In a world with no time for poetry
we still have to die.

It would be so convenient if we could just
turn in our badge with our
full-color picture on it, go into a room
set aside for that purpose at the
corporate office
and evaporate, our desk left in order,
instructions on the
computer for the
one who fills our
shoes.

But the earth itself is alive, its roots and its tendrils,
and even minerals are part of the food-chain
in the deep dark loam.
Air pushes itself in, shoving aside 40-story buildings
like a vaporized Jolly Green giant
to swirl around the
newly enamored, the
incessantly dejected, the old man watching at his window
for death,
the young girl wearing it next to her
skin on the
inside of her
coat.

Our bodies are ticking, their time is limited where they can
carry out the wishes and desires of the
unlimited spirit, but while they’re here

they get welts on their legs, exude fluids and
perfumes, live in a
strictly practical world, no time for
nonsense, while their

hair grows in ghost-land as long as the
anchor rope of the phantom galleon,

and minute mites like birds in branches settle down on our
eyelashes, thoughts like
ribbons of incandescence curve through us as
wide as the Niger,

and as we sit the walls around us become
obsolete, the hillside that
emerges as the
house dissolves, full of
unused warrens and
ant-entrances, blows away from

underneath us in a fine powder heading back to

The Fashioner.
_______________________
1990, from A Maddening Disregard for the Passage of Time, soon to be published)

Oh Lord, the orange cat lying asleep on the
shoe rack outside the Ka’ba
looked tranquil, lean from
living wild in Mecca, but still
cat-like and sweet-faced –
surely some of this peacefulness
could come to me?

Oh Lord, You raise up giant roof-beams in the
world and
hurl great foundations
as deep as the seas –
I am only your creation of
flesh and bone,
but surely some of those
depths and heights
could be mine?

Oh Allah, I sit here facing Your House on
earth, beseeching Your Grace,
seeking Your Face,
my own not good enough in
this life,
my own face a combination of
lusty panther and
awkward ostrich
in this life,
yet I’m grateful for its
miraculous properties in
facing the world,

especially the eyes – close them
and light spreads,
open them and
miracles appear –
especially Your stark square of black cloth rising
endlessly up into the night in front of me now
but Your Face, Lord,
could I catch a
glimpse of it at least?

A white owl flies in the night somewhere,
its impassive face and saucer eyes
fleeing through the air.

Is this my face, Lord,

searching everywhere?
_______________________________
12/20/95 (from Sparrow on the Prophet’s Tomb)

THE MORNING OF THE LAST DAY

Allah elects from whomever he wants of His slaves
for the presence of isolation
— Shaykh ibn al-Habib of Fez

The sun is rising and the sky is lightening from
deep black to fluffy blue and gray
with shadows and tinges of white,
revealing the marble minarets like
giant chess pieces against the sky,
the mosque’s arches within arches lit by a golden
glow around the edges
and the invincible House of Allah at the center
covered with its cloth of endless
night out of which the
Word of God emerges constantly in filigreed
gold lettering around the circumference,
the round circumference of the
square House of Allah
under a sky that brightens as I write
and is now a light blue with a puzzle of
gray clouds moving slowly across it.

I am seated in the first row of carpets
in front of the Ka’ba.
Behind me to my left there is a discourse in Arabic
to unseen listeners.
To my right someone is reciting Qur’an, and
two men with deep voices are engaged in
earnest conversation. An
African in pure white robe and

turban to my immediate left silently
studies the Holy Book.
People pass and people sit, men and
women learning each minute the
arduous delights of submission.

The sound in the distance now of a
marble-polishing machine, a
steady whirr as the
circular brush buffs places so many
thousands of human feet press,

and I am devastated and alone,
my heart a tub of molten lead
about to pour into space.
I am lost with nowhere to go,
childless, friendless, bereft,
a fool, constantly
imbibing my own foolishness rather than the
sweet deep spring of Allah –

I’ve hit zero.

The sky turned gray while I said this,
the electric lights will soon go out,
two swallows cross the gray sky,
an old beardless man in long black cape
walks past from left to right –
is he also devastated and alone? Is he also
childless, friendless? He smiles as he
passes, accompanied by a
younger man. Another soul

lost in the cosmos? Another adrift on God’s

surf?

