Sunday, August 25, 2013

One-eyed lion

To the lake it is open
a portal into blue.
His right eye slips back into stone.
He is not moved. He is not moved.

I want to go to him, now, and ask
if he will still be here
in a year.


Resource

Outer limits.
One's summary may just begin at the horizon.
I look out over a cloudless, summer sea.
Heat has left a pink haze over things.
Cicadas. Wind.
One more day! He deserves this.
The water,
hot air,
even the insects
act as reservoir,
stretching reserves.

Here's the pool I want him to find,
midafternoon,
on such a day as this.


Saturday, August 17, 2013

mörkersikte


I read The Story of San Michele when I was in my thirties, and dreamed of finding or building a white house soaked in light.

Axel Munthe loved the sun.

In one day, in his fifties, Munthe's life changed - a dim eye, detached retina, led to near blindness.

He moved from homes of light to a dim tower, a curtained palace.

And yet, knowing it may have led to his loss of eyesight, he never abandoned his passion for sunlight.



Y te espararé,
le robaré besos al tiempo,
Sueño.

un rumor...el viento me despierta
Y aquí estarás.                                       (Ignacio Ballesteros)

This is where I will wait for you
stealing imaginary kisses as time goes by
Dream

A noise, the wind awakes me
and you're already here.                




Thursday, August 15, 2013

muso soseki 2

Why not ghosts and heavens, gods and God, godlessness, nothing, lux continuum, absolutes of longing and completion and darkness?

A sacred place begins as a cave, a rock, a tree, water. We build dreams, paint incantations, dance. But such central, supporting spiritual poles will lose their vigor, secularise, crumble into the dirt. Our nature is to forever forget and reconstruct  the holy.

What this is does not change.

Emperor Go-Daigo's ghost was feared by his antagonist Takauji Ashikaga. He asked for the help of Daigo's friend, the monk Muso Soseki, to build and grow a place of spiritual appeasement, upon the corrupted ruins of Daigo's favorite palace. Together they constructed a dream of tree and green, water, light, shadow, and shelter. Takauji and Muso grew together, close and into the temple they made and cared for. 

Takauji remembered. Fishes' eyes never close. Day follows night endlessly.


In each of us is a City of Purple Mountains and Crystal Streams.

  



muso soseki


Illness teaches the biological and timely impossibility of knowing.  
Without the personal "me", a sense of before and after and now lose relationship, slipping into one another seamlessly, on and on and on. 


" Green mountains have turned yellow so many times...When the mind is still the floor where I sit is empty space."



aquaphilia


Friday, August 9, 2013

interrupted stream

Imagine the body as a succession of nets, one inside the other, placed in fast flowing water. What can be caught, or slip through, set free? What clogs, corrupts, tears these infinitely delicate filters?


flod

Wednesday, August 7, 2013

إيمان

Out of the darkness, she walks, greeting us. She is with her family, laughing,  a stroll before breaking their fast. It is nearing the end of Ramadan. Their bodies have adjusted to emptiness, their spirits high. Two years ago, she had cancer. She turned from architecture to medicine - she is studying to be a doctor.

Waiting for the moon.
eemaan faith

Monday, August 5, 2013

evening walk

new moon

wind off the lake

 fireflies.


φώς

강 (river)

Blood runs through him, laced with Cisplaten or an alkaloid derived from May apples. These together measured destruction -
a vesicant,
a dessicant



and hope.

ἐλπὶς 'elpis', meaning 'hope'





Sunday, August 4, 2013

sight reading

Visual music. My husband walking slowly, in beige from head to toe, white bearded, his wolf-headed cane pressing him forward. There is a sword hidden within the cane. He didn't know that when he bought it. He delights in the drawn metal sound.

Visual music. She is drawing dog's paws and learning to play the hurdy gurdy. Bosch and Bruegal thought the instrument a roguish, ill bred thing, and put it in their pictured hells.

Visual music. We visit an exhibition of handmade midwestern American instruments and beautiful scores. A lovely old woman all in white, white mane of hair, turquoise earrings, listens intently to a description of a composition by the composer, who stops, as one thin silver note escapes the pages. We surrender to it.


Saturday, August 3, 2013

mantis and monkey, waning crescent

Long ago, in the Northern Sung mountains, tai chi mantis style was born. The body moves in a studied insect fluency. Fifteen minutes, twenty, thirty movements become hundreds, the sudden clap and leap, the introverted hook following fixed eye, breathing.

James, 42, has been practicing Tai Chi since he was  fifteen. In Taiwan, he remembers watching his teacher wind slowly through true mastery, and despairing. This morning he rises and enters his garden
in America, renewing the pose, reciting it to himself, edging years into his own chi.

Later, in our sunlit salon, small and spare, James dedicates the mantis with strong monkey feet to my husband.



see

chi


to absorb and equalise

Friday, August 2, 2013

stone

I noticed a dead bird in the hospital garden. It had hit the glass window, and lay broken, stiff, among crushed stone. There it was, near small locust trees, rocks, benches, water.

All tableaux, stone, stone, stone, water, wood, bird, still, opaque.

I thought of the Islamic angels of the Second Elegy - beautiful, disinterested.


Every angel is terrible. And yet, alas,
I welcome you, almost fatal birds of the soul, 
knowing about you.......
Who are you?

Rilke, trans. C.F. MacIntyre






Thursday, August 1, 2013

first day, within and without - lux continuum

The River


        


      

              I should have been somewhere else, but I am here. It is what it is. The lungtas remain to be made, the notes taken, the people met, new places, within, without, entered. These coming weeks will change my life. I thought to start alone at the end of an old pilgrim trail, but instead walk together with a man I've known for 30 years into unknown territory. 

              Today, as the doctor suggested, we walked. I drew him down to the river, full of sun and stones. He slept in the coolness of the shadows of tall trees while I gathered stones from the banks. These stones I have been dreaming about, common stones, as common as he and I, as common as our fears, and his sickness. Each stone is oddly shaped, uniquely shaped by the weight of life - icebound, thawed, flooded, fractured.

             Limestone, from an ancient warm sea that washed this place. See? Preglacial sands, sponges, small, small bones.

             I will gather many in the coming weeks. Mark them with bindi, marrying them to my dream, another context.


Reading
First and Second Elegies, Rilke.
The garden of Tenryu-ji, Kyoto.


moon waning crescent

four birds: male cardinal, female song sparrow, robin, swallow 



Ideas come, as dreams, compulsions, intuitive nudges. Things are as interesting, if not more interesting, than thoughts.