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Poets and refugees sing & want supper
& souls polled between them compromise.

I cleave to a better grieving, one
in which I am comforted by living

and dead alike as I eke out homage
to each. Killers among the quick

admittedly distract me with new wit
& dinners. May I be sparing in viewing

each; may I feed on old silences,
& keep the new ones for leaner days.

And may I forgive every part
of myself & of others, & vivid middle

spaces in our midst—and the hollows
of love & of friendship—our trespasses.

As promised to many friends recently, here is my poem on the Apple Tablet on the occasion of its introduction. It’s an historic moment that may or may not mean anything at all just now. It’s a lovely and yet somewhat scary instant.      [Editor's note: There is some trouble with the formatting function in Wordpress; allow the interlinear periods to represent stanza breaks.]

.

The more portable a day is

The less fixed, tied down, firm it is

leaving open the choice of liberty

or fleeting duty.

.

How gute the Gutenbergs of all time

in the opening hours and months?

How long before the Joe you don’t know

gets his hands on the Good Book?

.

Which Tablet?

Which Have-or Have-Not-Let?

.

How long before Roddenberry’s meme of Access?

.

The charnel ground of unknown treasure

points an arrow to hunters of space age diseases.

If we open up the secrets for all to see,

what is left to view, to heal, to cure?

.

Aluminium the Durable. Aluminum Who Conducts. Aluminum the Educational, Number 13 (Atomic channel 13);

Aluminum Who Causes to Forget.

.

I am cheerful and morose, grim and giddy, all gloom and tune.

Because no one knows if you are a Game or a Conversation,

A Book or a Movie, a Blind Date or A Gate with Destiny.

.

& yet everyone gambles, portends & pretends to know…

The “everything killer”; the rosetta; the slab; pad; slate;

the TV in the Teletubbies’ tummy, announcing a new childhood

.

for anyone who’s watching; an end to television,

a beginning of the Bookstore That Never Ends;

a Textbook that smirks at teachers everywhere;

.

and yes, the doctor’s chart that never fails—

.

O 1439—first day—Everyman’s Birthday—Christmas—Easter—1999—9/11—2012—and comic book start-and-stop Authorized Holy History—Hole-in-One:

.

Release us from our addiction to filling holes in our middle, to speculating

on what we cannot know.

Free us from our need for leaving holes unfilled, planned obsolescence—free us to speculate

on what we already have and are.

author \ne \!\, friend \ne \!\, angel

but I welcome and risk fire from heaven in staking such claims beyond my own powers

.   .   .   .

That there are problems basic to authorial privileging does not foreclose on the function of authority.

Or that of authors.

Let it be said: our job is not only to be uncomfortable, but it would seem to be part of our job.

If one asks another to be a “friend,” one may be asking, perhaps unwittingly, for a dangerous angel to enter one’s life.

Are all true friends such difficult angels?  Making such a claim is wrapped up in the problem of authority. But why not make such a claim? I make it - but know well enough that even much less than an angel can change my mind.

I keep upsetting people by speaking too little or speaking too much. What to do? I cannot care too much or too little about that. (Beat. I know there are double-entendres in opening one’s mouth even to yawn, let alone to protest or cry.)

Are such people I upset my friends? Are such upsets the marks of higher friendships as well as signs of other things? Am I a friend to be challenged by and yet still challenge these upheavals?

I am not asking questions now simply to seek answers or only to lick my wounds. I am asking questions to aspire to the job of the unlikely ally. I am asking because I love what we can be more than what we are.

Secrets: are they perilous? And/or necessary?

All truth for some available from an open hand. Openness? A different order of secret.

Then there are poetry orders of the open hand following, and others for initiates.

The idea of a final initiation is as frustrating to some as the newsprint poems of those who don’t endorse secrets.

For others, a good poem is the furthest thing from enjoyment. More like a workout. And let’s keep it that way.

The “time is gold” crowd: don’t even waste their time asking.

The “Time Is God” folks. They may be mostly correct, but they seem so inconsolably sad.

Let us step between God and gold. Into the poem between sex and loss.

If we are lucky, the group will forsake us, and we will discover black gold and flowers on their property.

“I am sweeter than your jugular vein,” said the vampire god of the southern country in my dream last night.

I don’t think he’s someone to take shelter in, but he’s very good at impersonations.

Most gods are mimes and impressionists and stagehands putting on someone else’s show.

Each heaven I’ve seen is the foyer of the next promised celestial conference center. I know I haven’t seen them all.

“Please forgive me,” she said, “for sharing things I’ve seen. I no longer distinguish between book, dream and movie; vision or half-forgotten lover’s half-forgotten longing.”

I am the lunar eclipse or punchline at the end of the horoscope. An angel checks her horoscope by combing her hair in our direction.

