The Path

This is a rewrite of a ghazal written many years ago, making this my 132nd. The original ghazal used the closest equivalent in English of qaafiyaa, or that rhyme which recurs directly before the radif, which is the refrain. The rewrite uses another device entirely, primary alliteration (on the accented syllable) before the radif. Everything else is different, too.

Years ago, I wanted the poem to metaphorize that quiet calling that leads one away from common pursuits to something more personal, lasting, and perhaps even contributive. The rewrite is more focused on depicting this idea than was the original.

The Path

This poem has been published in my book an inkling hope: select poems, available in Kindle and paperback formats. Out of consideration for those who have purchased a copy, I have removed it from this post and online viewing in general. However, the above player can still be used to listen to it.

The original, written in June of 2002, can be found under this title: “Path” (no article).

Publication History:

LYNX (web-based) — September 2012

an inkling hope

The idea for this poem came to me a few months back, at which point I hurriedly tapped out the opening four lines—then nothing. So today after four or so months of periodically checking in on it, I’ve finally managed to sit down and finish the original idea.

an inkling hope

This poem has been published in my book an inkling hope: select poems, available in Kindle and paperback formats. Out of consideration for those who have purchased a copy, I have removed it from this post and online viewing in general. However, the above player can still be used to listen to it.

Publication History:

Clamor — Fall 2009

Solitude

During my week in the Yolla Bolly Wilderness last month I encountered a stillness of mind and peace of spirit unlike I’ve ever experienced before. I’ve only twice before gone more than three days without coming across another human being, both of which were on the Yukon River. And I found these two experiences extremely disconcerting. Clearly I wasn’t ready to make peace with Solitude.

To make peace with her I’ve had to—not reconcile myself to a life without intimate companionship—but accept that it’s a very real possibility. Accept that maybe it’s not the most important thing in my life, not so essential to my health and wellbeing. And when I met Solitude a third time in the wilderness, this time backpacking, I found her not so repulsive, not so unfriendly. In fact, I found her energy quite feminine in nature, and comforting, accepting.

Solitude

This poem has been published in my book an inkling hope: select poems, available in Kindle and paperback formats. Out of consideration for those who have purchased a copy, I have removed it from this post and online viewing in general.

This poem has taken me a month to write because I felt it so important to take my “self” completely out of the poem, and to make only pronominal references to Solitude herself. This stretched me to find other ways of wording a journey and expressing the development of a closeness between the spirits of two beings, one an embodied entity, the other an immaterial principle.

Poems like this represent what I strive toward as an animist poet.

Publication History:

Clamor — Fall 2009

spires

A ghazal! I haven’t written a ghazal since June of 2005. So that makes this—what?—my 127th. Feels nice to get one out again. I remember I got real tired of them by the end of my ghazal project a few years ago, but I never really intended to abandon them altogether.

With this one I veer away from using my penname in the signature couplet (last couplet) to using a reference to one of my penname’s meanings. In this poem it’s “open skies”, since “vast openness to the heavens” is one of the Arabic meanings for ‘Zahhar’.

spires

let’s twine our roots beneath the world together
until we rise against the wind together

let’s turn and reach to gather shades of light
with countless long thin leaves that wave together

let’s make a bed beneath our outstretched limbs
shaded by the dreams we weave together

let’s draw clear waters from the hidden earth
and breathe them out as vapors washed together

let’s share the sounds of creeks and faint cicadas
their rhythmic songs like magic wound together

let’s shelter soft brown trails among the fern
where lovers holding hands may walk together

let’s filter daylight from the open skies
through daydreams spun like amber webs together

Publication History:

Art Arena (web-based) — March 2007

Lapse

My 10th trisect poem. The first segment depicts our sun, the second our galaxy, and the third the process (or principle rather) of acceleration.

There are some prosodic curiosities played with in this poem, like the juxtaposition of primary alliteration in the middle two lines of each quatrain. This proved to be more difficult than I expected, but also a good exercise I think.

