Poetic musing
© 2000 Philip E. Harding
dreams
so much larger than this
yet this is the way they proceed
one word
and then another
Fragments
Memories like the rubble field below basalt cliffs.
Vibrations
Shaking like a bus between two lives.
Images
Views through windows.
Windows in my memory.
Fracture
I like the word.
Geologic like plate tectonics.
Sudden snap of explosive force.
It's over before you've begun to react.
Thimble berries.
It's been a long time.
Memories of an Olympic trail where a ranger
names the many plants.
Indian paint brush.
Bracken fern.
I've lived with the grey sage so long I can't
remember the others.
There are things here I don't have words for.
Many trees have lost their tips.
Many piers have lost their decks.
The stony cliffs are undercut at the water line.
Someone has cut a fart.
Sandy beaches and wind blown trees.
Foggy inlets like a coastal morning.
Where did it go?
Dry grass and a grazing horse.
Airports, smelting, motor inns and restaurants.
A hundred mobile homes in each new park.
We seem to be picking up speed.
Plastic gulls on a concrete wall.
Rusting scraps.
Dried up trees.
Surprising little flowers on the road side.
Broken timbers.
Heaps of stone.
Then a picnic in the under growth
(the bug has a flat tire.)
It reminds me of a line I once drew.
It is hard to draw lines like that.
Everything has to come together in one moment.
You must be totally awake to draw like that.
But I keep drawing even when half awake.
Words can pass a shaky time.
Create a cool breeze off the evening river.
Add the smell of pine and drying grasses.
(Faint. My imagination tells me it's there so I breath deep)
Rock cliffs that rise behind me provide a
sharp silhouette against a powder blue sky.
And the bus shakes, windows rattle, my
pen bounces across the page.
White caps are on the river.
I breath deep.
I catch a real smell.
Faint but real as we passed a combine wheel
rolling behind a tractor over a green field.
Getting back toward my country.
Basalt keeps farmers off of my country.
I dream a lot of art.
Unfortunately I often see smoldering patches
of scorched earth rather than paradise gardens.
I find comfort in basalt cliffs.
They don't burn.
They can't be grazed.
They are harder than hell to build with.
Though not paradise to most, they retain a touch
of the primordial.
I look up the cliffs and see a few trees.
A forest of stone columns and pinnacles
support their ridge.
I envy their view.
Rocky ridges and wind bent trees.
Golden foot hills peppered with stones
and grey sage.
A washed out ravine and dry creek bed.
Someday I will live there.
I will bring in a herd of mountain goats
and draw pictures.
I will learn how to sing from birds,
to heal from snakes,
to put down a deep root from sage.
Only but for the fragments
would I be whole
The earth is solid.
It supports me
like the stones on which the lichen grows.
She is patient
as I slowly grow
and learn to look around.
The earth supports my life and waits for
my death just as she now holds the
body of dead lovers.
You know how big the universe really is
but you owe the earth for supporting you
long enough to think about it.
These are her molecules we have borrowed
for this book
for the eyes which read it
for the synaptic connections in your brain.
What do I expect?
Not that it would matter.
And what have I done?
The consequence will greet me soon enough.
What do I want?
Her.
Words to make me feel better:
sparrows
summer evening
winter fire
greenhouse seedlings
young cedars
new music
plane tickets
letters from a friend
Christmas cookies
high desert plateau
water lilies
July fireworks
dancing Sufi mystics
medieval Indian temples
strong coffee
the whole salt
the whole grain
the Russian olive in bloom
blowing in with the spring wind
(a strange sweet desert smell)
Who have I become?
When did I become whole again?
Who gave me back my life?
Cold grey day.
Rhythms of an old electric clock.
A body full of inertia in a sagging, red easy chair.
There is a dawn on a horizon in my mind.
Memory, imagination or anticipation?
How should I behave? The house is cluttered.
There is a drawing on the board. There are
assignments to complete.
My mind goes to a woman. Does my desire
for her justify involving her with the complexities
of my life?
I seem to move between all manner of moodiness.
Sometimes sadness, but just as often feelings of
profound spirituality bring me to
my knees full of wordless prayer. Most
often I try to keep up the matter of fact, level,
detached state of the craftsman at work.
I can't work when I get too emotional and
I need to keep working.
I feel like someone running away. Unfortunately
(or maybe not) I have no where to go or
money to get there.
Dark but for candles.
Wide awake but largely unconscious.
A life on automatic.
Acting on impulse without question,
much less to fight.
Drives are mostly unchecked.
The only problem is that I know it.
Not a word
can I speak
of what I dreamed.
These sail on
without me
while I sit and listen to the clock.
Am I still cornered by my fears?
Will I still sit and bleed in silence?
Can this be
just another page
in an endless open file
that no one will ever read?
There are no clues.
My mentors are all dead.
It is late and I am tired,
but I have other dreams.
There is still some color in my eye.
A race of thoughts
spilling over the cliffs like
a run of lemmings to the sea.
Words piled so fast
it will take a life to digest them
(or even pass them whole!)
A sledge on a mountain.
Impossible odds. Then another,
and there are pyramids on the plains.
I have burned the deck of cards.
I am really on my own.
Logic and intuition will have to work this out.
Hungry.
I want you at my table
to eat you whole.
The gold is falling from the trees.
wet worms and centipedes consume it
and with them I plant seeds.
sage
little lizards
western junipers
yarrow
magpies
one way to open the sky
within your life is to
walk in the wilderness
and sit
in
the
sage
Beyond Time
Not a word or sound is mind
no thought or feeling is
nor is without either
Not being nor not being
but as is is
salt, sage and tincture of chaparral
(real salt, dried ocean, gray, unrefined, ungrounded, wet)
sound of space and stars
silence, solar flares and super novas
open doors
opening out onto a view from a high
mountain of ice and stone
15,000 ft. (is that high tide or low?)
Funeral pyre
on a high desert mesa
(in violation of local law)
midnight, a moonless night, a bon fire,
erase my flesh because I won't be coming back
an old man
with a belly full of ashes
unable to weap for so long
waiting to die
a woman sits
like an empty shell
all twisted up inside
cool air passes
through the home of
a young man carrying
away the incense he
has lit
a girl
traces her small hand
on a sheet of paper
and laughs
Year's end layered with implications.
Frozen ponds and compost piles,
long quiet nights in an empty house.
Quiet except for the ticking expansion
and contraction of base board heaters.
Another sheet of paper on the drawing board.
Repetition and variation drawing on my life's breath.
When did this place become so beautiful
and I so tolerant of it?
I lost control and it began to grow again
The light changed and free thought came again.
In your next life
what will you know of this?
Chances are you won't be reading the
personal papers of a long dead artist.
You will be too busy writing your own.
The art you might see.
The art is all anyone is likely to see
a generation from now.
I knew that I would.
Ya it took a lot of time
and perhaps that is what the spacing
was all about.
A certain equalizing,
a detachment,
detached and raised up
transformed by an aesthetic.
and in a day
and in a generation
without long complicated ideas
dust
and new rain.