What I Tried To Capture

To concentrate the mind / to live in the shape of a moment / involves persistence.

. . . . .

Overheard is a soft voice guardedly magnifying its way into consciousness,

lingering on the corner / of the heart's compassion / it glistens without noise.

Whatever it is / of its drifting / the very least of it slinks / sliding sideways 

into the hidden dailyness of imagination / asserting its own kind of grammar.

Now, the eyes consider how it teaches / the body, the mind / to be as still as it,

even when one's thoughts push against imagining / in such a transitional terrain.

Something to think about / as the camera clicks / giving its best shot to draw it out.
And when you lock eyes with the geometry of it, the uniqueness of the world sings.

. . . . .

A kind of joy sends its regards as you delight in the mystery of the voice in it, the light.

. . . . .

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkAFV-hw1Js&feature=relmfu

Before Departing

A habit of mind.

. . . . .

Step away outside.

Be an ember in that light.

Feel it.

Painted of a lemon's zest.

Unweave a thread of it.

Independent of what is temporary.

A strange quiet.

A contemplative tempo.

 A slit of time.

 . . . . .

Opposite you, a mode of interpretation. 

A motion of repose. A mouthful of air. A habit of mind.

What It Is The Eye Discerns

Beginning is not only a kind of action. It is also a frame of mind, 

a kind of work, an attitude, a consciousness.

– Edward Said

. . . . .

Across time

something has been written –

a solitude

to

a solitude

to

a silence –

across time 

something is being said.

. . . . .

In an otherwise dark room the requisite skill

of the imagination stalks a part of self.


At hand, an invisible pause – out of it an inkling finds a point

of departure from the concreteness of the outside world.


The soil shifts, something begins – 

a sprouting, if you will.

. . . . .

From the power of one's palette a mood, an idea, begins. In its quiet way of rendering 

interpretation, the mind works rigorously with the eyes to lift an impression off the page.

. . . . .

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjprWxdr6q0&feature=related

What I Might Have Missed

Had I not walked the dog

I might have missed everything in view

under a sky enswathed in blue.

. . . . .

The highest ecstasy is the attention at its fullest. 

– Simone Weil 

But What Then Do You Use It For

Love is a flower 

that grows in any soil, 

works its sweet miracles 

undaunted by autumn frost 

or winter snow, blooming 

fair and fragrant all the year, 

and blessing those who give 

and those who receive.

– Louisa May Alcott

. . . . .


and how we are all
preparing for that
abrupt waking,
and that calling,
and that moment
we have to say yes,
except it will
not come so grandly,
so Biblically,
but more subtly
and intimately in the face
of the one you know
you have to love

– David Whyte

All Around Us Its Uprooted Depth

At any rate

words stir, spiring 

towards the first
light of morning –
too bright to believe.

An azure sky heavy

with birds on a wire –

whole congregations
emerging as a pictorial
to the day's anatomy.

Life, the awakening of it,

at its core skips a beat

to an uncertain height -

never ever ending,

its potential infinity.

The open-hearted many,
the broken-hearted few traveling,
probing its universal design,
meet, every which way,
some kind of blessing, and
its continuous tread.

From time to time
optimistic eyes stare up
from the sideways pull
of bigger things, inciting
an introspective gaze.

Come evening,
the layered sound
of crickets circulating –
listening, the pitch
goes on and on.

The Night Quietly Appeases

Back to me

it came – the night.

Finally rendered into something

I could understand – like a piece of music,

the possibility of everything.

In the sigh's heavy release, the mind

coming to this – an unremitting peace,

without the momentum of day.

Fragments Of Shape

Something I've meant to write about…

. . . . .

But for now the sun

filtering warm through

the window screen,

burning in silence –

far, far, away…

. . . . .

I imagine that –

spur of the moment.

By Design The Eye Observes

Almost faultless, the poet's gaze nearing ubiquitous surroundings.

Verbal mutations front another way of seeing beyond lucid interpretation.

Looking Behind – A Thousand Joys In Place

I love the closeness

of another's voice
coming around again,

touching me all over,

noticing especially 

its omnipotent hold –

the mind of a poet,

visually itemizing

in a way, the focus

of their labour.

. . . . .

The Layers

I have walked through many lives,

some of them my own,

and I am not who I was,

though some principle of being

abides, from which I struggle

not to stray.

When I look behind,

as I am compelled to look

before I can gather strength

to proceed on my journey,

I see the milestones dwindling

toward the horizon

and the slow fires trailing

from the abandoned camp-sites,

over which scavenger angels

wheel on heavy wings.

Oh, I have made myself a tribe

out of my true affections,

and my tribe is scattered!

How shall the heart be reconciled

to its feast of losses?

In a rising wind

the manic dust of my friends,

those who fell along the way,

bitterly stings my face.

Yet I turn, I turn,

exulting somewhat,

with my will intact to go

wherever I need to go,

and every stone on the road

precious to me.

In my darkest night,

when the moon was covered

and I roamed through wreckage,

a nimbus-clouded voice

directed me:

"Live in the layers,

not on the litter."

Though I lack the art

to decipher it,

no doubt the next chapter

in my book of transformations

is already written.

I am not done with my changes.  

– Stanley Kunitz

The Habit Of Solitude

Without prompting, the eyes lock eyes

with something affectively progressing –

independently a plush silence passes.

Later, Something Becomes…

Lit by the light thrown onto it,

a partial image – the thing itself becomes

a reference to something seen before.

Stone-quiet, the thing itself

pressed like a flower, becomes forty words 

I draft slow enough, but only just

to interpret something inanimately projected,

saturated with a longing to retrieve its zest, its spirit

though its fragile construction sits motionless becoming

but a spare moment I want to recreate – to make luminous

its flatness in its passing, passing through utter abstraction, 
linked to the indefinite duration of a briefness progressing –

upping its effect, an unnatural light in the room cast upon its face,
and now to poeticize it – it itself without any soul, forty words
having somewhere to go, each becoming a part of something.

. . . . .

a winged thing bulks in the dark / painted in stillness / regal its bearing / needing 
nothing / the act of inscription / in this public space / austere walls / granting excess 
access / filtering through the light / less and less / a part of something splayed