"the great indelible poem"*

Sky's clear tonight

starshine is a billion cool candles;

and Siva writhes tandhava.

I'll surrender to sky tonight,

to blue and deep Siva

ten arms out spread;

fear not for all is in illusion

and play.

Dharma children,

we follow the shore

to erect totems,

temples in his honor,

sea-carved and blonde,

half buried in sand

we build them.

Sunday night 11:00pm

headaches, screaming sinuses

raw cavity walls, deviated septums,

we manage to jive all night

neurons firing liquid poetry

till the dexedrine sunshine comes.

We speak the language of discovery

Eros dialogos bewteen us,

communion of chalice

again and more.

Sky changes blues

dark denim to dawn,

coming of light in

a real smooth movement.

Walking through morning,

an empire of signs, reveals

our temple, the city's backyard.

No buddhist bedtime prayers

echo in hollows of cliffs.

No buddha perfects wisdom here;

no wisdom perfect-

no wisdom here at all.

No mind gathers dust and delusion,

no mountain, not you or I

no thing at all,

but

silence, sings the world's

first cry. Om,

silence fills the cool void.

Silence blows a three degree

breeze-

silence of the first voice

fading out.

Silence will hear itself after

the imperishable syllable dies.

Silence of a drunken moon

in tropic sky...dreams serene

vegetable air,

silence of cricket symphony

bullfrog bass, and wild turkey drills.

Silence of rain drumming

plurirhythmic on the pane,

silence so prehistoric

it does not care if we

live or die.

In a mental cemetery,

blue-bomb mushrooms on

screen, the fallout is

greifen und seigen:

'The spoken word is a gesture,

its meaning, a world.'*

*Airplane's exhaust,

an arrow of mackerel cloud

narrowing to a silver tip

on poolwater sky

whispers, I endure

to crimson green of Cézanne's trees

against sky, draws a northern

line.

*(Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Colin Smith, transl. The Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, Ltd., 1995. P. 184.) A translation of La Phénoménologie de la Perception. The quote is from Part One: The Body, Chapter 6, 'The Body as Expression and Speech.' In other words, a world is created only when the intent of the gesture is seized upon by the other. Thus we have the two terms greifen und seigen, gripping and seizing. Cf. Martin Heidegger's sense of "world" in the essay 'The Origin of the Work of Art,' contained in Poetry, Language, Thought. Also compare Hegel's "Begriffs," roughly translated as concepts, literally translated as gripped. In this sense, to understand, the meaning of a gesture for example, is to grip or as we say in English, grasp. The gesture, an intentional act, be it a simple wave or a work of art, is the birth of meaning.

*Lawrence Ferlinghetti said in a poem titled "I Am Waiting" that he was waiting to write the "great indelible poem." In same poem, he also said he was waiting for some strains of unpremeditated art to shake his typewriter. I always assumed his tone in "I Am Waiting" is ironic. Any remarks, send me lovemail: trahairamyma10@gmail.com.

*This isn't a poem at all, but an inelegant storage silo of lines, phrases, images, and so on. I often commit poem rape: the act of stealing lines from an earlier poem for use in a new poem for the benefit of the former and to the detriment of the latter.

©1997, Amy Hart.