There’s no time left for fancy thoughts.

The Ka’ba faces us with its
implacable face.

We face Allah with our
original face.
__________________________
1/1/96 (from Sparrow on the Prophet’s Tomb)

Every person on earth
walks their entire life back and forth
underneath the stars, but it seems as if
some never look up.

Babies crane their necks when they notice for the
first time the
ceiling’s been replaced by
sprinkling lights of heavens, hot white pinpoints
beaming down through the sieve of
dark in titillating dots. Things with

wings of various
sizes and velocities pass
by under its
concave canopy. Lions pounce on gazelles and
quietly gnaw fresh flesh by moonlight under
the fierce intensity of the night sky.

Hut-smoke curls gray snakes of fuzziness in
tiny wriggling threads up into the sparkling blanket of
the sky as it
curves entirely
around the globe.

A speck of three-masted boat in the moonlit sheen of open sea
has within it, the size of
microbes, intelligent mites looking out through
telescopes and calculating with
astrolabes in order to reach
shore on schedule. The stars, the

silent stars are their counselors.

A bead of water on marble, imperfectly
round, heavier at the
bottom, actually reflects
all the visible heavens and all the visible
stars on the
surface of its sides without any
visible effort, even
catching their progress from
horizon to
horizon before
evaporating un-immortally away.

On the blackened circular
surface of the
coffee in your coffee cup many of the
same stars are
mirrored. You drink their
light with your last
satisfied gulp.

Why do you hide the stars inside you?
The wild stars.

Why do you turn down their light?
_______________________________________________
12/9/89
(from A Maddening Disregard for the Passage of Time)

A little mouse in a hole in the house
sings to the moon with the

sweetest of squeaks

Crows can only caw but caw they do
as they fly into the sky’s maw then

into trees for their morning Conferences of the Birds
squawking and cawing for all they’re worth

The giraffe it’s said also vocalizes but at
decibels so high or so low (I can’t recall)

humans can’t hear with the naked ear

Stars also sing in perfect
pitch though of strange keys

and peculiar harmonies you’d maybe
have to be in a front row seat among star debris

to correctly hear
and then you might find angels and

space-demons also leaning in to listen

Light and sound and space and the
creatures who dwell therein…

What a thrilling ensemble we all are
singing to our deity in the

best harmony hoping to be heard the way
we’ve been created to sound

in light and space
while we go through our

paces
______________________________
9/25/09 (from The Throne Perpendicular to All that is Horizontal – in progress)

How strange that it’s all based on the sighting
of the slightest
sliver of the moon!
The whole sky veils it then, only the
curved edge, like the
rim of a silver glass, can be
barely seen, yet it

signals the
beginning and
end of the Fast!

We go out looking for it, but what we’re
looking for is only a
thin rind of light, no big

structure of stars or full-moon’s totally
visible target, nor yet the

biliously glowing fireball of the
sun, but only the
hair-curve of that
dead reflective body, magnetic
mirror companion to earth, pocked
corpse of weird desolation, to us

brilliant Klieg when bulbous, but such a

spectral delicacy when new, so

furtive in so much
sundown (where it usually

is at the
start and
end of each
lunar month), and it is this

subtlety we are commanded to
seek, this beautiful
uncertainty, known for sure really

only by God, that

signals to us

as clear a renunciation of
earth-life as death is, as

clear a reflection of our sliver-thin

mortality as not
eating is, so that our

days are made more
transparent on earth, so that we

too are made

more transparent.
____________________________
(from Ramadan Sonnets, The Ecstatic Exchange)

AFTER AFTERNOON NAP

1

Awakening from finally a Sunday afternoon nap
having a hard time actually getting up, from
weakness? From being an
empty lead weight? From mental
inertia at not being able to go
right into the kitchen and grab a cookie, or have the
institutional cup of tea set out in one of the
china cups with blue flower rims, honey and milk on a
round silver tray, the Sunday afternoon
pick-me-up (the actually
everyday afternoon pick-me-up) totally

gone out the window during this whole month of
cutting the food umbilical, weaning from
Earth as Mother, Life as Tit, for just one

month out of the year, every year of our
life, until we get
good at it? Or
die?

