Momentum in the Surrendering

If the essence of travel

is like a bottle

on the floor of a moving bus,

it can encapsulate

a momentum in the surrendering,

how every curve in the road

repositions its

temporary home.

With the imagination as a source

and destinations unknown,

there’s a pause over a glassy surface

like the reflection of pines

from a chair on an empty pier.

See them penitent in this light,

pressed against the sky

and in crystalized moments

the breaks in the clouds

 fall back into place

on glacial lakes.

There are simple rituals of control

in a fractured life,

the boiling kettle

that begets tea

in a green leafed kitchen,

Tai Chi that steeps the internal

in a laundry beneath

the backdrop of mountains.

There is something sublime in

running of hands

over ridgelines and the curves

that follow the currents

of continuous movement.

Like the trains

who by track and tunnel

deconstruct images

that huddle beneath passion, variety.

Through these windows

the inevitable takes shape

and life gives it strength

by the knowledge of the end of the line.

A momentum in the surrendering,

the landscape’s haphazard design.

From a veil of dark,

from whatever meaning

can be divined

from memory’s spark

in a field of fog,

the commingling of shades,

journals and coffee stains,

the night blending into day.

Along these borders,

dreams and swollen rivers

a life blood is

sourced from a common ancestor,

the past is only passing through.

Adapting but never arriving,

embracing but never evading

the ever-present chaos

sewn into the stitches

of a fabric unraveling.

This rite of passage,

the unfinished fragments

of letters and old poems

from a life mostly forgotten,

is shown to have its own momentum

not in the surrendering

but in seizing the moment.

In the Intervals

Between childhood and aging,

travelling and settling,

I know our time here is temporary.

Though the tides

tied everything together eternally,

moments rolling in the soft distortion

of ever shifting clouds.

Wanderers, caught by candlelight

become silhouettes

in the snow mansions

of a dissolving union.

All that is transitory

the sky would express lyrically

through the windows of

these communal rooms.

The sturdy peaks pierced through

the ephemeral,

leaving stars and mana

a milky residue

that through the passing

of glittering stones

carried

hundreds of miles

would construct walls

and floating cities.

From the dark of speculation

we’re guided by coral,

shaped by the invisible.

Behind a veil of questions

we’ll ponder reflections

and the abandon staring back

offers no explanation.

Nanmadol.

What remains of the past

an effigy,

an extension of ancestors and

the energy of creation.

We’ll meet in the intervals

of bones and breaking waves,

as true nature stays

parallel

sourced from the ocean,

the largest of liminal space.

Thirsty, the sedentary receives

swells from seasonal rains.

Unstuck from routine,

boats are cast adrift

towards Argos, Phoenicia and Pohnpei,

the disappearing remnants

of another yesterday.

Gliding past the monolithic canvas

walls that do not obstruct the silence

but give rise

to the vines that

obscured entranceways

and distorted time.

The surface

of canals give passage

to the strange light of torches

toying with the senses.

Moments adrift

and winds becalmed

in a labyrinth of choices

pressing forward

through the blanks,

the sunlight through the palms

looking for openings.

As the wind picks up again,

you’ll consider the will and the breadth

to what has been left

upon this petri dish

of life and death.

It tells a story often repeated,

of benevolence and dissolution

crossing over into myth,

that realm of the unseen

and the power

to move everything,

while waiting in the intervals

as always

for it to pass somewhere

between vibration and illumination,

it will be built again.

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An Expectant Exile

An expectant exile

in circular patterns,

a clasp in the necklace

fastened by chance and distance.

What is left unfinished,

an art that is never completed

in the endless reel

of this motion.

The tide receding

the stars fleeting,

pinned like sea salt

on the slick surfaces of sky .

The expectant exile,

journals in the blanks

left on the trail.

Words weathered,

soaked through with rain,

the wind turned pages

in the book of changes.

A deep ancestral resonance,

chanted into the grooves

and in mountains

a distant profile

textured in stone.

Sunrise over Ka Iwi

the coast of bones.

Black are the remains

of an ancient flow,

like charcoaled veins

for a jagged running

narrative to time.

These silent sentinels

revealed in first light

at the border between worlds.

The edge of the sea was

an armor over the distant glimmer

perceived from the ridgeline,

a single drop in the universe

to nourish the thirst

for horizons.

The expectant exile

of sturdy trees felled

from far away forests.

The storms turned to driftwood,

made errant to currents,

to wash ashore

on far away beaches

with the lullaby of soft violence

that shapes these expressions.

Gods carved in effigy,

their likeness

carried off to war

or kept at temple entrances

to ward off the restless,

even harbor those protective

in places of refuge.

Shifting seasons,

Ua Koko,

the heavy rain

brings blood in

the tragedy of rivers.

