Tat Tvam Asi

For Ashley Berger


An old photograph of my self
Wearing a younger face,
A face I no longer recognize.

Who is that stranger
There beneath the skin
Staring out from in my eyes?

The self inside looks for sign
Of who it once was when
It was smiling in that face.

This is a slippery fish
To think about: my self now
Standing in an other self's place.

Where is the self that once was I?
When was it born? And did it die?
My minds are now both filled with doubt.

You are staring at me inside the mirror,
Is it me now looking in? Am I you or
Am I the one now looking out?

She opened the door of night

She opened the door of night
And became unhinged.
Hanging upon a turning knob,
Lifting high as her children's kite
Had lifted love and then was lost.

Wheels sing with the sky,
Constellations not composed of stars
But of a billion hollowed moments.
Every thought as unconnnected
As a heart's diagram exploded.

Walking in a spiraled ring
On suspended sands in Alabama,
Her faith the duration of a flower.
In the drystone riverbeds of Babylon,
She unsieves sediments of the hour.

She made her bed at last inside
The shadows blanket thinking:
There'll be time enough tomorrow.
As the lunatic moon undid
Her countenance of sorrow.

The Mourning Rituals

The morning rituals:
Water set to boil,
The coffee measured out in spoonfuls,
Paper filters folded in half -
Because we ran out of the right ones.
It satisfies me to improvise,
To make do with less;
I wonder if there's less than this,
Less than this, I whisper
Quietly to myself.

Cat is out back
Lounging in a square of sunlight.
I open the window and meow,
Startling cat awake -
Go out to fill its bowl
As cat meows and hisses at me.
No one ever taught you how
To show proper gratitude,
I say to myself.
Then meow and hiss back

The water is boiling.
I remove it from the base
Letting it cool down some
So as not to make the coffee bitter.
Then pour it over the cone,
Adjusting my flow in
To equal the flow out.
A perfect slurry,
I say out loud to no one
And then I also add a meow.

I stir in a spoonful of sugar,
Then a spoonful of cream,
Watching the Milky Way
Spin in endless night,
Endlessly fascinated.
Never tiring of this part of my life,
Marveling like a child
At the simple daily events.
I am a child,
I think out loud.

It pleases me to bang
My spoon rhythmically around
The mug's interior listening
For the distant bell from the Monastery
And the ancient bell of the ox.
Then I hear her say, Jesus!
From the other room.
You're gonna miss this ringing
One day after I'm gone,
I say out loud.

This world is no longer home for me

This world is no longer home for me:
There's a fishing boat up in a tree,
The inverted cross of its anchor hangs
Loose as the tongue of a bell exhausted.

The neighbor's house cut in half
Exposing the unmade bed and blue sheet,
An easy chair facing a shattered TV,
A black boot standing on the stair.

The Laughing Horse gutted clean:
What remains behind is empty frame.
And once surrounded by a home,
A solitary door half opening.

Down on Tarpon street,
Beside the piles of blank debris,
The boatless fisherman drink for free:
Siren's tears from broken glass.

A hermit crab from a souvenir shop
Tumbles in a tide now amniotic,
His new home the empty shell
Of a washed up piece of plastic.

Born of Sun

Born of Sun,
Out flesh of woman,
He stands,
Sword hanging his hand
Like a curse.

Sea incarnadine,
Attacked abject rage,
Blood surf,
Wounds opening words
Between waves.

The son set
Himself against father.
Eternity paused,
Blood letting loose lost
Amidst slaughter.

Ever mutable
Memory of death,
Full fathoms mine,
Words echoing lie
Under last breaths.

Born on waves
Icarus descended,
She rides,
Pulsing tides
In vulnerable ended.

As Albert Ayler Stood

To live for the love of God.
To stand as a reflection from God.

As Albert Ayler stood
When the music moved
Through him.
As Chang Tzu's butcher slipped
His blade effortlessly inside
The spaces in between
The bones of breath.
Dancing with the ox,
Raised up on hind legs,
To Summertime.

Summetime...
In the easy evening light
Upon the killing floor
Until the sweet beast shuddered,
Let go a low moan
Sounding sigh
Unwinding
Its last breath.
As if it grasped
Its own sweet death,
Falling apart,
Being entirely separated,
A harmonic graced note
Suspended, then faded
Into blood and bone and flesh
And air.

Could George Gershwin
Have ever imagined Albert Ayler?

On Easter Sunday
In Eliot's crowded Cathedral,
The Sisters of Maculate Mercy,
Stand before the congregation,
Black veils breathing
Over faces ruined by elation,
Singing,
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

In our less than critical evasions,
We think of the voice of the Rilkean angel,
A terrible beauty uncontainable,
Reverberating in a cul de sac,
Trapped in the apse
Of this terminal musical cathedral,
Notes now not so much as fading
As collapsing inward
Under the pressure of inadequacy
Into the absolute silence of the crypt.

There is the haunting question:
When is even music inadequate
To the task of surrounding
Human experience with meaning?

Here at John Coltrane's funeral,
Thought rings with the unimaginable:
The human being is not inevitable.
Ayler's accidental notes inscribing
The sigil of our unwelcome presence
Upon the pain turned threshold
Where being itself becomes unbearable.

The punch-line always ready to pounce.
And the Pretty and Sweet and Lovely
Are now the over-painted terrors,
The wandering ghostly errors,
Singing Fuck Fuck Fuck on Easter Sunday,
Profanity now a prayer.

There is meaning.
There is meaning.
But it is a music we can barely endure,
A music we can hardly hear,
The bone's prayer -
God's ghost shuddering
Through Albert Ayler.


***

Sources and antecedent:
http://www.laughingbone.com/thelaughingbone/word/prose/a-beautiful-lie-but-beautiful-nonetheless