One month being castaway on a
desert island from dawn to sunset
with no refrigerator?

A band of deprivation running through our year!
And that band has
entranceways to the Garden, actual
Gates open in the
Unseen for us for all the

fasting we have done, cheerfully or
grumpily, but
submissively, a Gate that
engulfs us during our

doing without, so that its

sparkling energy of openness

actually surrounds us in the

air as we

forgo the pounding

demands of our stomachs and

titillating appetites on the

lunch counter of day, like a

drunk’s fist insistent on the

greasy Formica of some

downtown Sloppy Joe’s.

2

The beginning of the Fast is a mercy.
The middle a forgiveness of sins.
The end, freedom from the Fire.

No one said it was supposed to be easy.
No one said it had to be
enjoyable. (I’m from California!
Everything’s supposed to be
enjoyable!)

The coal miner’s face as he
goes down in the cage with the
other miners, sons and
grandsons of miners, maybe
born coal-blackened, is not the face of someone
enjoying himself, but he knows one

truth in the total array of this creation, and that one
is all-embracing in its
human implications, and it is the

grimness of one side of our life, like the
side of the moon no
light ever touches, pitted and
scarred, and it is

not all of life, but it is the
bleakness of hardship, it is the

sore muscles and short breath of human exertion,
this band of the fast that
imposes itself like iron through the lighter
fabric of our life, and shows us a

truth, and I

have to endure it, and there is

reward for enduring it, almost

palpable during enduring it,

uphill or not, as in the

uphill exertion of actually

getting up from my nap, pulling my

trousers on and waiting another

hour to break the fast.

Not easy or fun
working all week, through the day,
bicycling home to lie down for an
hour in a kind of
body-wrack trance, then somehow

get up, until the

sunset breaks it all with that

first taste of date, that

first sip of water,

that first physical taste of the

Garden on the tongue, the strange but

total sense of well-being and the

simple surge of energy that

goes through the body from just eating

and unclenches the mind and gives it light,
and makes everything

have more light around it, and

be less grim.

3

By day we side with unfortunates –
stark landscapes, the vast
geometric
distances between stars.

By night we are laughing at the
feet of the Bacchanal, rolling in
pink velvet, eating
grapes off their stems until their
wetness glistens our
beards and chins.

Gratitude releases us from the Fire.
Habits are a mercy.
Hardship is having to face
obligation that
goes against the
grain.

After a moment of drought –

rain!

25 Ramadan
_____________________________

GOD’S GARDEN GATE

By day we side with the unfortunate,
those who have little, and it makes us live
in a stark landscape, our energy spent
doing small things, and we give

up small comforts, existing in the wide spaces
between stars, in a geometry of light.
Grim during the day, color comes into our faces
when we enter the gentle Bacchanal of night.

Then creation’s natural feast lets loose its floods
which circulate in streams in the body’s beds,
day’s darker starkness enters brighter moods.
Our hearts are open, brightness frees our heads.

There is a tightness in fasting that makes us wait
in daily patience at God’s Garden Gate.

25 Ramadan

for Abdallateef Whiteman, village architect

An adobe wall, dust by dust, is built up
to surround the town.
A trail enters it from
desolate and wild surroundings.
A cut-off from the unpredictable and
unkempt in nature is made, a
boundary.

The town is constructed, brick by humanly
molded, hand-packed mud brick,
making house-walls, rooms, wood windows,
doors, then roof-beams, tiles to
catch and let rain
run off to the
newly formed cobbled streets. Then

lights go on in the houses. Passing from
room to room. At the
domestic centers: multiple radiance.

Winding lanes lead in jagged labyrinthine ways
to the center, past
bow-legged pillars of the
marketplace, selling-stalls under
provisional roofs,
concatenation of courtyards, rushing

to the central square, where an even
stronger light is displayed. And when

we arrive
there is nothing. At the

heart of the town is an
openness, so
tasty and
sensual as to be almost a

thing. Bright air. Intangible, unnamable, but a

definite apprehension. And there is
light there.