Their curving knives

down clay hillsides

filling artesian springs

with an ecstasy

that sings through the rock

of expectant exile,

when clear waters are expelled

into the brackish grasp

of the unknown

who cast it adrift

to begin again.

In Dreams of Trains

In dreams of trains

our faces are pressed up against the glass.

Images strung together

through a film reel

of inseparable memory.

In the intervals of freights

passing strings of suppertime light,

we’ll meet by the makeshift fires

like hobos in eternity

on abandoned beaches and under bridges,

amplified by the boxcar musicality

of the past brushing against the present.

Wheels fill the gaps,

the click clack continuity of dreams

becoming the vessels through which trains

connect myriad lives on parallel tracks.

Restless spirits, wayward rambling

to an alarum of shrill yells

that usher in a collision

of chance meetings.

The seared impressions,

through metal and iron,

are the first sparks of insight,

that oncoming light that floods

the narrow rooms of domestication,

a midnight special that breaks the isolation.

We’ll measure the width of impact and expanse

by rails that clear fields and walls,

all the demarcations of a hemmed in life.

The far off grain towers

were the outer reaches

of the imagination

that motion pierces

to separate lives from careful decisions.

Left in the wake of smoke and vagrant coil,

the scent of diesel that evokes travel,

trains were the sudden revision

before all would unravel,

before blackbirds would pick through and scatter

like storm clouds to the periphery,

harbingers of the necessary renewal

that disperses to the four directions

all the stagnant energy.

We’ll gather once again on a tiny sliver of land,

at the end of our youth,

in the mystic continuity of

long shadows and laughter,

in the beach fire’s theater

we become the protagonists

no longer constrained by time.

The ocean waves through the fog,

motioning to the rites of passage

going thousands of miles

if only in consciousness,

towards the far reaches of a folded map

stuffed in the pockets of a weather beaten pack

these disparate lives will always overlap

at the charred edges they’re seared together

in faded photographs

film reels and

windows

The Motion Beneath Confinement

The Potential of Travel:

The potential of travel when confined to islands becomes mental.

The strength of creativity, equilateral

to the flight of frigate birds

and the horizon that completes the triangle.

The shadow casts a wide net knowing not where it will land,

somewhere equatorial,  over vast tracts of luminous sand.

Sometimes it’s necessary to scan an entire ocean

before we can temper the distortion.

Can the mind’s eye touch the spirit?

Will the interplay of a thousand images get near it?

There comes a surge of words but you barely hear it

in the motion of a distant storm

and the supple blackness that gives form to the correspondence.

 

The Drifting Leaves no Footprints:

Lodged like a shell in this primitive expanse

your dreams of drifting leave no footprints.

You await the tide,  the next great swell

to bring you back out again.

Through the hypnotic reverie of the surf

the sound of whitewash dissolves

into ancient squares.

Surreal and composed

it proceeds over stone

breathing its soundtrack into the motion

of when it comes and it goes.

It rises and recedes

beneath the toes of a statue,

this patron saint of lonely virtue,

companion to the emptiness that time would accrue

over centuries of our movements and the residual echoes

are the only things left that pass through.

 

Fragments of the Imagination:

Fragments of the imagination gathered like debris,

it’s a war for control within the limits of any city.

In the contents of journals

In the semblance of journeys,

fragments of experience are closely cropped,

before spilling to your feet like errant teardrops,

turning the well worn passages into cascading streams

and through these gleaming mirrors all will be revealed.

 

Outside of Awareness:

On the outskirts of the glass city,

far from the sheltered harbor,

near to the pathways outside of awareness

there is a mystical sequence of moments

at the crossroads of consequence,

a series of propositions to remind us

that we’re merely riders on the wind,

passengers on the bridge

spanning the moment

between the past and the future,

suspended, nebulous as a rumor

afloat in the ether,

the faintest of bells

ringing out from towers and hills

and the freedom that follows

the silhouette of sweeping swallows.

 

 

The Back Valley Exhales:

You’ll descend like a strand of rain

loosened from a cloud,

a radiant bird

the illuminated shroud

of a monk at work with the sacred word

describing the light before it’s dispersed.

The knoll is aglow in resplendent intervals of flame

from out of the shade of the back valley

it is framed by the ridges, to hold in the essential energy.

Until exhaling with the strongest of wind,

it is a phoenix conjured again.

There’s an attempt to harness it,

to give names to the shrill songs

but wayward is my own breath,

destined to unravel before long.

Looking back on your travel like a colorful thread

lifted like wildflowers from the riverbed

unencumbered from moors

the moments of ascent

reaching towards the unbroken sky

when there is no breath to give

the memories die.

 

The Motion Beneath Confinement:

There’s a highway that follows the coast

and around every bend

recollections call out like restless ghosts.

A temporary retreat from quarantine

the city is shuttered, encased in concrete.

Here you evaporate instantly

into mist and sea salt,

leaving stains we’re urgently altered

by the whims of the water.

