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OLD AND NEW POEMS
2011 The Village Philosopher 1
CUTTING GRASS AFTER RAIN (2006)Even after all these years
everything I write still seems a lie.
Nothing on the earth appears
convincing to my tired eyes.
Nothing I can summarize
fulfills my need to speak.
I would have chosen silence
if I had not been weak.
The new cut lawn sings in the sun.
Gunmetal wasps settle in to fan their wings.
Ten thousand things adjust themselves
on every side to make use of the One,
yet I cannot fathom the smallest face of anything.
She has a favored way of thinking.
Her lovely eyes turn up and right
for just a moment and holding brightness there
they smile, then she declines to speak.
My thoughts rush up demanding air,
spending wildly as if there is no death.
From week to week, regular as the moon
she makes investments in her face,
banking thoughts to feed some future race.
We make no headway here.
Mind chatter has no claim to make.
The sweetness of the yard can mend the heart
or tune the mind more truly than the art of thought.
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OLD AND NEW POEMS
2011 The Village Philosopher 2
ETERNAL RETURN (1980)Stories we once loved
Are stories we love now.
And all we love
Is what we have loved,
And our inner eyes tie us
To other times.
This means that somewhere
Not easy to locate
We recline in the screening rooms
Of our particular fate
And barely say Ah! Um hm or some such,
But have never imaginedA higher darkness than this,
Or that we are delivered
By ideas of deliverance
Vast sets of them
In sympathetic resonation,
All finally ripped out
And thrown away,
Unneeded.
Gift after gift,
Falling into place
As an ordinary world.
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OLD AND NEW POEMS
2011 The Village Philosopher 3
THE FIERY THUMBS (1986?)Oh, dark soft and deep
I shall fly straight and wild
into your sweet treasury,
crooning my fears up your sleeve:
no walls, no walls! The bliss falls
everywhere, killing us (in dreams).
This is your terror, your blessing,
your ancient devise:
If I see You, I see all things
conjoining, all meanings pierce
my heart to breaking.
If I yearn, run down the hall slaveringon all fours, burning, begging, singing
I see all things are
mad with mindless partnership.
This is what You offer, this piercing
clarity, that no one knows anything,
that the world is only to adore.
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OLD AND NEW POEMS
2011 The Village Philosopher 5
THE ALCHEMISTGold, save this darkening mixture.
This heat has burned for days,
and the rude lump boils and dries,
flakes and melts again, endlessly.
They say this lore is filled with anagrams;
the search set me back a day:
I started, threw the book aside
No fire glow glinted on the vitrine bowl,
the lapis huddled like a shrunken toad.
The maker of this art
knew this peace of heart
would hold me like a manacle.
FOR WALLACE STEVENSHis third eye
was a poem.
All objects scanned as lines
of it, that is
he was a man possessed,
needing a touch of the most outspoken page
for cure.
A swaggering abstract,
the mere style of belief
referred to,
any cartoon of relief
proved the poem, that eye, intact
in the heart of things.
That eye loved;the Hartford Company, the ocean,
anything.
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OLD AND NEW POEMS
2011 The Village Philosopher 7
LAPIDARY HYMNAll rocks have green cores.
They beat in silence,
hearing the worm turn,
the thunder of woodsmen armies
or the roar of burning.
Fire breaks them
and they go blind.
But in that split second,
they see the wild body of the universe.
VISIT THE HEART, SEE THE TRUTHDarling, your excess of mind
caught me out of love again.
Never consign me to the dust
of speech.
The coil of your heart's my armature.
In that sweet cradle of attention
down where the names are born
no one says lover or lovelorn;the current streams uncovered.
You may not know
all lovers freely rise there
like the air in chimneys,
unhindered, born of light.
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OLD AND NEW POEMS
2011 The Village Philosopher 8
CABALISTIC THEOREM"Each point in superspace stands for an entire three-dimensional geometry."John A. Wheeler in American Scientist, Spring, 1968.
Everything refers to everything else,in the best books, the best worlds.
Really, she too knows all the worlds
turn back on themselves.
This is the fundamental theory
of romance, the old one,
the soap-opera fate
in which we each become speechless darlings,
shining in bliss, and losing our edges.
