28 SEATTLE and 1 NEW YORK POEM FOR THE 2001 POEMS
10 Birth - 10 Journey - 9 Death
SEATTLE
#01 BIRTH
08-21-01
In remembrance of the qasida I give birth,
spin out the spidery substance, allowing new
birth
in a dew bespattered pinwheel of trembling light.
Fogs roil with summer's whispered
memories of birth,
choosing to reflect light in the teared rain,
choosing a rainforest's
nascent, watery, nurtured, non-visible birth.
#01 JOURNEY
08-21-01
Born in winter, with the chrysanthemums, my journey
began as a cold, wet, hard-clodded, long
journey
into spring toward the viridian grass. The light
daffodil's gold sun, its stemmed
heaviness, its journey
toward bloom, its hard-sucking need for pattering rain,
its
birth-weary, evanescent, bow-headed, spring demands inevitability's journey.
#01 DEATH
08-21-01
Toward the end of afternoon, clouds signal death.
The sun setting in whispering pinks signals
death.
The ice-blue, silver building's reflection in the light
signals new ways to summon
summer's of death,
which, lasting too long, readies itself for rain,
seeks the sodden leaves of autumn's announced death.
#02 BIRTH
08-23-01
O Devayani, where to begin? Where to begin?
The evaporation of experience bugs you so you
hardly
dare to wake, sit up, move about.
After sixty-eight years of gathering and discarding
there's
nothing left to give you comfort. But isn't
that what you have opted for? It was
beneath you to draw comfort from things, places
or people. You live only in the
creations
of your mind and, as they must, they
have failed you. You have looked at each
thing of life and set it aside. Now
you wonder what do to, where to go.
You feel as if you
have been beaten
and bruised, as if you have been sick,
are not quite well. You journey toward death.
#03 JOURNEY
09-03/12-17-01
I've followed my master for sixty-seven years.
And who is your master, madame?
The necessity to
turn human experience into words.
Why turn it into words?
To make it graspable, meaningful, to catch
it like musical notes from the
wind.
The nature of music is to be heard and die.
I once wrote:
"There is nothing
but what happens
at the center of things."
But you don't believe it.
I believe it in that momentary way a writer does.
Tell me about the momentary beliefs
of a writer.
No human activity is more omniscient.
And then it is gone, like the music?
You
can see everything as you write.
Then having written it is gone?
Exactly.
#04 DEATH
09-04-01
So, its death today, once again, unease, fear of disease,
depression, repression, all arising from
the chemical soup
of a body with its own intentions and desires,
appetites, curiosities, drugging
perennial emotions.
You would have thought God smart enough to beware of giving
a creature
as limited as man the dubious gift of consciousness.
What does he get for his pains? Boredom, anger,
revenge, hostility.
You'd of thought, omniscient, he would have seen it coming.
But it really
is all an illusion, there is nothing but chemical soup.
The world is Maya, they say, illusion,
delusion.
It's what you eat and what you breathe that causes interaction in
the molecules. You
interpert them how you will.
It seems there is only one law beside Peter's principle. That it
is you
who must decide what problems you are interested in, which you try to solve.
No problems,
no life. So you might say the first creation was a propensity
for error, for problems. Then came
human beings to solve them
On a great field of gold, crimson and blood, was displayed all the
most
attractive problems. And the, preferably, young human being could
choose among them.
Nobody told him about "must". Only later in life,
finding one's self problemless, out of the swim
of life, did one know
how important that choice was -- that it was indeed the first
law of
the universe to lead a life of other than despair.
Why the secret? Does it sound too trival to me
true?
It's the law of civilized man. The wild-man, closer to the animals,
Still knows how to do nothing.
NEW YORK
#05 BIRTH - September 11, 2001
09-11-01
Nine one one, the day that changed the world.
You walk in your friend's door, ready to walk their
dog.
The radio on, to keep the dog company, says:
"Two planes have just crashed into the World
Trade Towers."
O, you realize, take the leash -- and then your memory stops.
Did you walk the
dog or call your sister.
You'll never know which you did first.
