The government & BP just upped their estimate of the spill-- from 5,000 barrels of oil a day. Now they say between 12,000 and 19,000 barrels of oil are escaping each day. In the worst-case, that's 13.194 barrels per minute, or a barrel of oil every four and a half seconds.
A barrel of oil is 42 gallons. So that's 554 gallons of oil every minute, or a little over 9 gallons per second. And to think they hope to use good old-fashioned mud (their "top-kill" strategy) to clog a leak that looks like a fire hose even a mile below sea-level, where the sea-pressure is 2,000 pounds per square inch. Some have speculated that the leak must be gushing at around 4,000 pounds per square inch to overcome that kind of downward pressure.
In more earthly terms, that's roughly enough pressure that if the oil was spewing from a manhole cover or fire hose, the force could overturn a 70-ton bulldozer.
Thursday, May 27, 2010
Buddhist Ars Poetica
For my final Sanskrit essay, I translated some poetic verses written by Buddhist monks. The larger collection these verses are a tiny part of were compiled by the monk Vidyakara sometime in the 11th century. He brought together some 1,700 verses into his 'Treasury'. Most of the more exciting poems are written about Shiva and Vishnu, Buddhism not being known for its aesthetic. But I prefer the Buddhist verses, which when you scratch the surface have a great deal of wisdom...
The first translation is my own, while the second, in italics, belongs to Daniel Ingalls.
Verse 1:
namo buddhāya
nānā kavīndra vacanāni mahoharāni samkhyāvatām paramakanthavibhūsanāni ākampakāni śirasaś ca mahākavīnām teṣām samuccayam anargham aham vidhāsye
Salutations to the Buddha!
He will promote a diverse number
Of insightful utterances of great poets;
Like great garlands adorning the greatest throats,
Making poets nod their heads
At the priceless collection [of verse].
I shall make up a priceless store
Of charming words by sundry master poets,
Such as have ornamented expert throats
And made great poets nod in approbation.
~ Vidyākara
* confusingly, I found “samkhyāvatām” to be a compound comprised of “samkhyā” (number) and “avatām” (imp. sg. 3 pers. of av- promote or protect). Though Ingalls renders avatām in the first person, as “I shall make up”-- it seemed prudent to stick with the third person, both because of verb form and the fact that it follows the salutation “namo buddhāya” to the Buddha, and thereby most likely asserts that “he shall promote” these verses, rather than the compiler of the verses, Vidyākara himself.
Verse 4:
kāmakrodhau dvayam api padam pratyanīkam vaśitve
hatvānangam kim iva hi ruṣa sādhitam tryambakena
yas tu kṣāntyā śamayati śatam manmathādyān arātīn
kalyānam vo diśatu sa munigrāmanīr arkabandu
Samghaśriyaḥ
Love and Rage; both traits arrayed
Against self-discipline.
What, indeed, did Shiva achieve
By killing Cupid from fury?
May the one who calmed Kama
And the hundred enemies, through restraint,
Manifest your well-being.
The Buddha-- that chief of saints--
Friend of [radiant] Surya.
Love and anger both are states
Hostile to self-control.
What then did Shiva hope to gain
By slaying Love in anger?
Rather may he who by forbearance
Quelled Love together with a hundred foes,
That chief of saints, the Buddha,
Point you to your welfare.
~ Samghaśrī
Verse 6:
śāstā samastabhuvanam bhagavān apāyāt
pāyād apāstatimiro mihiropameyaḥ samsārabhittibhiduro bhavakandakandukandarpadarpadalanavyasanī munīdrahḥ
vasukalpasya
May the Blessed Master
Save the compounded world from calamity,
Like the sun discards darkness.
Smasher of Samsāra’s walls, an Indra among Saints,
Crusher of imperious Love--
That furnace for the bulbs of birth.
May the blessed teacher save the world from grief,
Who like the sun dispels all darkness,
Breaker of transmigration’s ramparts,
Prince of saints, destroyer
Of that skillet for the bulbs of life, proud Love.
~ Vasukalpa
Verse 11:
pāyād vah samayah sa mārajayino vandhyāyitāstrotkaraḥ
āsīd adbhutamauliratnamilitām vyāttānanaccāyikām
ālokyātmana eva mārasubhataḥ paryastadhairyodayaḥ
śrīpārśvavarmaṇa
May you attain to the Buddha,
Who sterilized Māra’s weapons at the triumphant moment;
When, from rage, Māra, who would swallow up the great head,
Was met with a wondrous jewel [of the crown], and saw himself,
In wide-open-mouthed reflection
-- Wherefore his courage vanished.
May that victorious moment of the Buddha save you
When the soldier Māra, weapons rendered impotent,
Screwed up his courage to that pitch
Where, angry, he would swallow up the sacred head,
But then within a jewel of the wondrous crown
Did see his own wide-open-mouthed reflection,
At sight of which his courage failed.
