Amor et Infinitatem

Full felt fast is fire's desire,

Round and round and round again,

Hot turning like lively ashes atop a pyre.

In streamlined whip of unending spin

Love's flames lick no cornered edges tips

And fail to find an end, nor no finite wall.

Nowhere is there times hard held grip

But like the smooth sphere of a shiny ball 

Revealing no terrestrial marks,

Movement enshrouds illusory sight

Of no end or germinating spark;

Where there is no future or a past much like

The circling of two single snakes,

Convex things contoured north to south

Where each a link of chain, aligned, do take

The others taut tail within their mouth.

And so we walk in love from anywhere

Arched in infinite curves we do not see

And, though limitless, leaves a center bare.

It is when that finite space is filled we

Sense our time and take a nauseous turn.

And in the snuff of a mortal gust

We then know, within, it will fail to burn.

Love does not die but will go on without us.

A Crime of the Senses

'Some artist’s have a nervous hand at drawing, which give their technique something of the peculiar sound of a violin, for instance Lancon, Lemud, Daumier. Gavarni and Bodmer remind one more of piano playing. Millet is perhaps a solemn organ.'~~ Vincent Van Gogh, in a letter to his brother Theo 

I did something naughty. It was explicitly against the rules and I have nothing but the utmost respect for the rules. Yet I couldn’t help myself. I claimed no actual right to do it nor did I claim to possess any special privilege to do it. I can safely say I did not do it simply for the sake of getting away with it. I just simply possessed this overwhelming, sweeping, unquenchable desire to do what I did. I touched the Van Gogh. There it hung by a mere couple of nails so majestically, so worthy of its ornamental frame and adoration of the ever present crowds. I chose my moment with the utmost precision and care. I swept the room for every security person within eyeshot. I knew of where all heads where at any given moment and I gauged for every eye that might lay on me. It was time. James Bond time.


I was utterly calculating in my scheming. My mathematical efficiency surprised even myself. Bond might have blushed. However in a moment of all this planning, I thought how absurd this whole covert dance was in attempting to touch a painting. The impulse seemed ludicrous to want to touch a painting that hung right before my eyes. It was a sight to be enjoyed not an object to be groped. But this is no simple picture. There it was. Vincent Van Gogh’s Wheatfields with Cypress Trees on the wall of the Metropolitan Museum of Art so very within my reach yet seemingly a million miles away. Many adoring eyes come to the Met to view all the great work it has to offer but there can be no denying the multitudes perpetually surrounding the poor Dutchman’s picture. I started wondering about this man whom I had read so much about. I remembered his dire poverty and his grappling with mental illness and the very popular notions by many a poet and scholar alike that he was just too sensitive for this world. Most of all, I remembered his solitude and thought that maybe it is very difficult to be locked up in one’s own senses for a length of time without the possibility of expressing them.

This was the absurdity. The more I thought on it, the more I realized he might have allowed me to touch the picture. It might at first seem an odd request until I thought that possibly, just possibly, he would understand my urge. Maybe with a slight flick of the wrist and a chuckle, he might have acquiesced. But this is all assumptions. He is not here to grant me permission or otherwise. I should call it wishful thinking if it were not such an evident daydream. There I was again placing myself outside the confines of my own time and space in hopes of finding solace in another. When will I learn, I think to myself. If Van Gogh failed to find solace in his does it really matter the time? Aren’t we all living lives of quiet desperation waiting for inspiration? Pondering the past does nothing in seizing the present.

My mind returned to the gallery where I stood and I noticed at once the dispersement of the crowd. Coupled with the inattention of the guards, I realized all my scheming gave way to a stroke of luck. I made my move. I swept my hand as delicately as I could muster along the ochre coloured wheat fields saturating the bottom of the painting. At once, my fingertips felt the opacity of the thick paint as it protruded in relief from the flatness of the canvas. Van Gogh’s paintings are so thickly painted in some areas they resemble more wall sculpture in their three-dimensional excess.