You do remember it was 7:55 when
you called your sister.
You didn't want to wake her. She had a broken arm.
You asked if she was
awake. Advised her to turn on
the television set -- she never watches television.
You told her
about the Trade Towers, you sent some
rather casual e-mails suggesting it was Osama ben
Laden
doing it again. You canceled your trip planned for tomorrow --
all the airports were
closed. It didn't seem so very important,
until,
on Television you saw -- well you had wondered
how the one
hundred story buildings could just fall down,
and then you saw --
first, the top
of one slowly sinking, puffs of smoke like dust
climbing up from the windows
one story down from
another,
dust up,
down one story and then another,
down down down,
up up up
then, like
a banana peel,
dust puffs folding down
great fountains of dust puffs going down
like falling
fog-shapes falling fireworks
a flow as fluid as an atom bomb,
but going down
and the central
structure shrinking
down down down.
Another shot,
up from the street,
showing the hundred
stories
just sinking into nothingness.
Another shot, and a roiling river,
like a tsunami of
dust
flowing like a cumulus cloud
rolling down the street,
people fleeing toward the
camera.
screaming.
Another plane crashed through from the west
three of the fortress-like
defense rings
of the Pentagon.
And one final hi-jacked flight,
not too far from Pittsburgh,
not too far from Camp David,
crashing.
The White House was evacuated,
so was the
Congress.
Our frat-boy president flying around in the air
from place to place
talking of
vengeance.
The numbers of the dead withheld
all day.
You look up the specs.
The World
Trade Center Towers could house
50,000 people
Many ran down steps for fifty, ninety
stories
and survived.
SEATTLE
#06 JOURNEY
09-16-01
One in each doorway,
homeless people sleep.
The great doors, of course, are
never
opened.
Except on triumphal occasions.
Cascading down the steps,
perhaps two hundred
candles.
Some, in tall blue-glass jars,
still alight at five a.m.
And flowers.
Not a great
many, but some.
Paper wrapped bouquets,
some in jars, drinking
to stay alive.
The fog
stagnates in the Seattle air,
cool, now, in September.
Up on First Hill where the
twin
towers of the great cathedral rise,
where the doors are locked
for the dark,
even with
five thousand missing
or dead in our teetering new world
there's no room inside
for the
homeless.
Yet, O Devayani, as you look at the twin towers,
you are grateful for Christianity.
Its great buildings grace the landscape
of almost every country.
And you like
architecture.
You don't much like humans,
but you like their works,
their hubris throwing
steel
and concrete into the sky.
And, perhaps,
even the hutzpa of knocking it down.
This
time with planes.
Airplanes of people.
Christianity may have destroyed the
world,
civilization after civilization after civilization,
peoples upon peoples upon peoples
with their architecture
and their gods,
but they added new buildings.
And the Muslims,
with their blue mosques,
and Sufi skirts,
those hyper-Christians,
perhaps it was
they
who knocked down the twin towers
of the Golden Calf.
Like the implosion of the World
Trade Towers,
Christianity evolved into world Capitalism,
Islam into Retribution.
And still,
the homeless, sleep peacefully
in the twin doorways of the great
cathedral.
Where
they are not allowed to rest,
even with five thousand
crushed to molecules with the steel,
the
concrete, the computers,
the blizzard of papers,
the financial papers of the world,
floating
out as far as
the statue of Liberty,
there's still
"no room at the inn."
The stock market will reopen on Monday.
They have said They will try to
restrain the trading.
Lest someone make money on our disasters,
as we've made money on
theirs.
O Devayani your once-best-friend, who plays to win,
wants vengeance, as
does
Mickey Mouse, our President.
He's got what he wants, what his vengeful
party wants, not
just financial,
but military control -- new rules,
new powers, new games to play
with the
lives of others.
While the homeless sleep at the locked
cathedral doors,
peaceful until
daylight,
watched over by the light
of the blue candles,
the flowers,
the dead.
#07 DEATH
09-17-01
I live in Seattle, white-haired, in the fog and the drizzle,
and wonder if
other lives are as skimpy as mine.