~ Srī Pāśavarman
Buddhist Ars Poetica: Refuting the Pull of the Sensuous in Sanskrit Poetry
Buddhist poetry is a curious phenomenon. For a religion so intrinsically averse to sensuous delights, the poetic mode of expression seems improper. Indeed, in verse 4, the Buddha’s equanimity is contrasted with Shiva‘s passion. Shiva is probably the most depicted character in all of Sanskrit poetry, revered for his extremes of ascetic self-abnegation and sensual indulgence.
Kalidasa’s Kumārasambhava captures this tension between Shiva’s ascetic devotion and the call of the gods’ to procure a gifted warrior son from powerful Shiva; a child who would be capable of destroying the demon Taraka. The gods’ plan ends disastrously once Kama, the god of Love, has hastily snuck up to Shiva, to pierce him with the arrow of Love. The usual snares of sensual desire won’t work on a god so devoted to renunciation, and Shiva, aroused from his dormancy, incinerates Kama with a glance from his fiery third-eye. Instead of being lured by a trick of the gods, Shiva requires the incredible ascetic efforts of Parvati, who matched or exceeded Shiva’s own, to both impress and require him to reenter the stream of samsara, delighting in erotic union with Parvati, and finally providing the gods with a much-desired warrior-prince.
Shiva is typically portrayed very physically, as the “god of tangled locks“ who can cause mountains to sway at his “dance of madness in the full moon twilight“ (Ingalls 64). Shiva is said to have fantastic dreadlocks, made of “matted hair… its color bending with the lightning flame that flashes from the hollow of his forehead-eye, its heavy locks encircled by the winding tendrils of his snakes” (Ingalls 63). In addition to his bodily description and very sensual, ecstatic practice of dance, Shiva is also depicted in sexual union with goddesses and human females. In Vidyākara’s collection of Shaivite verse, Shiva is seen as virtually insatiable sexually, even after long years of challenging ascetic practice, he ravishes Parvati for days on end, causing her to have “a fragment of her bracelet broken in love’s exercise” (Ingalls 63).
Elsewhere, after the killing of Kama, Shiva is said to be “wet-eyed with pity, and lets the bow fall from his hand” (Ingalls 65). Presumably, this refers to Shiva’s willingness to abandon his ascetic practice to reenter the world through the emotions of pity, remorse, and perhaps, compassion. Most bizarre, however, is his willingness to forfeit his ascetic self-containment to indulge in an epic and erotic task of lovemaking with Parvati. This type of sacrifice, even for the gods themselves, the Buddha would probably look upon as dangerous in its furtherance of sensual desire and thus the samsaric cycles which shackle both men and gods.
While Shiva is often seen as more austere than the Buddha, who famously resided in the Middle Way, preaching a mean between self-mortifying asceticism and hedonic self-indulgence, Shiva is somehow capable of a sort of superhuman transit between these extremes. Thus, Shiva-- in all of his tensions, indulgences and negations, and feats both physical and metaphysical-- becomes the perfect subject for poets interested in plumbing the depths of the human condition-- the nature and responsibility of spiritual power, relationships between divinity and humanity, tensions between sensual pleasures, earthly and heavenly duties, and spiritual union; and ultimately, this type of poet aims at capturing the mystical union of sensuality with divinity.
This is why the contrast between Shiva and the Buddha in the fourth verse is so important. The author, Samghaśrī, draws a sharp distinction, showing an antagonism between self-discipline and the passions-- love and rage (both of which could be reworked within the Buddhist paradigm as attachment/craving and aversion/hatred). To say that “Love and Rage” are traits ‘arrayed’ or ‘massed’ against self-discipline, is to compare them to an invading army, intent on disrupting a more primary, peaceful order.
In destroying Kama out of anger, Shiva is shown as emotionally fallible and thereby not quite the exemplar of ascetic self-discipline which the devotional literature asserts. The author poses this insight as a question to the readers, indirectly asking them which figure they ought to reasonably follow-- Shiva or Buddha. The question is followed by an answer made in the form of a request-- of a benediction from the Buddha, who, “calmed Kama and the hundred enemies through restraint”--- rather than through defiance, anger, or aversion. Indeed, those emotional responses would be a few of the ‘hundred enemies’ the Buddha, and presumably Shiva, sought to overcome. The poem points to the greater question, what good is it to overcome one passion or set of passions, by indulging in another passion? To the Buddha, giving victory to lust is not substantially different from giving it to anger or fear. Indeed, choosing anger to combat lust is to be trapped within the very cycle one proposes to escape. These passions are all equally enemies of the ascetic or the bhikkhu, whose ultimate goal is, if not total self-transcendence, at least self-control.
The sixth verse, by Vasukalpa, is an invocation of the Buddha’s aid. It is a prayer and a blessing, to “save the compounded world from calamity.” The compounded world is the world of samsaric phenomena, which are viewed as entirely contingent and therefore empty; every existent thing being conditioned upon some other cause. The calamity referred to must be the ugly reality of the first noble truth-- that all life is subject to dukkha (suffering, or more accurately, dissatisfaction). An interesting image follows, common to the Theravadin and Mahayana tradition, that the Buddha will act like the sun discarding darkness, or like a lamp illuminating a darkened room. But the violent epithets used to describe the Buddha as the, “smasher of samsara’s walls” and “crusher of imperious Love,” contrasts sharply with the sense of the Buddha we saw in verse 4, wherein he transcended samsara and the three poisons through a deeply felt equanimity. Here, however, samsara is viewed quite cynically as a punishing, “furnace for the bulbs of birth,” indicating that this poem is probably written from a Theravadin perspective. In this poem, we are shown the necessity of a very powerful, deity-like Buddha-- an almost Christ-like, vengeful figure who casts away evil-- who not only overcomes the chains of Samsara, but destroys those fetters for all of creation.