So that these mere events,
and these verbal forceps
always graze each other but
unawares, by mirrors
endlessly facing into clearer and clearer
like the glass pores of space,
Indra's bubbling vacancy,
the space around you, in you
of you.
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OLD AND NEW POEMS
2011 The Village Philosopher 9
THE LOCAL GROUPOur hearts are like
that hulk buried in Australia
waiting for neutrinos
indescribably battered,
by ancient, invisible news.
Hard against the membrane
of belief, through sheer
remembrance, they clock
the pulses, and await the rain
of final adoration.
THE MECHANISMThe determination to be born
formed in the vaguest turn of thought
as warm breeze that keeps blowing
in the same direction
minute to minute, year to year
feeding the fires of discourse
through each disconnection, untilthe thin flame inside fear
bends, and directs me to the source.
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OLD AND NEW POEMS
2011 The Village Philosopher 10
OLD MAN ECHOSide by side
on the limestone stair
two grackles peck at lichen.
It tears silently
like antique leather,
green dust on the snow.
It is December.
The sun burns cold.
Few thoughts.
Straw whistles
in the crosswind.
Wyomissing Creek has shifted
twice since I was twelve.
Icy rain falls on crabgrass now,
where crayfish hung suspended under ice.
Once, during June flood days
deep under the borough,
breathing fog
we peered out, sun-blinded,
through an iron screen:the sun rode trembling,
mirror slick and green
on the roaring cataract.
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OLD AND NEW POEMS
2011 The Village Philosopher 11
LET'S SAY WE COULD TALK ABOUT ITThis slice of time
is fat with puissance when I start;
I cant sneak up
before the forms are all laid out for questioning.
Lay back and rest.
Im already seeing everything that shows.
The parts hold all the parts;
the seeing knows what can be seen
right at the heart of things,
before I ever mention witnessing.
HOW WE SEE
Language is the ocean,
My head swims.
Verbs, adjectives, gerundives
School, feed, mate
And dart away into
Abstraction.
Great white conceptsRoam for the lost and bleeding.
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OLD AND NEW POEMS
2011 The Village Philosopher 13
FARTHER INLAND STANDS THE OAR
These days I reflect upon the pains
The demigods have taken to hide beyond the worlds,
All of which exist to exhaust our human wishes.
If we can stay awake and creep beneath the layers,
Lay open the birthing place of the sayable forms,
The ontic crucible parades its metataxonomic shocks,
Knots inexplicable, too fast or too reluctant to be resolved,
A continuous mummery held in place to mask the disconnecting forces
And the horrors of disturbance lying just beyond the gate
All to allow our shallow little world
To lodge in semblances of slow wholenessTimed to the plodding of our reconnoiterings.
There is a falseness by the door of this world
Where all our visions and intentions are thwarted by design.
Looking out, in the usual way, moving to understand
No eye survives the legerdemain, the distracting thuggery.
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OLD AND NEW POEMS
2011 The Village Philosopher 16
LEHMAN HALL
In this dim space
Lit by distant crystal chandeliers
The light is scarred
And vague in places
As the language of it is,
But intimate,
Warm as this soup du jour,
Soft as the alphabets
Overlaying clarity.
MOYERS HILL
A dark, thin line
crosses the brazen wheat,
sun and air complying
with geometry.
The stepped fields bristle
like gold wire, then bow
towards the fire trail.
Wind passes intothe next valley,
lifting Paulas chickens,
dimming the creek
by bending the young beeches.
Where I lie
pollen drifts down the rock face
without touching
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OLD AND NEW POEMS
2011 The Village Philosopher 17
ELM STREET, READING
Above the flint-soled, wing-tipped shoes,
ponderously crunching street grit into flour,
swings the olive golf-sweatered
bulk of the old, vertical
Negro gentleman,
one of those with hands like paddles,
slowly threshing air,
lips frozen into grim 20s elegance
under the carefully considered hat:
caramel straw threaded with black leather,
forever headed toward the station
and the Pullman car.
HOW IT GETS DESCRIBED
Bayberries shake, so
partridges of thought
fly up, knocking, turning.
Seagulls tack eastward
over dunes. Look, Hopkins,hindquarters of a cloud
darken, and rain
slows drifting sand.
Waves closing on the beach
feed mental fires, mine,
and presumably
the girls down the shore
where black grit and broken shells
form a crescent beside her.
