The Persistence of Illusions

Does every moment in time already exist?

Can an eager eye spy all of space

Before us as the distant void it is?

I walk with illusory sight at a pace  

Through a world I think is yet to be.

This same eye in succession blinks

And the world unfolds itself fragmentarily.

With blinking rapidity the eye it thinks

Time and space are bits of demarcated frames

Like reels in mechanical rewinding,

Not seeing each and every moment as the same,

One swell, a universal expanding.

I am in the world like my sight is in

My eye.  And it is the other “I” that inclines

To conceive himself the creator within,
The prime mover that birth the signs

And wonders and every thought that

Arises. There is in turn felt a “me” within

Spied by an inner eye, a searcher enrapt,

Not creator, but hunter for a ‘him.”

Thinker and thought, time and space are same.
And like the light upon the water that gleans,

So dance many lively charges atop the brain,

Sparking persistence of things that seemingly seem.

The Chinese Gardener

Just another early morning walk past

Suburban yawning houses

       No different than the morning last.

   Each house with sleepy pride announces

At their feet sit pretty Jersey gardens.

     And the mindless clod trods through

One with a thousand beg your pardons.

       With western plod he traipses into

Some eastern loves and old enchantments

        With crowns of cabbage tops and rows

Of reddish roses. A dream, he thinks,

   That's ushered in by oriental blows

    Of wind which brushes leaves and slips

Over ringlet stalks like wedding bands

         Over blushing, rosy finger tips.

     Amid the cultivated patch stands

      The wordless cultivator. Child sized,

    She is sleek in black to the teeth.

  A conical hat, bamboo-leaved and wide,

Shades the gaze of exotic eyes underneath

That fail to look or heed his remorse.

    She stoops to dig with ungrowing glee.

  And a stab of the earth with delicate force

          Sows this garden of deeper mystery.

His mind digs with a thousand if's and so’s

    As the morning continues a silent call.

    She digs, aloof, heedless, with a garden hoe.

 Death plants seeds at less than five feet tall.

      A sedge wide hat that's fixed to a point

Where seed-love growth anticipates birth.       

         Yet rich brown soil is balm to anoint

     The many beds of subterraneal earth.