Flesh of Spring

light

flows

out of a dark spot in the shape of a woman

an ecstasy of saints

the honey-stain sun shines through

the karmic sky

revealing an aching mystery

a big book of questions

and connections to your voice

in the deeper realms of a spring day

Thought for the Day

“Find what causes a commotion in your heart. Find a way to write about that.”



—Richard Ford

A Shape of Heaven

There’s a man standing at the edge of things



of a soft, blank sky
on an early spring day
cries of tiny white birds
sun breaking through
feelings unknown
eyes to the horizon
my offering to you
the grace of unknowing
canyons of hymns
all the wild angels
at the end of the breeze.

Thought for the Day

"The purpose of the poetry is not to dazzle us with an astonishing thought, but to make one moment of existence unforgettable and worthy of unbearable nostalgia."



— Milan Kundera, Immortality

The Swallows

These bones will leave me.

I won't see them in the other world.

No one stays very long.

All vanish, tumble-weed away

and between the vibrations thoughts.

As the wind comes blowing

swallows fly as one.

I risked a wonder thing.

I belong to someone.

Honor Our Poets, Adrienne Rich, 1929-2012

Thought for the Day

"While I was sitting one night with a poet friend watching a great opera performed in a tent under arc lights, the poet took my arm and pointed silently. Far up, blundering out of the night, a huge Cecropia moth swept past from light to light over the posturings of the actors. "He doesn't know," my friend whispered excitedly. "He's passing through an alien universe brightly lit but invisible to him. He's in another play; he doesn't see us. He doesn't know. Maybe it's happening right now to us."



- Loren Eiseley

I Want To Give This To You

Dear Fact,
I think quicksand of universe. Imperfectly closed. Can’t reason with touch or letting go.


Dear Inspiration,
I think the soft, inner outer edges. Paradise of promise. I think singing the soul.


Dear Language,
I think making boundaries where there are none. Unjust to the lovers.


Dear Invisible,
I am thinking wilderness light, in the deepest frontier, the unbound insight. I think streaming word. Slow growing seed. Blur of the void spoken here. Labyrinths of myth. Hybrid of us all. Please dispose of these words. Don’t flinch when I mention you. It’s all a high frequency.

Thought for the Day

ABSOLUTELY UNMIXED ATTENTION IS PRAYER.

Simone Weil.

On this quote, Stephen Mitchell made this comment:


“I love that. I think that could be as close as someone can get to a wonderful definition of prayer. In that sense, prayer has nothing spiritual or religious about it. A mathematician working at a problem or a little kid trying to pick out scales on the piano is a person at prayer. She’s not saying prayer is absolute unmixed attention; it’s the other way. The attention itself is the quality that she wants to call prayer. So whatever context you’re putting it in, whether it’s inside a church or inside a toy box, that’s the quality that is the sacred one.”

Space and the Perfect Night Sky

Kingdom
of existential dissatisfaction
I know you
from my past
I held you
and then I let you go.

Thought for the Day

"The one thing which we seek with insatiable desire is to forget ourselves, to be surprised out of our propriety, to lose our sempiternal memory and to do something without knowing how or why; in short to draw a new circle. Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm. The way of life is wonderful. It is by abandonment."



— R.W. Emerson

Outside Conventional Wisdom

I might be waiting in the blue yonder

if you wake up
tell me a secret
I’ll fly in homage to the sun for you
time will not be lonely
it will crawl inside of quiet
as if it were a woman
loving to be kind


I see an unnamed, vast geography
all souls hanging in the sky
catching light from the sun
I laugh to praise the world
leave tears among the unawake

Thought for the Day

Look out for the stream that flows to the Enlightenment Revolution,

it is forever and a day just outside your grasp.

Floating Roshi

Feeds No One For Sure

This liquid pearl sunrise. Dark inhibitions lifting. Dreams like a naked lunch of surrender, shuddering to the edge. Agape’s voice & tender sun whispering in the beginning was the word. Distances of silent, secret separation cut to here. Upward skyward: beyond words lifeline. Suddenly the heart becomes the center of one’s universe, when two hands reach across a keyboard and true word improvisation knows ahead of Time there is no correct response linking us to each other and all most everything.

Thought for the Day

1.



The cloud is free only


to go with the wind.




The rain is free


only in falling.




The water is free only


in its gathering together,




in its downward courses,


in its rising into the air.






2.


In law is rest


if you love the law,


if you enter, singing, into it


as water in its descent.




