POETRY SWEDEN 2002
BÉ
BEING FOUND
CÉ
CULMINATION
DÉ
DEATH
IÉ
I AM
IN AN INVISIBLE UPSURGE
KÉ
Kitchen Madness
NÉ
NIGHT OBSERVATION: GOTLAND
OÉ
ON A BALCONY IN VISBY
SÉ
SUNSET #1Ð GOTLAND SWEDEN
TÉ
THE DELICATE FRAGRANCE
THE FINAL CHAPTER
THE LAMB SALESMAN
THE NOTHING IS PACKED
THIS IS THE PATH
THREE SWANS
VÉ
VERBAL REIKI BLESSING
WÉ
WITHOUT CONCERN
WORDS
OF TRUTH RETURN TO THE SOURCE
17 Poems
Final poem: DEATH
Kitchen Madness
(At a workshop on healing the inner child)
It was to be a day of mourning, but madness broke out. Who can explain such things?
They fly right out of the heart. Dancing because of joy drifting through the kitchen like a
cloud of electric birds, it was infectious. The mourners coming in from the dinning hall all
broke out with wide smiles, and the madness kept building until the chef and her helper
were making wild love to the bread dough, kneading, rolling, beating the soft fleshy
substance warm in their hands, unearthed passions gyrating, getting hotter, the ecstasy
of primal earth at last celebrated in water and wheat and their bodies falling into an inner
hollow, unashamed, their minds barely serious with the fearless work of being fully
woman.
It went on for an hour, cooking like inspired scientists in
a disco lab. It was a You Ain't
Nothing But A Hound Dog, Schubert, good timey Gospel hour, with the sweat pouring
down from soul-fire through bodies that couldn't tire, and heat from the oven's open
doors, and a dance that would not stop its wild leap over the abyss of a wounded
child's lost sorrow.
September 17, 2002
VERBAL REIKI BLESSING
The top of your head opens like a portal to heaven.
Let the golden oil flow down.
Welcome the golden oil into your mind
all warm and welcoming your mind Home.
Your mind opens like one eye,
single and simple and clear.
Let your mind open, relaxed and unified.
Feel the clear spaciousness,
the fresh open sky of God.
The golden oil flows down into your voice.
Your voice opens to sing and say
this one tender truth without fear:
God is flowing through me.
God is my freedom in compassionate Love.
The golden oil flows down into your heart.
Open your heart to the freedom of God.
The portal of your heart opens
and the tender bud of Love
opens slowly, so gently, fragrantly,
sweetly opening, fragile,
invincible, incorruptible Love.
The flower hangs in an empty sky,
radiant with all power, perfect in peace.
Drop into your heart's flower.
And into the deep flower in the center of the flower.
Drop, through endless flowers unfolding
in infinite oceans of Love.
The golden oil flows into your will
and your will makes its simple, unerring choice:
for openness, innocence, and wildness in Love.
The golden oil flows down into the belly
and old emotions rise up and spill over
to flow away freely in rivers of Life,
in the waters of acceptance, in the Light flowing,
out of your secret emptiness
into the world with passion,
with purpose to express the glory,
to let the Great Love flow on.
The golden oil flows down
into your sexual joy with innocence,
to wash all passion clean to be free
in the pure gift of simple ecstasy: rose buds
and milk, pearls and hot silk.
Creativity flows, joy flows, passion flows,
Love flows as one river in the river of Life.
The beautiful gift is made clean and restored.
The golden oil flows down
into your deep, fertile earthiness,
into all that is fecund and juicy, hot and lush,
through your legs and feet,
blessing every step you take, blessing the ground,
blessing existence without effort,
as natural as sunlight,
as clean as autumn wind.
Your whole being is held open, mingling,
all oily and open, with unlocked
mind and heart, will and emotions,
with tender sexual delight,
all your earthy self and the pure Spirit,
golden and spacious, white and holy,
one Life, naked and clothed,
dancing through the moment,
the unchanging radiance
in the ever-changing river of time.
