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.
.
“The one is all things but no thing.” Plotinus
I walk out into
the bloc heat of August noon.
The absolute one.
Things in the cool shops
and a little money buys
air conditioning,
human relations,
my smiling self. Once outside,
the inscape wobbles:
which overflows, being or
mind knowing itself?
A few sips of pop
and things settle down: finite
goods are the real goods.
Summer Song by the Ocean
“Our horses winnied to each other at parting.”—Li Po
Voices cross the bay.
Duck voices, boat people, waves—
all carried by wind.
It could be any
time of year, but it’s summer,
and you are away.
The empty- fulness
of this day leaves plenty of
room for a love song.
Summer friends stop by
but I’m not there, I’m here with
you by the ocean.
“The image is a mediator in the porous between—making the between porous to what is beyond the between.” William Desmond, GOD AND THE BETWEEN, 270.
In the July sun
the cove becomes a mirror
too bright for my eyes.
I listen. The ducks
keep talking quietly. Time
overflows it seems.
The peace that passes
understanding passes as
the ducks fall silent.
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