On paper, just the bare facts of my life
sound like
great adventure,
but I know the thinness
beneath the narrative
line.
It takes not a minute of experience
to fill up pages and
pages
catching the essence, the nuance, the scarlet flush
of the dawn in a
world
of uncountable molecules,
horrifying death, birth, journey,
experience.
I wander on, amazed at the richness,
the thinness, the grid,
the pattern,
but of sixty-seven years, I spent only
three months, three
weeks in India,
and a lifetime's study,
I spent a year and a day in
England,
another three other weeks,
and a lifetime trying to wash
its
seductive, distortions of life from my life.
But, if they had not done
it,
others stood by to conquer the world.
When there were no countries left
to conquer,
America flexed her muscles of power,
did much the same as
Britain
without needing to leave home.
They say its man's nature to
conqueror
one another. But there have been civilizations
of peace --
rarely, individuals of peace -- often.
I dwell on that in the fog and the
drizzle.
In the middle of a beautiful, oncoming fall,
in Seattle, with
more sunshine than usual,
I saw the 9-11 planes crashed into the Towers,
the
Pentagon, and our civilizations changed,
I began to change.
I had been
to the top of the tower once,
with a man, a dark angel, an archangel, now dead
(if angel's die).
He painted his way to the top and jumped off,
drank
himself to death on the way down.
He, too, tried to exercise his morality --
and failed.
#08 BIRTH
09-22-01
Is there a poem in me this morning?
I doubt it.
The grey mantle
hangs over the sky.
The gloom is in my heart.
I dealt with the
plagiarizers yesterday
and heard some of the "poets'" response,
both
subhuman and inhuman.
I had heard that "the boards" on the
Internet
are full of vituperations and insult,
that they collect a
lot of the scum.
I never thought to experience it.
Well, I'm dirty
now,
asking if the suggestion to repost the poems
in such an
environment was a favor.
But then, I look again at the sky.
It
is blue, the sun beginning to shine.
The crispness of autumn is in
the air.
I like to wear heavier clothes.
Summer is the season for
nakedness,
but Seattle is too temperate to indulge.
So heavier
clothes are a boon
along with a heavier heart.
#09 JOURNEY
(Found and added in 07-24-04)
09-22-01
Out on the streets of Seattle, the newspaper says:
the Dow plunges as low as 1933 --
the year I was born.
And, indeed, I feel like the muck and the soil
where the daffodils were planted
the year I was born.
Born into a new journey:
A sixteen year old on the bus
doesn't know that Canada is a separate
country, doesn't know the reference to
"You can always go to Canada"
when he says he won't "join" the draft.
Each journey begins with a single step
over and over and over again, beginning
the year I was born...
#09 JOURNEY
09-30/10-03-01
What do you expect from a book titled:
Guns, Germs, and Steel by a
believer
in "progress" called J. Diamond:
"Evolution selects
for those individuals
most effective at producing babies and
at
helping them spread to suitable places to live." p. 198
And, re
writing, as quoted from Claude Levi-Strauss:
"ancient writing's main
function was
'to facilitate the enslavement of other human beings.'"
p. 235
There you have it. What else is new?
Here we sit
psyching ourselves up for a biological warfare
attack while I lie
reading, remembering how, in America,
my ancestors got the
continent in the first place:
smallpox et al, we arrived and reduced
the inhabitants
of Mesoamerica from about twenty million
(20,000,000)
to maybe 1,600.000 (with the help of a little
warfare).
And the inhabitants of North America from 20,000,000
by about 95% to about 1,000,000, also with
a little warfare and a
lot of smallpox blankets.
Wouldn't you say its sort of, "poetic
justice" for our present
"civilization" to be brought down by germs,
to write about it
in a language system
(in a country snatched
by Christians -- the precursors to Islam --
with the aid of disease
and religious fanaticism)
only ocassionally misused for poetry.
#10 DEATH
10-03/05/07-01
With its crosses and dirt, represented in Spatial
Composition by Tadao
Ando, glass and cross
on the edge of the lake, a swamp of
illumination.
