The non-action of the wise man is not inaction.
It is not studied. It is not shaken by anything.
The sage is quiet because he is not moved,
Not because he wills to be quiet.
Still water is like glass.
You can look in it and see the bristles on your chin.
It is a perfect level;
A carpenter could use it.
If water is so clear, so level,
How much more the spirit of man?
The heart of the wise man is tranquil.
O thy bright eyes must answer now,
When Reason, with a scornful brow,
Is mocking at my overthrow;
O thy sweet tongue must plead for me
And tell why I have chosen thee!
Stern Reason is to judgment come
Arrayed in all her forms of gloom:
Wilt thou my advocate be dumb?
No, radiant angel, speak and say
Why I did cast the world away;
Why I have persevered to shun
The common paths that others run;
And on a strange road journeyed on
Heedless alike of Wealth and Power —
Of Glory's wreath and Pleasure's flower.
When I’ d reported to the couple, thus
That up there no one murders now for gain
Since no one owns a thing, the faithless spouse
Who’ d beguiled that woman so improperly
Lifted his hand, now tied to hers by chains
And looked at her and turned perplexed to me
So no one steals, if there’ s no property?
I shook my head. And as their hands just touched
I saw a blush suffuse the woman’ s cheeks.
"I thought of you as a butterfly tonight," getting to eschatology from a sketchpad, your mom's.
And though you write sermons nice and linear you also digress and about-face.
The jeroboam trees are dark tonight.
Darker in the outage than the stars let the sky be.
Partyers all.
The abbot told you, "I do not have power, the archbishop does not have power, the pope does not have power. Only God has power."
Then it is not a kind of violence to put a photo of the Pope in a luscious hacienda, imperilled by a minature pullbell.
John Gordon Boyd
died on the birthday
of three remarkable, and remarkably different, writers:
Heinrich Heine, Kenneth Patchen, Ross McDonald
John, too, was just as remarkable, blessed with an inherent “graciousness”
and with extraordinary eyes & ears…
I think of two texts
on the grievous occasion of his death:
“Religion does not help me.
The faith that others give to what is unseen,
I give to what I can touch, and look at.
My Gods dwell in temples
made with hands.”
— Oscar Wilde, in De Profundis
The smashed weirdness of the raving cadenzas of God
Takes over all of a sudden
In our time. It speaks through the voices of talk show moderators.
It tells us in a ringing anthem, like heavenly hosts uplifted,
That the rhapsody of the pastoral is out to lunch.
We can take it from there.
We can take it to Easy Street.
But when things get tough on Easy Street
What then? Is it time for realism?
And who are these guys on the bus
Who glide in golden hats past us
On their way to Kansas City?
Fish of the flood, on the bankèd billow
Thou layest thy head in dreams;
Sliding as slides thy shifting pillow,
One with the streams
Of the sea is thy spirit.
Gean-tree, thou spreadest thy foaming flourish
Abroad in the sky so grey;
It not heeding if it thee nourish,
Thou dost obey,
Happy, its moving.
I
Eastward the city with scarcely even a murmur
turns in the soft dusk,
the lights of it blur,
the delicate spires are unequal
as though the emollient dusk had begun to dissolve them...
And the soft air-breathers,
their soft bosoms rising and falling as ferns under water
responding to some impalpably soft pressure,
turn with the city, too.
is my season
of defeat.
Though all
is green
and death
is done,
I feel alone.
As if the stone
rolled off
from the head
of the tomb
is lodged
in the doorframe
of my room,
and everyone
I’ ve ever loved
lives happily
just past
my able reach.
And each time
Jesus rises
I’ m reminded
of this marble
fact:
they are not
coming back.
is an opening, is all
we can see
of the long
strands that make
the pathways for
rays, bisecting
annular rings,
the most
vulnerable door
of what makes
the holiest of
things.
