                                   

                                                            Snail signs infinity

trail across low-tide sand

encircles itself once

loops again

snail signs infinity!

shell swirls

echo design bands

leave infinite behind

head north.

Brushless

Brushless

fire lit

to sit

beside

you

smoke drifts

thoughts away

from mind,

leaves you behind

burning wood

warmth makes,

takes

you inside

orange flame

air lifts

to find you

painting brushless.

IMUNURI Prompt: Mountain Songs

Hanyu Pass (from Every China)

Who is today's dweller of that cave house?
...
Destiny has brought us together
        from all corners of the world.  

From Crossing Hangu Pass, by Zhan Shichuang, translated by Charles Q. Wu
Poets of place, lovers of earth lore, take out your pens (or tablets), croon to the hills!
These images of Hanyu pass visualize the mountain site where Laozi wrote the Dao de Ching.

Check out this site that features planet-wide MOUNTAIN SONGS.
What is your local place, hill, or peak whispering through you?

 Find the clickable Googlemap here: www.mountainsongs.net
of click one of these: http://www.mountainsongs.net/translator_.php?id=21

Riffzone: take it low, write from the mountain's base ... or write a poem of climbing... or take it high to the peaks. Write a poem of restoring earth...
What functions do mountains have in the earthsystem, and/or the worlds' creative capacity, epic poets of earth?

Riff 2: Start a poem with a line you find on Mountain Songs site (and credit it, those ancestral poets love to be praised)

Riff 3: Sparking from this entry on Mountain Songs, "All Nature's Splendors Captured in This Gourd-Heaven"

http://www.mountainsongs.net/poem_.php?id=1029
What would we see if we hopped into your Gourd Heaven? Give us a tour in your mountain-song...

Tags: mountain-song, poem, <poet's moniker>, epic-earth

Epic-Earth: An ongoing series of earth-related prompts as part of an Imunuri experiment to dwell repeatedly on a theme and its riffs, and/or the possible poetry challenge, bit by bit, of producing an epic or body of poems...

Notes from Mountain Songs: (By Professor Charles Q. Wu)
This inscription alludes to an ancient Daoist legend, "The Gourd Master", recorded first in the History of the Later Han. Here's a version from The Biographies of Spirit Immortals, by the Doaist scholar-practitioner Ge Hong (283-363).

"The Gourd Master was a Daoist healer. He came from afar to sell medicine at the market. After he had sold all the herbal pills in his gourd, he would come home and hang the empty gourd over his seat. After sunset he would turn around and jump into the gourd to no one knows where.

Changfeng, the market officer, was the only one who saw this from upstairs and realized that the Master was no ordinary person. He swept the floor in front of the Master's seat on a regular basis and even brought him food. But curious as he was about the Master's strange disappearances, he never dared ask any question.

One day the Master said to him, 'Come again at dusk when no one is around.' Changfeng did as he was told. The Master said, 'When you see me jump into the gourd, just follow me and you will be there.' Changfeng followed the Master's instruction and tried. As soon as he put out one foot, he was already in there before he knew it. Once inside, what he saw was no longer the gourd, but buildings and scenic objects of all shapes and colors, gates leading to more gates, and walkways leading from on pavilion to another. With the Master were dozens of retainers.

I'm an immortal,' said the Master. 'I disgraced my celestial position because my subordinates did not serve with diligence. On that account I was banished from above and returned temporarily to the mundane world. You are teachable. That's why you were allowed to see me (as I once was).'

From this story comes the phrase "Gourd Heaven", and apt symbol for a classical Chinese garden, which may be limied in space but contains a microcosm of all nature's wonders.

Quoted from Listen To The Fragrance, Literary Inscriptions in Lan Su Yuan, The Portland Classical Chinese Garden by Charles Wu, published by the Portland Classical Chinese Garden www.portlandchinesegarden.org

Desert road trip

White dust rose in our rear view mirror
Inexhaustible silence pushed us in deeper 
We became vast in its presence 

Whenever we slowed or stopped
Wherever our feet touched ground
We found a hundred sorrowful things to love

Inside the Navajo nation
our tires hit washboard road
A clunky expedition met
the imposing dignity of ancestral desert 
Where ancient cave dwellings converge 
with patches of mobile homes and abandoned Chevy trucks 

A ghost town feeling threads through random settlements
Here and there, they seem to thrive...but most appear as if stranded

Pueblo ruins and corrugated aluminum shanty-villes  
Mirror each other at a distance
Collapsing into the sand,  the ground... as if trying to return home

Still,  the strength of the tribe endures
As does the Dwarf Oak and the Cottonwood with its 
complex Sage understory

The ways of  Song and Story are protected here
by those with a powerful will to wait 
Who suspend themselves upside down on the oldest limbs
of desert trees
Watching the land intently as they have for millennia
With all other eyes ( more than human )
They peer through their canyon wall windows
Whispering blackened or nearly extinct languages
who speak the textured sounds of  the woven Place
  
Songs guide, tales navigate wilderness 
and negotiate threat
   
These we imagined embedded in thousands of caves and Kivas 
The refuges of the still threatened land
Vast reservoirs veiled by darkness
Vulnerable to pillagers and thieves  
even now.

"The veils"

The light that shuts is still the light—

which is what? The bulb, the socket,

the meeting of wires and current—

the switch, the Tinkerbelle faceplate—

the concentrated heat, the shine—

the cloud of rays that radiates—

the objects upon which they bounce—

the eyes that absorb all those glints—

the mind that somehow pronounces

-gh- as a silent switch making lit

long? How do we divide what counts

as off or on? The room goes dark

while outside comet-eyed cats pounce

on each other with fearsome yowls.

Now the light is on for those cats—

and for the bugs under the hose.

The veils move like nothing we know.

She Lies, a Simple Sin

I ask her to take a veil
and hold it up to her face,
simple shadow play

as the dancer Salome wed

to the idea of my head on ice
like the Baptist or Antoinette.

She could drop all seven shrouds
on a visit through the underworld;

but, she shuns my comedy.
She rips the cloth in two and swears
my demise is imminent, but not yet.

She covers me with lace
and plods through deep dark myths with army boots.
She lacks imagination. She's heavy.

Then, she lies like snow on leaves in the south,
a lightness that melts before morning's out.

Bring branch to fire

Bring branch to fire

dring

  drang

    “cock a doodle do”

awake on the Other side

     dawn break too

bring a branch to fire

     & “Wail”

bring a pail

     to sound

     & fill

ding

 drang

earliest bell, chimes blue

blurred lines meld

& which side of the mesh?

to look through to see which other side

pop! button...snooze pop!

ten dream scenes more

break dawn dance

    Over there

        Here

     a drop in water

       is of water

           &

surface ripples not.

up hardwood stairs

 chant begins

tee-wah-oh-so-la-me

 wen- fo-lo-see-da

  wen-fo-lo-cee-day

dring

 drang

  bring brang branch to fire.