A.S.Kline
©Copyright 2001 A.S.Kline, All Rights Reserved
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Contents
Loose, Shifting Ghost
At one end of Nature is rock, stone,
at the other end, Life.
At one end matter.
Mechanism at the other.
At one end a glory, light
from the galaxy, a flower,
from inside the petals of dust,
at the other end, Mind.
At one end is word,
at the other end, silence,
the sifting of sand over gravel.
At one end darkness, complexity,
driving at truth.
At the other is grace, truth,
laughing simplicity, mocking complexity.
At one end the drift,
the quiet, mindless ease.
At the other the lure,
to get, form, create,
in the sweat of the maker.
At one end, the adult, dying,
at the other, the child.
At one end power,
at the other, powerless love.
Climbing blue night,
on the mountain, madly,
at one end of Nature,
is light,
at the other is ground,
root of our being.
What is it this Mind
floats above, the loose,
shifting ghost?
Incantation.
Corona Borealis, Canes Vetanici,
Berenice,
Perseus, Andromeda.
Antares, Arcturus, Spica, Vega,
Cassiopeia, Deneb,
Gemma, Mira,
Rigel, Regulus.
Anguem, Alta,
Orphiucus,
Lyra, Serpens Cauda,
Altair, Crux.
Capella, Draco,
Bootës.
Hesperus.
Soul’s Mirror
Quieter, quieter,
and stiller, stiller,
between leaf-stir,
between star-flare,
nothing human.
Those we have missed,
un-found forever,
those we have missed.
Quieter, and stiller.
Until a trickle of light,
in the slow-flowing stream,
lifts a dark piece of branch,
moves it on;
until a corner of forest
shudders with light,
embraces the moon.
To love and not touch,
to miss them forever,
who would have been loved,
the soul’s mirror.
Those noises we hear,
but quieter, now, stiller,
are voices that move, in the dark,
we never recover.
The darkness is lover,
the night, without love,
starred wind, bleak fire,
void of joy,
abyss of measure.
Duller, softer, blunter,
quieter and stiller,
the longing, the anguish,
what is not said to the other,
the pain, of the lover,
soul’s mirror,
between leaf or leaf, star or star,
quieter, quieter,
and stiller, stiller.
Trying To Make It
Trying to make it,
so that nothing is there.
Trying to be, but not-be,
breathe, not think,
think void, see,
nothing, where there is tree,
but still see tree,
tree to be void,
and Mind, nothing, there,
is hard.
Trying to see, cannot see that
trying to be nothing
is nowhere. Light stares,
tree sings,
but in the word, work, being there,
before the task, entire,
and watching, till something,
not the self, creates, is there,
where nothing is there,
in tree, mind, air.
Behind the Words
Still enough, here, you can hear the voices
without speech,
those who are silent.
Can you be so still?
Not the speakers,
not slaves of the word,
the others,
the ones with no voice,
no names,
who fill history,
silent.
Where there’s no moral light,
words are dead, artifice
is no longer a gift to the night,
but a dark fire,
entrancing,
the dance of the dead.
We must shine,
to the end of our lives,
we must shine,
through all dark,
and be still,
to hear, on the mountain,
behind the voices,
the voice,
of the ones without voice.
They died in love,
they sang,
at the rim of the heart,
sun, light, and life,
life of the word, of the heart,
as animals sing, birds,
out of the spirit.
We must sing,
love. The rest is deceit,
names, artifice, word,
that engrosses, inflames,
sends spires high,
made forms, made games,
worth nothing,
unless we are still,
still to hear,
voices,
words behind words.
Reflection
Through distance
I feel you,
something of you,
some shining of time,
heart engages,
desire engages,
spirit’s concern, mind’s love,
but a ghost with a ghost,
side by side,
in an insubstantial country.
I see. Voice. I hear.
Tremor of sounds, remembered,
on the brink of space,
in the centre of time,
separate, words of departure,
and word is pain.
It reverberates
where the feelings, tremor inside,
where the severed threads,
go silver, in twilight.
It is going, and then,
eternity’s silence,
a nerve of stillness, a never,
a nothing, a no-one’s world,
out of time, out of being.
How? When this shone,
with the force of a star,
with the strength of a sea,
with the sweetness
at the root of what moves.
How going? How done? How
silent and nothing?
But you, something of you,
shining,
reflected light,
the ghost of a mind,
saying to all those,
alive,
deeper than you, deeper
I live.