The final verse is another benediction, asking the reader to reach the Buddha‘s heights via the inspiration of the Buddha‘s attainment. The attainment is considered a great victory over the forces which Māra has marshaled against disillusionment and total cessation. The scene alluded to is just prior to the Buddha’s enlightenment, when Māra, frustrated by the failure to provoke fear or lust in the Buddha through repeated attacks by his demon-armies and seductions by his demon-daughters, mounts an elephant in his terrible form and attempts to swallow up the Buddha. Upon seeing his own terrifying, monstrous form reflected back from Buddha‘s jeweled crown, Māra loses his confidence, perhaps intimidated by the Buddha’s supremely confident equanimity.
The poem seems to be saying that if Māra, the representation and protector of all that is illusory, is unable to provoke fear or desire in the Buddha, then neither he nor the illusion he maintains, any longer have any power over keeping the Buddha chained to cyclic existence. Māra therefore recoils in the face of the understanding that his terrifying, albeit illusory, nature is reflected as ultimately hollow in the jewels of the Buddha’s crown. Powerless, Māra recedes from the Buddha’s presence, perhaps as a barking dog would, upon realizing that there was no longer anyone to hear its bluster.
I believe that these Buddhist verses, though relying on an aesthetic medium in poetry, are meant to point us away from consideration of the beauty of the forms which poets like Kalidasa have mastered, and instead reorient us to the wisdom of the path of the renunciant. By highlighting the strange compromises in the lives of Brahmins depicted throughout Sanskrit literature, and particularly in the case of that exemplar of Brahmanism, Shiva, these poems partly articulate the Middle Way through an understanding of the dangers of going to extremes. It can be further inferred that such extremes are engendered by the poetry of such masters as Kalidasa, who are infatuated by the worldly indulgences and excesses of gods such as Shiva. In the end, I imagine that though Māra is more often invoked, the inclusion of Shiva in contrast to the Buddha shows an urge to confront the older gods with an image of the new renunciant-- and furthermore to lump those gods together with the figure of Māra. As several sutras in the Pali cannon will attest, even gods high in the Hindu pantheon, such as Brahma and Indra, are viewed as subject to samsara-- meaning impermanence, dissatisfaction induced by attachment and craving, and ultimately, an attachment an illusory self-- and therefore abide in some degree of delusion. The Buddha thus is revealed in contradistinction as truly the Tathagata-- the “thus gone one” and the “thus come one”-- who has transcended all of Samsara’s traps, and returned to human existence only for our benefit. Extrapolating upon the notion of expedient means from the Mahayana tradition, we find that even poetry, an aesthetic, somewhat indulgent form, can be used as a vehicle to convey this wisdom to those who would otherwise fail to encounter or understand it.
The first translation is my own, while the second, in italics, belongs to Daniel Ingalls.
Verse 1:
namo buddhāya
nānā kavīndra vacanāni mahoharāni samkhyāvatām paramakanthavibhūsanāni ākampakāni śirasaś ca mahākavīnām teṣām samuccayam anargham aham vidhāsye
Salutations to the Buddha!
He will promote a diverse number
Of insightful utterances of great poets;
Like great garlands adorning the greatest throats,
Making poets nod their heads
At the priceless collection [of verse].
I shall make up a priceless store
Of charming words by sundry master poets,
Such as have ornamented expert throats
And made great poets nod in approbation.
~ Vidyākara
* confusingly, I found “samkhyāvatām” to be a compound comprised of “samkhyā” (number) and “avatām” (imp. sg. 3 pers. of av- promote or protect). Though Ingalls renders avatām in the first person, as “I shall make up”-- it seemed prudent to stick with the third person, both because of verb form and the fact that it follows the salutation “namo buddhāya” to the Buddha, and thereby most likely asserts that “he shall promote” these verses, rather than the compiler of the verses, Vidyākara himself.
Verse 4:
kāmakrodhau dvayam api padam pratyanīkam vaśitve
hatvānangam kim iva hi ruṣa sādhitam tryambakena
yas tu kṣāntyā śamayati śatam manmathādyān arātīn
kalyānam vo diśatu sa munigrāmanīr arkabandu
Samghaśriyaḥ
Love and Rage; both traits arrayed
Against self-discipline.
What, indeed, did Shiva achieve
By killing Cupid from fury?
May the one who calmed Kama
And the hundred enemies, through restraint,
Manifest your well-being.
The Buddha-- that chief of saints--
Friend of [radiant] Surya.
Love and anger both are states
Hostile to self-control.
What then did Shiva hope to gain
By slaying Love in anger?
