What we are
what we might be
the charging resonance
of the clock
the surge and retreat
the streaming
inconsequential landscaping
of desire…

I could hold a thousand ideas together at once in the awareness of you, in a deep listening for pulse and context, or a single thought that keeps expanding to allow all your cherished places and feelings, all your aspirations and doubts and dreams of consequence, to take root, a thought that is fragrant and is all colors and is love wanting a geography to cover like rivers and lightning, a brave springtime ripe with melody…

I sit surrounded by glass and rain
ruined but for glass and rain
hoping for something warm and visionary to emerge
and settle on the splinters of a monumental clarity
knowing how to touch and heal them

a world built on past decisions
on the stuff of wanting
on principle and disorder
at once my own and all that there can be
breaking over the rocky edge of time
speaking wanting comprehending

one telling silence shades the meaning of all else
hammers out a problematic melody
against the glass and rain
and sits swirling in the inauthentic warmth
of the cup that shares this wondering with me

liberty is flush exposed
proposing justice come to her breast
& remember there were ideal beginnings
even clutched & smothered in time
& remember that peace can only be
their daughter & is otherwise inviable…

This our first step into the light
all heavy slinking mists aside
the waking secondary
a vigor made of grasses and gains

these the untiring mighty threads
of a song unwinding through thick woods
where a spirit skiff
on evergreen and thistle brings

an offer of wholeness
and the air is spent in somersaulting
half-made heats and sluicing rains
that tell an ancient legend

rains that reinvent the shape
of the audible world
regressing to first principles
erasing inventories

forgiving the investigative
indiscretions of reason
rummaging under steep battlements
after the sumptuous ache

that is significance unpossessed
or a struggle with thunder
kept in preserve deep within
the saturations of the mind…

everything is at once
much more and much less
than it pretends to be

the romance of place
the need to know
the inner life of another

the whispering sea deep under the night
hints of failure lightness & resuscitation
falling together behind the glass

I think to myself in quiet excursion
you cannot be what you are
as you cannot be what you are not
because the world is too brief & teetering
& the sense of self is too constant & necessary
you cannot empty out the hollows
& the high sierras by mind or hand
nor heat the agency of despots
to a curling winnow
unless you speak clean & free
& detail the beauties everywhere roiling…

a quiet gaze, a constancy
going further into the imperfect
mystery
that word
the whole spanning lightness
of the single memory
the beginning
to overcome
the seeing novelty
where there is timeless remaining
the scent
of having connected
with other kinds of radiance
and awakened

As a blue-fire sun came up over the sea, milky and iridescent, there was no sound, there were no motorized noises, the world was sleeping and nothing moved but the water and the sun. The time was not important, but the thick of atmosphere and the damp of unknowing was. Jitters at the cold of morning. Trembling at what could not be said.

Lydia moved to make something fluid of her anxiety. Always. She wanted to be known as someone who knew herself well and was comfortable with that, because she did and she was, but she was never comfortable with the capacity of other people to see these aspects of herself clearly. Too much at stake, she would say.

One came to think: too much at stake to take a chance on being misunderstood.  But why?  Why at every moment was so much at stake?

I loved this way of concentrating universal truths and global risk into the idea of what another might hear.

In this way, her intensity overtook my capacity for calm or solemnity: these I gave to her, these rights and incantations I placed under her control, hoping there would be a cosmic reward.  We would battle together, and we would rest together, and she would see that I understood what was at stake and for that reason, was able to see who she was.

But one believes what makes the most bountiful world of comfort and knowing, in the moment; it is nearly impossible to shake this temptation, to walk in broad fields of zen discipline, clear of mind and flowing with the diaphanous mystery of what is true, or might be, and not inject our desire, our need, our insecurity.  She would see or not see what I knew of her, but not because I did or did not; she would see it because her soul was caught up with mine in a way that made sense to her, that gave plenty to her personal mythology.

Lydia came and went like the tides, and was a kind of respiration.  We breathed together, and waited together for the sunrise, and we moved toward a certain dream we never openly discussed and never put a name to.

The mystery of what collapsed, when I realized she would not be there the following day, is the mystery of what goes into willing, the will to give oneself up for something of this world, something impermanent, something the stoics would warn you will become like dust and earth and be reshaped tomorrow into something else.

There is a space of reason beyond loss, of comfort in the steel grip of doubt, that has come to exist because we know the kind of brazen pact of so many little unspoken guarantees, the haunted mornings we could not share, the quiet that was full of absence, and even the graces given me by people willing to hear of it, to want for it as well, to see the sublime torment of your distance…

we had spoken of breath, its role as salve and guidance, its ability to observe and to know urgency, to transmit the metaphysical, only by changing the rhythm of its one dance : we had offerred a word of advice to three lost souls —separately, maybe they knew each other and were intertwined in their unraveling— about finding the waves under moonlight, and then we talked in all directions about breath till the moon washed out in the frothy yellow morning, and I remember we said that stretch of sand, and the rippling hints of oceanic depth, glistening with the determined light of that moon that had come for us, would remain as it was, perfect and unassailable inside us and that only those who knew about our shared immortality, our grandiose heartwelling treasure of affections, could know about that breathing moon…

I remember it now, or it remembers me; I am made of that story, that metaphor, that matchless timing of souls, I am composed of that superlative getting-into, that seeping and evolving, that surpassing fixture, by the almost lamentably cumbersome sensation of being lost and adrift in beauty; that’s how I recall it, why I’m still searching, still fighting, still reading the signs, marking progress in the hopes of getting back to that, back to the place where we were one shape, one self, two kinds of agony and just marveling and pouring promises into the world…