Such is the
self. Such is the

Fast.

19 Ramadan (night)

MIDNIGHT PING-PONG MATCH

A midnight ping-pong match
is playing among the stars

Atoms careen through space smacked by
invisible paddles

The shadow of the Player Who plays both
sides leans over our hearts

The tick-tock sound of the ping-pong balls
can be heard in our ears among the

singsong of speech and in the
soft darkness of silken silences

But the shadow in our hearts
peers deep inside our souls

and finds inside the same space as the
outer space it finds in space

8/25/09

My friend, Hakim Archuletta, with whom I became Muslim in 1970, sent this on to me today, and it is truly mesmerizing… (a little Ramadan gift)

(With prayers that everyone on earth benefit from this year’s Ramadan Fast, far and wide, high and low, and that the blessings become an ocean that touches everyone’s hearts.

I’ll be posting poems from time to time during the month from my book, Ramadan Sonnets, written each Ramadan day in 1986, insha’Allah.

And with news soon of a new book just out, Sparrow on the Prophet’s Tomb, available now…)

______________________

THE INEVITABLE

It’s like practicing for death. No food or drink
during daylight hours no matter
what, in the
heat of summer or
cold of winter,
and no way out of it but through

sickness, pregnancy, menstruation, madness or travel.

So that
it’s something that comes
inevitably each year, like it or not, whether or not
you’ve got a knack for it, and
some do, and love to fast, and
thrive on it, but
I do not, yet

each year it makes its visit, and year after
year it builds up to be a
sweet thing,

which makes it like death, the way it’s
always on the
horizon, and an
absolute obligation, which must be

why Muslims often die well. They’ve had a
lifetime of Ramadans tenderizing them
for The Inevitable. And The

Inevitable surely comes.

1 Ramadan

_____________________

HEADACHE

Headache, the invalid feeling of being sickly and having to
take it easy, testiness when
things don’t go quite
right, annoyance of magnetic
gravity, things
fall in a pile or
slide off an incline – not the

hunger alone that binds us in brotherhood ultimately with
hollow-eyed Ethiopians of
this and all other eras,
but the frailty, the passing alone down the
alien corridors of this world that is such a
poignant reminder to us, so that in our
momentary physiological grayness

when the food finally comes showering at the
end of the fast and turns all things back to
Technicolor again, and we feel
the old soft-shoe lightness in our step again and the
old brightness in our smile,

the cornucopia dome of the sky turned
earthward again, the arid stretch
suddenly fertile, fruits and
flowers as if by
cinematic magic fill our
perceptions, the
floodgate of generosity opened to the
full, then our

body-bound, sense-imprisoned
selves expand past identity with one
hollow-pitted stomach dusty in the
hot rays of a pitiless sun
to a non-entity whose single characteristic is

gratitude and whose
every pulse is animated by the

Single Provider of all this
and every life’s

provision.

2 Ramadan

A ball of mercury
slides down an incline into a pool

reflecting all the starry heavens
making a whispery inaudible splash

A planet dislodges from its orbit and
wobbles out of tune with its

moons and asteroids following suit
and for a millennia or two a tiny

corner of the universe is in
disarray shivering in disquietude

unfelt by all earthly beings except perhaps
the poisonous tree frog

In a corner of our world
behind a broken sun-baked adobe wall

an extraordinary baby is born
whose exemplary life will inspire

even the plants to grow more generously
and in more profuse abundance

actually felt by a distant galaxy
that to us is just a number with

no name though the baby’s name
indicates an infinite number of Grace

(not the baby Jesus peace be upon him
but a contemporary saintly one

known by only a handful as a
paragon of purity who

lives his entire lifetime for
everyone but himself)

on this night O God Your granting forgiveness
for all mistakes big and small

I’ve inflicted on myself and others
now and forevermore

hoping expectantly for absolution by You and
by everyone whose failings of mine have caused harm