I argue with Sergio constantly -- in my head
--
against assigning meaning to the abstract.
I design some of the
most complicated grids in the world,
but I "put that there" because
"I like it there,"
never because I think others will react to it thus
and so.
Who's to know if high space fills another with terror
or
awe, who's to make another's reaction wrong
by saying: high spaces
mean thus and so.
Theoretical response to abstract space is
as
personal as sex. A four square building of joined
timbers,
with struts from illuminated floor to glass ceiling,
glass
in between: a box. It's the house I always wanted to
live in, in
the woods, in privacy, open only to the woods
and the sky. I'd make
one change. I'd replace the cross in the swamp
with Shiva Dancing.
#11 BIRTH
10-08-01
The war has began.
The war started yesterday.
I cannot find in my
heart any
more than a neutral statement of that
fact.
I look
around, I try to imagine Seattle's tall
buildings crumpled, its hills
devastated, Seattlites
searching for small foodstuffs, drinking from
puddles
in the Arboretum, ice-cold at night, shivering in the
winter
sunlight.
No, I cannot imagine it. And why should I?
The reality will or will
not be here soon enough. Along with
Christmas, the birth of Jesus, those
who refuse to believe in the
Second Coming -- in Mohammed -- will soon see
who wins. The world in
shambles and chaos. It's happened in my lifetime to the
Jews,
Cambodians, Pakistani, those of Bharat, East Timor, and earthquakes
galore.
Why not us? The Columbia Tower, now called Bank of America
Building, disintegrated
around our freshly wet ears,
while it
rains
steadily.
#12 JOURNEY
10-10-01
BUSSING IN SEATTLE
I ring for release from the 43,
walk across the Montlake
Bridge:
mountains to the left, the Olympics, mountains,
the
Cascades, silhouetted against the red rising sun,
to the right.
and down, via the lawns beside the canal, behind
the Hospital, get my
66-cent coffee in the Plaza Cafe,
walk the corridors into Health
Sciences --
the garbage cans are having a private convocation
in the vast never-used lobby, hemmed into their
privacy with yellow
disaster tape,
their fat cheeks not quite touching,
5 cans, and one
in the middle. The person
who passes me says: "There must be a drip."
My scenario was more exciting: the world
in disaster, why shouldn't the
garbage cans
invoke their own? Why wouldn't they get discouraged
called on too often and for too much?
Why shouldn't they send a delegation out across
the bridge, look for
someplace else in the rising
sun to perform their services
instead
of hauling away mind trash
manufactured in the serene
morning where,
walking, there is nothing to be thought of except the frightened
women
in Afghanistan hiding from the bombs. First their husbands, now
the bombs.
One can begin to understand how, sooner or later, garbage
cans become
the receptacles for babies.
#13 DEATH
10-14/17-01
The gray shroud of the sky
the wet pavement of the terrace
a plane
crashes into the silence
-- its noise.
It's now reflex to pay
attention
to the sound, wait 'til it
disappears -- and a little
beyond, to
listen carefully.
Is it circling back? I live
a
long way from the airport.
Few speak of the Trade Towers
in
conversation.
We hold public ritual grief sessions
but already
it is a bit
embarrassing to grieve personally, when 3,000
miles
separates
one from knowledge, from encounter, from
the smell of
5,000 pulverized bodies
being slowly digested by bugs, no
doubt
infrequent
survivors themselves. The constant fear-chat
about
biological warfare already bringing it into
being. Anthrax
through the mail -- sick
people always
willing to respond to the media's
goad to be heard, to
participate
in the news. Or is it
deeper than
that?
Diseases unknown carried by colonists,
smallpox blankets sent by the
Cavalry
to the Indians, 95% of Americans
dead within
a year
or two. Biological warfare
before it was invented, nonetheless
effective.
Today, horrors! -- we would never do
such
things.
But the pharmaceuticals, who don't mind
shipping
expensive, out-dated, poisonous medicines to
the 3rd, 4th, 5th worlds,
might.
They're not
making their fair share with everyone
dead in an hour. A little
Anthrax to be cured? -- not a
bad
idea.
