generations

They have been walking from the beginning,
through the foggy sponges of lowland
forests, under umbrella leaves, in the shattered
rain of ocean beaches, through the tinder
of ash pits, the thickets of cities, along washes
and ravines and the dust of dry creek beds.

When the great ice mountain split
its continent and became two, they were walking.
When smoke from the burning plains
blinded the western seas, they were walking.
They walked by dead reckoning on steel,
on ropes, over swales and fens, on pearls.

They passed through congregations
of meteors, through knots of flies,
and howling tangles of hungry winds.
When they were sleeping on moss,
they were walking. When they lay
broken, torn and still on the field,
they were walking. They were walking
when the sun gathered together the tightening
strings of its slack, when the sun dissolved
into the withering circle of its power.

An old dog trailed them off and on,
and flocks of ricebirds and their shadows
rose up and scattered before them. Herds
of holy caribou and hosts of preying
wolves disappeared ahead of them
over the snowy hills. They were walking
with ghosts, with choirs of grasses
and armies of stars. They walked
through the words let there be light
more than once. They were walking
with chronicles of chains. They walked beyond
the headwaters of the moon.

And people saw them coming and people
saw them passing, and their walking
was constant, unmoving, invariable,
and the seeing of the people was ever
present, immutable, liberation.

keeping up

Any faithful attendant must be able
to travel as fast as winds in a black
blizzard, as winds in the gales
of a north sea storm, must move parallel
with the cheetah, the coyote, the hare
and fleeing gazelle, must fall swiftly,
side by side with everything that falls—
rains, and meteors, and forests afire,
wounded men, crumpling cities,
melting mountainsides of snow.

Whatever monitors stone and fire
must circle the sun with the disintegrating
comets, the cold planets and their lackey
moons, orbit the galaxy with each and every
one of its stellar systems and bursting stars.

Whatever is steadfast must be
as quick as an electron moving by no
means across the emptiness between
one phantom ring and another, like a firefly
that loses its vanishing place and finds it
again across a vacancy of night.

To be in union with the seasonal,
that which adheres must go and return
year after year among winters and springs
with all of their motions multiple, speed
one by one with the flying spores of royal
ferns, with mescal beans flung outward
and each red, wind-spinning key
of the swamp maples, hover among
the migratory grey and the humpback
whales and the rapidly sailing spray
porpoises, matching eye to eye exactly
their true directions, their determined paces.

Whatever it is that keeps careful watch
with the fleet, the rapid, the brisk,
the headlong rising or descending,
must become itself the virtue
of velocity, the intimate of light.

jacob’s ladder

Regard these immortal beings
as one by one they descend
in garments of scarlet tint like
evening shining on ivory terns
and ice-filled seas. They come
covered in seamless cloaks
like rain swaying like human ghosts
gathering across the prairie, in silver
sheen like salmon at night through
a black rush of rapids, come
veiled in laces like tall grasses
in webs of bowl and doily spiders,
like morning in a dispensation
of white-threaded poplar seeds.

Observe these immortal beings
step by step, scarves wrapped
around their presence like light
wrapped around field sunflowers
in full bloom. They descend
in rings and green drapery like
the birch and the sweet bay descend
without moving from their highest
branches down to the earth. Down
they come in ritual procession,
in hoods of violet velvet so
deep their faces disappear like
the faces deep inside the hoods
of monkshood blossoms disappear.

Watch them descend one by one
in robes of wind like silk flags
alive on their bones, dressed
in stars like shawls settled
like memory across their shoulders,
becoming the place of themselves
like descending mizzle sheathing
winter in glass, clothed like blue
Arctic butterflies in the eternal
form of their own motion. Arrayed
in the phenomena of immortality,
they are made immortal. Regard
these beings from heaven forever
in their earthly descent.

The spiral staircase in this tower
winds upward in tight circles.
I can hear each of my footsteps
as I go around and up on the worn
stones, the railing certain and cold
in my hand. I climb around
and around almost circling myself
in this narrow space, almost
meeting myself face to face,
one step behind, one step ahead.

