The Book of Yes — my blog of love poems and duets with Mazie — has recently been revised and re-formatted, and all readers are welcome to peruse the changes, which include the addition of visual materials to accompany the verses.
http://lovesight.wordpress.com/
Thank you!
Scattered by Love in its mindless
flight are worlds within worlds
where we sometimes alight.
Now upon hearing this,
there are some who
might plead:
“O Brother, please –
pour us some wine and
spare us the tease!”
Well, you’ve probably heard the old cliche
that there’s veritas in vino, yet gulping
this wine invariably leads to a case
of life-long amnesia!
Just so, and before you’ve all gone
around the bend, I’ll share with
you how we’re tricked here,
again and yet again.
The Sommelier approaches our table,
leans close, winks, and pours us a little taste –
just enough for the perfumed bouquet to reveal
its seductive promise, alluringly suggestive
of lingering attachments, with a subtle
hint of that old aromatic insinuation,
the longing of emptiness for form.
We are encouraged by the stirrings
of an ancient interior appetite
to proceed, intrigued.
Raising the glass of soulful curiosity
to our lips, we promptly fall right in.
There are fleshy particularities to this ruby rapture
swirling in the chalice of our indulgence which
we do agree meld perfectly with a persuasive
yearning for some physical expression.
Desire intoxicates itself, and so we find ourselves
sublimely afloat in a dark womb of wine, a cask
timed to an irresistible uncorking, decanting us
into a small crystal jar of selfhood once more,
just as with each previous vintage which
has been oh so deftly poured before –
and all for just another taste,
just a little innocent sip . . .
and lo, we find ourselves
taking birth back here
once again,
and bewildered
once more by the trip!
In this heart’s garden there’s a gathering going on –
phantom playmates culled from misty memories,
anomalous voices who spoke out loud from
street corners, exotic moonshine temples,
ancient battlefields, vaporous mirrors,
from seething realms of flashing light,
faces drawn from a darkness that
I myself was too dark to see.
All are smiling, circling, their
ghostly hands and hearts twined
happily for the sake of pure happiness,
happy in the way those loving hands that
hold my own heart are happy, happy with
no memory of anything but this happiness,
this presence indefinable, even in the absence
of any happiness at last, even in the absence
of anything sayable or knowable, of anything
memorable or not, desirable or not, while
here, in the garden’s frozen pond, stands
a flowerless stem of a lotus in winter,
its colorful petals all dropped off,
all fallen away and scattered –
forgotten yet forgotten not.
Before,
I could not
see beyond myself, I
hadn’t learned to remember.
I couldn’t hear any other voice,
so absorbed was I with the one that
spoke to me, unbidden, from within
that I’d forgotten who and what I was.
Then one day everything fell away, like
the colorful petals of a lotus in winter,
all dropped off and scattered.
Still, I couldn’t bear the raw clarity of
my own death, its silence, and so I longed
to lounge in the fragrant springtime breeze
of what I dreamt love could be, finding only
the yellowing leaves of a summer folded
into autumn, all falling into winter.
Forget me, forget me not.
Later, in the deeper purity
of hardened snow, nothing falls or
rises up to be remembered or forgotten –
no laughter, no weeping, no love or hope,
no dancing in a swoon of life, no trick of death,
no waiting for the one to appear that I once called out
from a dark place for, no you and I, no shine of heaven,
nor anything I could praise or blame for the emptiness
of what stays in place, or the emptiness of what changes.
And yet, even now, arching up through the brittle frost,
one stalk stands still, the flowerless stem of a lotus
in winter, colorful petals all dropped off, all
fallen away and scattered, while in this
silent garden’s grace, life patiently
waits to resume again, to be
born again, to grow and
thrive and bloom
again –
forgotten,
but not forgotten.
Sometimes I affirm.
Sometimes I deny.
Sometimes I neither
affirm nor deny.
Sometimes I affirm and deny,
simultaneously.
I am life – a paradox
to the certainty-seeking mind,
but never to a heart grown intimate
with its own unqualified nature.
To such a heart, I am fathomless peace,
ever-new joy, unaccountably free –
your own open spaciousness –
expressing itself as the simple
innocent truth at the core
of every moment, both
in and out of time.
Love, how can I be other?
I am your brother, your mother,
your teacher, your fool.
I am a drop-out
from the holy saint school,
a drip of doggy drool,
a footless stepping stool,
a double-edged tool
of the true nondual,
a non-exception
to the golden rule,
a cool crystal pool
behind your hazy
eye wool.
I descend from the skies
to kiss those eyes –
I am the kissing,
the kissed,
the kiss.
I am
what it is
when you ask,
“What is this?”
Historians lie
and prophets are blind.
I am the light
behind their mind.
Yes, No?