What does postage cost? Let's all
be patriotic and
mindful to preserve
the shoppers. The Trade Towers barely
down
before
our president urges us to "go
out and shop," "fly,"
maintain "consumer
confidence," preserved the economy, even if
its
cost
is death to the human soul.
Resurrect your frivolity out
of gray
skies and the dead cement, carry
on, give
up your rights with glee, preserve
the guilty government into
eternity. Power,
whoever it represents -- not you or
me -- would
carpet-bomb the world, preferably in silence.
For a little
extra cash. Profit.
Why not? Sell guns to your
neighbors and
have a nice little war. Train
them in terrorism, espionage,
and it'll
last a little longer. Who usurped
our government.
Is it democracy? What happened to
you and me?
#14 BIRTH
10-17-01
Awake Seattle's sunshine, doing my morning things,
rising from bed,
from my anxious sleep,
swallowing my pill, reading a few
sentences
about Mount Mazama -- exploding, leaving
behind the
crater behind, 400 feet deeper than
the World Trade Towers were tall.
And up, green tea now
that coffee makes me itch and
sneezed.
Seattle tricked me yesterday, sunshine at 7 and by noon
a
downpour. You'd think, practically born a Seattlite,
I would be so
susceptible to trickery. But I got soaked,
skipped one of my treasure
lectures when I saw
the bus coming early!
Home, whiskey, hot
bath and bed. But restless.
In the morning, the radio. I listen to the
radio now in the morning.
Write about the anthrax scare. Still
doubtful, still cynical.
But always listening to the news and noticing
all the clues
for terrorist. Each time the reporters broadcast a
potential
fear, a potential way to disaster. If I were a terrorist,
I'd be taking notes,
and I'm sure they do.
Biological warfare?
If that's what they fear next, let's give them some.
Contaminated
water? Well, that's not such a bad idea either.
Collapse of the
economy? Let's ratchet up the fear. I wash my dishes,
I cannot wash my
mind. Except with impatience, I turn off the sports
news. Write one
more poem, another downer packed with
cynicism and
despair.
Welcome to the earth: worse than it used to be.
#15 JOURNEY
9-22/10-24/10-27-01
On the streets of Seattle, the newspapers say:
the Dow plunges
as low as 1933
-- the year I was born.
Indeed, I feel
like the muck and the soil
where the daffodils were
planted
the year I was born.
A sixteen-year-old riding
in the dark
on a pre-dawn bus doesn't know
that Canada is
a separate
country, doesn't know what "You can
always
go to Canada" refers to
when he claims he won't "join" the
draft.
Each journey begins with a single step
over and
over and over again
-- beginning the year I was
born.
At a genetics lecture, I hear the question:
If
simplicity works, why is
everything so
complicated?
Like an echo of my breakfast of
frustration
every morning, dinner of despair
every
evening.
But the questioner corrects:
If it's so
complicated,
how does it evolve?
Phylogeny
recapitulates ontogeny
Hence we're slow, so very very
slow
to evolve.
Every time the computer balks from
imprecision
in its complicated process
you start
over.
Phylogeny recapitulates ontogeny.
The better
question may be,
if it wants to progress,
why is
everything so complicated?
And why are we, progeny of our own
thought,
so dedicated to stasis?
#16 DEATH
10-27-01
At times
I seem to dissolve with the illusion
that I AM
poetry
Whatever my thought,
it makes lines; lines move
into poetry;
the word is made clear.
As if the
self
were churning on, like a locamotive
on
coal.
Black smoke ascends to heaven
and is gone.
Cinders remain,
the ash of words, the detrius of thought,
nothing --
when the wind comes by
branching the yellow autumn trees.
#17 BIRTH
10-27-01
Let go of the belly of the worm.
Rearrange your molecules to
come again.
And again.
Redundancy trumps
complexity.
Madness springs from the base of the
cell.
Change your vocabulary
for
sanity.
Ninety-million raindrops later,
the Liquid
Amber still fakes sunshine,
Eager to fall to the earth
the
leaves stand still
or shimmer.