I have always held the notion that his paintings are worthy of the blind to enjoy. If I had closed my eyes, I might have been reading very beautiful Braille. I could feel where the paint had hardened in to thick masses as if every stock of wheat was its own glob of carefully placed paint. My finger felt as if moving through peaks and valleys riding in and out of crevices that were at once bare canvas then thickly condensed paint. I then rode my hand up the outline of the green Cypress tree that dominates the right side of the canvas and rises like a flame tickling VanGogh’s azure and purple Arlesian sky above. The outline of the cypress is also a thick stroke of paint reaching from the bottom to the pinnacle of the tree as if Van Gogh willed it in his work to be as sturdy as found in nature.

I could distinctly feel the rough, opaque nature of undiluted paint. I felt as if I were a god following with the tip of his giant, omnipotent hand the length of a mini mountain range. I took my hand to the bare areas of the canvas. I could feel the dimpled roughness where there was next to no paint at all. The “whoosh” of sound made by the canvas surface I thought echoed through the halls of the great building. The swishing noise of my hand over the bare areas I perceived echoing into other chambers of the Metropolitan rooms leaving me utterly self-conscious until I realized I was lost in my own heightened sensations. I did not want to stop though Idid.

A beautiful painting whether a Van Gogh or otherwise is meant to be viewed. The eyes act as a window sending a sensation through the whole body in search of the spirit. But I could never stop my mind wondering that he painted so thickly for another sense to be enjoyed. It seemed to be crying out for touch. This time I wanted to feel the sensations from the nerve centers of my fingertips. Instead of a route from the cornea of the eye, I wanted to start from the sensation of the tips of my finger. I found that no matter the starting point, the route still leads straight to the seat of the soul. The feel of the painting is sensational. Somehow touching the painting felt as real as looking. It was tangible. This paint taken on the end of a brush and placed with great care at by a man so desirous of expressing himself with every touch of the canvas, I was now touching.

I felt at a moment as if there were connections over a wide waste of years as if somehow by touching the very paint Van Gogh had touched somehow made us closer. A poor but passionate man felt an artistic urge to place this wet paint on a canvas and here I was, over a hundred years after the fact, standing in an ornate room in a large museum touching the same paint. The paint may have dried over the many years but the inspiration has not.

I took this inspiration home with me. My mind, swimming with the thoughts of Van Gogh’s works and my senses filled with paint, I made my way to my own small art studio. It is a cramped little area filled with debris as if left over from a hurricane. Bits of old newspaper and ripped pages of magazines litter the floor, images used and then discarded. Old coffee cans line the shelf filled with old, unusable but somehow indispensable brushes. The cans and brushes are blanketed with a half-inch worth of dust accumulated over months like a fungal growth. I could not help but notice on this day the film of dust actually give the objects an almost ethereal quality as if light as feathers. I often blamed this cramped and littered condition on my lack of inspiration at those agonizing times when I had none.

On this day however, I realized any lack of inspiration had to do with locking my senses away from this real and actual environment. On this day, all were beautiful objects glistening in the sunlight. The sight of my studio at once gave over to the scents always so apparent in the studio. The advances of our modern age have helped create an odorless turpentine but the fact is remnants of the scent still emanate even from even the best quality turpentine. Anyone not familiar with a painter’s studio will readily attest to this. Yet the smell oddly does not offend. People who visit me regularly remark on it and even coyly confess to liking it in that same perverse way people admit to liking the scent of gasoline.

My heightened senses on this day decided to track these scents further. Different paints have different aromas due to the different plants and oils that go in to the manufacturing of the paints. I picked up a tube of alizarin crimson and noted the strong aroma of flowers so often used for red colours. The pleasing scent is only hampered by the oily smell. Ultramarine blue like most blues has a sharp odor most likely due to the acrid plants that go into making it. All of this somehow blended in to something I can only call the scent of an artist’s studio.

My paintings, some finished some half-finished, lay strewn on the floor. Some leaned on the walls. I sometimes laugh to myself that they never quite make it to hanging on the walls but are rather always leaning as if an understudy actor waiting for his moment in the wings. Poor Van Gogh never saw his players center stage. I began to wonder if there might be a time when these very paintings might themselves hang somewhere where they might be deemed untouchable. But the thought was too ridiculous to seriously ponder. I inspected them closely. Like VanGogh, I try to paint in a thick, opaque technique that requires a constant building up of the paint over time. It is a multi-layered business that takes some patience. The paintings too, I noticed started accumulating a good layer laying over the thick impasto of paint like soft tissue over engravings.