No One
The black candle shines
in the Houses of Dust.
No one is forgiven.
Pain belongs to the victim,
and not the unclean.
No one is forgiven.
Pain is a black flame,
burning at sunset.
No one is forgiven.
The land there is empty,
despite many people.
No one is forgiven.
There is a form, a shape,
a design in the dust,
it dances, it stirs.
There is no language, no word,
no space for the word.
No one is forgiven.
It rises beyond. It glitters,
it rattles, it burns,
in the silence of night.
Under the eyeball,
and over the hand,
in the voice out of crystal,
it sings,
in the darkness of fire.
No one is forgiven.
Time heals, you say,
and silence. All is forgiven.
No one is forgiven.
The black candle shines,
in the Houses of Dust.
No one is forgiven.
Mind and Its Light
In the darkness,
a shade to a shade,
will you (three times) believe?
Blood in the vein,
flickers, pulses, burns red,
with the language consumed
by the voices of fire,
up there, up there,
by the vortex of stars,
where the mind sings,
for strangers,
by the stream of light,
in nobody’s house,
in the dark.
As a spirit, as mind,
as process, as shadow, as shade,
through all of the roads,
earth, water, air, fire,
tempest and sea,
mountain and love,
O love, the rage
of the angel,
the devil’s desire.
As a flame, almost caught,
gentle, that burns,
in the courtyard
where no-one comes,
singing for strangers.
The Kingdom.
What light angles
down the paths,
forces’ stairway in the darkness,
you, shade, inhabit,
the mysterious word.
Babel. We purify,
to a dialect of flame,
by blood, and by time,
with a charity no one denies,
with a love,
no one can deny,
by the word,
by what’s staked on the word,
Mind, and its light.
Babel’s Tower
In Babel’s tower,
my eye is the pupil of stone,
the time-voice,
the network,
of broken fire, on the face,
of night, before dawn,
is shadow, naked,
is arm, plumed white,
the bird that cries...ah, ah,
in Babel’s tower.
In Babel’s tower
the ghost’s breath
the bright
glitter of pebbles, the spume
that blows night together,
in foam, in murmur,
of cliff-fall,
in Babel’s tower.
In Babel’s tower,
distance, the lion-eyed
desert of fear,
a pain, between brows, a trickle
of flame, of ash,
floating down
from the eye of the lion,
to the hiss of sand,
air’s whirr,
storm’s sigh,
in Babel’s tower.
In Babel’s tower,
something, bone, sperm,
dream, wound,
hammered, split, peeled,
mind-womb, unseen
barb, the bright wire
drawn through the mouth,
gales, bird-mouths, the bricks
of a tower, a gate,
keen, moan, grief’s moan,
and it blows, breaks, brightens,
in beams of agony, rays,
and names, always names,
in Babel’s tower.
Core
The core of power
is a heap of dust.
The centre of power
is a light that blows
on a void,
over silence.
The heart of power
is a night gasp
from the statue’s head,
on the path of stone.
The focus of power
is the sterile coil,
the tornado turns,
the twist of light,
on the inner face,
of the gaze of death,
the broken lens,
the shiver of shame.
The essence of power
is fine sand,
dark gravel,
powder-scree,
cloud like a hand
on a desert.
Power’s name
is the name of ash,
the drift, the smoke that clings,
the oily, viscous
flakes of despair.
Power’s silence
is fools’ gravity.
Power’s violence
is fools’ work.
Power’s irony
is fools’ gold.
The core of power
is a sigh of dust,
a motion of dust,
in a dawn wind,
by the black tree,
where the creature sits,
mouthing,
the meaning,
the purpose,
of power.
Remains
The heart is not owned
beyond the corruption of eye and ear,
where the yellowed grass slopes
to the dark stone of the temple.
The place of the heart
is not owned.
The wind, the sea, the grass is not owned,
blows in the silence,
breaks in the silence,
stirs, is not owned.
The Mind is not owned.
The stars, the dark stars,
the flares, out of stillness,
out of the reaches of night,
spaces where nothing will be
but moment’s chaos,
the gulfs of the deep,
are not owned,
nothing is owned.
Word
Spirit – not to deny,
spirit, ghost-fern, down
the misted space, fern-seed
hollow, that must not be void.
Not to deny, process, spirit,
objectify, make voids
that darkness fills.