Waves breaking against the foundations,

no windows remain.

All the best laid plans,

wind blown and sacrificed to the rain,

to all the old gods in nature.

We’ll advance, hand in hand with the unknown.

All structure going up like matchsticks,

like retirement homes in the lava zone.

Against the hardened darkness

there are streaks of light,

in contrast we find the alignment.

So we lose ourselves for a time

peeling back layers of confinement,

seeking motion for guidance

to see through the blindness

and the sickness that knows no limits.

 

 

The Color that knows no Border

The essence of travel,

like a luminous thread

in the recesses of memory,

unravels again

after years of neglect,

for it has not faded.

Its radiant color knows no border

in the confines of categories

or in the dark closets

conveniently tucked away

with letters and photos from a parallel life.

 

There is wind behind the doors you would pry

the sudden brush burnt scent

of foreign fields and infinite sky.

The rush is immediate

and time is flipped on its side.

All your notes on motion scatter

like prisms of decisions,

east or west?

Best the flicker of inspiration

that always leans towards the far flung places.

 

Once that tide turned,

all that was constrained

is drawn out by the moon,

a cool depository of longing,

leading the retreat

into phases of falling.

The life left behind

each night is deconstructed

and getting further away.

The illusion of brightness

only highlights the reality of distance,

for change was continuous

and none could get too close

to whatever we were seeking.

 

The boundless wind makes haste on the ocean

initiating waves

like raised lines from the empty page

distorted by fingers

that try to tighten and contain

belief that there is form to disorder,

something to be worn of the unseen,

draped  like an ancient sweater

over the shoulders of the highway

that runs unencumbered on the periphery.

It sounds like surf next to the machinery,

a tempting break in the repetition.

So you’ll make an abrupt transition

towards the outskirts of that city

and the wilderness that runs the length of the past.

 

The parkway is traversed by twisting two lane,

stark against the season’s shift to amber,

I think it was September

when the sudden flare paints a forgotten corner

of what you’d remember,

forming the backdrop of further forays

into conscious embrace

of the unknown all around you.

The slow burning blue ridge

turning with every corner,

like the foliage,

we’ll make our way south

towards that place in the past

longing for renewal.

These cycles in the essence of travel,

infinite, immutable,

where one color ends another will begin.

Thoughts that Wander Dark (shaking hands at the end)

I know these thoughts that wander dark .

While traveling we coalesced briefly,

as strangers when neither offered shelter,

out beyond the city lights,lying in forests

almost too quiet to be pacified.

Back East, where the Atlantic is brewing storms,

darkened they would form from the subconscious,

until  breaking over Montauk,

memory grows full of the sound

of wave grain scraping pebbles,

descending, with salty skin,

smooth as seal wash,

like shipwrecks to subterranean sand,

it is never solid ground on which we stand.

A weeping, for all of us sinking.

Thoughts going abruptly dark,  drowning

like sailors with no one’s mourning to lift them,

only loosened garments , black and torn,

strewn across the sky like an aborted skin.

It takes the form of storm clouds and bellowing wind

to shake widow’s peaks and usher in

a spray of gulls, deranged and white,

with cries like a piercing reprise.

In the dunes a string of flowers endures,

while burning forests of evergreen

cast down the safety screen,

thrusting us once more into tenuous positioning.

The horror inherent in a charred landscape,

the specter of cancer haunting our mutated shapes,

we’re absorbing the next tragedy through the TV,

breathing deeply the Autumn scent of gunpowder and spotfire.

Out beyond the reflection of light on the surface of the sea,

gasoline ignites  from underneath,

so you get to know the inverse as well,

for the source of words can transform wounds to beauty,

like streaks of light that adorn the sky,

a holiday to the eye though it temporarily blinds

into forgetting that we all must one day die.

The body cannot sustain this creativity.

At it’s peak, it used these techniques

to attempt immortality.

High upon the mountain, it gains traction on the stars.

Till far below it sings odes to the river that washes out to sea.

Down the road you migrate through the mirage in a distant bend,

calling to the future like an estranged friend,

shaking the hand of what comes to meet you,

once again putting aside the folly

of aimlessly grasping at the illusion of permanence

amidst the totality of an eventual end.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Imagination, A Point of Entry

1.

You know that feeling well,

when incomprehensible streets

greet your first steps

and a breath of woodsmoke and foreign leaves

awaken various states of disorientation.

Under the strange sheets of temporary homes,

getting off the road, a coffee’s respite

awaits those who roam through the element’s assault.

Arctic Terns and the road seems to go on and on,

each vista eclipsing the last gasp

from the sea to the snow capped peaks.

There is thought, there is action

and on a fog blurred ridge line

they become entwined

in a swirling yin and yang with the sky,

how each can obscure and direct the other.

2.