Rather may he who by forbearance
Quelled Love together with a hundred foes,
That chief of saints, the Buddha,
Point you to your welfare.
~ Samghaśrī
Verse 6:
śāstā samastabhuvanam bhagavān apāyāt
pāyād apāstatimiro mihiropameyaḥ samsārabhittibhiduro bhavakandakandukandarpadarpadalanavyasanī munīdrahḥ
vasukalpasya
May the Blessed Master
Save the compounded world from calamity,
Like the sun discards darkness.
Smasher of Samsāra’s walls, an Indra among Saints,
Crusher of imperious Love--
That furnace for the bulbs of birth.
May the blessed teacher save the world from grief,
Who like the sun dispels all darkness,
Breaker of transmigration’s ramparts,
Prince of saints, destroyer
Of that skillet for the bulbs of life, proud Love.
~ Vasukalpa
Verse 11:
pāyād vah samayah sa mārajayino vandhyāyitāstrotkaraḥ
āsīd adbhutamauliratnamilitām vyāttānanaccāyikām
ālokyātmana eva mārasubhataḥ paryastadhairyodayaḥ
śrīpārśvavarmaṇa
May you attain to the Buddha,
Who sterilized Māra’s weapons at the triumphant moment;
When, from rage, Māra, who would swallow up the great head,
Was met with a wondrous jewel [of the crown], and saw himself,
In wide-open-mouthed reflection
-- Wherefore his courage vanished.
May that victorious moment of the Buddha save you
When the soldier Māra, weapons rendered impotent,
Screwed up his courage to that pitch
Where, angry, he would swallow up the sacred head,
But then within a jewel of the wondrous crown
Did see his own wide-open-mouthed reflection,
At sight of which his courage failed.
~ Srī Pāśavarman
Buddhist Ars Poetica: Refuting the Pull of the Sensuous in Sanskrit Poetry
Buddhist poetry is a curious phenomenon. For a religion so intrinsically averse to sensuous delights, the poetic mode of expression seems improper. Indeed, in verse 4, the Buddha’s equanimity is contrasted with Shiva‘s passion. Shiva is probably the most depicted character in all of Sanskrit poetry, revered for his extremes of ascetic self-abnegation and sensual indulgence.
Kalidasa’s Kumārasambhava captures this tension between Shiva’s ascetic devotion and the call of the gods’ to procure a gifted warrior son from powerful Shiva; a child who would be capable of destroying the demon Taraka. The gods’ plan ends disastrously once Kama, the god of Love, has hastily snuck up to Shiva, to pierce him with the arrow of Love. The usual snares of sensual desire won’t work on a god so devoted to renunciation, and Shiva, aroused from his dormancy, incinerates Kama with a glance from his fiery third-eye. Instead of being lured by a trick of the gods, Shiva requires the incredible ascetic efforts of Parvati, who matched or exceeded Shiva’s own, to both impress and require him to reenter the stream of samsara, delighting in erotic union with Parvati, and finally providing the gods with a much-desired warrior-prince.
Shiva is typically portrayed very physically, as the “god of tangled locks“ who can cause mountains to sway at his “dance of madness in the full moon twilight“ (Ingalls 64). Shiva is said to have fantastic dreadlocks, made of “matted hair… its color bending with the lightning flame that flashes from the hollow of his forehead-eye, its heavy locks encircled by the winding tendrils of his snakes” (Ingalls 63). In addition to his bodily description and very sensual, ecstatic practice of dance, Shiva is also depicted in sexual union with goddesses and human females. In Vidyākara’s collection of Shaivite verse, Shiva is seen as virtually insatiable sexually, even after long years of challenging ascetic practice, he ravishes Parvati for days on end, causing her to have “a fragment of her bracelet broken in love’s exercise” (Ingalls 63).
Elsewhere, after the killing of Kama, Shiva is said to be “wet-eyed with pity, and lets the bow fall from his hand” (Ingalls 65). Presumably, this refers to Shiva’s willingness to abandon his ascetic practice to reenter the world through the emotions of pity, remorse, and perhaps, compassion. Most bizarre, however, is his willingness to forfeit his ascetic self-containment to indulge in an epic and erotic task of lovemaking with Parvati. This type of sacrifice, even for the gods themselves, the Buddha would probably look upon as dangerous in its furtherance of sensual desire and thus the samsaric cycles which shackle both men and gods.
While Shiva is often seen as more austere than the Buddha, who famously resided in the Middle Way, preaching a mean between self-mortifying asceticism and hedonic self-indulgence, Shiva is somehow capable of a sort of superhuman transit between these extremes. Thus, Shiva-- in all of his tensions, indulgences and negations, and feats both physical and metaphysical-- becomes the perfect subject for poets interested in plumbing the depths of the human condition-- the nature and responsibility of spiritual power, relationships between divinity and humanity, tensions between sensual pleasures, earthly and heavenly duties, and spiritual union; and ultimately, this type of poet aims at capturing the mystical union of sensuality with divinity.