3.

Or song is truest law,


and you must enter singing;


it has no other entrance.






It is the great chorus


of parts. The only outlawry


is in division.




4.


Whatever is singing


is found, awaiting the return


of whatever is lost.






5.


Meet us in the air


over the water,


sing the swallows.






Meet me, meet me,


the redbird sings,


here here here here.




~ Wendell Berry

Unexplainable Abandon

                           

                             Dreamy is the dawn;                               

a heart is upside down

but we say, we say

one shore needs another

to spark a flame.

Burning full circle

turns all things greater.

When sky breaks open

we will be waiting,

we will be waiting, 

trembling to be transported

spinning, smiling,

to the center of the hum.

Thought for the Day

from The Song of Wandering Aengus, Willliam Butler Yeats


And someone called me by my name.



It had become a glimmering girl
With apple blossoms in her hair
Who called me by my name and ran
And vanished in the brightening air.



Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands
I will find out where she has gone
And kiss her lips and take her hand



And walk through long green dappled grass
And pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon
The golden apples of the sun.

Live to be Born

"The ancients say poetry is a dream letter to God." Jeremy Reed

Inside every departure a tangle. We remain deadly alive with word wings. You always put a better face on everything. Your hair behind your ears a prophecy. To know that heaven’s listening. We walked and walked so far in to put pure radiance to use. And the word as it was in the beginning fell straight through to the only ears that were listening. We were carried away into the next incarnation. And you a taste of sun. Sometimes it’s all about the barrenness of being. Awakening. Like a laugh when funny is a moment of vision.

Sunday, March 25, 2012

LIVE POETRY NIGHT
at our NEW LOCATION:
VICTORIA’S ESPRESSO & WINE BAR
(510 EAST DURANT AVENUE, ASPEN, ½ BLOCK EAST OF RUBEY PARK)
SUNDAY, MARCH 25, 2012
6:30 PM – 9:00 PM

No experience necessary. Only requirement . . . to enjoy an evening of wordsmithing and fun. Let's continue the rebirth of live poetry in Aspen. Everyone is invited. All poets and forms of poetry are welcome – from the sonnet to the haiku and beyond.
Poetry Night is as much for the audience as for the poets.

LIVE MUSIC
Featuring SINGER/SONGWRITER
MATT HASLETT
OPEN MIC FOR POETS
FEATURED POET:
BILL KIGHT


Bill is a native New Mexican who loves the Southwest. Since age 17 he has hiked or fought wildfires in the wilderness of every western state and is currently the public affairs officer for the 2.3 million acre White River National Forest which surrounds the city of Aspen. For over 30 years he has worked for land management agencies empowering Indian tribes and the public to become actively involved in land stewardship. As did his mother, Bill has been writing poetry for over 50 years. His four daughters and 13 year old granddaughter, NneKa, are also poets.

POETRY NIGHT IS SPONSORED BY ASPEN POETS' SOCIETY, INK & www.aspenpoetsociety.com

Thought for the Day

Toward a Greater Daylight

Send the sun. The act of being sunny, blown open bright-out of the dark blue night, an arrow heads for its target and it is good, catching first rays, the secrets of heaven and the wounds of beauty.

It is sunny in the
tunnel of doubt. No clouds
in the melting sky.

Thought for the Day

Once I spoke the language of the flowers,



Once I understood each word the caterpillar said,


Once I smiled in secret at the gossip of the starlings,


And shared a conversation with the housefly in my bed.


Once I heard and answered all the questions of the crickets,


And joined the crying of each falling dying flake of snow,


Once I spoke the language of the flowers… .


How did it go?


How did it go?

Under the Skin

Dear Friend: A crooked prayer roaring with imperfections — juniper berries, a fleshy sky, pine cones, black butterflies, coyote tongues, and a bloom of bees. A shimmering candle. Before seeing there are words. Let dreams unlock.



A humming. Praised. And then surrender. Say, spark. Say, body of light. I hallucinate your smiles, a joyous looping. A Crown of Dreams. Eyelashes. Forgive the body. Save your life. Get to natural wonder.

From the Book of Clouds

Between hunger and the tongue. A wire on which precarious reality is hung like laundry. Infinity as I saw it in a dream, in the ordinary world. In a gust of wind the secret comes undone and we arrive. It is our turn. There is a wire, fragile and delicate, and at each end a large door. Sometimes there’s a short hurricane and there’s no turning back. A door opens honoring the soul, you pay up. If you do not wish to pay, you rebuild your world from the ruins of your internal landscape. Yet we are sustained.

