Not Reason But Song
1. POETRY—A CALLING
Poetry is the house of soul.
—I. A. Richards
What we are really, and the reality we live, is our psychic reality, which is nothing but...the poetic imagination going on day and night.
—James Hillman
And as imagination bodies forthThe forms of things unknown, the poet’s penTurns them into shapes, and gives the airy nothingA local habitation and a name.
—William Shakespeare
Inherent in prose is a problem to which poetry (all art) is the answer. Communicating in prose, as we do, trapped in the prosaic levels of life, we can only intuit wholeness. We yearn, but we cannot break from the linear ruts of the rational, and modern life, hungering for the soul, withers on its vine. When writing poetry, we allow in the wholeness, we welcome it. We work with images and rhythms capable of conveying, of carrying, wholeness. The reader or listener is in turn given an experience of wholeness, a moment in time that is complete, one in which he or she does not feel the need to change or control the world. (1)
At its best, poetry exists on the edge of what is formless and boundless. The writing of poetry—again at its best—is a spiritual discipline. This even when the poet’s work isn’t overtly spiritual and he or she does not think of what they are doing as spiritual. The poet nevertheless works at the service of those living archetypes that are the gods within. When we read a good poem with undivided attention, we go lost in it for a bit, enter into a moment outside time, a surprise experience of the eternal even as we breathe in and out here in the present.
Whether conscious of it or not, the serious poet has answered a calling and is discovering, connecting with, his or her spiritual source and sending it outward. Of course the spirit of such a calling is ever in danger of being damaged by excessive ambition and careerism. In terms of this, an important advantage of poetry is that it earns so little money. Better far that the poet’s reward be the depth of fulfillment given in the writing (and sharing) of the poem that the philosopher Martin Heidegger has described as “the principal return home.”(2) Home, that is, to the deeps of ourselves in the unconscious, or as Heidegger would have it, to that source from which the creative emerges, that resonant and ever-abundant emptiness that is the Tao.
I once heard my poet friend Michael Kincaid say, “The poem is an invocation of a sacred order.” And my poet friend Thomas McGrath, suggesting a return to that order, once wrote the following hopeful lines:
The warm and radiant Goddess who once held all our hands! . . .
Is again to be born and burn with that flame the world once was
Before the abstract light of the Father’s Heavenly Power
Put out the eyes of the stars and drained the life from the moon. . . . (3)
We, most of us, are a disenchanted people. Indeed, it has been argued that disenchantment is the major characteristic of the modern world. Today we encourage the brightest of our children to focus on math and science, perhaps to learn Mandarin, so that they (and we) might be “globally competitive.” The “abstract light” of these disciplines leaves us wanting. If we do not sense the infinite within the particulars of our lives, we are forever dissatisfied. And so, the search for the Holy Grail continues with us. Be certain that what it contains is not material wealth. Like the white spaces between the lines of a poem, the Grail’s emptiness might hold a clue as to the possible re-enchantment of our time (4):
WHEN TAO ENTERS THE POEM
The ancient Chinese critic,
Yen Yu, told us that when
Tao enters the poem
it becomes an “antelope hanging
by its horns from a tree,
leaving no traces to be found.”
The white spaces between
the lines in such poetry abound
with shifting herds of possibility.
Venturing into them, we are lifted
on the vast wings of emptiness
and carried away for a time. (5)
There is of course room for all sorts of poetry, but I’ll share here a personal preference I hold having to do with the making of a poem: Lao Tzu reminded us that “On tiptoe our stance is unsteady.” (6) And so, the poet would do well to heed what I remember from somewhere to be a Taoist request for “Simple sincerity to the highest degree.”
Jung once wrote that “As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.” (7) And the former Secretary-General of the United Nations, Daag Hammarskjold, believed that those who would do good work in their lives should become a channel for the light: “You are merely the lens in the beam,” he wrote. “You can only receive, give, and possess the light as the lens does. If you seek yourself, you rob the lens of its transparency. You will know life and be acknowledged by it according to your degree of transparency—your capacity, that is, to vanish as an end and remain purely as a means.” (8) The poem itself is such a lens, an access point for the light. Guided from the unconscious deeps even more than the poet knows, poetry has a way of leading us to that edge where
the light shines through
each blade of prairie grass,
each mite, mole, mushroom,
running killdeer. Each
is wondrous. And the human face
when lit
will be a beacon
for galactic travel.
The light shines through!
We belch over pork,
worry about weeds
while we drift amidst galaxies
God-light,
infinite song of the infinite universe....(9)
2. IN THE ARMS OF SONG
BLOSSOMING MUSE
In dream, I caught her
at the eastern lip
of my father’s garden, to our armpits
in nourishing green. I reached down
around her flesh which was my music,
and she whispered in my ear:
“Sing, that I may feed and grow
to fill the hollow in you.”
BARDIC TEMPLE
I’ve seen it in dreams, a circle
of rough-barked, ancient
cottonwood trees, trunks thick
as old rowing ships afloat
on the blue Aegean.
And a poet sitting there,
back to a tree.
A sacred grove here, yes,
at the center
of North America.