This is why the contrast between Shiva and the Buddha in the fourth verse is so important. The author, Samghaśrī, draws a sharp distinction, showing an antagonism between self-discipline and the passions-- love and rage (both of which could be reworked within the Buddhist paradigm as attachment/craving and aversion/hatred). To say that “Love and Rage” are traits ‘arrayed’ or ‘massed’ against self-discipline, is to compare them to an invading army, intent on disrupting a more primary, peaceful order.
In destroying Kama out of anger, Shiva is shown as emotionally fallible and thereby not quite the exemplar of ascetic self-discipline which the devotional literature asserts. The author poses this insight as a question to the readers, indirectly asking them which figure they ought to reasonably follow-- Shiva or Buddha. The question is followed by an answer made in the form of a request-- of a benediction from the Buddha, who, “calmed Kama and the hundred enemies through restraint”--- rather than through defiance, anger, or aversion. Indeed, those emotional responses would be a few of the ‘hundred enemies’ the Buddha, and presumably Shiva, sought to overcome. The poem points to the greater question, what good is it to overcome one passion or set of passions, by indulging in another passion? To the Buddha, giving victory to lust is not substantially different from giving it to anger or fear. Indeed, choosing anger to combat lust is to be trapped within the very cycle one proposes to escape. These passions are all equally enemies of the ascetic or the bhikkhu, whose ultimate goal is, if not total self-transcendence, at least self-control.
The sixth verse, by Vasukalpa, is an invocation of the Buddha’s aid. It is a prayer and a blessing, to “save the compounded world from calamity.” The compounded world is the world of samsaric phenomena, which are viewed as entirely contingent and therefore empty; every existent thing being conditioned upon some other cause. The calamity referred to must be the ugly reality of the first noble truth-- that all life is subject to dukkha (suffering, or more accurately, dissatisfaction). An interesting image follows, common to the Theravadin and Mahayana tradition, that the Buddha will act like the sun discarding darkness, or like a lamp illuminating a darkened room. But the violent epithets used to describe the Buddha as the, “smasher of samsara’s walls” and “crusher of imperious Love,” contrasts sharply with the sense of the Buddha we saw in verse 4, wherein he transcended samsara and the three poisons through a deeply felt equanimity. Here, however, samsara is viewed quite cynically as a punishing, “furnace for the bulbs of birth,” indicating that this poem is probably written from a Theravadin perspective. In this poem, we are shown the necessity of a very powerful, deity-like Buddha-- an almost Christ-like, vengeful figure who casts away evil-- who not only overcomes the chains of Samsara, but destroys those fetters for all of creation.
The final verse is another benediction, asking the reader to reach the Buddha‘s heights via the inspiration of the Buddha‘s attainment. The attainment is considered a great victory over the forces which Māra has marshaled against disillusionment and total cessation. The scene alluded to is just prior to the Buddha’s enlightenment, when Māra, frustrated by the failure to provoke fear or lust in the Buddha through repeated attacks by his demon-armies and seductions by his demon-daughters, mounts an elephant in his terrible form and attempts to swallow up the Buddha. Upon seeing his own terrifying, monstrous form reflected back from Buddha‘s jeweled crown, Māra loses his confidence, perhaps intimidated by the Buddha’s supremely confident equanimity.
The poem seems to be saying that if Māra, the representation and protector of all that is illusory, is unable to provoke fear or desire in the Buddha, then neither he nor the illusion he maintains, any longer have any power over keeping the Buddha chained to cyclic existence. Māra therefore recoils in the face of the understanding that his terrifying, albeit illusory, nature is reflected as ultimately hollow in the jewels of the Buddha’s crown. Powerless, Māra recedes from the Buddha’s presence, perhaps as a barking dog would, upon realizing that there was no longer anyone to hear its bluster.
I believe that these Buddhist verses, though relying on an aesthetic medium in poetry, are meant to point us away from consideration of the beauty of the forms which poets like Kalidasa have mastered, and instead reorient us to the wisdom of the path of the renunciant. By highlighting the strange compromises in the lives of Brahmins depicted throughout Sanskrit literature, and particularly in the case of that exemplar of Brahmanism, Shiva, these poems partly articulate the Middle Way through an understanding of the dangers of going to extremes. It can be further inferred that such extremes are engendered by the poetry of such masters as Kalidasa, who are infatuated by the worldly indulgences and excesses of gods such as Shiva. In the end, I imagine that though Māra is more often invoked, the inclusion of Shiva in contrast to the Buddha shows an urge to confront the older gods with an image of the new renunciant-- and furthermore to lump those gods together with the figure of Māra. As several sutras in the Pali cannon will attest, even gods high in the Hindu pantheon, such as Brahma and Indra, are viewed as subject to samsara-- meaning impermanence, dissatisfaction induced by attachment and craving, and ultimately, an attachment an illusory self-- and therefore abide in some degree of delusion. The Buddha thus is revealed in contradistinction as truly the Tathagata-- the “thus gone one” and the “thus come one”-- who has transcended all of Samsara’s traps, and returned to human existence only for our benefit. Extrapolating upon the notion of expedient means from the Mahayana tradition, we find that even poetry, an aesthetic, somewhat indulgent form, can be used as a vehicle to convey this wisdom to those who would otherwise fail to encounter or understand it.
