Sleepless Rose

Sheer vault of verdigris and cobalt

Taut atop the etherized streets

Vacant and blind their drifts through time

Dream-worn and endless

As the glissade of the dew drop

Down the sleepless rose

Benighted crimson rose robbed

Of her berobe’d blush, robbed

By a suborning wind 

Running fugitive at nightfall

Through sedated neighborhoods

Filled with the oxide glow of lamps 

Above furtive streets-

Citrine and acid green

Beneath the tarnished sky

Stilled called heaven
Where advanced alchemies are performed in gutters

Ex nihilo, The City Of Man.

Hurled stone of star seed,

Ex coelis, Lapis exillis!

Meteor of civilization thrust upward-

Shards of streets and buildings arising

Splintered, gleaming like crystals,

Shafts and clusters streaming upward

Into skyscrapers and bridges-

Rays of countless perspectives

Of  seconds and minutes and degrees of space

At myriad points of attention.
All motion coming together,

Gleaming in crystalline perfection:

The City a jewel at nightfall,
A sleepless rose.

Seeing in my mind’s eye a panoply of vistas

A swirl of ancient places transposed

Over the Berkley/Oakland horizon.

Going in my mind’s eye,

Following the visual perfume

Whither this universal city of man first began.

The dust in my vision 

From Erech to the foundations of Rome.

The empire of memories overlaid

Of great places of the past

Strewn over the map of imagination, 

Its compass rose

Totally awake in all directions

I see encapsulated through the window

Into a prism

That which sees through me, sees past me, sees beyond me

Sees now, in toto, the assemblage of every step of

Civilization, 

Panoptic, like a jewel, multifaceted, spinning.

The Sleepless Rose

Spinning in the eye of the wind

With countless rooms and stairways inside 

And countless reveries

In a kaleidoscope of rose petals.

Rose of time which never sleeps,
Turning and turning in cosmic mansions of mind,

In a starry vista of prisms

Hung in a window that teems with rays and facets

Which scatter throughout the windy room in which I sit,

Ensconced in a psychedelic vision

Bewildered by the magnitude of it all.  

The Nameless Speaks

I am the tongue

That slides back to unbolt

The gateless gate,

The portal to the emptiness of emptiness-

Unobstructed, transparent, open

I exclaim the place and moment 

But am unheard.

Undisguised and artless,

Yet inconspicuously hidden all around you

I expand, I free, I release, I bare

The uncertain, the unresolved, the ambiguous,

All that bespeaks the uncelebrated, the obscure, the unnoted,

All that shapes the way of the routine and the accustomed.

I stand here before your senses naked,

Never to be dressed in language.

You enter a garden

Through my gateless gate, its tongue unloosed.

Diamond light strikes your eyes,

Diamond sound your ears.

The light and sound a vajra blur,

Here I am shaved to diamond precision 

Within the ordinary dust

That gleams with the evanescent.

You cannot put a name on me, only to say

That I am the emptiness of emptiness,

The utterly Nameless

Within this  garden of the senses.

The common flowers here blossom 

With the abstract principles of creation,

Their buds opening at the heart of diamond awareness

On the immediate path before you.

With every step taken in this garden

You must listen to the silence of the flowers
With the profoundest of concentration,

Must constantly evince your prime motivation 

For the diamond path.

At this point of articulation where everything pivots

You have no words for anything

But I, the Nameless, speak

And you find my gateless gate unbolted for you to enter

To gaze upon, to touch and to smell the flowers of the ineffable

And suddenly reach the multi-faceted diamond 

Center of the garden

Where we may speak.

I have been waiting.

                                                        II

I am Mahakasyapa's smile

Before Shakyamuni's mere white flower.

I am the mown ear of wheat

Silently held up before the initiates at Eleusis.

I am Socrates standing on a street corner of  Athens,

Deeply absorbed, listening to his daemon,

Finger pointed toward the sky.

I am that which all reason strives toward,

That precision of thought
Which attains the genius of understanding,

Yet I am the flaw in every system of thought.

I am all the long unsolved problems of philosophy

That are passed on from one generation of philosophers to the next.

I am an as yet undiscovered theorem of calculus 

Awaiting to be brought to light,

Awaiting to be formulated, but a pre-existent a priori.

Everywhere you stand, I stand beside you

Not your shadow but the shadow of your thoughts-

Their secret reverberations…

I never exist without form

But at the bottom I am formless.

I delimit and define, yet

I abide beyond, ungraspable

At the edge of the mind.

I am as rare as viewing the shadows of birds

On the ground before you 

But as common and ordinary

As the weeds and wild flowers beside your foot

That you have no name for.

Rarefied, I am that which precipitates into dense form

I am close to language, but always precede it.

I am both elusive and allusive.

I am the spinner of the cloth of nuances

That weaves together the strands of your attention

Inside the mesh of all time,

Interlacing the threads of your thought

Into the invisible garment of your soul.

I am naked piety trembling 

In the wind, a blossom blown and twisted,

Devoutly obedient to any direction the wind takes.

At that place where reason, exhausted, leaves off

And beatific intuition begins,

Where one ceases to classify or describe

I reside.   I reside as the particular intertwined

With the universal

Where the transcendental meets the immanent

And transcends it again

Before your eyes.

                                                 III

 

Now after illimitable deliberation

Of having listened to you strain to call me

I can confide that had I a name

It would be Many,

And when called it would be to Many

That I answered- yet few, very few could accent it. 

Perhaps there is only One person in the world

Who would be able to pronounce my name

Because it is so difficult

To articulate its strange and foreign sound.

You have been unable

To utter my name because it is

So long and endless, so infinite.

It evokes a place so distant, 

So extralocal, so exotic, 

So remote and unknown.

Few can even intend to address me

Because I am the force of such silence

That may only be listened to

In complete surrender 

To the One and the Many.  

Yes, you may still call me

The Nameless.

I shall speak to you, and only you,

Alone

A Couple of Water Drops

There are times a woman stands at the edge of a meadow

Expansive, in a deep mood,

The trees wet above her, ripe with crisp raindrops

She thinks their scent

Like that of a man freshly bathed,

Looking up toward the cliff where a hawk glides by.

She imagines a couple of water drops

Running down his chest

Absorbed by her hair pressed against him

She is so fertile, merely the water on his skin

Impregnates her with deep joy

As she conceives of his pleasure…

                              …..   

Sometimes a man stands high atop a cliff

Encompassing a thought

Overlooking the trees edging a meadow, the sky freshly drained

He thinks the scent of the lea below

Like that of a woman freshly bathed

Looking down towards a hawk circling there near the trees

He imagines a couple of water drops

Running down her chest,

Trickling through his fingertips

He is so virile, merely the water on her skin

Sires in him deep joy

As he envisions her pleasure...

He has fallen in love with the idea of a woman

She has fallen in love with the sense of a man

Who are beyond the field

Surrounded by their unseen presences

In the separate places in which they stand

Both know emptiness

That only their complement could possibly fill

An emptiness that they would embrace

Defiantly together in something like a prayer

                        .............

Dropping down past the cliff past the trees,

The hawk alights into a freshly running meadow stream,

Water drops trickling from its beak and wings

Taking its fill, it gathers for flight.

Telepathic with the world all around,

To the hawk a deep knowing soars

To cross the horizon alone

And a strong, lone cry calls out,

An echo answering from the cliffs and trees...

A couple of water drops falling from its wings.

And where they fall, the world is nourished

Even if not a seed is there