as the mercury sphere descends into its
shimmering original element

and distant-most stars audibly
twinkle in this nearest-most cardiac

element of light

8/7/2009

We live in the hold of a great boat
moving through the stars

There are no windows in this boat
and it is all window

The rudder’s held fast by a
force we can’t imagine

The bow’s pointed to a
place we’ll never know

The high sea and the high air
we breathe are all the same

It is night and navigation is by
celestial lights

There’s nothing of earth on this
boat but a few medicinal plants

It may be Noah’s Ark with its
genetic doubles

Can you feel it gently rocking?
It’s never still

Out the window that is not a window
are the woods the unearthly woods

The deep darkness of the woods
is the deep darkness of the heavens

Our hearts are solar flares
born in the deep darkness

It is not silent here
and the waves are song

A face where the moon should be
looks down and smiles

The whole cosmological realm
is like this smile

The boat is moving in all directions
and goes nowhere

Everyone we will ever love
is on this boat

Where have you heard of this boat before
if not in your heart?

It never lands because
there’s never land in sight

God’s motions are its motions
and His will its way

Finally we can say
it’s all a matter of starlight

Homelessness is its home
and its watery shelter

The Captain never sleeps
in His Divine Absence

If His Presence were any more Present
it would shatter us

The window that we look out
is the window that we see

What we see is the
window we look through to see it

It’s not ours
but God’s alone

Who owns it

_________________
8/4/2009 (from Stretched Out on Amethysts, in progress)

from SPARROW ON THE PROPHET’S TOMB

TIMETABLE 1

All the historical pantomimes
that spelled out subtitles in fractured rhymes
under the movie that unrolled forwards or backwards
were resolved in a blink by the spark of the falling swords
as they clanged into the tree-trunk at the end of time
to signal the cut-off point of the nonsensical pantomime.

A large round table in a large square hall
where men in uniforms stood before their fall
and unrolled a map of the world laid flat
and passed a pencil from one hand – fat
and pudgy with excess of pork in their diet –
to another to draw outlines in a universal riot
of borders and frontiers and nationalities crazed,
then shook hands and sniffed importantly,
leaving the peasantry dazed
for decades in hemmed-in contraptions of death
that counted off heartbeats and charged rent for each breath.

Kaisers and kings and presidents and führers,
shoulder to shoulder under portraits of ancestors
in a chandeliered hall in Vienna, Austria,
an old world country with shelves full of china
and invisible cobwebs behind beer-mugs and plates,
and visible dust on the map of new states
as they left the table to the drawing-room cigar
as flames caught its edges and began the scar
that ran its wound through the human heart
separating mankind into one cubby-holed part
next to another, like several square pigeon-coops set on the globe
as it turns slowly eastward in its cloud-lined robe.

The life of this world
is just a series of skeletons dancing in the dark.

The life of this world
is a series of skeleton keys opening different doors.

_______________________________________

THE FEW WITH ELEGANT MANNERS

The few with elegant manners came as if alighting from horses,
they stepped down and gathered folds of radiance around them
as their feet hit the ground which showed no footprint below them
for it was not solid ground beneath them
— the footprints in dirt were for those
who saw it as gross and solid beneath them —
they went on, straight-backed, to their places
and stood patiently waiting, but their waiting was bird-flight,
wings in the wind, all the flurry of wing-tips that ever
flew in the world down below
fanned now in the air of their waiting.

Their faces were moons assembled on cloudless horizons,
their eyelids were shields drawn down over inward gazes,
their hands rested at their sides, relaxed and pulsing,

no terror shook them, as promised,
no last-minute griefs or regrets,
no sudden anxieties to go back to do something differently.

They cast no shadows as the sun bore down upon them,
shaded by the Throne that stood
immaterially before them.