Lapse

Entity

Clouds of gas and seas of dust
whirl in layers round a turbid well
which gathers density and force.

Concealed inside a cyclone spun through darkness,
hidden meaning flares flush against compression
and opens like an eye, wide with burning gaze,
its heavy lids thrown back against the void.

For aeons faint reflections cycle round
this fluid presence held haloed in the night,
concentrating dreams deep into the light,
into a stillness wrapped in fusion storms.

In time the fires dissipate
to vapors, glowing like a distant jewel,
which fades into the emptiness.
 

Colony

Vapors glow amid the gloom,
phantoms waiting to return to life
or fade forever from perception.

Splashed across an easel framed from absence,
a hidden brush portrays rays in random molds,
dispersed as tracts of foam frothed beneath the moon
to bulge about the heart of mystery.

Potential blooms like tufts of baby’s breath
with scattered silhouettes wound throughout the fields
where waves of motion spread spectrums far through time
to ripple in the skies of countless worlds.

A hundred billion modes of thought
glimmer like a liquid fused with light,
spiraled round a well of doubt.
 

Balance

Suspended like an ornament,
the master clock wheels slowly through the void,
seconds passed in fluid count.

Cogs and coils gyrate, stretch, and snap,
countless turning gears gripped by gravity,
which sends the broad machine churning through the dark,
momentum bound to arcs across the deep.

Throughout the ages systems come and go,
little flecks of light lit for stellar moments
like after-image flares fading from the mind,
half remembered from a distant past.

In time the random orbits dim
and yellow like a blurry cataract
across the burning eye of god.

Publication History:

Tales of the Talisman — Winter 2007

Origami

Recently, as I reflected on how I seem to resist the best efforts of people to change me in this way or that, I found myself writing this.

Origami

This poem has been published in my book an inkling hope: select poems, available in Kindle and paperback formats. Out of consideration for those who have purchased a copy, I have removed it from this post and online viewing in general. However, the above player can still be used to listen to it.

Indeed I have always resisted obvious attempts to change my nature, especially when the person making the attempt seemed to have something to gain from it. Those who have had the greatest impact in my life are people who just offered ideas, letting me take or leave them as I wished. I think such people felt no desire to gain anything by changing me, and were therefore compassionately offering a piece of information and/or perspective along the way.

Publication History:

Clamor — Fall 2009

Ark

This, my 5th trisect poem, is inspired by the moon of Europa. The one in orbit around Jupiter. Some believe there could be something neat happening beneath the rind of ice surrounding that unique sphere.

Segment one depicts that rind of ice. Segment two depicts the underlying potential. And segment three depicts the evolutionary process proposed to be a possibility.

Ark

This poem has been published in my book an inkling hope: select poems, available in Kindle and paperback formats. Out of consideration for those who have purchased a copy, I have removed it from this post and online viewing in general.

Publication History:

Art Arena (web-based) — March 2006

Guardian

This poem, my 2nd trisect, reflects on my experiences on the Yukon River in Canada during two river trips, the first when I was 18 and the second when I was 27. Segment one depicts the modern canoe. Segment two depicts the river itself. And segment three depicts the animistic interaction between the paddler (myself) and the wilderness around.

Guardian

Cradle

Fiberglass for birch tree bark,
a coat of paint for resin pitch,
and plastic trim for cedar wood
compose the modern wander-boat.

Nonetheless there’s craftsmanship
in building plugs and curing molds,
sculpting sand to form a shell
that tumbles life down waterways.

A ghost of the old ways filled with gear
caressed by ancient subtle hands,
appraised and held in fair esteem,
the new unnatural ways aside.

Like driftwood on the open surf,
the fiber-foam cocoon is cast
and swept along on buoyant waves,
tossed by every twist of wind.
 

Meridian

Fueled by swollen alpine lakes,
mirrors to the craggy peaks,
countless glaciers, ponds and streams,
sprung from clouds and hidden springs,

an everlasting thunder rolls
that carves an everlasting path,
a stormy rush of living things
that slakes the stormy rush of life.

