The Gull: to Jeffers

I strove for reckoning upon these shores
Of battered stone, sand and shattering waves.
I watched a seagull above them soar
And know the cold, but know no pain.

And through the blackness I strode with that strange gull
That pressed into the wind above the roar,
Headlong toward a goal that with all its might pulled -
Its wings leaving an invisible impress across the moor

And down the sandstone cliffs to the sandy shores
Left it… like a feather through a cleft
Of rock and time, fading. Yet in my core
The defile my footprints made was mere spindrift

And let each step be done, as best I could.
When I came here, I brought no polemic –
Only unwritten poems that tossed like driftwood
Inside my blood, and from it pulled a gnarled stick…

Tracing my thoughts in the sand beneath the moon.
Watched them spill, cast in silver, yet of no worth.
Watched them linger before the erasing surf
As I their singer, slowly wandered, marooned

And again I saw that same gull, just a ghost
Suspended in the wind, plying its course
As though it couldn’t leave and haunted this coast.
It complained, yea, it shrieked above these shores

A face lean and rough as a cypress
It couldn’t pass. It shrieked as if it deplored
My presence, and wanted to halt my trespass
For I was a man, a thing it abhorred.

J. Landon

Everybody Gets It, Michael McCulloh

Everybody always gets this thing.

And how to say it in physics
And not just pretty words.

I guess I'll go diving down
The deep tunnel of life now

And hazard all of my belongings
And scream through sharp blizzards

And hope and hold and let go
Until the brief, forgiving sunrise
On that warm beach reminds me

That every speckle of sand
Is it's own entire world.

Everybody gets this.
Everybody knows this.

I'll just go diving down
That deep tunnel of life...

Wind, Women, and Stone.

From the southern shore of Jeju
There lies an ocean view before us

Beside broad, radiant fields of rape flowers,
Tangerine and orange orchards
Ringed by rustic walls of piled volcanic stone
Wave in row after row behind us

And spring light and wind through those flowers
And through the seams of those unmortared walls,
Allowing gales to freely pass between.
Their paths dappled with the windy image of you.

Standing a few fields inland
From the sea running gold and green
The waves lift up in the sunlight,
Splashing with images of you

Wind and stone,
So much wind and stone
I hold a memory like wind and stone
Of you.

Wherever I have walked these last two years
I have seemed to see you, only you.
And though you were with me all day today
You will never remember any of this

As I glance outward, the sea is a mirror
That I dare not look into anymore.
It reflects such emptiness
As again you dance into view
And once more trail off on the wind

Here is song from the shore
Of my bones
Along the long stretch
Of my heart
For you

A sound that becomes
A song in my throat
Without words
A sound outside my words

A sound inside my bones,
A sound, just a sound
That is a song without words
Coming from within my soul...

A moan that would become the sound
Of your voice
Speaking my name in a whisper
To my ear.


It will be ages before
The many walls of Jeju or
My love for you
Come down



J. Landon

Ode to Rilke

You walked the castle parapets of the poetic
Your gaze turned toward the Open
Breathing the pure element of vision
Sweeping from off the ocean of eternity,
There to cast forth emptiness from your arms
So that one bird might fly more passionately
As you walked straight into the crushing arms of an angel.

Engulfed in the wind that fed upon your face,
Polishing it to reflect Cosmic Space,
Transforming you so that you could transform Things
Upon the polished surface of your being, you cast them forth
Knowing that they weren’t completely solid, nor you-
Only reflections of the Spirit that shone brightly there.

The World had a need of you.
The Stars waited for you to espy them
Waiting as only lovers can wait for each other

As you stood before a stone tower which a hawk encircled
Which a storm engulfed, never knowing whether
You were the storm, the tower, or the hawk
As you emerged again and again from the mutual depths
You reached within your intimate slumbers with Things,
Brought to a different day that all but few have awakened to
Your self-world charged with violent insight into
Everything you saw, you felt: you embodied.
Yes, you embodied
The tower, the hawk, the storm, the springtime.

Sometimes a wave rolled toward you
As you paced the castle parapets of Duino
Stepping trippingly through the words of a song
A blindman, a drunkard or an idiot might sing,
Letting the world’s sadnesses stumble through you,
Constantly walking directly into the body of an Angel
To see the world “the way a blind angel sees it”

Eyes reversed, looking through your beloved, looking through Her
Nakedness and all that it concealed
As you sang of the unrequited woman, the poet Gaspara Stampa
Who loved for no reason, who loved beyond comprehension, Who loved
Simply because there was no hope and therewith here sole Purpose for being:
To hopelessly love
Saying of here unexampled devotion
That should any girl exclaim “if I could become like her!”
Love might...

I say of you

O mighty, mighty poet

If one could become like You.
You understood the autocratic task of Transformation, knew
Its harsh commandments and undertook the bold exposing
Of human treason before this world, rescuing the honey of beauty
And returning it to the invisible like a bee commuting
Between the Living and the Dead
As you plunged onto the path with only your shadow,
Listening, listening to the soil of your heart,
Listening to the flowers there
To whom you lent your fate

Listening to a tree, to the din of innumerable animals
From inside a crude hut inside the wilderness of the World’s soul,
Opening its door and letting them into the temple
Within your ear.
All that listening such hard work, the vocation of a saint,
But you had the blood for it.

You understood with the ruthlessness
Of an Angel
Both love and death
To the end
A wan smile upon your careful, piercing face,
That undying iris
That you enigmatically carried as a young man
Through the streets of Prague
Forever an angel in your hand.

You caught up to what was yours in the end.

Zoo of the Stars.

I, gone on far too far ahead,
Like a child wandered off in dread
Staring beyond the bars
Deep within the zoo of stars

Alone and wondering why
All the animals in the sky
Don’t run…don’t simply fly?

Lost suddenly inside a stampede of light.
The firmament left carelessly unbolt.
Constellations unpent like zebra colts.
Starry hoofs escapading in heedless flight.

Fleeing toward planes re-opened,
Mere stellar mayhem, a spree of minutes eloped ,
A vision which only a child could cope:

Dancing with kids, a pupil of rams
Taught to catapult seas of side-stepping crabs
Over the backs of rampaging bulls
Floating delicately, hand in hand, with fools

Those twins beside me, milking a lioness
Spooning her cream to a scorpion prioress
Like only a virgin child can, unborn –deathless

Unscalable distance, unweighable time
A rainbow arrow knocking a goat from a mountaintop
Washed down to the sea by jugs of clear wine
Into a school without a bell, swimming non-stop.

Until an adult in consternation might say,
“There you are! …Whew!
Why do you always stray?
We were worried sick about you.”

“Now, go on, get back in line. Not another pause!
We should thank our lucky stars
You didn't find your way through one of those bars."