Thought for the Day

I’d have to be really quick to describe clouds— a split second’s enough … for them to start being something else. Their trademark: they don’t repeat a single shape, shade, pose, arrangement. Unburdened by memory of any kind, they float easily over the facts. What on earth could they bear witness to? They scatter whenever something happens. Compared to clouds, life rests on solid ground, practically permanent, almost eternal. Next to clouds even a stone seems like a brother, someone you can trust, while they’re just distant, flighty cousins. Let people exist if they want, and then die, one after another: clouds simply don’t care what they’re up to down there. And so their haughty fleet cruises smoothly over your whole life and mine, still incomplete. They aren’t obliged to vanish when we’re gone. They don’t have to be seen while sailing on.


Wislawa Szymborska

Thought for the Day

The most important kind of freedom is to be what you really are. You trade in your reality for a role. You trade in your sense for an act. You give up your ability to feel, and in exchange, put on a mask. There can’t be any large-scale revolution until there’s a personal revolution, on an individual level. It’s got to happen inside first.



— Jim Morrison, The Doors 

Sacramental

I maintain a mighty dream through the stars, from the hidden



meaning in which we are nailed, mysterious and unknown. Under


an invented language I escape from myself within this brilliant


night; the dream of the poem


the closest thing to love.


Bit by bit the word gives breath, my spirit


extends, my spirit refreshes


to live like the living, to die


like the living,


open and bright.



I am already tracking


toward


ungraspable signs—


where everything is born.

Seven Prisms

one
only this, over and over again, among the ruins, to name the holy real, with unflinching chants
I am bright burn

two
leaving for somewhere, so much angelical time, dropped as darkness broke, near now
I am released

three
frozen hands choose enchantment with your face, point the way, fine-boned, expectant
I am heaven within range

four
and the road so often forgives, never asks for rules, must jump in dazzlement
I am clear-shattered

five
every grace deepening, uninterrupted
I am all bets are off

six
your face that one only
I am into clouds

seven
golden yes, and yes
I am sky-eyed

Thought for the Day

"Transience is the most general phenomenon of the cosmos. Change is the only changeless reality. Seasons, livelihoods, personal relationships - all of these will change. Our experiences in life are transient and relative. Only death is certain, completing the cycle of life that begins with birth. By meditating upon this truth, we recognize that we, too, are manifestations of transience. When we understand this teaching deeply, we become humble and sincere. We treasure each moment and endeavor to do our best. We feel less stress and become more accepting of the diverse phenomena of life. If something good happens we can feel the joy and be thankful. But we know that the conditions for the situation will not last forever, and we do not become attached to the feeling. We will simply consider every moment and every experience as a blessing." - Ilchi Lee

As With Angels

If everything is punctured,
harmony, cool joy, sun through trees, money and trigonometry,
miracle scratchings, crackings in the brain, me,
if everything is punctured, tender niceties and tears:


we become brilliant without knowing it
we too are filled.

Thought for the Day

Arthur Quiller-Couch, ed. 1919. The Oxford Book of English Verse: 1250–1900.

William Butler Yeats b. 1865

When You are Old

WHEN you are old and gray and full of sleep
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace, 5
And loved your beauty with love false or true;
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face.

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead,
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

Born--New

I walk in time. Whirling about. No matter. Peace to you. True high. I found endless play when love became a birth wound. Now I'm not just in this body but open to the life that falls from the sky.The wound is my whole world, Lord. Imagine winter blue. Ringing bell of being. And those gifts, tiny and lovely, hidden behind walls of ice. I'm only talking to myself, to myself. I'm finding my way through to an infinite grace. Self breaking. Broken. I fell into a joy, a wonderful coincidence. The moment became my sacrificial act. You can't rush a healing. I fought the slow dream of love. I burned my wings, sweetheart mama. Poet vertigo. Saint Miles of Promised Wonder gone to stone. My labyrinth. My walking. Wanting to stretch out of time. Ready to escape. Talk heavenly shining, mama. I’m stoned on blue, running to the moon. I’m hallucinating afterlight forever.

Thought for the Day

THE PLACE WHERE WE ARE RIGHT

From the place where we are right
Flowers will never grow
In the spring.

The place where we are right
Is hard and trampled
Like a yard.