I felt compelled to paint but I did not want to paint a proper picture more than I just wanted to feel the sensation of painting again. This led me to squeeze some tubes of paint onto a palette and then found myself an untouched canvas on which to paint. Nothing is more frightening than the blank canvas. It must be the equivalent of a blank piece of paper for the writer. It is a paralyzing thought to see this blank space and then to think that it somehow must be filled with a masterpiece but I was oddly less interested in filling the canvas than I was filling my artistic spirit with a desire to paint. I wanted the inspiration with the hopes that a masterpiece might follow.

I took some dry paint on a brush and just freely scumbled the paint on the canvas. The sound of the brush on a blank canvas was as electrifying as my fingers on the Van Gogh. The energetic whooshing sound of brush on virginal was a magical moment reminding me of all the reasons for excitement in starting something new. All the senses are stimulated anew by the thought of a new work. I then took some paint diluted with turpentine and violently spread a line of paint over the canvas. The “swoosh” of the brush on the canvas echoed the animation of the stroke. My senses, so preoccupied with painting, forgot the desire for food.

I went to the kitchen and hastily placed cuts of ham and some Swiss cheese in between two slices of rye bread. One of the rye pieces I slathered with mustard rather foolishly pretending I was covering a painting. To wash it down, I poured some old wine into a glass. It seemed appropriate somehow to be drinking wine this day. I took my food and drink into the studio slightly fearful that the inspiration might leave me if I were not in the vicinity of the room. I ate my sandwich, spying the room for my muse like a jealous lover. I was soon led out of this stupor by the foreign taste of my sandwich. There was something more than just ham and swiss.

I looked down to see my hands were stained with different colours of paint mingling with my sandwich. I could taste the tinny tang of titanium white as it mingled with my mustard. All the remnants of the paint from my fingers tasted bitter to the tongue. The wine too tasted like colour as it burned in my throat.

I thought to myself: Was this you, too Vangogh? I laughed to myself. Not long ago, I was in despair at finding the inspiration to paint. I often thought of those great painters I read about who lived and breathed their art at the expense of everything else in life and here I was ingesting it as well. What an oddly satisfying way of finding inspiration. I hope it works again.

How Do We Learn Words?

Not long ago I was lucky enough to spend the day with a little girl who I adore. She is all of fifteen months old but before anyone decides to attribute my strenuous sensation to the realm of the innocent, I would remind all how the young can teach us about our own nature of knowledge. The reason for this is because, though we are all born into the middle of a certain kind of knowledge without the benefit of a starting point, as it were, with small children we can at least get a glimpse of the very germination of it as it slowly sparks from a consciousness that is a sponge though it is unaware of it's true power to soak up a world which it really has no specific knowledge in understanding.

What I'm trying to get at here is just how we think a child learns words. It is tempting to think that a child learns through us, the adults, as we place a kind of hypothetical sign on words that the child merely recognizes and learns by rote. The child learns different words for different "things". This can extend to people even. A child might learn that a certain person is called "Johnny" and we then like to think that he differentiates Johnny from other people and things the way he might differentiate a chair (when she learns the word) from other objects not the chair. He might learn that "Johnny" is different than his brother "Jimmy" though there is a family resemblance. She will not mistake one from the other unless she is confused about who is who. If we think of Johnny and Jimmy as "objects", we also tend to think the child has learned a way of placing monikers on things that differentiate them from other things.

Yet when I spent my day with my "philosopher-child", I learned that there is world that is being perceived beyond the mere pointing to objects as a learning tool. I have hitherto mentioned the calling of names of two brothers as a way of pointing to things being named so as not to be mistaken for the other. Keeping this in mind, I was struck that when I held up a strand of her hair and I asked her what it was, she immediately called it, in her own way, "Hair!" It would seem that I have taught her a word for an object. But when I then lifted a strand of my own hair and asked her what that was, she also remarked "hair!" On the face of things, this may seem unremarkable but keeping in mind our analogy of the brothers, it is important to point out that I taught her the word for one object and she named the said object. How is it then that when I pointed, or rather, lifted my own hair, another object technically speaking, she was able to call it by the same name? Of course, the most tempting thing to say is that she "saw similarities". However, keeping in mind the simple act of teaching a child the word for hair as a simple sign of pointing and naming, the question occurs as to just how the child learned what the "similarities" are in the scheme of things.