And within this circle, the flaring
imagination must voyage until
these trunks have been polished
by the weather of love and adventure
into the gleaming pillars of
that very temple within
which ancient bards
at the deep root of us sing.
THE SANCTUARY
When we write poems, free
of excessive self, we create
for ourselves and others
who enter a sacred place
of words, windows stained
by the blood of our lives
that allow in the radiance.
This place exists outside time
for the time we are in it.
It is a sanctuary
in which our burdens go lost
in the white spaces
between the lines.
Within its resonant interior,
we often discover,
however briefly, even in
times such as these, happiness.
MAY DAY AWAKENING
May Day morning, awakening,
struggling up through liminal mind,
I first see
my Crow River Poet cap, hanging
from the extended wooden neck
of a goose,
then hear, strange,
in some deep
auditory region of the brain,
words, as if from the throat
of migration:
“Not reason, but song
is the proof of our life.”
And I,
as if some wayward gander,
finally hearing goose gabble
coming from the home pond,
think to spread wings and begin
a hopeful yelping
toward melody.
SINGERS
We sang.
Kids, age nine to fourteen
or so, two or three at a time,
on foot, heading out
along gravel roads
for the here and there remaining
stretches of the old green magic:
oak groves, copses and dells still alive
with the singing.
The hard part was getting there,
and we sang
better than you might imagine.
Without thought on it, rhapsodic,
we sang to ease the boredom,
went lost within the rhythm
of our rapid footfalls, abandoned
to risen joyous sound.
Like native peoples
before us here, singing songs
given by the Creator
in the beginning, we sang
to lift us from the profane
world we traveled through
toward our sacred places.
In this slight trance
of imagination, I hear yet
the light crunching drumbeat
of our footfalls
on gravel roads and
our singing, feel again
the bliss of it. O, singing
is great sensation in the flesh.
We sang the snatches we knew
of “Wonderful Copenhagen,”
“The Drinking Song,”
“Massa’s in the Cold, Cold Ground,” and
“My Ass Is.” Most anything that rhymed.
“Onward Christian Soldiers” and
Christmas carols. On top of old Nelly
instead of “Old Smokey,” an endless
stream of pretty murky quatrains
flowed from us like water
from a fiercely surging spring,
life itself rising, unhindered.
We sang
with a relish that silenced birds
and burned the air.
We made it there.
MORNING’S LOOSE NET
Other’s still nourishing
in pillow regions,
I’m alone in the scatter
of this radiant room:
purple socks, sandals
with straps dangling
like the tongues
of dead mammals.
Here,
in the flight pattern,
jets scream
down long slopes of air.
Cardinals, jays,
crows, they wake
AWAKE!
within their cries.
I feel a greatness
starting in the flesh:
first cup of coffee
taking effect.
It’s good
to be here, contained,
secure, the breathing so pure
in and out, as if forever.
It’s good to feel good
about one’s life,
rolling out
from its center.
I am hovering yet
at the fringes of a dream
in which serious students
from small country towns
rode their work ethic
hard to my home.
Given the luxury
to be teacher, I told them:
“We are caught flies,
buzzing and jumping
in Indra’s awesome net, jewels,
each reflecting each, effortlessly.
Our work here, you see,
is simply to let go
and glow.”
THE YELLOW HORNBILL
There is a bird, right here
in these trees, local, native
to south-central Minnesota
and, in truth, everywhere else.
It’s called the yellow hornbill,
black and yellow, larger than a crow,
with a curved bill, longer, heavier
than an index finger, evolved
over aeons to crush
the husk from souls.
The yellow hornbill resides
only in deepest green foliage,
and is seldom embodied.
You may never see one,
though there could come,
just possibly, a moment
when leaves part . . . .
Your heart will stop.
It will take at least
a score of years
of most careful listening
to hear the deep rich warble
of the yellow hornbill.
That song, some say,
will suffuse the flesh
with a sweet agony of love
for this painful life.
Others, perhaps wiser, say
without first that love,
the yellow hornbill will never
feather full and sing for you.
THE SECOND HALF OF LIFE
The first half of life is devoted to forming a healthy ego,
the second half is going forward and letting go of it.
—Carl Jung
Time now, yes, to let go
such a lot of it.
And time to allow
our inner selves
to emerge more fully.
Give in to them.
They are the archetypes,
the gods within who
on Olympus and
in the sacred sites
of our personal lives
guide and sing.
Time, yes, to allow
our gods to guide
and sing
through us,
and to allow,
even within the pain of being,
our increasing ripeness
to sweeten.
FERMENTATION
This blanket of new snow
is joy and rest.
I somehow know
the drifting breath
and wet mittens
of childhood.
I have no need
to open the door.
I am only this breathing.
A cup of tea, a flame,
even as, tusks popping,
the hogs snuffle at my feet.
I know, I know,
I too am food.
I can let go.
This blanket of new snow
brings joy and rest, and
it’s a time to dream,
a time to tell the story,
a time to turn
souring old fruit
to wine.
BIRD WATCHER’S BODY
Each day one thousand orioles
fly through my eyes,
and finches, grosbeaks, buntings....