But doubts and loves
Dig up the world
Like a mole, a plow.
And a whisper will be heard in the place
Where the ruined
House once stood.

—Yehuda Amichai

Plea Prayer

He carries the longing
Your shadow grows inside him
A faint stream of red blood
The sweet medicine of twilight
All the way to the mythical nest of sky
Grace he couldn’t find a thousand times before
A fire surges up from his head
Resurrection that is stunning
He’s got nothing but this
To remember
How he cares more than the words
And when he cries it is a beautiful crying
And the tears he cries are very pure
Meaning it is mystery
Meaning he touches wonder
And the love arcs between the stars.

Thought for the Day

World Inside the World

Through
gracing mistakes

inside a raw spiritual hunger
the eternal crosshairs
remain
on constant communion.

“Yes, I thought I was haunted,
a symptom of unrest,
but it drew me in closer
to you.”

Thought for the Day

Jack Kerouac: San Francisco Scene (The Beat Generation)

“Now it’s jazz. The place is roaring, all beautiful girls in there: one mad brunette at the bar drunk with her boys; one strange chick I remember from somewhere, wearing a simple skirt with pockets, her hands in there, short haircut, slouched, talking to everybody. Up and down the stairs they come. The bartenders are the regular band of Jack, and the heavenly drummer who looks up in the sky with blue eyes, with a beard—he’s wailing beer-caps of bottles and jamming at the cash register and everything is going to the beat.

It’s the Beat Generation. It’s beát. It’s the beat to keep. It’s the beat of the heart. It’s being beat, and down in the world and like old-time lowdown, and like in ancient civilizations the slave boatmen rowing galleys to a beat, and servants spinning pottery to a beat..."

Nature of the Journey

he spreads out the map of the four corners of his soul
he absorbs the geometries of his failures
time flows leaving no instructions
he types out the endless is never, the never is endless
what is consciousness for an accidental being
he explores his own mountains and mystery tunnels and islands
everything whirlpooling, hypnotic and wounded
a love falling into death and descent
a heartbeat

rocking open-door rhythms
the pull of the sunlight and a mixing of angels
he pushes himself in and out of a false sense of security
he rises in language to the edge of his life
clouds as feelings and feelings as clouds
he charts the deep but the destination keeps moving
the place which is not-here and no-there and not-then

Thought for the Day

“And the deepest level of communication is not communication, but communion. It is wordless. It is beyond words, and it is beyond speech,and it is beyond concept.

Not that we discover a new unity. We discover an older unity. My dear brothers, we are already one. But we imagine that we are not. And what we have to recover is our original unity. What we have to be is what we are.”

—Thomas Merton from his Asian Journals.

On the Edge of Angels

We travel the sky
with no certain route.
It’s a lifetime.
Are these horizons
sacred sanctuaries of the self
or code for a whole way of life?
We lose ourselves in the wind
where there is no salvation.

Thought for the Day

In Lucid Space

Heaven is a thought of crazy splendor.
O, inner game, stay pristine--
who loses wins sometimes.

The art of acting out the impossible might change us.
Imagine a childlike code of angels is by tiny
degrees a riot of crystal living colors.

Nothing half so real.

Thought for the Day

"This simple and radical truth was known to the alchemists:
It is the light hidden in matter that will redeem the world."

— *From Anima Mundi: Awakening the Soul of the World; Published in Sufi Journal, Issue 67, Autumn 2005 by Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee

Prove It

When all the golden blue earth will come to be reborn.
Bears in their forests, oranges from the sky,
Flex of earth like an arrow flies—
Just something sweet, invisible luxury of the sun
Disrobed of the madness and words.
Angels that never waver in the stream.
Spirits in uproar, never lost in the spectacle.

Thought for the Day

You wake from dreams of doom and--for a moment--you know: beyond all the noise and the gestures, the only real thing, love's calm unwavering flame in the half-light of an early dawn.”

―Dag Hammarskjöld, Markings

Inside a Vaster Space

I am drawn to
the deepest

blue tranquility
as bone to sky

bowl, up
to the mystery

of my life
where I swim

in the vision
spilling

elemental
flowing

outside flesh
like the time

when you said
when you said

YES, or the time
when we simply

pretended to be
birds, flying.

Thought for the Day

"You are whatever a moon has always meant and whatever a sun will always sing."

E.E. Cummings

Unfading

something tender that comes from a feeling of primordial blessedness

Waiting at the moon-bright window
for the sweeter unheard melodies
to softly cross the threshold
while kingdom come
from far beyond the mind of winter
signs of wreckage between footsteps in the snow.