Are we supposed to believe that a child must be taught through the simple naming of objects yet is somehow supposed to innately understand a more complex concept like "seeming the same". The answer might be yes. The problem here is just the idea that we point and the child mechanically learns as if by rote. But that would mean that when we point to a pencil and call it a pencil, a child might understand we mean we are saying this is "hard" or this is "wood" or this is "long". What are we doing when we teach a child a term for "hot"? I may turn on a stove and point to the fire and say "this is hot" but how might the child might mistake this for "fire" or "blue" or "triangular" as I've really only pointed to an object?

The fact is that a child, when learning a word, is also witnessing the world beyond just the placing of monikers on an object. "Hot" after all (like "similarity") is not an object but a feature of an object. The child learns the word, true,  but she also observes through conscious and subconscious living, that people burn themselves on the fire, and another heats themselves with the fire, and another still may cook food on the fire. So that while we think we've taught them a word, they have in fact witnessed many uses for the word "fire" by a kind of self-knowledge through a kind of rhizomial learning through living, while still learning that an object itself is called "fire." I think this is where we might demarcate the concepts of 'meaning' and of 'use.'  We give words meaning but we do this through their use.

What this tells us further is that it is a shared experience.   To understand this collectively, we know there are rules to be followed and these rules can be explained.  This is simple enough, but we also know we come to a point where our spade is turned and we can dig no more; there is a point in human language and meaning when the rules cannot be explained. I can explain the child learning the word "hair" by pointing to a strand of hair but I do not explain how the same word is to be used in pointing to anothers' hair, a "different" object. Again, saying she saw similarities still begs the question whether this child really knows exactly what the concept of "similarity" is. To my knowledge, she never used the word herself. She is, after all, struggling with the simple, ostensive definition of the word "hair" never mind the more ephemeral concepts of our language. Maybe there is an "a priori" sense that presupposes learning apart from the rules governed by the man-made world. Again, rules can be explained for things but there is a point where following rules becomes more ambiguous, especially when learning language.

One can ask a person, when they've read sentences on a piece of paper, how they knew to do it correctly and their answer might be that "I learned the rules of the ABC's" or "I learned the rules of grammar". But this still does not answer just what rules were necessary to learn the ABC's. What rules were grasped to learn that? What rules were followed for that? A simple answer might be just a general consensus but this only points to language as being innate no matter what rules we apply to it.

My little girl is not just mechanically learning words to put with an object. She is living and breathing these words and finding, within her little but potent mind, the many USES that all words have in our collective expressiveness. But how she computes these USES is the all too mysterious and all too human mystery shared by all.

Metaphors and Misuse

What is it we consider non-sense?
Consider two propositions:

1. God sees everything. 
2. The security system in the lobby of the building sees everything.

Though the subjects of these two propositions are distinctly different, the form each sentence takes is deceivingly alike. Each makes a claim on the subject that, at first glance, seem the same though I would venture to guess that the form changes drastically when we take in the particular gravity of each subject on its own. Let's see which of the two sentences may contain what we consider sense while at the same time delve to consider whether one or both (or neither) may contain no sense, that is, in the real sense of the term non-sense. The structure is all important but as we shall see, the subject will be a deciding factor in weeding out whether either the former or the latter contains real growth in the flower bed of our language.
First, I must point out exactly what I mean by non-sense. It’s not an accident that I hyphenate the words. I do want to distinguish it from the very concept of what we consider the table-top variety of the everyday definition of nonsense. I do not use the word as synonymous with ‘silliness or ‘ridiculousness’, as we might with nonsense. Rather, what I mean here is what the philosophical movement of logical positivists meant in trying to discuss what in thought and language had meaning and what did not. That is, something that, when looked at carefully, really carries no sense. Some things just really carry no sense. If we state something like, “It is not raining outside,” this proposition may or may not parallel reality. If the fact in the world is that it is actually raining outside, it’s safe to say that the proposition is nonsense. It’s ridiculous but only in the sense that we have a reality that we can then compare to our statement. The statement is logical but only in the sense that it can be right or wrong. However, if we were to use a tautology and say something like, “It is either raining or not raining outside”, we encounter a problem. This statement does not make sense but neither is it nonsense. It really lacks sense because it lacks any possibility of being compared to reality. This is the rub. When we use language we are in fact mirroring a reality that seems to be objective beyond our own thoughts.
And because language is as rich and varied as it is, there are times when we cannot distinguish the silly from the unutterable. 
To say that "God sees everything", it must be explained to us what we mean when we utter such a proposition and that explanation ought to come in a simple look at the language. We have a simple noun/verb postulate here. It might be smart here to look at the noun first. Presuming everyone entering the discussion understands (loosely) what we mean by God, that is an omniscient, always-present deity in the sky, we then have to understand what we mean when we say he "sees". This brings us to our verb. Seeing or having a visual field is a human function that takes works as a matter of the "hardware" in our eyes that are attached, and function with, the neurons of the brain. However, as is natural in our language, we have turned this into many different ways manners of speaking that use the literal use of "seeing" as a kind of anchor. For example, when we say we see with the "mind's eye" or "I can see the future", or even as a matter of understanding when we simply reply "I see", to something we’ve understood. We are using language creatively to illustrate other ways of speaking that have a loose connection with the literal. But it is this loose connection with the literal that the many uses can function as a matter of sense.
When we want to describe God "seeing", we are forced to explain it in anthropological terms naturally from a human point of view. What do we say when we propose God sees everything? Well, initially I want to ask, with what? Does he have eyes? Eyes have a function but they are also material things. We thought this God was invisible. Invisible material? Does he see the way we do? Does he have perspective? Can things obscure his vision? Does he have a blind spot? (The last two hypothetical questions also point out a problem with perfection or, more to the point, a certain lacking). The point here is that it is very difficult to have a certain ideal of a perfect being as a subject then confer on him/her certain human traits. We come up against a wall as to how a theistic perceiver of all things behaves or even just exists with certain finite attributes like "seeing". It is also in the nature of some verbs to be misunderstood. We can point to someone ‘running’ but can we point to someone ‘seeing’ or even ‘thinking’ (it’s much too difficult to say that someone is thinking hard simply because she has furrowed her brow. Someone could be thinking even harder without furrowing their brow). So how do we then scale this wall? We do not. We actually hurdle it in one giant leap by calling it a METAPHOR. Herein lies a problem. For in order for a metaphor to work we must already understand the original statement or idea. And here, in my view, is where much of the confusion begins: For a metaphor to be understood, the metaphor must stand for the original. That is that the metaphor must have the capability of being dropped so that the literal sense can then be understood.
Unfortunately, metaphors have sort of morphed into the same mistakes as when people rely on the subjectivity of opinion. It has become fashionable to say that they are arbitrary. But this is not the case. If I say my lover has rose petals for lips, I am pretty well understood to mean that her lips are as appealing as rose petals. Certainly, if I went to another culture where rose petals were considered poisonous then my metaphor has not fallen flat. It has, infact, just changed it's meaning. My lovers lips to that culture now becomes one which is negative or dangerous. But the metaphor still stands. Both the literal ideas of 'dangerous' and appealing' are understand even when the metaphor is dropped. One thing this culture would understand is what I mean by 'appealing' or positive and just replace the metaphor with something they understand. Certainly different things can be appealing but there is at least a general understanding of the word. If I say I mean it in the sense of being ‘appealing’, I am then understood. This is the same with ‘seeing’. So if we get the idea of the metaphor, it seems to be that it is our subject it is suppose to stand for that is flawed. Is the idea of the security camera flawed? If I were to say "The security camera sees everything", I can mean that to say that there is a certain camera (like an eye) that is set up in the lobby to capture images. Capturing images is important here because in a sense, this is exactly what the human eye captures when looking at a visual field. The security cameras "eye" is being used a metaphor for "seeing" in the literal human sense. In this case, if someone misunderstood what I meant by the metaphor of the security camera, I can then drop it so that it may be understood in the way meant while also explaining the metaphor. Both the metaphor and the literal now have sense.
But this metaphor hinges on the word ‘everything’. When we say ‘everything’ here, we are presumed to mean everything that happens within it’s purview of the confines of the lobby. So we have another literal sense that another metaphor stands in for. We can explain the ‘seeing’ and the ‘everything’. But when we say "God sees everything" as a metaphor and we then drop the metaphor, we become again mired in the original problem of what it is that God is doing when he is "seeing". We do not seem to have the luxury that we have with the security camera. We are back to answering the unanswerable question about God's sight that forced us to just call it a metaphor in the first place. It all becomes circular, like a snake eating its own tail. The metaphor does not do enough to explain because it never had anything itself to stand for in the first place. It is like a house with no foundation; something utterly absurd. In this way, the proposition lacks sense. It is non-sense.
When we do not have a foundation for a metaphor to stand upon the metaphor crumbles to the ground in a heap of non-sensical rubble. And when these things cannot be explained they can neither be spoken about. This, I believe, is what the famous philosopher, Wittgenstein meant when he famously said that “what we cannot speak of must be passed over in silence”. The problem of course, is that we rarely want to pass over in silence. We then proceed to hit our head against the wall or else end the argument with a scream. We want desperately to transcend certain of our own attributes but we are bounded by the world that is objective reality. And anything outside of our world either carries no sense or must be passed over in reverent silence.
We are beings that go to the end of the universe and are happy to find a wall but then suffer for the thought that our imagination tells us there is something beyond the wall.
It hasn't escaped me either that I have used a wall as a long, protracted metaphor but I only hope it makes sense.