September 23, 2002
Gotland, Sweden
THREE SWANS
The wind howled off the gray sea
in the dim light before dawn:
an autumn wind, from the east,
from Russia, from the step lands,
from the Caucus mountains,
cold and raw. The sea stretched
into a low line of dark clouds,
while the first sign of day shown to the south
on the tops of bonnets of mounting clouds,
warm and gold and reminding me of God.
Suddenly, from the south, came huge sea birds
pumping wide wings, distant and dark,
silhouetted against the wind-ruffled sea.
I watched carefully, thinking they must be geese,
but the porcelain beauty of their bearing
and the graceful turn of the lead birdÕs neck,
and the snowy coldness of their feathers
revealed three wild swans in whose presence
I stood amazed, my mouth open
as they flew by in slow, surreal motion,
so close my heart touched
the cool demeanor, aloofness,
and regal distain of their freedom.
And I thought of a beautiful woman
who has wept all week, feeling her
fear of the sun, of human hands,
and open mouths, and suckling need.
I could not wait for the dawn. The cold drove me home
to warm my hands over a morning fire
in a small, empty room.
SUNSET #1Ð GOTLAND SWEDEN
The skies are electric, and hovering so huge
they threaten to fall and crush me.
Thick, juicy rainbows
hang down everywhere, like fingers of God
dipped in colors pressed from wild flowers
in warm meadows to the south.
This is my first sunset on the eastern shore.
The sky is purple and burnt sienna
and dusty gold like wallpaper in a classy salon.
The cold sea turns violet, with riffles of dark
wind-ruffled shadows.
Gray clouds curl like decorations on Greek pillars,
their bellies raw and red, rouged and rubbed,
loosing their gray veils of mist
enwrapping two rainbows, running down like liquid color
into the color-filled sea.
Minutes after the dropped sun extinguished the show
the full moon arose like a radiant face
from the darkening sea, open and pale,
like an innocent woman, a virgin, softened
by the ecstasy of just loving her.
September 24, 2002
ON A BALCONY IN VISBY
The air is crisp, the wind fluid.
We are held in love by nothing more
than the fragrance of salt from the distant sea,
the look in our eyes, the intent of our naked hearts.
I am melting. Don't try to fix me.
Life must spill freely from its own moist heart
into the dark hole, the howl no one can heal.
I'm rolling over. Your lips speak from a world
I must depart.
The oil is still wet on the canvasses. Your paintings shine.
I say they are airy dreams, colorful revelations
of your most tender and wounded heart,
but you say you've ruined the signatures.
WITHOUT CONCERN
The battered and bruised seaweed on the shore,
the broken bulbs bleeding mucous and flies,
an unknown sticky substance on the rocks
catches wet, stringy, shrunken feathers:
while above, the wild swans uncaringly fly
and the scavenger gulls look for one more meal.
But things are such because they are cared for.
This is the secret of the sea and wind.
And all things wait for someone to sing,
"I Love you", without concern for anything.
THE LAMB SALESMAN
This is the real and true state of my lost affairs:
I would lie meekly by, wooing and winning
the innermost innocence at the heart of all things
and then subtly, with most smooth and delectable guile
use it for my own purposes, the unerring agenda
to heal my deepest howl of errant grief.
I would parade the Lamb, and sell Him.
I would turn him over to the circus owners.
I would make him a sideshow attraction.
I would hoard the nickels and dimes.
And as they carted him away in a cage
I would look at his sad eyes and weep bitterly
that my livelihood has been bartered away.
THE FINAL CHAPTER
All within the heart he sang and wrote
until his bones grew frail with withering age
then every word was written for the wind to read
and every song composed for a birdÕs throat
as rocks and grassy fields became his final page
to labor over out of Love's need.
IN AN INVISIBLE UPSURGE
In the upsurge
of white pearls bursting
in lightly lingering fragrance
from the fume-hole of the world,
the thin, dark rim of pure pain
is broken and crumbles
into the abyss of light.
The howl has lost its shadow
and the whole episode appears
as tragic and laughable as it has always been.