I’ve climbed similar staircases
before, ascending windowless
cathedral towers up to high-wind
belfries where birds swoop and circle,
up to walkways of sudden sun
shining on red-tiled rooftops.
Once I climbed stairs leading
to a lamp twice as tall as a man,
brighter than 10,000 candles, a rotating
beacon at the top of a lighthouse
tower. The sea below was a rage
of contradiction and unanimity.

Old church towers often house gears
and cogs and spinning parts,
the operating machinery of enormous
clocks, crown wheels and click wheels
that creak and turn making minutes,
hammers that lift slowly and strike
making hours by sound. Climbing
to the top, one might touch the great
passing noise and workings of time.

There’s a miracle staircase, a spiral
hanging in the desert suspended midair,

aspiring, now and then

witnessed only in late autumn light
after dusk, before stars. I may have
seen it, though I have never climbed it.

Maybe the tower of Babel
had a spiral staircase too, maybe
just a wooden ladder the final
few steps to heaven for those who might
climb to the top without dizziness,
without falling in confusion.

Now and then someone might imagine
rising at night to enter its sheer black
tower of windows, imagine walking
through the doorway to climb the tight
galactic spiral. Circling its form, one
step ahead, one step past, the body might
discover and become by that motion alone
the grand inevitability of the galaxy itself.

creating a pillar to heaven

Start anywhere . . . a ragged minstrel
dances with a fiddle round and round on the back
of a sleeping black cat;

a stick balancing
a spinning plate is poised on his greasy
head

upon which spinning plate Death
in white stands tiptoe holding a golden
jack-o’-lantern by both hands

above her gorgeous
upturned, turning face,

atop which leering
lantern a cracked and ancient blue bowl
tips and sways;

a mountain of earth, seeds
of wild grasses, and a riley river fill the deep
blue of the gyring bowl

in which vesseled
soil an ancient oak roots itself

with hooks
and nails through cycles of summer;

a glass
egg, holding the heart of a pulsing sun
and a skeleton of stars spinning inside
its oval surfaces, lies

in its nest clasped
high in the encompassing brackets of the oak’s
uppermost branches;

and see, a black cat
is sleeping inside that egg, dreaming of weaving
through a sleek forest of sun-seeded grasses
as easily as a minstrel wind,

as poised
as Death beneath the nebulous sky within
and without the egg lying

secure in the steady
bowl of the nest and its retinue revolving round
and round to the refrain

of a dizzy fiddler
laughing as if there were

a detectable way
it could all have been meant to be forever.

oh mother, oh father (i dream we are cats beneath falling leaves in an autumn wind)

Sailing bird skeletons, entire
or in bone pieces, miracle bodies
filled with light, all those skittery
hearts and open wings are finally
set free now, falling from the sky.
They spiral and roll, bobbing
and swaying as if floating on the current
of a wide and ancient river.

Down they come within easy reach
of even the crippled, the scarred,
the one-eyed and the toothless,
the wretched and imbecilic. Even
the cockeyed, off-key leaping
of the insane is rewarded.

A flock of surrender, they weave
and twist in their falling, turning
sensually, tauntingly, exactly
as we always wished, a crowd
into which the homeliest among us
might bury himself, sink away,
become one with the delectable.

A few attempt escape, flee
in awkward wheels across the lawn,
a welcome chase, each easily captured
and kept. We pull them close.
They partner with us.

Some we catch are certain to contain
that luscious blood honey so magical,
so coveted. We might pierce, tap
and drink. We can taste it now.
Others, tumbling in mouse-like
curls, hold our loves that never were.
We call them our ardent hope.
They have experience with the skies.

Nestled deep inside any of these
wizened bodies, little lizardy bodies,
lies our most precious fear. We guard it.
We swallow it whole.