The Lovely Oddness of Pushing a Bed, a Model T, and a Piano Up Ben Nevis

Above the minion hills of Caledonia,
Crowned by fog and robed by dewy dew,
Sits a green-brown king that's waiting for ya,
Benevolent wet welcoming for the few.

And there were a few who, to pay tribute to,
And place some jewels in the crown of the king,
Held fast his soil, scaled through the robe of dew,
To adorn upon his head peculiar things.

Some creative set set forth on steep ascent 
Up the Caledonian hill where it's said
They planned hard all the way as they went.
This plan, understand, it included a bed

Pulled through robed dew and thick whiskey peat.
And as whiskey'ed dreams cause one to snore aloud,
They probably did between soggy sheets,
Surrounded by a webby web of clouds. 

Yet others, it's said again, as if to top these,
Sought to push a Model T up the kings side,
Thick coats of dew and peat under old wheels,
Arguably a most unusual drive

That demanded sheer and original will.
For to haul up a combustioning engine
Over such steeply steep and stormy hills
Begs: Did they merely drive it down again?

Once more at the top of his peated plaid pate,
Again at the apex of such kingly ground,
Was seen a piano as if found by fate,
A heap of a thing mysteriously bound

And buried within. One wants to imagine,
When once in a piece, they played what all crave;
Rousing renditions heard from the glens,
And cities, and towns, of Scotland the Brave!

You! All of you showed strange reverence
Celebrated in unusual ways:
Things scaled in a country, a proud land whence
Greatness is expressed best in peculiar praise.

So, my madly mad ole Scottish brethren,
Who let your irreverent flags unfurl!
I dream those whiskey'ed dreams of when
You let them wave atop that green-brown world!

Little Ben

Little Ben is easily confused with a same

Little zen but that’s because his body’s small

And because the little zen he has contained

Within him stands straight and just as tall.

Those who are as worldly and as wise

Don’t find it hard to wonder between the two

As when we ponder a bright set of eyes

And the joyfulness found in them. Wide and china blue,

His wily saucer eyes look up and down

Then left to right as he attempts to gauge the length

Of the world so that he might know just how

To bend some elbowed arms in a cradled strength

And wrap her in embrace. But with the upturned

Corners of his smile he pushes her away.

But this is so he can see clear the joy she's earned.

He’ll always have his homing beam lest she feel astray.

Little Ben gives a playful push and the world comes

Swinging back. And the swinging forth brings

Another push and the world and he are one.