These were the Chosen Ones

THEY CAME DOWN FROM THE HIGH AND LOW PLACES,
they threaded themselves along
through the intricate threadings,
the ancient ones and the new ones,
all the famous were among them,
all the shining stars,
all the historical glory-grabbers, the great thieves,
all the inventors with their psychological quirks,
the nobodies came as well, the flowing multitudes of the anonymous,
the endless dissatisfied housewives, authoritative bureaucrats,
gas-station attendants and couples with no children,
philanthropists and the workaholics,

they came through the sandy pass,
faces were indistinguishable, differences unnoticed,
naked they came and assembled,
fear for their own state kept their eyes on the ground,

they came and made ranks,
the noble and notable next to the hardened criminal,
the saint in his glow next to the shrew in her darkness,
all the Chinese came, all the Australian Aborigines,
some who had never been clothed came,
and some who had never been out of them,

important socialites were bereft of their diamonds,
the scholar with references bereft of his briefcase,
the policeman with his beer-belly pitched on his heels,
the priest with his miter now gone, lost in a haze,

well-known faces recognized in the earthly crowd
were lost in the mass now, shaded by the one standing next to it,

no Rolls-Royce stood ready for the king,
his feet made dust-prints with the rest,
no helicopter hovered to take the millionaire away,
he felt the weight of his reconstituted body now with the rest,

as they awaited the setting-up of the scales,
as humanity assembled on the plain under a blinding sun
and awaited the judgment to fall

that would decide each one’s place.

Even the sainted were afraid, the ones whose hearts
glowed like a sunrise
through the transparency of their rib-cages,
even they were covered in sweat to their eyebrows,
the camel-drivers of the edge,
the caravan-leaders at the margins of the earth,
the destitute, delicate, daring hearts who
stayed up nights calling out in hope
and spiritual derangement,

they took their places in this place of no-place
and awaited the click that would tell all,
the sinking or rising of the pan
with the light or heavy scales registering
the forever of their moments
lengthened out now along a line

visible from the beginning to the end of each life
like a straight narrative, or a string with knots in it.

No flaws in the universe,
and the universal memory has no lapses.

Each dwarf or giant of sensibility and care
came to the jamboree

at the beginning of Eternity
and wondered in its echoes

what its final fate would be.

The lover lowers her gaze and the Beloved
raises it

until lover is engulfed in oceans too vast to
circumscribe

and around their margins fly continuous bands of
singing birds

The lover closes her lips around silence the way
light enters a room and obliterates darkness

and the Beloved suddenly starts singing inside the
lover’s mouth until even the stars like wandering animals
in their constellational shifts bleat and bay across
vast astronomical distances making them as small

as the moisture bead on the lover’s lip and the
Beloved’s eye-gleam from as far away as
deep undersea

The lover stands to embrace the Beloved
and the Beloved stands to embrace the lover

And the lover stands to embrace the Beloved
and the Beloved stands to embrace the lover

and the echoes from their movements blow rainbow
lights stuttering against earth’s canyon walls and icebergs
break off and slide into black waters

And the Beloved stands and the lover
shrinks within the microscopic compass of all her
insignificant acts until each breath
obliterates her
and the Beloved stands to embrace the lover
until the whole world rises to a standing position within that embrace

An Ant gnaws at a redwood tree and it
falls in a straw across a single heartbeat

We’ve never left God’s glorious dimension and need only look

not within us nor around us
but through the sphere of that Glance the Beloved takes and
blows into a ball of sky and crashing waves

which is all the lover offers through the paucity of
her multifaceted “I”

The singular embrace
__________________________________
4/2/2005 (from Holiday from the Perfect Crime)

A late-night videoku, extemporized before hitting the video button (I will confess), but only a moment before… and responding, May 7, 2009, to sad, gathering clouds…

Pray Afghanistan
be allowed to breathe easy
among the living

Video’d haiku in the moment of its making… with one false start…

Haiku: 5/7/5 syllables,
a momentary noticing, a flash, succinct, over in an instant.

Here in its raw freshness… inside on a rainy day.