Each day,
wide-throated from the foliage
of my brows, young birds cry
and mothers with flare,
flutter and worms enter
my spaces,
pick insects from my hair
(my rib cage streaked with white!)
and I am filled
with spiraling.
Birds in flight
turn and dip to alight,
line my lip
(sharp little toes!) singing,
till the body’s first stars
turn bright.
A SORT OF HONEY
Soft golden bees, filled with fire,
storm round the hive, and helpless
in our dream of the sweet,
we are stung again and again.
The world will take
our measure. If our days
are not hard enough
on their own, our desire
will rise to sting us.
Yes, we suffer here
and purify and ripen,
and a sort of honey grows
in the wax of our dying cells.
WOMAN IN ABANDONED FARMHOUSE
In my dreams, a dark woman
haunts what is gone, and yes,
even abandoned farm houses
have abandoned us now, risen
in smoke and joined with old
abandoned dreams turning
among planetary rings.
A detached, lovely singing there.
He splashed gasoline, scratched a Lucifer.
Flame-spurt touched dry tinder
of old labor, old dream. Brief inferno
swirling with shades and shrieks.
He’d mine the soil beneath.
Hibernating raccoons asleep
between joists, snoring
into almost-hands.
Hives of honeybees droning softly
in walls. Risen as smoke. The woman-presence
in the abandoned continues
persistent in dreams. Dark woman,
ephemeral, alone, her footsteps sound
on old cold wood along vast hallways
of time, the sleeping mind.
Anxious, she peers through
cracked dusty windows, waiting, expecting
return of voices, the warm blood and honey
she’d known. Somehow gone wrong, gone
urban, suburban, the daily commute....
She turns then suddenly from the window
to me. In lamplight, the loss of everything
etched into her aged beauty, impacts
my entire tree of nerves. Am I accused?
Was I too slumbering, warm enough
for years, within her walls?
Is my singing already no more
than smoke, gone lost
and adrift in the spheres.
In the novel Finnegans Wake, that grand literary partnering of an awakened mind with abundance from the unconscious deeps, James Joyce chose not to include the apostrophe in “Finnegan’s.” In doing so he turned the name into the plural, and “wake” from a noun to a verb, and the title became a command. The old ballad “Finnegan’s Wake” was important to Joyce’s great work, but it wasn’t just one fellow named Finnegan that he hoped to wake to life again—“Finn again, Finn-begin again.” The missing apostrophe gives us to know that it was the whole of us he hoped to wake from our slumbers, from this dream that all the world is. Joyce was calling on all of humanity to awaken. Finnegans all. Wake, you Finnegans! “Here comes everybody”!
RESURRECTION OF THE FINNEGANS
T’was whiskey
brought the tipplin’ Tim Finnegan
alive again. Believe that
if you will.
Here in the life I lead,
now and again hiking aisles
of the stones that hold down
those gone, I’m doubting.
But
the stones in their rows
bear each a name
with its numbers
and a buried story,
tinder to kindle in me
a whiskey-sweet fire,
similar enough, I say,
to that which
lifted Tim Finnegan
from the bed of his wake—
stuff to tell that will
I dearly hope
wake them again
from their slumbers
in the deeps
of the all of us.
CARRYING HIRAM HOME
In dream last night, there was work
I was called to, bound to do
for a dead man:
I was carrying Hiram home, limp
in the arms, somehow, of song.
He had the life all of us breathe
in and out of our bodies,
more or less, the same train
of passing moments, too seldom boarded,
and in this it may be he did better
than most of the rest,
most of whom agree:
“Hiram didn’t amount to much.”
Day work on farms did for him.
Lifting bails, pitching bundles,
and such. Winter was a time
for sleeping with the good wife,
a woman who later went bitter
and left with the last of the kids, all
friends of mine back then.
I never saw him out of blue
work shirt and worn bib overalls.
Shining black hair and eyes
bright as anthracite were linked hot
to an easy low humor that
caused the kid I was, hanging around,
to kick the ground, grinning.
Owning outright a small house
was key to Hiram’s life. And a big
garden and a small
flock of chickens
and now and then a pig.
The garden fed with chicken droppings
filled his winter bin with fists of fine
red potatoes, and late summer sweet corn sold
for a quarter a dozen. Popcorn filled
the family’s winter nights with munching.
Melvin said,
“Dad’s teeth got worn down like that
from chewing old maids.”
I ate popcorn with them and sunfish, twice,
great golden piles on every plate, free
and fresh from the lake, took nourishment
at Hiram’s table and insight
of a primal kind.
Hiram went to the hospital once
in his life: “My blood is good,”
he told me, but with all
the rest around him gone
more or less modern,
his old house, too,
with its rusting pump out back,
was smashed to the ground.
Before it went,
on a cold November day,
I clumped around within
a shifting surround of ghosts
one last time.
Such a vast echoing emptiness!
There on the bare-wood
second floor, I grew fearful
I might break through
into painful memory of life
once loud around
a now-barren table.
Though the house that was key
is gone, and the garden
and Hiram, too,
in dream last night
I carried him home
in the arms of song.