Tiny scales of fern,
edges, whorls, heart-fern,
to which we return, to the heart-fern.
Faith, hope, love. Give the fern: share the fern,
down the dark path, speak to spirits.
Valleys, fern-slopes, fern-rimmed
water, wells, springs that spout
from fern, pour cold stone,
over stone slabs, into dark soil,
the dark earth of ferns.
Do not deny – the spirit,
do not deny. We shift
in the wind, in the rock, we are not
one thing, time’s process,
we are many lives, heart’s spies,
lost, in the homeland of fern,
in the country of fern, green
dark where the dead wait,
to tell us their word.
Do not. Nothing owned
in space, by us, who are time.
Nothing owned in time,
by us, who are space.
Not fern, not star.
The Book
The Book.
What is the book?
Slope of the heart, between teeth,
the silence grown light,
the exile’s stair.
What is the book?
Smoke, the remains of stars,
meridian circles of syllable,
blind-moving mouth.
The Book.
What is the book?
Speaker in night’s intricate shades,
follower of gleaming voices,
finer, more distant, than cry.
Boat, rowed to the island,
clouded with aspen, on cliffs,
where the waterfall carves no name.
The Book.
What is the book?
The window, dark
with glass, the crystalline rain
of sound, the incantation.
I chant the people, the nation,
graced without roots,
except those in the air,
without blades, or icons,
without faces or names,
without being,
ash, asra, asher.
The Book.
What is the book?
The curved wings meeting in darkness,
the pillar blazing in darkness,
the smoke, the cloud of burning.
Spirit. Freedom is the book.
Earth, air, light, heart, written on water,
a table, where bread stands,
a wall, on which light falls,
of sun’s pain, of memory,
memory, the Book.
Grave Goods
In the darkness, with the child by your side,
under the earth, and waiting,
in the darkness, with the child by your side.
Gold over the heart, gold in the hand,
gold around hair, and on foreheads.
Gold of the dark, with the child by your side.
No one climbs the air that looks for an eyelid.
No one stirs the arms that look for a moment.
No one touches your face, or the child by your side.
There is a distance, as far as a star-field,
one where I do not cry, where I do not see,
that shape of the child by your side.
In the dark, with the child by your side,
an offering to earth, an offering, and waiting,
in the dark, with the child, by your side.
Stranger
You sing for strangers, and your word is a cage,
out of which spirit seeps slowly,
into the dark canals, into the evening light,
into the soul of the mirror.
You say this is all fine, all clear, all true,
but I say time dies, the earth dies,
and you, you sing for strangers.
By the waters there, where we wept,
at nightfall, the rose, the fish-pools, the jewels,
the galleries, what is clustered? What is
perfumed, what is turned by the maker?
You sing for strangers.
Believing the heart can survive, the mind
can survive, the spirit need not be harmed,
the soul impaired.
Mouth, in the stillness, you weep.
Knees, in the silence, you bend.
Hand, in the mirror, you move.
Word, in the darkness, you yield.
You sing for strangers.
You Build the Tower
We make what nobody knows.
You build the tower, hollow on slenderness,
put there a stillness, the leaf of a rose.
We watch time in the glass, and nourish
each other, with names, strange foods,
and the curios of eternity.
We exchange eyes: we count seconds,
out of the fibrous past, its tentacular spread,
we make roadways from winter to spring,
we make a bridge from ocean to ocean.
We exchange tears. We watch: we study
the things they have made, the dead,
and the echoes between, we are firing a metal,
strange, in the crucible, angling the stars.
We know each other in light, carry
each other through darkness. I watch you stand
in the flames, walk through the flames,
and I praise.
Is there a ferry to cross to your shore?
Is there a boatman over the pool?
I can see down to the floor, of the ocean
of fear and division, white sand, dark rock.
The gates of both earths are open. We hear
the birds flocking, that cry, through the skies,
skies green with light’s refusal. We gather,
truth from the stone, trust from the hurt.
Making what nobody knows. You,
the slenderness there, placing word on word,
life on life, silently, building the tower.
Birthing
The dying is leaving: that is the pain,
being left, reducing, to what we have not
loved, not known, not understood,
exhausting ourselves, sighing out flowers,
winds, leaves, the outgoing breath
of the mind’s eternal face, the crystal child,
finally ravished, finally damaged and torn,
as we give birth.
