for someone close to me
Can I really give you this advice
everything hanging in frozen air
great stillness and profound arranging
all this emptiness within
we know one moment it will switch
a full plenary of rain
or the dingy mush when heaven is obscured
but today bright, delicious
OK, well, how can I
except as an other
in a world where what the gods wrote
is a phrase for laughter
& quite rightly not honour
for what the gods are is familiar
as ourselves
their huge absoluteness
like vast capital letters
to say: this is more than troubled optics
dismal banality of entoptic flux
oh let them then be counters or relics
we shuffle to work out the final sums
our lives suddenly ending up as here
So, they’re contained & quivering
vibrating within this flawed blue bowl
heaped then in holiness
children &
parents &
partners &
families &
houses &
distances &
money &
its lack and
the decay of things
their inadequacy
& besides
the whole nature
of rule & control
& the point at which
what we’ve got is still better
than the guys w/ hatchets & big hammers
& then too
that absolute
sense of difference
to the world
& people
we are variously
born into
I can’t see
really
your collection
I expect
I’ve put
the ingredients here
& then
what processes
of lives & aging
of saying & not saying
of meaning & projecting
of hoping & of fantasising
carried on or rejected
the rules are rigorous
& I don’t understand them either
I think it needs
negotiating tenderly
as if a dark room
approaching the little one
& I know
you can do this
& do it so often
that all can be well
as the room’s vacuity
will surely decay
within hazes of nothingness
into human love acting
Then, like
it’s starting to bake
let it cohere
around what there is
& who there is
that runs around
laughing with life
believe in this
as your gods
hidden within
this sorry world
to redeem us yourself
[I got this from nowhere but here, and having stood here, all my life.1 I don’t really know what can help you; here is where “hope” and “faith”, like brown and red sauce in an unreconstructed cafe, make the whole mess better is the plan. Somehow & nevertheless these things may work – tenderly, not splurging, never to gain, but to live within & give. Yes?
But nothing is really from nowhere & I did get some of this recipe from Kenneth Rexroth’s poem “A Sword in a Cloud of Light”, from the sequence “The Lights in the Sky Are Stars” (dedicated to his daughter, Mary), The Collected Shorter Poems (New Directions, 1966), p 239 – tho first encountered by me with surprised delight on an A-level English “unseen poem” paper I was teaching.]
1 To lead on further, through the pressure of the maintaining of the reality of powerfully projected mental forms I’m exploring, as you know, through Dion Fortune, Stortford’s greatest student. Thank you here then too, Dr Theodore Moriarty, and all at The Grange.