He has given her as a gift, lively loving wings.

But remember, Ben, on life’s playground, always

Keep her close. If she knows enough you are a friend

She ought to do the same. So let her swing but raise

A hand so she too gives wing to you and your budding zen.

Graveyard of the Gods

The bars of the cemetery gates were

Majestic, thin, archaic and crooked

Like the half outstretched fingers of

Death himself.  Though they pointed upwards

Towards the glassy orb in the sky,

I went in.  Like rotten teeth, the gravestones

Protruded from their place at unequal

Distances each to each; some were long,

Some short, askew or straight, and all chipped at

The edges showing age. Only the worship-less

Moon gave them a white that was not there. 

And though the whole decrepit mouth stank

As the vapours of the earth enwrapped the

Chalky slabs, I, like one whose intuitive

Manners precedes action, didn’t flinch. 

I was in the graveyard of all the gods

And my plan was clear. With spade in hand

I pierced some soil to resurrect those

Oft forgotten bones that lay resting

Under some weighty years of progressive

Dirt, grave layers set in loose lumps of

Man’s knowledge tramped down at a time.

But some days they are surely worthy of

Resurrection.  The first I dug was new.

He still held flesh to bone that laboured time

Had not undone and a white beard still shone

Like wispy clouds or ripped cotton clinging

To fossiled flesh (the archetypal beard,

I thought!).  I propped him upon a slab and,

With makeshift lines, drew upon the dirt some

Crude square forms for chess.  The rocks and

Stones we placed as kings and queens, castles and

Horses.  “The pawns are essential,” I said

With a nervous laugh but the sockets where

Once was housed omniscient eyes were now just

The collapsed space of infinite black; holes

Where, If looked intently, shown an image of

Myself in a pall of deathly moonlight white.

We played our game and sometimes stopped to laugh

At the wily ways of men (and women)

And all the myriad ways that chance can

Hope upon a move. And when I came to

Realize I made his moves and mine did

I feel the heavy haze of the moon’s stare

In a heatless glare that seared shame.

The second was of a different kind.  The

Hips were in a convex curve shone wide

That spoke to the feminine feature in

Her skeletal remains; crescent hips like

The moons childhood before the steady

Motion of times waves made it full.  But they

Arched like the bended bow that launches all

The arrows that can be blamed on love.  I took

Her in embrace and wrapped an arm around

A wide waist as we danced among the stars.

Her ecru arm I crossed over my own

Boned shoulder where, from a lifeless wrist,

Waved a jostling hand full of mock life that did

Sway to and fro with each merry step like

The puppet sans the strings.  Under the night

Sky I swept her round and round through swirls

Of dirt as we sometimes threw a head above

To glimpse the swirls of the moons aspect in

Unearthly spirals like ghosts on the wing.

We danced and danced until her celestial

Bones collapsed upon my own, a crumple

Of life not really there.   The love I held

 I realized then was contained in my own

Bones that emanated spirit and the movement

Of us both.  Then did I see I was the

One who caused that hand to swing and sway with

The dance while the heavy haze of the moon’s

Stare in a heatless glare seared shame. The third

And last I rose from the ground.  I propped his

Starved skull skyward so we might in concert

Contemplate the stars.  We peered at the spray

Of sprinkled lights that blinked in reverence

Around the mother moon that shined like a

Progenitor never out of sight.  I

Grasped a pensive moment to explain how some

Lights in the sky had nearly died when he

Was but an infant when he had an infant’s mind

And an infant’s eye to tell what he might see.

I said, as if a student who dared show

What he knew, such light has leapt across the

Bounds of time to spy upon us now, you

And I, as if to come back from the dead

And see us wonder why.  He only stared.

The slithering snake, like sins surprise, came

Round the cavernous reach of his eye, peered

A hastate head, and hissed.  I left those bones

To be found.  Let another decide if

They are fit to hide again.  Toward the

Gate I made my way and in a flourished

Flight.  If old bones have their use then I will

Shave mine own down to a point to write

A name.  The bars of the cemetery

Gates pointed up to infinite abyss.

There the hallowed moon patiently sits

Where she does not blink nor does she see.