Nothing moves. I am nothing too.
And the happy consequence
proves utterly real, as Life happens.
WORDS
OF TRUTH RETURN TO THE SOURCE
To eat
and drink the words of truth
is to
grow robust and free,
to
laugh that we are made of dust
and be
what we are meant to be:
composed
of water, dirt and stars.
And
when the empty winds of praise
wind through the brain's and body's fields
to make
the melting soul reveal
the
deepest secrets of its heart,
then words
return from whence they came
the
naked essence of the flame
that
purifies our twisted parts.
THE DELICATE FRAGRANCE
God does not bind us to Himself with chains,
or ropes or even silken chords,
but with a delicate fragrance,
like an oriental, cinnamon breeze
born faintly across the salt sea.
THE NOTHING IS PACKED
To the empty mind, God is nothing,
the invisible, empty essence by which it is seen.
But, Ah, what an Nothing:
brimming with beings, saturated with song.
The Nothing is packed.
I AM
I am Pure, Naked Being at Rest in Love,
in the Infinite Naked Nothing of God.
ALONG THE CLIFFS
Gotland, October 1, 2002
Along the cliffs, on huge
white stones,
in the straw and grass,
in the sea breeze, amongst
the birds,
I thought of the blue sky
in a womanÕs eyes,
and the golden sun of
Sweden in her mind,
and I felt my naked thigh
stretched over the bicycle bar
and with it a woman's open vulnerability and tawny strength,
and I wondered about fish,
and birds, and stars,
and wet stones on the shore
and how all these things
can fill a soul with such
a joy.
And I felt her presence.
And I felt alone.
And the sun streaming
through high, thin clouds
was half-warm, but happy.
NIGHT OBSERVATION: GOTLAND
A moth is beating, beating itself against the glass.
For a moment I saw reflected in its eye
the light that has enflamed its mindless passion,
the ethereal engine driving it to die in flame
or beat its body to death in the dark.
BEING FOUND
The sky, like a beautiful woman,
puts its cheek to our cheek
and with streaming fingers ruffles our hair,
but receives no kiss, no tender thankfulness.
God gives all good and beautiful things.
Thankfulness is being found.
TWO VISIONS
Did we come here as
punishment
for some willful
disobedience,
some stubborn rebellion of
dishonesty
deep in our spirit?
Or did we choose this blindness,
this wound to our most
vulnerable innocence
that we might learn to
Love God
more purely, more
completely
than ever possible before?
In the first scenario
we are devils needing to
be redeemed;
in the second, blind heroes—all of us—
waiting to wake up from a
spell
that we, for Love's sake, chose.
CULMINATION
The moon sits in a dark corner of a room
and waits for the sun to enter through the door.
He is her Lover, the one she has dreamt
of for a thousand years.
She pours for him wine she gathered
on the hills of Galilee when her Lover
created the bud, the vine, the swelling grape.
The room floods with light. The sun has come
to sip his wine and kiss the moon.
She disappears in a blanket of gold.
He opens the folds with burning hands
and discovers a young star.
TWO MEN
Two men stood on a cliff
above the sea.
One was a businessman on
holiday;
the other, a Love-drunk
artist.
The waves beat against the
rocks below them.
One man was thinking about
a thousand things
he must do next week
while the other felt waves
splash
inside his chest.
THIS IS THE PATH
To walk in this world with an open heart,
with burning hands open to bless,
with open eyes
seeing all beings luminous,
enlightened, hidden in clay,
lost and alone for a while:
blind heroes waiting to wake up
from a spell they willingly chose
that they might learn to Love God
more passionately and completely
than was ever possible before their birth.
This is the path of ordinary miracles.
DEATH
The gray swan rests her tired head on the ice
and closes her eyes to the snowy wind.
Something warm is glowing deep within her feathers.
Quietly, something like a small bone breaks in her heart.
Stirred by the pain, for a moment she opens her eyes,
and they shine like light in the ice.
Wings open just above her body
and she feels the old rise of freedom.
Slowly, her eyes darken
and are covered with snow.