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
Point of View -- poem by Richard Jackson
I stumbled across this fantastic frame of a state of mind which resonated with me and thought to share it with... you..
Point of View
While his memories pace back and forth like expectant
Fathers, he tries on the loneliness like a loose-fitting shirt.
Somewhere in the room there is the ticking of a palmetto bug.
It reminds him of the planes on the way to Kosovo,
The fading crackle of wireless ground-to-air talk.
He'd like to take an eraser to that life, leaving
Just a few ghosted lines separating one nothing
From another nothing. Outside his window there is a
Darkness except for one balcony where a woman is sitting.
The smoke from her cigarette disappears into the stories
Reflected in the windows above her. She is probably reading
One of those romance novels where the characters speak
In the extinct language of a love she once knew.
Okay, let's drop the fiction. You know who you are.
Despite searching for yourself under stone, in trash bins,
Behind boarded doors of houses about to collapse.
The old loves pile up like skeleton sculptures in a Capuchin
monastery. What do they know about how we come back?
The things you want to say are as light as helium.
Now it's 12:14 A.M. In this world, two parallels meet,
The circle never closes. Maybe you have cried out
In your sleep. It's so hot the leaves are burning off
The trees. By Fall we'll be able to see right through
The forest into the future. By then you'll know this is
about me. The palmetto bug is just keeping time.
What's at stake here is how we define ourselves.
You are me when you are not you. I am you
When I am not me. The branch above us wonders if
It is time to fall. Our lives line the post office
And supermarket walls like runaway children.
Sometimes we just want to appear in our own mirrors.
I've double-locked the doors. It's so hot the blackout
Won't end for a few more days. In Lebanon
The light spreads out like shards of a mortar
Round. One family trying to escape is hit by
A random bomb. This is really about us, isn't it?
Are bombs random? These lines? Who was it
That I began with? As a kind of defense? There's a barge
Stuck where the river changed course. Day and night
Take turns trying to escape our field of vision.
Hope spreads its tentacles but we know better.
When I started, this was supposed to be about love.
But look, we can't even control what we think about
The moon, the train's distant whistle which is sad
Or promising, the existence of centaurs, peacekeepers,
Runaways, skeletons. I can't stick to one subject
For more than a line. In no time at all I will find
A real self. I don't know how many bugs have come in
Through this open window, a kind of lung these lives
Pass in and out of. You, me, him, I understand, I do,
Your hesitation. The branch, too, is about to fall. You,
It, have no idea how much of me this love has become.
Point of View
While his memories pace back and forth like expectant
Fathers, he tries on the loneliness like a loose-fitting shirt.
Somewhere in the room there is the ticking of a palmetto bug.
It reminds him of the planes on the way to Kosovo,
The fading crackle of wireless ground-to-air talk.
He'd like to take an eraser to that life, leaving
Just a few ghosted lines separating one nothing
From another nothing. Outside his window there is a
Darkness except for one balcony where a woman is sitting.
The smoke from her cigarette disappears into the stories
Reflected in the windows above her. She is probably reading
One of those romance novels where the characters speak
In the extinct language of a love she once knew.
Okay, let's drop the fiction. You know who you are.
Despite searching for yourself under stone, in trash bins,
Behind boarded doors of houses about to collapse.
The old loves pile up like skeleton sculptures in a Capuchin
monastery. What do they know about how we come back?
The things you want to say are as light as helium.
Now it's 12:14 A.M. In this world, two parallels meet,
The circle never closes. Maybe you have cried out
In your sleep. It's so hot the leaves are burning off
The trees. By Fall we'll be able to see right through
The forest into the future. By then you'll know this is
about me. The palmetto bug is just keeping time.
What's at stake here is how we define ourselves.
You are me when you are not you. I am you
When I am not me. The branch above us wonders if
It is time to fall. Our lives line the post office
And supermarket walls like runaway children.
Sometimes we just want to appear in our own mirrors.
I've double-locked the doors. It's so hot the blackout
Won't end for a few more days. In Lebanon
The light spreads out like shards of a mortar
Round. One family trying to escape is hit by
A random bomb. This is really about us, isn't it?
Are bombs random? These lines? Who was it
That I began with? As a kind of defense? There's a barge
Stuck where the river changed course. Day and night
Take turns trying to escape our field of vision.
Hope spreads its tentacles but we know better.
When I started, this was supposed to be about love.
But look, we can't even control what we think about
The moon, the train's distant whistle which is sad
Or promising, the existence of centaurs, peacekeepers,
Runaways, skeletons. I can't stick to one subject
For more than a line. In no time at all I will find
A real self. I don't know how many bugs have come in
Through this open window, a kind of lung these lives
Pass in and out of. You, me, him, I understand, I do,
Your hesitation. The branch, too, is about to fall. You,
It, have no idea how much of me this love has become.
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
More Old Poetry
Call them psyche; the Greeks did,
thinking they were ancestral souls,
returning like breath.
I think of them as here to show
how beauty is a whimsy.