I tell you, if enough innocents play the “telephone game” with this 2012 business, the world business really will go out along with the movie business. A punctuation mark; an untranscendent punchline.

The Lord of unassuming slips away from the film projection and meets his Lady in the empty foyer. Pronounced the French way. They unite the French way.

Your bunkmate at the monastery shuddered at the Indian name for the Lord of Time. He said he’d heard this Lord was Death, wasted no time, hurt people.

The time that God lost in the shuffle between your memory of Him and your absorption in the sporting event was enough to build a new life on.

God loses you when you forget your time with Her. She weeps, because you’re beautiful and perishable.

I have discovered I am intoxicated by education: a condition that does not neatly fall within the margin of mere allergy or inebriation. And the variable that I work in an educational institution does not in and of itself have anything to do with this diagnosis. Rather, by some nameless transaction, the Creator in each of us gets inalienably lost. In the interest of clarifying, I am capable of understanding institutions, and I grasp that “education” is a word to which one may assign a range of concepts and values.

Nonetheless, the overall “rock” or “brick” of an idea that one may educate or be educated invites scenarios that remind me of that stock moment when members of my philosophy class first sound out the empirical syllables of Bishop Berkeley. “How absurd,” they invariably inveigh against his case. “He’s saying this world–my world–isn’t real.” And although I quickly move to adjust this misread — to stand in the midst of person and book and weigh in on what distinguishes “real” from “material”–often enough, one can’t proceed much further. Berkeley does not deny the carpet in the room its net worth, or the chalk in my hand its obvious role. What he denies is the body these phenomena are supposed to orbit: matter, thingness. He does not speak of becoming nauseous or sick at the idea of such static in the airwaves of the mind of God, but we may infer from his writings that human “off-ness” has something to do with the broad error.

In much the same way, I become aware of a sickness which suggests we may get something from an outcome. To be able-bodied does not by itself suggest an exit. To be capable, to have the capacity to be and grow and share meaning, does not imply an arrow hitting a target. An arrow is wonderfully compatible with a target; the Kyudo shooter is not averse to hitting that endpoint. But something else is here. If we spend our time working to align ourselves not with entrances or exits, not with a vehicle on a road from here to there, not with the mark on a door, but rather with the source of doors, the code of roads, the crude or finer stylus whose mark it was–if we dare to pause for the “in” or “withinness” upon which those more concrete “comings out” or little apocalypses of mind must hinge–we may uncover a peace before, and schooling beyond, our labors ever pressing us to grasp and know.

for Bob Harris, in gratitude for a long friendship

God can be remembered in the balance of the inner ear; God can be sipped from a blossom of fire in the presence of each and each.

I won’t suss out her God for her, his guru for him from the penumbra of fellowship. Fellowship rather is the penumbra of God; much as the moon’s shade is a sweet lassi of resemblance.

In the honest Zechariah or Thomas Becket of everyone is nonetheless a grain of vision impatient with the literalness of martyrs. Sacrifice has its own beauties and risks, but they are not the only gates to grace. Grace is a sort of lily, or down fluff sneaking out of the pillowcase. It may not have to know our name to bring us color and love.

………………………………………

*The title oddly stuck with me - some improvisational iteration of apophatic, but intoned after the pattern of “Leggo my Eggo ®”

If I make time my protector, I hazard a contract with death. And death has no need for any form I may draw up; death laughs at human constitutions, let alone my cheap formalities. Of course, the bigger concords aim to carry a people beyond the success of death’s contract on any single life. But the single life should know it has its own work cut out for it.

If I remember what a difference in fat and life 2% milk is over its lesser sibling, that is one reminder. A year amounts to more than one per cent, though - unless I make a pact with those transhumanist angels who’d tuck another few rounds of extended warrantee into the bionic body they’re dreaming forth. I make too light, too little of each tragicomic circled sun. How can I assume a year is not so very much more?

Yet we live, and on odd days,  living can mean denying. Sometimes the meal we crave, the granddaughter of the Kabbalist reminded me, is the taste this Being needs now, to be freely me. But such hidden sanctuary of flavor, beyond a provisional and true joy, may not obtain. To reckon an Epicurean remedy from this seems to miss the point. The sharp spit is as pertinent as the meat stuck on it.

I work to live beyond works. I don’t offer any single response to our overall din of sadness; I recognize that sadness also is more than one per cent of joy. If nothing else, I would ask to be remembered as a singer whose expanse of voice refracts a fiery love. If I am lazy, too, I accept that, but not the odds attached to it: my fight embraces the numerals of limits, but not conclusions we so often draw from them.

Any of us who is in relationship to omens knows that they don’t owe us anything. But we often conclude that we owe them our attention, our time, our care, our worries. How should we distinguish a true sign from a lemon portent, a real portal to some future from an impoverished and meaningless signal?