Firs collapse and boulders plunge
into the undulating surge,
swept across the winding earth
to strike with titan force the sea,

and clutched against the serpents back
a fleck of lost humanity,
immersed in sprawling majesty,
grips the currents deep and black.
 

Spirit

Black bears peer from root-filled banks;
ravens watch from stands of spruce;
eagles gaze from sudden bluffs;
a bull moose stares from out the wash.

All the dreamtime creatures wake,
bodied forth like smoky signs—
deep claw prints in frosted mud,
fang marks on the aspen’s trunk.

Each regards the floating soul
that wanders broken in their midst,
a well of rage and twisted grief
that echoes through the howling wind.

And each respects his long release
until the blood cakes on his lips
with massive silence like a mist
that rises up to steady him.

Publication History:

Art Arena (web-based) — June 2006

Anima Cantus

This poem, my 13th hybridanelle, attempts to depict and convey one of the ways I look at ’being’, what a being is, and how it is connected with its self and other beings. The title is Latin for “mind song” or “psychic melody”.

Anima Cantus

This poem has been published in my book an inkling hope: select poems, available in Kindle and paperback formats. Out of consideration for those who have purchased a copy, I have removed it from this post and online viewing in general. However, the above player can still be used to listen to it.

Publication History:

Art Arena (web-based) — November 2005

Halflight

The night; the wilderness; a stream. Here silence takes on new meaning, and it includes a movement of sound. Here stillness absorbs new significance, and it involves touch and motion.

Halflight

This poem has been published in my book an inkling hope: select poems, available in Kindle and paperback formats. Out of consideration for those who have purchased a copy, I have removed it from this post and online viewing in general.

Publication History:

The Alchemy Post (web-based) — November 2005

An Invocation

To me, inspiration is a sacred thing. Without it, the creative soul experiences nothing but frustration and dismay. Some ancient poets were known to incorporate an invocation of the muse or muses into their epic poetry, such as Homer, Virgil, and Dante. I do not plan to write epic poems during my lifetime, though it could happen. Still, I would like to try to invoke the muses for the epic journey of my writing process, which I hope will last the entirety of my life.

              An Invocation

          O grant me rain from out the sounding clouds,
        and flash against the backdrop of my thoughts
      an inspiration wrought by subtle minds.

    Dissolve the soughing haze that clings to all my dreams
  and wraps confusion round my spinning soul.
Unveil the primal light obscured in stellar dust.

  Release creative flow like prismed floods
    that sweep stagnation from my standing sense.
      O grant me rain from out the sounding clouds.

        Lift the heavy doubt that cowers thick and close,
          a fog that saturates in vapid shades of gray
            and wraps confusion round my spinning soul.

          Reach through this cacophonic mental din
        and seed within my harried understanding
      an inspiration wrought by subtle minds.

    Sweep a translucent wind throughout my psychic planes,
  infused with temperate airs to clear the cotton mist,
a fog that saturates in vapid shades of gray.

  Defrost the ice and snow from all my fields,
    the winter-scapes within that numb perception.
      O grant me rain from out the sounding clouds.

        Return decayed ideas to elemental drift
          so they rise again as notions nursed on cosmic breath
            infused with temperate airs to clear the cotton mist.

          Connect me to the place where light is born,
        from where it swells to crest in consciousness
      an inspiration wrought by subtle minds.

    Part confusion from conceptions fallen dead,
  and draw its suffocation off my faculties
so they rise again as notions nursed on cosmic breath.

  Restore the waters of my inmost lands,
    so that my springs will flow with apprehension.
      O grant me rain from out the sounding clouds,
        an inspiration wrought by subtle minds.

          Sing to me invention, and help me learn to heed.
            Dissolve the soughing haze that clings to all my dreams,
          and draw its suffocation off my faculties.
        Unveil the primal light obscured in stellar dust.

This is my 11th hybridanelle.

Publication History:

Art Arena (web-based) — August 2005