How could we have known before?
The spirit of heaven is a wind
made real by the illusions it carries.
Even the warriors among us
are satisfied without murder
over and over again.

and motion in philosophy

We say we move miles across desert
ice and black volcanic sand, down
numbers of leagues into the night
of oceans and caves. Marking
units and distances, we say we move
an hour among damp spring grasses,
two days along canyon roads
and creek beds, country lakeside
borders. This is the way we move,
because we pronounce this to be
the way of our moving.

But maybe in truth we pass through
not just miles of forest but a testament
of trees, neither walking nor riding
but moving as sunlight moves in one
steady procedure through underwater
weeds or as music moves making
time and space of the void.

And perhaps we move as well
through ardor, entering it and leaving
as if it were an incendiary city
with gates. Perhaps we cross the seven
parameters of bliss as if each
were a slow river of meadow to ford.
In bed asleep we might approach
a settlement of inner union where
it exists in a thousand definite
coordinates around the earth.

All facts of the body, we know,
are composed solely of light
and its speed. Therefore, a traveling
beam of luminous star and a single blood
corpuscle of radiance in the heart must be,
in myth and song, one and the same.

While considering the consecrated
motion of winter moonlight across
a vision of white in the mind, it might
be possible to journey there, to move
at will with the conscious speed of prayer
through such a current of god.

in union: skinny grandfather riding a bicycle

1.

Grandfather and bicycle move together
down the gravel road, passing through
the two-dimensions of shadows and shades
melding and flickering over the single
being of their creaking, rattling motion.

In silhouette it would be impossible
to tell where the skinny old man’s pipe-thin
arms actually stop and the handlebars
of the bicycle begin, both the same bent
shape and stiff intention.

The rhythmic click of his joints
as he slowly pumps the pedals matches
the click of the chain on the teeth
of the gears. Both skeletons
show their thin and bony frames.

2.

His feet circling with the pedals,
the turn of the wheels and spin of the rims,
spokes flashing in streaks as they catch
the light—this is a universe of heart centers,
hubs, covenants and revolutions proceeding on
in their ways as every universe does.

3.

The bicycle seems strangely out of breath now.
The tires groan on the gravel. They hesitate,
lurch ahead. Is it the grandfather panting?
Tensions strain and gasp.

The road turns suddenly, the bicycle
swerves, they veer too far, wobble wildly
close to catapulting into the ditch. Dust
flies, grasshoppers and field birds flee
in all directions. There are jagged
cries and screechings. The elements—
grandfather, bicycle, ditch weeds, birds,
the sun’s instant—are willing together
with all of their might not to spill
and break apart.

They resist the chaos, right themselves
and continue in balance. Birds, seed-filled
weeds, grasshoppers, road dust settle
back into the silent sun.

4.

The bicycle, retaining in its skeleton
a dedication to motion and the maker
of motion, is propped against a tree
in the coming twilight calm. Grandfather,
hub and heart wavering and resuming
with falling weeds and fleeing birds,
rests in the circling frame of his sleep.
The ditch weeds and empty road,
the insects and field birds, infused
with the wheeling shadows and recoveries
of near catastrophes, are still in the revolving
light of the night. We are all the souls
of one another, proclaim the riding
stars, and the soul of each moment
through which together we pass.

a traversing

The easy parting of oaks and hickories,
bays of willows, borders of pine and screens
of bamboo down to the crux, grasses, bulrushes
and reeds parting down to their fundamental
cores, the yielding of murky pond waters,
layer upon layer giving way to the touch

of the right touch, the glassy, clear
spring waters, bone and gristle alike
opening as if opening were ultimate fact,
the parting of reflection allowing passage,
and the cold, amenable skeleton of echo,
the unlatching of marsh becoming as easily

accessible as the unlocking of mercy,
as the revelation of stone splitting
perfectly with the sound of the right
sound, everything, a nubbin of corn,
a particle of power, the pose of the sky
relenting, and the sea swinging open

like the doors of a theater giving entrance
to everyone, no fences, no barriers, no blinds
to the parting of the abyss, not bolted,
not barred from the utmost offering
of the dusk, enigma itself falling away
until all may enter all and pass among them.