Only we can determine what is static and what is the good song that fuels us up for the morning run. This is why all reliable omens have correlate echoes in the linguistics of our breath, our veins, our instantaneous reflexes, our loins. But even to these we don’t have to listen. I believe  there is a difference between acquiring certificates and credentials in the clock of what is real, on the one hand, and deciding what our life is, what our death is, what is love and what is not, on the other.

So I have learned to ignore the most signifying, the most insistent and faux-primordial of crows. Those that followed me in my darkest wonderland of ‘92 from home to monastery to other states to skyscraper to docks, always there, and always alleging importance. Even  lacking  a larger looming Form of raven, I allowed them to leave me impossibly dumb and craven.

Now I try to speak after listening to greater voices. I seek ways of lifting my own and others’ crowness to a music from its lowly hover. I caw at myself to use up the crow of me. Or maybe I try to love the crow without ignoring all life around its shade.

Of course I am talking about more than a bird. I am talking about every hint and sigil that grounds us from our main flights. In the biggest book of words and High Dream Logic, each is but one entry.

There is a new group of three elements that I would like to discuss instead of the usual theological emphasis—in Christianity or Hinduism, for example—on, say, Trinity or trimurti (sacred frameworks for showing the order of things). Most of us who are seeking more enduring meaning are also usually just trying to get through the day. There are all kinds of richly traditional and also pop spiritual recipes for linking the two together. I am concerned, however, with avoiding those extremes.

First it is important to clear the room of hate-mongers. If you are one of the exclusivist (or, we could say, “focused”) Christians whose practice proceeds from love, I have no problem with Jesus defining your breath, light and perception. But there are too many other claimants to Christian life and “love” whom Jesus would not recognize, during his lifetime or any other. Love is capable of being humble about what it doesn’t know. But if one is so sure that others are going to hell because they have not embraced one’s Jesus, then surely that person exists himself right now in a particular kind of hell. And there are Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, even neopagan versions of that kind of religious wickedness.

So if we clear the air of the “holy haters”—yet do not give up our powers of analysis and discernment—we can discover something about the sacred. First, it was already here before we stepped into the room.

It was here since before time as we normally reckon time. But sometimes its presence is not recognized or further cultivated, nurtured and spread. Now, I should say first, before we address that cultivaton, a few words about fertilizing one’s life for miracles. Atheists and agnostics who do decry the absence of miracles cannot disprove the sprouting of miracles for those who have experienced them. But the absence of a formula for inviting miracles seems to stack the score in favor of the nonbelievers. Yet at another extreme, surely the Puritans did not have it right in the simplistic terms that worldly success was a sign of an appointment with heaven, and worldly tragedy a calling card or token of a hell to come.

Instead of trying to work on formulas or fixed outcomes for the supernatural, we could talk about form. Here is my view in a nutshell: it is mostly folly to play cosmic accountant, and presume we know the ledger or tally sheet for any individual. We don’t and cannot know their spiritual credit score. But we can confidently observe that regardless of any human’s current status—destitute, wealthy, homeless, possessing several home—whatever—that the current moment is largely the result of an incalculable number of prior moments and actions. It is therefore neither savvy nor reasonably modest to take anything for granted, or to change our posture or form radically in response to good for bad fortune. When some incredible stroke of good fortune drops on us—ranging from something as simple as an unanticipated smooth day at the office or an unexpected hug or kiss on the one hand to events of greater magnitude: an unexpected advancement in career; a swift and inexplicable recovery from illness; a “chance” encounter with someone who changes our world forever— we can be confident that our own or someone else’s labor had some direct or indirect work in that process. Even events that some religious would call solely the intervention of God or the Divine often entail the hard work and sweat of human beings somewhere down the line.

I am not going to get into whether these people are “divine agents,” or “angels” or whatever. Sweat is sweat. A feeling of the miraculous does not mean that we don’t wipe the sweat or tears out of our eyes, or that someone else did not do so ten years ago in an act of labor that fed into our current state.

This is the missing link, I feel in my bones, within the age-old Catholic-Protestant war as to whether grace has anything to do with works. Protestants deny this, and Catholics embrace a bipedal project of faith and works. But the reality surely must be be more subtle than either/or—some works or no works. The reality is that even if there is not a direct link between effort and grace, effort feeds into a pool or fuel supply of resources. Those resources can simply be shuffled or redirected by a force much greater. It is not that human energies are inevitably wasted, though many would seem to be. My grandfather, who did not believe in spirituality, meditation or even herbal medicine, nonetheless valued Thanksgiving as a holiday worth celebrating, and rebooted his wish to help the world and his loved ones on that day each year. As a prominent physician in Connecticut for many years, he also influenced medical policy as an officer in the AMA. All of that work trickled immediately or eventually into many lives. It certainly meant that little miracles of the stomach and G-I tract happened for patients under the care of other doctors because of the practice and research of one atheist stomach doctor.

