Monday Poem
Burning Bush At twenty I danced the tops of walls Najinsky of the double top plate bent in-two like an onion shoot unbending up through an earthen gate lifting sticks to be put in place nailing their tails held against my boot walking the wires of gravity’s net as a spider commands the filament web…
Monday Poem
God gave names to all the animals, in the beginning, in the beginning …………………………—Bob Dylan Cut to the Chaste to be called anything, to be called, Jim, for instance, is to be tagged for life unless you choose otherwise and pull a new name from a hat— a new you, say, Ed— which would amount to a tangle…
Monday Poem
Pattern Language strolling through town with Plato we take the sidewalk one step at a time; shards of its exposed aggregate form archipelagos, and overhead, Jesus in a cloud, or is it Lao Tzu explaining Is without a word clefts in the bark of trees we pass define Appalachian humps. we saw Scranton strewn along a grey gully on the…
Monday Poem
A Question of Necessity Can you tell me a certain thing that is a moral fact? … is a specious question because the fact of the thing exists as something essential to the survival of homo sapiens in creating civilization, though civilization does not always believe in the necessity of its essential thing: the root of what…
Monday Poem
Illinois man arrested for spray-painting swastikas on gravestones —NY Daily News, 5/31/18 Epidermis ….. skinhead: a thing shrink-wrapped in pink tissue, shorthand for fear ….. epidermis of a skinhead: a nonsensitive layer of skin covering the true skin, or corium; or the outermost living layer of an animal, a layer so thin it flakes like…
Monday Poem
Pi —(Pi day, one day late…) pi is perfection with a loose end 3 point 1 four and so on without pattern or closure the precision of a mandala drawn by a drunk on three martinis not describing wholeness merely but thinking odd numbers spouting them while rambling home disheveled, irrational, unseemly as the similar…
Monday Poem
9-Lived Cat where? where are you, ……….. on the willow-hung swing ……….. in a field of golden grass? where, ……….. in the hemlock ……….. straddling the limb at top ……….. hands sticky with sap? are you ……….. sitting on the well-house step ……….. with the lake at your back ……….. remembering a future of ……….. yes! or collapse? are you ……….. on the topmost…
Monday Poem
Flight and Gravity a story, a recollection of 79 summer solstices bundled in one thought of when I was young—a carpenter with muscles, sweating, lugging planks from lumber stacks to half-framed houses, stud walls proud in sun, precise in ranks ………………………………………. a thought that segues into a later solstice down the line, along the way, a…
Monday Poem
Monday Poem
“This is conclusive, and if men are capable of any truth, this is it.” ……………………………………………….…— Blaise Pascal, on his wager Blaise’s Place Blaise’s place is on a sunset strip sliced razor-straight through desert air many cul de sacs veer from its hot black path which is squeezed in a pass between mountains there west where…
Monday Poem
Buddha Mind Buddha mind’s a still but never motionless field Buddha mind holds all, each wave and ripple subsumed along with every tiny dot, a broken wholeness no metaphor can speak its more-and-less no single thought can split its late-and-soon its splash and depth of shade, golden color, its sanguine stippled clouds, its calm bronze…
Monday Poem
Monday Poem
Prayer I thank Thee for this couch and the room it inhabits and the chair which, being its partner in undeserved comfort, leaves itself available to any weary stander who might take advantage of its open invitation to sit, and for those two aptly-named bolsters plumped at one of the couch’s ends near the bookcase…
Monday Poem
Until I’ve not roamed the four corners of the earth but I have roamed the four corners of the earth I contain as much love and callousness as any human does I love and harm as sure as the passionate sun does, which inflames dawn clouds in iconic peace and beauty which inflames sunset clouds…
Monday Poem
Everything passes and everything changes, just do what you think you should do …………………………………….… —Bob Dylan Flux You, Heraclitus! …. —for Brian Another lifelong friend has died Sunday part of me again has vanished too We were young together building things, partners, carpenters in sync we drove spikes through joists hammering steel to steel. You…
Monday Poem
Imagine our town rests in a mountain-bowl at twilight, common and small as dust and dream but huge in life beyond what it seems, its few lights jitter on the river’s skin, the dam pond’s spillway lets its waters out as upstream they come in under a steel truss bridge, the dam buoys’ stillness under…
Monday Poem
“(Swifts) feed in the air, they mate in the air, they get nest material in the air. They can land on nest boxes, branches, or houses, but they can’t really land on the ground.” —Researcher Susanne Åkesson Swift I’ve been airborne since Augustus set the footings of the Roman Peace —in that alone I flew…
Monday Poem
August 18, 12:10 pm orange serpentine between sloped green and me sky pondlight blue clean, clouds cumulous/cirrus half unseen in a frame like dream geometry/physics bone-like brick wood-like flesh and glass that, with reflections, sings with ridges and walls, choral: concrete, spheres, steel and other distinctly human things Jim Culleny 8/18/19
Monday Poem
A Simple Ontology maybe flower petals are held to stems by thought and the wind’s a counter-thought that plucks and sets them elsewhere in the grass to grow in contemplative resolution beside the notion of a grub-pulling crow maybe the wind itself is a palpable bright idea, something about motion and the abhorrence of vacuums something about coming and…