(Actually, in the moment, I miscounted, and “washing machine noise surging” is actually 7 syllables after all, but I prefer the second try, without a repeat of the word “noise.”  Though I do like the word “surging” there with its present-day ovetones… )

Why be a stickler for the 5/7/5 form, when poets today, in Japanese as well as English, often catch the Haiku spirit of momentary noticing with even one or two lines, and disregard the exact syllable count?  Perhaps it’s both a challenge to me and a little respite from my usual Open Form poetics… otherwise, hey, one may do as one wishes…

The house is noisy –
washing machine, dryer… ah!
Outside, the gray sky –

I’ve been preparing another book for publication, this one from 1988, called The Perfect Orchestra (whose title poem sees all of creation as “the perfect orchestra,” waterfalls, traffic noise, etc… all God’s creation lending their instruments to the total sound…

And came across this poem to the music of Olivier Messiaen, my favorite 20th century composer, a true mystic, who actually envisioned being among the angels, often by putting actual bird song from the entire world’s populations of birds, into his music (as the poem mentions).  This video clip from YouTube has him playing the organ, a little improvised piece (so it says) which sounds like it is based on a birdsong motif.  He was a major cathedral organist while still in his teens…

In the 60s in Berkeley I attended a concert with him in person, and because of the overflow crowd, was seated on the stage, actually behind him at the piano, about five yards away.  He was much older than in this clip, hair wispy, and he had on one of his signature florid bright-colored shirts with the pointed collars outside his jacket.  I’d first heard of him from a Life Magazine article showing him in the country, with sheet music and pen, notating birdsong… his beret on… and it fascinated me.  That we should all be so situated in the world, to be able to hear and make use of God’s direct manifestations…

BIRD SONG

I envy Olivier Messiaen
stalking early mornings in the
fields of France, in a
magazine article I saw
years ago, with a

notebook, notating

bird song!

He is said to be able to orchestrate birdcalls
just by hearing them, write those
trills and
watery runs with

tiny black dots on lines a musician back in a
musty room might play on his clarinet!

Notes, out of
tree-wilderness, out of
bird language, one to
another for
whatever reason, bodily
companionship, territorial
rights, mating calls, thrills of
pleasure in the plumage, beak

gabble, sunlight
delirium, a bird’s sense of
entertainment, some
floating on updrafts,

whatever reasons God gives them for responding the
way God’s made them
respond over a

silken wheat field at
first slants of
dawn, gold

light along
dew blankets,

the world waking
up, birds
registering the
waking,

Messiaen with his
stubby pencil attached like a

seismograph to the knowledge of his
ear making

dots with or without little
black flags attached someone

back in a room can play on his
clarinet, or a

whole

orchestra, celestas, flutes, hitting those

high note-clusters, enraptured –

for no reason!

___________________

3/30/88 (from The Perfect Orchestra, in preparation)

A BREATH OF FRESH AIR

A breath of fresh air
sailed over the highest mountain peak and
down into the valley enjoying its
nonchalant pace over grassy plains as
green as unripe apples and the

breath of fresh air turned with the prevailing
current through a massive gorge and
just above a river where tumultuous waters as they
hurled over rocks resembled storm clouds though no
storm was brewing and the

breath of fresh air saw a city ahead and
pulled itself tighter though no less fresh
as it looped in a little air-pocket for a
short while which slowed its pace and
gave it some rest so that when it

began again toward the city it was going at a
much more leisurely rate and could really
take its time over outlying fields and across
meandering herds of sheep and goats that never even
looked up to see the fresh breath of air pass overhead

and the breath of fresh air descended slowly as it
passed the first thatched cottages dotted almost
haphazardly along the hills and it
skimmed along their brown roofs and lifted a
little as it headed toward a more concentrated
cluster of buildings and streets and now some
converging streets down below and traffic and even
noise like its memory of ocean surf

and the breath of fresh air pulled itself more
tightly together over children’s playgrounds and
a group of people sitting and eating under a
tree which the breath of fresh air slowly
circulated around admiring the massive
trunk filtering past each shapely leaf

and the breath of fresh air from the icy peak in the
far distance over the horizon finally sailed through an
open window in a tallish building with
green shutters where a sweet maiden was
sitting at a computer growing drowsy after a
long morning typing statistics

and as she turned her head and yawned
the breath of fresh air sailed happily into her
mouth and down her throat into her
filigreed lungs and she didn’t know why exactly
maybe it was the mystery of yawning
but she suddenly felt
uncannily refreshed

and her topaz colored eyes glittered for a
moment almost seeing the last few
rivering miles of movement the

breath of fresh air had taken to its
momentary dark destination in her blood
_______________________________
4/8/2002 (from Where Death Goes)