Chicken cooks on the
stove,
but clucks no more. Bid for birth or
perish
evermore.
Obey the binary code:
be
or
naught.
#18 JOURNEY
10-31-01
Ice-cold come the moon and the stars.
The leaves are
falling.
Scarlet and gold,
no one remembers your name.
The
black trees finger the sky.
Autumn.
Winter comes next
And
humanity cries under
the leaden clouds, rain clouds
and
destruction.
Climb to the moon.
You will never reach the sun.
#19 DEATH
11-02-01
DUALITY
Death
Departure
Absence
Divisions spring in my
soul
Diversions I create
Alone
Dread
Despair
Anxiety
Divided by laughter,
light
Dawn,
illumination
Awe
Death
Departure
Absence
Deep weirs
of pleasure
Desperate concentrations of
love
Awkward
Dread
Despair
Anxiety
Dancings of
delight
Dewali's flames and splendor
Announce
Death
Departure
Absence
Development of a new
world
Devastatingly
sutured
Amalgamated
Dread
Despair
Anxiety
Dreams
metamorphosing
Distinct cleavages in
granite
alleluia
Doom
Driven
Ascension
#20 BIRTH
11-04-01
Another of these sunless
suicidal Seattle Sundays,
the gray, the
birds flying,
small plants dying, oddly
learning, as I never
learned
before, that there is no hope.
History, ancient,
medieval,
modern, teaches me that,
or architecture or medicine
or
politics, economics, trade,
buying and selling in the streets.
All
of it is tied to investments
in some people killing others,
or
depriving them of food,
deporting them for slavery,
or importing
oil so they can
drive the countryside as
bombs pit other parts of
earth.
Accept it. Become a part of it.
No way. Let me be the
first
to run out for joy, welcoming
the falling missiles. It's a
pity
we can't divide the world into
two worlds and keep them
separate. Those who want
peace and those who want
war. Let the
warrirors fight
each other. But what command
will keep them from the
peaceful,
gathering berries, being born
everyday anew under the
gray
sunless sky on the mourning earth?
#21 JOURNEY
11-15-01
Journey in the rain, a yarmulke of baldness
in the center of his
long grey hair,
slightly stooped, walking slowly, drama his
forte, alone,
Allan, back from the grave on Diwali
morn...
He lives in his bones, said someone Jewish,
Italian's, do
you know, resemble the Jews. Later
that night, after the oil lamps
were waved
and the flowers' scents and the incenses'
smoke
thickened the air, we, studying world architecture,
saw
how all the great civilizations of Indian, Muslim,
Chinese,
Jew, Egyptian, Turk, Aztec, Inca, Anasazi, African
flourished worldwide
in equal triumph, equal beauty, until
the Christians went out and
cut them down,
reduced the greatest cities, cultures, architecture, by
their
savagery, to stone and ash and bone, terror.
So that
Allan walks now, with a holy,
bald spot, open, uncovered in the rain,
back
from the open, unquiet, lonely grave of peace.
#22 DEATH
11-16-01
The Aztecs, the Incas, the Indians, the Chinese,
the Vietnamese, the
Africans, the Arabs, the Moroccans,
the Mound Builders, the Hawaiians,
the Aborigines -- remember,
these were some of the most advanced
civilizations,
cultures, organized and beneficent institutions of
human behavior
that the Spanish, English, Dutch, French, Portuguese,
Belgian,
and American, disease ridden mobsters, drug lords,
terrorists
went in and took out. (Find the list
of all former
colonies and names of civilizations
that were conquered,
devastated, humiliated, decimated, obliterated to
create those
colonies as well as the names
of the ruthless terrorists, robbers and
unconscionable invaders.)
Perhaps it is time to rewrite the history
of the world, to see if we might
change so-called human nature,
learn humility, beneficence, peace.
#23 BIRTH
12-07/09-01
Mort, dead, heart-sick, my body hangs in there,
my spirit has fled. I
no longer understand
why I put one foot before the other.
The
journey is finished, completed, kaput, dwindled, amortized.