When the very religious speak of miracles, I think they often assume that their God pulls that state out of thin air, like a rabbit out of a hat. But this would imply or even shout a presumption that God has no relationship to the power and energy of this world whatsoever.  These fundamentalists want to have their cake and eat it, too, though, because although they maintain that God can suddenly intervene— via a charged interruption of mundane events and/or a prophecy of charged interruptions to come—they otherwise declare that God has nothing to do with the qualities or energies of this world. This implies a spiritual science or economy that has never made any sense to me. For even in the realm of mundane science, conventional physicists and quantum physicists alike tend to concede that there has to be some relationship between quantum mechanics and the laws of our universe. Back in our present conversation, there would similarly have to be some link between he supernatural spontaneity of apparent miracles and the ocean of a pool of human acts (called karmas in Sanskrit), works and labors.

That connection or link is love. Love is what joins the specifics, the minutiae, the details, the calories burnt, the particulars of the day or history—with something abstract and greater. Love has no owner and no single dominion, and does not bow to any known town ordinance or statute or constitution. It has become a cliché for the heartbroken and headstrong, but calling a bluff on its elusiveness or inscrutability does not either impugn love or put it out of business. The vitality or manifestation of love in a given place can indeed be corrupted by confusing it with works, with any kind of balance sheet or quid pro quo. But by purifying, resuscitating and reconstituting the love in our hearts, the larger love can again be courted.

A gifted ballet dancer is called “graceful,” and this designation is not arbitrary. The refinement of her form has invited grace into her world. Her labor has been fed by and in turn fed a growing love. If a shocking injury should somehow prevent her from ever dancing again, she faces choices as to how to reinvite new occurrences of love and grace into her life. Grace may re-emerge in her students. It may continue through a photography business she starts after months of sadness, investing in a forgotten love, an abandoned nascent grace.

This trio or triad or mundanely accessible “trinity” may or not have anything to do with the religious Trinity of Christians or trimurti of Hindus. But I touch on it here because I feel the need in my own heart to be spontaneous, whether or not any supernatural spontaneity will spark. I seek a form of beauty beyond tricks or formulas. Magic is not a dirty word for those who labor and love and are mindfully spontaneous. If this strikes a chord with you, let’s move forward along this track.

Whenever we fear that we will not make a contribution—i.e., have something to offer by which someone will remember how we lived during our “lease” here—the only thing vaguely magical or supernatural about our situation is that we could be right. Even if only within some scant aesthetic territory, that element of the unknown that calibrates why our predicament is almost always one that could be memorable or banal—and for good or very negative reasons—is itself something we experience as paranormal and not mundane. We note here not just uncertainty but a charged uncertainty.

It is within this sense and space that our set of very good clues could well add up to cluelessness. This is the part missing from both spiritual literature and success literature, because the mystics give the unknown the charge of grace and the secularist gurus the valence, for instance, of building character or training the mind. But the wild vectors or rodeo motions in which events, objects and people turn have so much of a life of their own that the saints and self-made men and mercenaries alike are suddenly uncomfortable with their usual responses to discomfort. It is something like the texture of the unknown that makes great tasks so terrifying to enter into—as well as so potentially rewarding as we ride out the trip.

Many of us have had the misfortune of driving on black ice. We have either walked away from it relatively unscathed or not, but we are usually shaken. There are guides regarding black ice driving that highlight what not to do—and we either recall that with our bodies or we fail.  I remember walking as a child on a glass floor in my socks, and telling my parents that I liked it because my feet were scared and the rest of me felt fine. I really probably liked the feedback of the unknown. Or not liked it exactly, but not yet had the language and religion in which to situate my fear—so all that was left was that “vibe,” that texture, that darkling thrill.

We put ourselves in the horror flicks, and imagine that we would be the umpteenth one to succumb.  .  .or could perhaps change the endings. We have little successes throughout the day, and small near-misses that nudge us to cling to all we love, if we are paying attention. Then, too, the bigger triumphs and scares. Like those Elite Everymen of the superfund “Long Term Capital Management,” who thought they’d found a Bible Code of investment, we look for our theme, our ur-ballistics curve and formula. Anything to amplify and explain the echoes, genes and patterns of our awful and ecstatic snakes and ladders. No one can suppress the drive to unravel mystery, to deflower and also de-sting it.

But that is also where we lose a source of fuel. As we get older, we are less alive to the earlier terrain of omens, and more so to the omens that will make us money. But what gives a courageous act the momentum and might to carry us into the next moment or lifetime is the experience that we are the fuel that the unknown consumes in the charting of the world’s journey. We don’t make out like bandits through a fixed curriculum of risk. We risk with purpose to win clemency toward, and freedom from, our bandit-like existence and condition.

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