The imagination was a point of entry,

in Kjarval’s studio

where a tenuous reality meets fantasy,

the canvass becomes an extension of nature,

a weathered glimmer behind the mind’s eye,

a shifting moodscape of faces

in rock formations and lucent turf.

This sudden shift can unearth

from the inanimate a movement

that gazing inward

reveals and gives shape to.

3.

Folk tales lead us through Horgadalur,

where half wild horses are prone to majestic pauses

by the swollen rivers of lore.

The regal falls, the rush of water

through clefts in penetrable moors,

completes the jagged unity of rock and valley.

While we in our tiny vehicle

become merely a pebble

in the volcanic masonry

of landscape and now memory.

4.

At the inlet of Kista

the sea recedes back centuries

to reveal the unspeakable cruelty

done to those condemned for sorcery.

Driftwood fires leave black marks on the Strandir,

the impassible cliffs

where Basque ships

strand sailors to unforgiving coasts,

where power mad hosts wrote edicts

and pursue them like wolves,

leaving bodies bloodied on an isolated shore.

In the Westfjords, the pastoral eloquence of sheep

give way to a violence bubbling underneath.

In its history it is much of the same.

Fleeting is the light in a narrative

that is dark more often than not

but we never saw it this way,

catching Iceland’s capricious rays

in the sky, like a precious

sigh of relief,

knowing this time is brief,

this travel only temporal,

lives soon to be fractured again,

like the land beneath

that makes room for the new,

though it may assume physical separation,

it leaves us with an indelible impression,

pictures and letters to draw on

to complete a path back.

 

 

These Wayward Notes Roamed

Peering over the edge of the half opened drawer,

you’re afforded a glimpse

through the void

of a former life

whose mind structures and stacked spines

were wayward notes roaming

undefined decades ago

through the oldest quarters of Paris.

What was left unfinished, the letters like lamplight

on the avenues and the pinched parallels of Marais.

What do they say of mystery?

Of being buried alive?

One fist seizes the light

seeking breath to break free of binds,

experience in hindsight

relegated to a page in time,

to squeezing sentences of quintessences,

dissolving these contour lines.

Mystery,  in the wake of transport

what can it take of the forgotten?

That which is no longer mentioned of moments

overwhelming the air of another postponement.

The bell’s chorus wakes the wasted ideal,

an incarnation through atonement

beneath the shell of inaction

reverberation towards something whole.

Mystery, that melancholy departure

pressed into the fibre of indecipherable spaces,

twilighted in notebooks

that grid and translate the travel,

blurring the towns in-between.

Still it remains pliant,

rounding out reason’s edges.

Along the border of the Seign river

it is under a saintly finger

as it dabs the transparent clouds

shot through with light

and by dusk spewing blood.

Mystery is the host

holy enough to reveal no wounds

from the dogmatic wars,

it makes it through without scars

without cracks in wonder

it is a stained window in a cathedral,

a marble current in the Parisien sky.

There’s a subtle door in the repetition of poems

unlocking the divine,

a cadence recognized in dreams and visions

sinking softly into a receptive mind.

Mystery, pulled from the void like a rebirth,

sets a glow over the changes,

encouraging new curves in the regiment

of the sensitive imbued with luminous purpose,

to illustrate and turn further pages.

 

 

Moments Return to Eternity

On some level I know I do not belong to this,

taut rope at the end of fine woven thread,

worn like a domestic noose,

nice and loose,

feet kicking out the distance

of mentionless miles

acquired to appease the urge to stay vital.

Those rapturous bells now hushed,

a dilapidated chapel at midnight,

only memory can read purity

on this soiled facade

whose rubble of relics

were boxed and closeted mementos

mapping our travel.

Crumbs on fine China plates

anticipate honeymoons ending,

reveal what’s lingering

beyond death carving into the best baked plans.

The knowledge cures us of naivety

but casting its shadow,

initiates a change.

Can we appreciate

the full scope of innocence re-arranged.

It’s disturbing when your own associations

service the undoing.

Stepping into that arena

you state your intentions,

asking for protection

to soften the steps of your treading,

while poems place a law

on moments that would otherwise decompose.

In the alcoves of a sprawling tree

I got to know your secrets well.

The once locked trunk

was like a psyche split open.

In the recesses you left offerings,

with Boo Radley you played hide and seek.

Turning down a shaded driveway,

pass the threshold

you tested like cool water.

Sandy slippers await your return,

underwater caves learn of what happened

beyond the wave break,

where familiarity shifts shape

and sharks devour us

in reef mouths a gape.

The black skin must have been

air tight India ink.

The sun slips through again,

stripping you of dark garments.

All the fear that followed you here,

become shadows

slinking to find sustenance elsewhere,

in some deep well beneath a canopy of thoughts,

in the eaves of trees

that do not sit still but walk,

when we weren’t watching,

moments return to eternity.