The living is leaving: that is the pain,
being left, diminished, by what we have failed,
in trying, to own, loved, and not known,
not understood, vacating ourselves,
sighing out selves, mists, flames,
the vanishing breath of the heart’s temporal phrase,
its stillborn child,
finally shaken, finally threshed and winnowed,
as we reach birth.
The moment is leaving, that is the joy, the pain,
leaving, beginning, going, from what we, now, are not,
to what we, yet, are not, unknown, not understood,
losing, re-finding ourselves, leaving behind the skein
as we wind the labyrinth’s web, our dark canals,
our clefts, our deeps, our forgotten children,
finally changing, finally forming, transmuting,
in unending birth.
Your Image
Your image,
of you, in the pool, in the liquid flow,
ripe, rich, among friends, in the moment, naked,
you fill with memory, memory’s tenderness,
making its space.
And a girl, your tale of a girl,
and an echo in time, a tenderness, she,
arriving in time, to your hand,
and now, seen again, seen again,
in the face of a stranger.
These are stillnesses, you can return to,
beauty and tenderness, you can return to,
sweet in the private mind.
And for me, there are landscapes, sea-coasts,
grassed corners, deep places, and lines,
words made of lines, there are faces,
but not with your peace, not with your stillness,
the beauty, that flowers from you,
like the child from your womb,
flowering, the tiny flower.
These are things you can hold, and return to.
There is death, and division,
mists’ dense gleam over water,
clouds’ snow-melt of silence,
obscurers of dream.
There is life. Its strange force
and arousal, ocean of movement,
white spume of the wave,
and what it delivers.
Your image of you, and of them, alone
in the pool, naked, ringed with water and rock,
your elements, earth and its flowing,
above them the air, the crystalline mind,
darting, a hummingbird,
secret through ancient darkness.
And a girl. These are stillnesses,
you can return to, pure,
in the private mind,
where all true things are,
where the real world exists,
to all hurt’s confusion.
The Singing
Faun’s touch in the silence.
Light falls in tenderness there,
where the sex is revealed,
in the soft swelling of line,
in the purest of forms,
from the Minotaur’s hand.
They gazed at beauty, that gazes
nowhere, beyond, is shape,
is a pillar of time, a thing out of time.
beyond action, they gaze, sleep,
the lovers, beyond, sound
in the crystalline earth
where light is alive.
Cradled in time, in trust,
in the stillness of trust,
like a flower, a miraculous flower
on a precipice, bright as a wave,
lifted and lost like a wave,
but cradled in time.
The Minotaur sings, not
in a tongue that they know,
he sings creature and man,
come from the mount of the bull,
the force of the sea. He sings. He cries,
with inhuman cries, a language
heard in the sonorous walls,
in the spirals of pain, in the hollow curves
at the core of the sea’s whitened shell,
its horn of immaculate pearl.
And you reach down and touch,
reach through the circle of faces,
the eyes without speech, and you touch,
bravest of all, truest of all, most naked of all,
you stretch out a hand, to the creature,
to his heart, and imagine a heart,
to create his heart, as another did
to set free the line, as if the curve sang
the space of the block, the white space
of the page, of the Minotaur’s singing.
Here
How to make it here, how to
create it, here, in this mist of the darkness,
this crystalline spirit,
without weeping, without lying,
how to make it, here?
White snows of earth-light
touch me in silence:
waters of space-time
cleanse me in silence.
How to hear stars, here,
how to feel earth, here, how
to recover the singing,
how to lay out
the places of love,
how can we make it, here?
Blueness of evening
I suffer your word-fall:
stones from the distance
shower on my page.
How to kneel down by the rock, here,
how to make anything sacred,
in error’s dark tower,
in the Babel of mirrors,
where men learn to destroy.
Black winds of morning
move in my ashes:
dark winds of dawning
scatter your knowledge.
How to know mind, here,
enact it, exalt it,
in the cold of the night,
in this time of oblivion,
in the pool of the dying,
how to build, here?
The Name
A place
for the hand to write
the name,
for the name
breaking
from light,
the space,
where memory
knows all the mirrors,
and speaks
the name.
It takes
It takes strength, calm
for the mouth
to speak the name,
a space
for the name,
boiling from darkness,
place where the hands
burn,
eyes melt, lips
make the name.
A light
for the heart
to read
the name,
a time
for the name,
flare out of silence,
earth has forgotten,
air has forgotten,
Void,
of the name.