There is
nothing to want, nothing to do.
I have shrunk my world to a
footfall.
I pass in the night not heard by
an angry God, unnoticed by the seductive Devil.
There is no illusion, no illusion of
illusion.
The path has twisted down to a chosen
nothingness, no
where to go, nothing to do.
Motions remain the same as the tears
fall.
But even the tears are illusion and non-illusion.
The
sadness and artifice, the pain a drama,
a drama ending in the blankness of being.
#24 JOURNEY
12-09-01
The Holidays: Hanukkah, Eid, Christmas, Being Laid Off,
Happy New
Year! 7,000 people laid off this
week in Seattle, who knows how many
next.
Freedom, holiday, no work -- this day or any
other day.
Enjoy! You'd think by now, in
our relentlessly driven Capitalistic.
consumer society, that they'd
change, for the sake of their own
pocket-books,
either the Holiday dates OR the fiscal yearŐs
finality. How can we fulfill? -- do our patriotic
duty, as
the President exhorts, if we have
no money to shop with in honor of
Jesus, that poor Jew who had/wanted nothing
#25 DEATH
12-16-01
What is poetry for? To stave
away the darkness, to fend one's
eyes
from the rain, one's heart
from despair.
What is darkness for?
To sustain
the life of the soul, to
shrink at the grave's edge,
to
lie abed.
What is rain for? To imitate
sadness in the
hearts of humans,
stimulate greyness before the eyes, to
shield
them
from gaudy flowers' illumination by the
sun, lest their
brilliance wrest the
heart from despair. Then what are
flowers
for?
To bloom and die without questioning
their existence on
the rim of
the Tarim Basin, their death in
Takla
Makan.
Jets and email have changed all
that. How many flowers
have you
grown in cyberspace, to stave darkness,
rain, despair?
#26 BIRTH
12-16/23-01/01-13-02
The black, iron-rimmed, glass topped tables
become repositories, pools
for the rain.
The iron chairs stand guard. Raindrops
are
perceptible
only against the dark. The jumping
jets splash
high. The wind blows.
At night trains shriek their passing,
ambulances wail
their assent. The rocketing of planes
is
noticeable in the sky. I
read about Urumchi and wonder. Why
did
god
make earth? or not? Why an
evolution to the point of
universal
despair, universal suffering, universal triviality. "Go
forth and
shop -- for the war effort." Even
in Kashgar,
civilization was founded on
the travel of tradesmen, defending the
Silk Road.
#27 JOURNEY
12-28-01
Again, at night and the pre-dawn
hours, Ella has become my
companion,
She often rides. I walked through
the Hindukush,
past the Karakorm, Kashgar. Today we
wander the Tien Shan,
bathe in
Issik Kol. She claims to be
solo in
Turkestan.
But it seems to me
she is surrounded, inundated, by people
of her
own ilk. When does
she walk
alone? Part II, Chapter I
declares:
"Alone." We'll see. The many famous
loners of history
seem never to
be alone,
I note with a certain jealousy,
a
certain pride, for I, who
have traveled alone in out of
the way
places, walked alone. No horse, no
camel, no dog, nor cat, no
companion, all my helpers, always, only
from the
road, the
kind people along my
way in India. Until I began
to feel truly
welcome on the earth,
unafraid.
A feeling that does not last
a lifetime. But to have known
it once, at least once! I
walk
on.
Western sociology says one does not
live alone, and proves
it. Eastern
dwellers in the desert and uninhabited
Pamirs, holy
sadhus of the forests and in
the mountains, live alone, and
prove
themselves. The senseless breeding of overcrowded
conditions
stops
with them. Nature may be blind
with lust, humans need not
be.
Whence this torrent into the future?
Why journey?
Nor
does one glimpse of enlightenment
suffice for a lifetime. My vision
lasted overnight, a few hours in
the day.
It was not
suffused with love
for my fellow man, it was
suffused with
knowledge that there was
nothing to do -- or not do.
I read on
and on in
travel literature, accompanied by Ella, others
alone in
my bed, awake to
soul movements.
More of The 2001 Poems