Some say the butterfly is so named
for sorceresses, stutter-searching for sustenance,
that they are witches in disguise,
hunting for milk or butter,
left out in a pan.
The butterflies begin in his belly;
tickling with their papery wing-weight
against a stomach's satiny lining,
in the exact shape of,
symmetrical to,
her voice.
Next I see him, inches from the screen,
face grayly aglow from texting her,
barraging with words I know he's
said before-- I've said before.
The butterflies stack
against his esophageal opening,
peristalsis reversed, churning from him
the morass of every
undigested word.
I want to tell him -- metamorphose!
and make a verb out of the noun...
and make the change volitional.
I want to tell him, metamorphosis is
the eventuality of larvae.
But age is too much like an endgame,
and we become stricken with self-
consumption, like Auroboros,
consuming ourselves, tail first,
with whom or what has preceded.
Each abortive attempt at flight
unravels the pupal clothing, revealing
a sheen of worn and wispy threads;
the veneer which wants to grow,
wants to weave strands of time around us,
proving that adage of healing all wounds.
While the shrill wings of her words
stir within his organs, he is once again free
to tear and to be torn.
Poor caterpillar! Hung so naked from a tree.
Butterflies strung from a mobile
diagram our fettered hearts;
marionetted with the also-entwined.
The mobile we never outgrew from infancy
--still chained to the ceiling.
A blue butterfly skitters towards
the room's boundary.
Swooping in tight circles,
he evinces equilibrium.
A slight puff of air undoes his position,
inertia sloughed off by the slow, unceasing drag
of bodies, unattached yet bound.
thinking they were ancestral souls,
returning like breath.
I think of them as here to show
how beauty is a whimsy.
Some say the butterfly is so named
for sorceresses, stutter-searching for sustenance,
that they are witches in disguise,
hunting for milk or butter,
left out in a pan.
The butterflies begin in his belly;
tickling with their papery wing-weight
against a stomach's satiny lining,
in the exact shape of,
symmetrical to,
her voice.
Next I see him, inches from the screen,
face grayly aglow from texting her,
barraging with words I know he's
said before-- I've said before.
The butterflies stack
against his esophageal opening,
peristalsis reversed, churning from him
the morass of every
undigested word.
I want to tell him -- metamorphose!
and make a verb out of the noun...
and make the change volitional.
I want to tell him, metamorphosis is
the eventuality of larvae.
But age is too much like an endgame,
and we become stricken with self-
consumption, like Auroboros,
consuming ourselves, tail first,
with whom or what has preceded.
Each abortive attempt at flight
unravels the pupal clothing, revealing
a sheen of worn and wispy threads;
the veneer which wants to grow,
wants to weave strands of time around us,
proving that adage of healing all wounds.
While the shrill wings of her words
stir within his organs, he is once again free
to tear and to be torn.
Poor caterpillar! Hung so naked from a tree.
Butterflies strung from a mobile
diagram our fettered hearts;
marionetted with the also-entwined.
The mobile we never outgrew from infancy
--still chained to the ceiling.
A blue butterfly skitters towards
the room's boundary.
Swooping in tight circles,
he evinces equilibrium.
A slight puff of air undoes his position,
inertia sloughed off by the slow, unceasing drag
of bodies, unattached yet bound.
Sunday, October 18, 2009
The Goddess named Regret
You could have seen it coming,
had you not been surrounded
by endless azure,
that blue mirror,
the echoing sky.
When she told you she was
leaving-- she was clear that
the evacuation
wasn't only of your island,
but the whole
male archipelago.
You told her that she'd prefer to drown,
than live on a raft. That she'd only
be airlifted to another
crumbling spit of sand.
Then there are your brothers' shipwrecks;
frozen as they wade ashore, islands
malformed of broken-bits.
Ships listing in the silt, ground down
to shoreline by the absent
lapping away at the foots of their beds.
You could have noticed the warning signs:
Time scraped on, a pale beggar
hobbling down a wide strand,
as buildings shot from the shoreline
meeting the sky halfway.
You could have seen her eyes water,
and not believed her bit
about the sour sea air.
You could have decided
not to call her that name, the one
derived from an Indian goddess,
but meaning surly bitch.
You could have stopped
pounding into her
all those reminders
of being shipwrecked...
had you not been surrounded
by endless azure,
that blue mirror,
the echoing sky.
When she told you she was
leaving-- she was clear that
the evacuation
wasn't only of your island,
but the whole
male archipelago.
You told her that she'd prefer to drown,
than live on a raft. That she'd only
be airlifted to another
crumbling spit of sand.
Then there are your brothers' shipwrecks;
frozen as they wade ashore, islands
malformed of broken-bits.
Ships listing in the silt, ground down
to shoreline by the absent
lapping away at the foots of their beds.
You could have noticed the warning signs:
Time scraped on, a pale beggar
hobbling down a wide strand,
as buildings shot from the shoreline
meeting the sky halfway.
You could have seen her eyes water,
and not believed her bit
about the sour sea air.
You could have decided
not to call her that name, the one
derived from an Indian goddess,
but meaning surly bitch.