Note: The name is the name, in the mouth of those who have lost, of the one who was lost, or the ones...it’s other name is Bergen-Belsen.
River
So many lives
carrying water,
carrying water
to the river.
Those teachers,
all those words,
those streams of light,
those flickerings,
carrying water
to the river.
The fountain of the poet,
that deep subterranean spring,
that tributary
carrying water,
carrying water
to the river.
The river glows below.
The river shines above.
Carrying water,
carrying water,
carrying water
to the river.
We Can Listen
The voices of dead men
are talking through stone.
They sing also
while hands move in the dark.
They are ascending
the leaves of summer
bringing a frozen word.
The Earth is empty.
Dead men fill it,
and women, dead women,
with voices of fire.
Their blind word is life.
Not to traduce it, corrupt it
with objects or wealth,
making men objects,
or women objects.
They tell us not to lie,
love power, defraud,
they ask us to try, living.
Out of the void, the heart,
unchanged, in the word
or the shape of the stone, the line
of colour, syllables, notes.
The voices of dead people
carry on talking.
We can listen.
Writing Me
Something is writing me,
says that the Garden
is not over,
that we could deepen
and recreate it,
before the Mind goes
under the sea,
into the space of denial.
Something moves this hand
sensitizes the heart
until every word is a fire,
every letter a branch.
There are paths to the hills
we have left,
a way to the shore,
of the horses and swans,
and the tracks of the gulls.
Something is talking in me,
not reason’s voice, or silence,
a perception,
outside the reference frame
that you read in,
and it speaks about nature,
the spirit, mind’s deeper dimension,
says that we
could recreate it,
its beauty, its hour.
I Entered
I entered the night
I broke the owl-sound
and threw it on roadways.
Moon shuddered in Earthlight,
she moved away.
Flights of birds, of stones,
towers of granite.
A city’s deceit
like the soil of waste
on mute fingers.
We wash and we wash,
in the silence,
but never get clean.
I entered the night.
Twigs waved. Buds opened.
A thought sang at high pitch.
Feelings trembled, eclipsed,
closed, joined, died.
There’s a counter-current of stars:
the sun swims backward against them,
rips earth out, takes it along.
We abandon the hammer of night
and leave it,
leave ourselves nothing,
we never redeem.
I held a fraction, a part
of a stamen, a rod,
sieved, sieved
at the black memory lake,
listened: do you? to secretive voices,
the not named, unspeaking,
the ones that go round
the anvil of night
and beat at the forehead of meaning,
the buried ones.
I sieved and sieved,
at the water,
that cannot be seen.
Lances
Autumn is over the hill.
An opaque light
congeals
is might have been.
Quarries, clouds
small silver lances
wound
go on, hurting,
with curious
knives.
Through a hole in time
a hand
moved to touch
half-hands
of passing flesh.
Flower is star,
its light
the heart,
it lights the heart, hurt,
gashed mind inflicts,
radiant, redeems.
Autumn is done. Heaps
of seed, forgotten,
wasted in darkness,
splinters
the Angel walked through
bleeding.
The Kingdom of Nothing
On the almond
from the black branch
a single flower.
And from the cherry-tree
the chamfered, rough
thready bark,
the first clear pink
double rich blossoms
break in winter.
On the almond, black.
And on the plum,
smooth, grey,
dark-grey column
slender as a girls’ neck
the buds open.
But on the almond,
on the almond,
despite winter,
there is a flower,
a flower,
despite winter.
A flower
in the kingdom
of nothing.
Folded Rock
On folded rock
the bird soars.
This power
is worth having,
not the other.
The fox, red, gazes
pointedly,
drags his brush,
flickers, is gone.
Deep inside
is his secret.
Look down
over lakes and hills
Mind knows
its place,
in the chest,
in the eyes.
On folded rock
sitting, seeing,
wishing for power
to pass me by.
In-form Me
Plenty of empty spaces
awash with words.
Plenty of things,
not useful,
not worth
having.
Wrong lives
need to be
in-formed
to fill emptiness
with space.
Only words
that transmit love,
many kinds
of love
form, in-form:
the rest are
used by power,
powerless
to create.
When we have overcome
this universe,
will we be
love
and in-formed?
What We Have
It came there, a mind.
It came from the root
from the flow
from the element eye
to say, like a shade, you.
Its word was aleph.
It had an evening light
and its galaxies
coiled, spinning
the wheels
of the word,
clustered, star-rich, branched.