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OLD AND NEW POEMS
2011 The Village Philosopher 19
FRAGMENT
Very long ago, I drifted on unerring light
Through the slit of dreams
In search of my true earth.
Nothing less, nothing more.
Now doors open on another season,
But we choose to remain here
Locked in a fading year.
AT CIBONIS
You cant sit down
and dont touch the cheeses:
Salmonella.
We use this halberd
for the mammoth gouda.
They say our cheese
killed King Farouk.
The blond barrels are of some thin
Near Eastern wood,waxed, sweet and stringy.
They bulge between the staples
when rolled, trailing cedar sawdust
in red arcs.
You are very close to goats
when you lift the long, cold braids
up and out into the light of
Bostons Oldest Cheese House.
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OLD AND NEW POEMS
2011 The Village Philosopher 20
SUMMING UP
So this is the little self.
Is it any wonder, dearest,
That we keep talking here?
If, out of fondness, I rejoice
In all your mindless foibles,
Whos left to give a true account
That sings and dances over time
Above my poor and sheltered views,
That tells with joy the little choices
I could never ascertain,
That held at bay the proof of everything?
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OLD AND NEW POEMS
2011 The Village Philosopher 21
I WANT TO THINK ABOUT THE PECULIAR HONESTY OF THE RISHIS
Id hoped that Id be thinking useful thoughts
By the time I was to go.
Some part of me clings on to this, reluctant
Although the answers no.
Shes trim and breathtaking
In her Chinese silk shorts
Wedged upright upon her zazen barley pillow
Taking in the inner sights
Just as she was told on Friday.
People yearn for pictures
Of themselves in meditationAs proof theyre making progress
In the spiritual realm.
People want to see reflections
As they vote for other races,
And wear the purest clothes
As proof theyve made real progress
In the virtuous realm.
They never want to know
There is no progress and no realm,
No proof through some external check,
Or that the checking kills the virtue and the spirit in one blow.
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OLD AND NEW POEMS
2011 The Village Philosopher 22
AFTER THE SATISFACTION OF THE WINE
Someone has now assembled
A portion of the world, but
I am not persuaded
By my minds cartography.
When each convincing frame
Has been paraded,
And in turn each has faded,
And you stand within this lantern self
A-burning in the frail glow
Of your brief autography,
Nevertheless you note
How irresistiblyStage rear a single trumpet
Yearns romantically in D,
And you must ask
Who chose the valved glory of that key?
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OLD AND NEW POEMS
2011 The Village Philosopher 24
THE AIR IN THIS HOUSEThings are as they are (ah me, that godly state)
and summer light continues to approach the shade
where sun projects the Forms for children's eyes
but also in this house
I feel the currents pull along the closing door
and picture how they tour the space
finding paths in need of freshening
and though one breath breathes it all
like an old friend approaching
known by his August breathing in the halls
the fronts admix invisibly
they slam the bathroom door upstairs,and creak the cellar door
pass through my knuckle hairs
and draw bread dust into the table crack
pushing, pulling on the fennel leaf
these sundry tiny waves
that swell to cool my windward side
to merely sit and feel the winds at play
can enforce my sleepy happiness
connecting me to spaces everywhere
and so the larger portions of the house
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OLD AND NEW POEMS
2011 The Village Philosopher 25
OUR PLACE IN THINGS
Our little band of self-sustaining sensors
making little villages and art
simple meaty darlings
doing our part
endorsing recursivity.
With deep infatuation
for the tricksome space we say we live in,
we take our readings,
make our findings
to the deep command,
assert our play,
surround ourselveswith storytelling, kings, and death,
the look of joy,
bowers of hope,
beguiling artifacts and axioms
and lies we love believing
for a timetales much like this
thinking all that there must be
is where we are, and looks this way,
and things are what we say,
until the blue syncope.
Is there a full report,
the full disclosure
of what we're calling purposes,
what was enshrined
beyond our scrannel compass,
beside our verbal envelope,beneath our rapturous decline?
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OLD AND NEW POEMS
LATE JULY
All morning
the big flat-bottomed clouds
slide east along the Appalachian chain
while down below
in their slanted shadows
damselflies flash red or blue
among the spatterdock
landing for a second or twoNo need to knock
no patter mars
the open spaceabove this collar,
just the bubbling
of the doves.