You could have stopped
pounding into her
all those reminders
of being shipwrecked...
Ancient Chinese Guy visits rehab
So much individual work that we require in this culture of ours. In my Eastern Philosophizing, I have come to imagine how alien this modern America would seem to an ancient Chinese guy. He'd show up to a reality show celebrity rehab all like, what the hell, why is nobody tending the fields they're dry as a bone and completely furrowless where is the plough and the ox and why are we spending our days sitting in a circle of chairs talking about our childhoods which by the way shouldn't have been that complicated since they were spent in blind filial obedience to our parents because after all would we even exist without them?
And then we'd all turn to him and laugh and go, silly old man there're no fields to plow anymore plus we have machines for that. Besides, tilling the fields at this altitude, in this kind of climate-- you kidding? You'd be spending your evenings plucking off precancerous moles. Meanwhile the Chinese guy would actually be picking some invisible creatures from his scalp while we're telling him this, causing one blonde lady with crows feet to remark, my god do you really have things growing on you why haven't you had that checked out at some point and should we all really be sitting this close to him right now when clearly he needs medical treatment?
These are all questions for the Chinese guy but seeing as how he can't actually respond it's a wonder why we even bother asking them, except to hear ourselves affirm that yes he's clearly nutso and who let him in here to our sacred space just to dump all over our whole process?
And then we'd all turn to him and laugh and go, silly old man there're no fields to plow anymore plus we have machines for that. Besides, tilling the fields at this altitude, in this kind of climate-- you kidding? You'd be spending your evenings plucking off precancerous moles. Meanwhile the Chinese guy would actually be picking some invisible creatures from his scalp while we're telling him this, causing one blonde lady with crows feet to remark, my god do you really have things growing on you why haven't you had that checked out at some point and should we all really be sitting this close to him right now when clearly he needs medical treatment?
These are all questions for the Chinese guy but seeing as how he can't actually respond it's a wonder why we even bother asking them, except to hear ourselves affirm that yes he's clearly nutso and who let him in here to our sacred space just to dump all over our whole process?
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
Tales are Innumerable of Love
Late in life, William S. Burroughs
remarked that
Love is nature's most
powerful pain-killer.
And this from a lifelong junky,
by the way.
*
... that within
the tether of the wedded,
flows an opiate
stronger than heroin;
sweetening the gaze,
numbing the brain.
*
We don't have names for these arrangements,
that arrive like wayward houseguests; unannounced,
that depart like an arrowhead,
straining from your ribcage
at a world it cannot help but injure.
*
Consider ourselves,
the lovers we've shed--
little children hearts carried,
each piece a meal,
in Dad's old cigar boxes;
slivers cold as sushi...
... tripping beside
a pile of rubble, stooping
to spill the contents
into earth, awaiting
some response.
*
Jesus, you're
half her age and
twice as confused.
Here is a woman, hurting
and a man, pleasure-seeking.
The cosmogony of modern romance--
chronicle their trajectory,
like errant planets.
*
The foretaste of disgust, abandonment,
Here in her pursed lips,
her swollen eyes, her dampening
cheeks. Still, you sacrifice
the bones of the departed
to the fires of her thighs.
Soundless, she awaits your
devastation, broken upon
the boulder of your bed.
Arriving eviscerated,
she awaits her grief.
*
Crows perch in her hair,
staring down the fresh kill.
Something tells you to guard her,
jealously. Use her flames
on the sorrows you hold.
Hammer them out,
like sheets of metal.
Batter your
boundless desires,
before more lovers leave them
useless,
screaming in the rain.
Forge your pain into something
completely other.
*
remarked that
Love is nature's most
powerful pain-killer.
And this from a lifelong junky,
by the way.
*
... that within
the tether of the wedded,
flows an opiate
stronger than heroin;
sweetening the gaze,
numbing the brain.
*
We don't have names for these arrangements,
that arrive like wayward houseguests; unannounced,
that depart like an arrowhead,
straining from your ribcage
at a world it cannot help but injure.
*
Consider ourselves,
the lovers we've shed--
little children hearts carried,
each piece a meal,
in Dad's old cigar boxes;
slivers cold as sushi...
... tripping beside
a pile of rubble, stooping
to spill the contents
into earth, awaiting
some response.
*
Jesus, you're
half her age and
twice as confused.
Here is a woman, hurting
and a man, pleasure-seeking.
The cosmogony of modern romance--
chronicle their trajectory,
like errant planets.
*
The foretaste of disgust, abandonment,
Here in her pursed lips,
her swollen eyes, her dampening
cheeks. Still, you sacrifice
the bones of the departed
to the fires of her thighs.
Soundless, she awaits your
devastation, broken upon
the boulder of your bed.
Arriving eviscerated,
she awaits her grief.
*
Crows perch in her hair,
staring down the fresh kill.
Something tells you to guard her,
jealously. Use her flames
on the sorrows you hold.
Hammer them out,
like sheets of metal.
Batter your
boundless desires,
before more lovers leave them
useless,
screaming in the rain.
Forge your pain into something
completely other.
*
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