Disappearing had its danger.
He remembers her
a whisper in his own blood
a call
from a far off bell.

Thought for the Day

I am astonished, disappointed, pleased with myself. I am distressed, depressed, rapturous. I am all these things at once, and cannot add up the sum. I am incapable of determining ultimate worth or worthlessness; I have no judgment about myself and my life. There is nothing I am quite sure about. I have no definite convictions - not about anything, really. I know only that I was born and exist, and it seems to me that I have been carried along. I exist on the foundation of something I do not know.

C.G. Jung, near the end of his life, in Memories, Dreams.

Mystic Monstrance

hing hoi, Thai for fireflies

We go into light and light opens.
Wild light with life and rowdy hallelujahs.
It drips down an exquisite altar of quantum dreams.
I find you there, in the words and moonlight.
No space between the light and the word.
There is spinning out of language.
As if the whole thing is a box full of light.
Too bright to touch.

Thought for the Day

Whatever we say
we know there is another
language under this one

W. S. Merwin

Mythic

Every time I feel the wind
I feel like I am opening myself

to transnatural horizons, ancestral mountains
and endless blue.

I open the window
further and remember
how I believed in you
before I even travelled this earth.

Thought for the Day

"The world’s continual breathing is what we hear and call silence."

— Clarice Lispector

Stretched

It’s the same mystical unknowing.
The earth is birth
a breathing flow, a personal echo.
She wears golden flowers
and smiles through the heavens.
The breeze is an epiphany, always with an edge.
The path to the meadow that knows us
is looking for us.
The abstract wings of the moment
are waiting.

Thought for the Day

I sped through heaven and saw god at work. I suffered holy pains. I dropped all my defences and was afraid of nothing in the world. I accepted all things and to all things I gave up my heart.

—Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf

Crooked

Poet says, These words are mazethoughts unplanned/ keys for doors that no longer exist/brushfires in my lungs/bells in the valley/nothing new/a small hole in the clouds/once upon a mountain stream/impermanent conditions/blended/ shredded/not a stone Buddha/pieces of dreams/transitory glories/mystery as a language/hide-and-sly seekers/sad wings/open arms/primordial fringe/peek-a-boo

– of course it would be whatever we imagine it to be/a trace/a seed/a scar?

Thought for the Day

"There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic."

Anaïs Nin

On the Doorstep

the walls on playground earth
are thin like body skin
maybe we were meant
to be a watered-down
version of blue sky
passing around
like a merry go round
looking for a trail
that can't be found
time and again
so we can say
it's so beautiful
that we heal
where we are
here

Thought for the Day

"Do I contradict myself?
Very well, then, I contradict myself.
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)"

—Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”

Many Ways To Fly

i dream countless versions of myself
as wide as the land of milk and honey
my voice a spark born in my mouth
and you the long awaited message
later we are birds of the mountains
crying out from the ridges

an offering of souls unseen
to the clear blue sky

Thought for the Day

"There are some good things to be said about walking. Walking takes longer, for example, than any other known form of locomotion except crawling. Thus it stretches time and prolongs life. Life is already too short to waste on speed. I have a friend who's always in a hurry; he never gets anywhere. Walking makes the world much bigger and thus more interesting. You have time to observe the details. The utopian technologists foresee a future for us in which distance is annihilated and anyone can transport himself anywhere, instantly. Big deal, Buckminster. To be everywhere at once is to be nowhere forever, if you ask me."

- Edward Abbey

To Write About It?

1
He looks out the window
the snow is falling
his thoughts drift too
it is the quiet
that dreams a meadow
that constructs a miracle.

2
He stands alone
on the shore of a small death
and there
he lets the word
gather her body
from earth to heaven
- Her light will spread. –

3
What do his words mean?
he doesn't know
he has a heart
he smiles
to feel his sadness.

Thought for the Day

When the body is in the grave, dead and buried, or when there is a death of ego and its perspectives during one's lifetime, then a deeper spirit or soul can come to be.  A deepening of historical being occurs by way of an under-the-worldly point of view.  The descent into the underworld of souls (psychai, animae) is a descent into a soul-perspective or depth-perspective concerning history.  One might say that the descent into hell is actually the ascent of soul.  It brings a sense of soul into ascendancy in life, and it gives the human ego a perspective from a soulful point of view.  The descent is itself a resurrection.

David Leroy Miller