the gift

 

that which is small is not small

“Once the soul was perfect and had wings and could soar into heaven as only creatures can. But the soul lost its wings and fell to earth, there it took an earthly body, and now while it lives in this body no outward sign of wings can be seen, yet the roots of its wings are still there and the nature of these is to try to raise the earthbound soul into heaven. When you see a beautiful woman or a man, the soul remembers the beauty it used to know in heaven and the wings begin to sprout and makes the soul want to fly but it cannot yet, the man is still too weak, so the man keeps staring at the sky like a young bird. He has lost all interest in the world around him." from Plato's The Phaedrus (and Terrence Malick's movie, Knight of Cups.)

"This is the prime reality —
Bird and man, the individual
Discriminate, the self evalued
Actual, the operation
Of infinite, ordered potential..."

from "The Phoenix and the Tortoise" by Kenneth Rexroth

psalm for the soul that needs it

countenance

dialectic of the exteriorized heart

what light carries

another two, on the move

a pause in fall migration, a long journey

stunned by being

the hand can sense it
     mud and marl

the eye can weigh it
     loquacious curve of light

what is made

a chorus of chaos, a holy order, ii

to achieve grounding

a chorus of chaos, a holy order, i

trust

the heron, roadside

if you slow your car enough
you'll see light still flashes off water and arrowhead
you'll see the heron still moves between dimensions
you'll see we haven't killed it all - yet

exploring the erotic, one crow at a time

shining into being

from out of the totality of an empty moment
the crow thrusts the black iron hook of its atoms
into the streaming particles of light
and screams, hooking its thin tin serrated voice
into my heart

everything is a wedding of things - "shines them into being" from d. h. lawrence's "wedlock"