WORK IN PROGRESS
“…there is no lost feast at the bottom of memory…” Hass paraphrasing Pinget
I stop by to see
the swan. Spring light graces its
long neck. I’m aware
the swan I see is
different: it’s head
and half its neck plunged beneath
the dark water. Were
I a poet not
a bottom feeder, I would
not feel a thing now.
Sun on the swan’s back—
salt and fresh brimmimg, the cove
is full of goodness.
……
White gulls squeal over
Narragansett Bay. I hear
the screams of women,
children, and elders
massacred by Puritans.
The gulls rise and fall,
timelessly, in time.
That is not all. These gulls
renew eternity.
WORK IN PROGRESS
“By thinking about the singular as the singular (i.e., an irreducible this), we find the passage to the divine origin from which its incontrovertible onceness is derived.” Takeshi Morisato, Faith and Reason, 185.
I almost tripped o-
ver it. High summer’s mirror,
empty, leaning there,
a motorcycle,
cold metal, dreamed in light of
the road ahead. Some-
one’s, now away from
it, maybe watching me look
at myself in it
and finding nothing
beyond the beauty of the
bike, his pride and joy.
A DAY AT THE BEACH
That kid knows something,
keeps writing ”love” in the sand
between crashing waves.
“…the ‘infinite reserve’ of divine nothingness as the transcendent ground of all things…” Takeshi Morisato, Faith and Reason, 168
WORK IN PROGRESS
Why I take these walks
is not at all clear to me
on overcast spring
days. I have to wait
a long time in the drizzle
for the difference
between the waves and
the ducks to appear, but when
it does, gray is not
gray. Nothingness is
nothing but makes room for this—
waves, ducks, gray poets
who, among others,
companion me on my re-
turns to these spaces.
“We can be lulled into a false sense of philosophy with respect to abstract dialectic; as if that, and only that, were philosophy; and not the emergence of thinking from an ambiguous ethos; not also the reinsertion of thought in the flow of life itself.” William Desmond The Voiding of Being, 177.
Big white boats tower
above the ducks at low tide.
In the spring sunshine,
the boats promise flight, the ducks
enjoy a few feet
of muddy water
in the shadow of the boats.
Poets dream journeys,
but I come down here
in shirtsleeves and sketch what
seems lit from below.
“Once the single individual realizes its finitude through its genuine self-criticism, it comes to realize its ground in what is other to itself.” Takeshi Morisato, Faith and Reason, 165.
The old Greylag Goose
couple loll in the Spring sun.
They own the boathouse.
Before your death, I
imagined us growing old,
inseparable, gray
if not white, like them.
Relatively simple lives
got complicated.
Now my life, simple
like theirs, has those rare moments
shared by animals.
WORK IN PROGRESS
“Would it be correct to say our concepts reflect our life?
They stand in the middle of it.” Wittgenstein, Remarks on Color III 302
It seems unlikely
but cresting, crusting Bay waves
once again roll in.
Last time seemed the first
and last time that Spring prevailed
over the world’s weight.
Ducks flap over ice-
edges and keep their balance.
Nothing comes to mind
like this. I awake
to what is other to thought
and the death of thought.
What I don’t know gives
me a lift as I let go
of my mind’s deep flow.
“Our posthumous thinking, which releases us beyond the bounds of the rational universal, also cultivates our attentiveness to the divine otherness at work in determining processes of becoming.” Takeshi Morisato, Faith and Reason, 131.
Susurration and
loud birds over my head as
I walk under old
trees renewed for now.
For now I walk without pain.
It’s been a good walk,
solitary, com-
panioned by the gift of time.
I wave to the dogs
that bark from trim yards
sporting Black Lives Matter signs.
They know their limits.
An egret lands mid-
bay on this soft day, itself
a dim splash out there.
The other side, gray,
green-gray. This side, Trinity’s
bells leap space and time.
I count syllables,
my way to play a part in
what goes on and on.
Metaxyturn Diaries 