Metaxyturn Diaries

WORK IN PROGRESS

“The existence of things outside God … about which he cares … is best explained by …the notion that God himself is characterized by…ecstatic love…” Catherine Osborne, EROS UNVEILED (OUP, 1994) commenting on Divine Names.

A wet tongue nibbling

my boot laces among chips

and tissues. “Hello,

my little man! In-

troduce me to your mistress!”

Our first winter storm.

Ecstatically

Eros makes the rounds. Her head

buried in the news.

No doubt these big raindrops

are the fruit

rewarding prayers. — Buson (trans. Merwin)

Waiting for rain, I

carry my umbrella. Grass

crunches as I walk.

With every step,

a prayer to end the drought.

The heavens open;

despite my efforts,

my umbrella is stuck shut.

I get wet, happy

as a dog, made a-

ware prayers are answered for

the poor in spirit.

WORK IN PROGRESS

“Here, given creation is not a part, but as apart, it is its own whole. It is not the absolute; it is a finite whole.” Desmond, God and the Between, 253.

Nice days are fewer

this summer. It’s true all o-

ver, but still, a break

in the heat causes

the heart to whine like a dog,

so we take a walk.

Light piles cloud on cloud

above the cove, silently

ducks patrol the cove,

the cove focuses

the attention. It’s why we

forget climate change.

Which is not to give

up on the world. The world tran-

scends us. We pass on.

WORK IN PROGRESS

The life of effort disappears behind the life of grace, of passivity. Simone Kotva on Simone Weil, EFFORT AND GRACE 162

Civil daffodils

droop from neat high street planters,

nod in August heat.

Their yellow has paled.

Only my passive, vagrant

eye pauses to look.

I stand abstracted

from the uncivil traffic

by the flow of time.

WORK IN PROGRESS

“Complete attention is like unconsciousness.” Simone Weil, quoted in Simone Kotva, Effort and Grace, 140.

Sweat trickles in my

ear, drops to a page of Paul.

A hot, moonless night,

too sticky for work.

Sleepless repose the hope of

this homo simplex,

with grace. My phone glows:

hazy photos of the moon —

a friend on the coast.

“The jolt puts us on edge on a tightrope, one side nothing, the other side exceeding life.” Desmond, G&B, 249.

Where did you come from,

late summer fly? You land here

and there. You brighten

airless passages

with iridescence. My eye

keeps losing the way.

With a jolt, I see

your doubleness: born in waste,

now pure energy.

Thought is a fair candle— Welsh gnome

Gulls pierce summer clouds

Hot winds whip up white caps on

dark cobalt waters

I walk by the Bay

the paths empty, no one sees

Earth’s edges burning

WORK IN PROGRESS

“The idiotic singular is the loved child of time at play.” William Desmond, GOD AND THE BETWEEN,237.

Napping after a

long walk in the Sierra,

my thin body on

the granite, I woke

to the glitter in the stone

as the sun went down.

Just in time. Boyhood

experience of the gift

of being in time.

For no good reason,

I made it back to the camp

in plenty of time.

Now old, I sit on

a rock, watching the light play

in time with the waves.

WORK IN PROGRESS

“It is the resonant silence you hear, and the resonant silence you make in return, when you get the poem and the poem gets you.” Robert Bringhurst, THE TREE OF MEANING, 309.

Only the mourning

dove softly pierces the peace

of the August heat.

Song accompanies

the way to and from home: no-

body but the birds

in the distances,

their many versions of the

same few dropping notes

lasting into dark,

their far presence the too much-

ness of summer’s end.

“Esti: It is. This, Parmenides says, this alone is left for us to say. (Frag. 8, 1–2).” Desmond, God and the Between, 55.

PARMENIDES’ MARES

Addressed too much by

the egret up to its knees

in the dark water,

the thinker doubts him-

self. If that exists,

I’m a minor premise! Yet,

the egret steadies

the horizon, flies

away. Where it was, the light—

that (Parmenides);

there’s the glossy mane

of the mares who brought him where

ESTI resonates.

.