What the hell –
let’s slip through the crack
in the Liberty Bell!
In brilliant late light
between blurred days of rain,
white cumulus clouds climb
a sheer sheet of blue –
a pillow parade
over spiked emerald hills.
Still, why bother
with adjectives that only
serve to modify emptiness?
Why not say it plainly?
None of it is real –
it’s only a dream parade.
Nor am I the image
you have of me –
it’s just a bit of fiction that
dissolves when what I am is seen
to be not other than what you are.
Inevitably we must recognize that
there’s no enduring self or substance,
even within these transitory stories of
our lives to which we so poignantly
cling, only to become our keening
heartbreak when we do so.
Bewildering as this
parade of forms may be,
let’s just let it march on by,
throw streamers in the air, and
laugh and clap at the clowns with
their silly props and costumed animals.
We can gaze in innocent delight
at the floats of colorful flowers,
all gliding gaily by in waves
of fragrant floral splendor.
Let’s just stand and deeply inhale
the lingering perfume of those blossoms,
which we must recognize are even now
wilting into petal dust and scatterings
strewn along an empty boulevard
which once was filled with such
a lovely dream parade.
You dwell among the causes of death
like a butter lamp standing in a strong breeze.
~Nāgārjuna
It’s been said that, as long as we’re living
we’re making mind, but after death,
the mind we made while alive
then makes us.
That may be cause for apprehension,
and yet perhaps it is not death
that we fear most,
but life:
life that seems to contradict
the dream of any victorious resolution
once imagined in the eagerness of youthful
idealism, in its innocent willingness to
believe without question or doubt;
life forever isolated from the rest of life
by the barrier imposed on itself through
trust in the reality of a dusty bag of flesh,
a mealy meat suit fashioned out of dirt;
life that might even seem to amount to zero
in a futility of form and motion racing from
nowhere to nothing, paradoxically feeling
trapped in a closed loop of the known
yet fearing the unknown –
deteriorating daily, yearly,
diminishing inexorably, until all
that is left is the stale dry air of used
concepts that by now have far exceeded
their fraudulent warranty, yielding
only cynicism and disdain;
life that moves regardless, teased by the rumor
of a beautiful desire — the End of Wanting –
so far out of reach for still-suffering
hearts left pining for that balm
of sweet oblivion.
For such wounded souls, death itself
may be welcomed, sought, and always found,
only to be usurped by yet another life of confusion,
disastrous fixation, and outrageous insult –
where boredom and doubt vie with a stubborn hope;
where relationship equates with deals and dilemma,
and love becomes a promise sadly despaired of,
perhaps to be regarded as just another lie,
a fool’s fantasy laced with hype;
where freedom seems a cruel fiction –
stories sold to themselves by
hopeful day-dream
believers.
Yet in the shadowed corners of the night,
the steady flow of frustration’s tears,
and perhaps some secret prayers,
some bargaining, perhaps
some poignant plea to
the one believed to
be behind all of
this endless
calamity.
Then back on the spinning wheel once more,
embodiment resumes again, and here
is birth and death again, a cycle
that seems to never end, till
the futility hones to a keen
red edge, and the flash
of its blade removes
the head.
Then mind falls into its own black night,
rests at last on a bed of cooled ashes,
all light blown out into a silence
beyond any comprehension –
all let go, all let go,
all struggle surrendered,
until, until . . .
from the stillness
of that deep dark, with
a true love unconditional,
a spark may rise, become a blaze,
illuminating limitless space, liberating
both sinner and saint, a torch in vast immensity,
beyond both sides of certainty, alive as the shine
of awareness itself, its deathless open essence:
Home at last.
Metaphors are bountiful –
perhaps this one will do:
we seem born into a prison,
each awakens in a cell.
Every cell is different, but
all share a certain something –
for one thing, they’re all jail.
Some will try to beautify their cells,
some will pound their heads against the walls,
some will even carve wise markings on the walls
about how the cell is not a cell, or even suspect
the Jailer to be none other than themselves.
Who knows how or when or why,
but a key may slide between the bars
some random night that turns just right.
Locks tumble, rusty doors creak,
then furtive footsteps in the dark –
Free!
Most such lucky inmates
beat a fast path to the light,
but now and then an odd one
sticks around to share that key –
to that rare one, it just seems right.
Once outside in free fresh air,
it may occur to some that they
were never really bound, that it was
all some sort of strange nightmare
from which they’ve mercifully
been spared;
while in the yard,
through the prison bards,
the rumor spreads about a key,
and yet for most, this prison life
meanders onward, aimlessly.
Will you be one of those
who won’t look back
till you are free;
or perhaps the rare one who
stays to help, right down
to the last detainee?
In any case,
for those that
dare to contemplate:
“Who or what’s to liberate?”
that question is the Key.
