[1]

Walking by Hummingbird Lane, you see grass flaming golden embers – the whole field is covered with glowworms. If you were a scientist, who you are sometimes, you would perhaps try to explain why those insects chose to gather at that particular field, and why and how they emit those flashes of light. But during these moments of dusk you are simple man, capable of only hunger and wonder.

You stop and watch. Your mind becomes empty and enters what the Celts called the Book of the World – this always subsumes and is greater than all the Books of God written down and endlessly recited by men. You observe your skin shivering and an inescapable feeling of gratefulness shooting through your nerves. Perhaps this is what a Satori – awakening - feels like. Some of this is always seen on that whole smile you see on the face of the Buddha – the Awakened One. When he was asked by someone to explain what or who is God, he stayed silent. And that silence perhaps is the most perfect poem ever not written down.

[2]

Peavine Creek is where he always stops. This is where he can touch the flowing palm of time if he wants to. But usually he stands still, leaning forward, eyes closed, listening to the varying sound of water, constantly flowing over rock and gravel. He is becoming intimately familiar with this sound, he carries this sound with him and it sleeps next of his ear, on that big bed of his, awash with half read books. It had rained all day and so the sound is a steady hiss of churning foam – a woman, perhaps with the heat of Bizet’s Carmen, dancing flamenco. He can hear her shoes tapping out love and death, the Morse code of all poetry.

A man’s imagination wants to be creek, if not a river. And all imaginings eventually become the sea. And what is the true nature of the sea – perhaps God? This he hopes will be drunk by someone else, a madman running the water in a canoe or a steamboat, a Mark Twain say or some meditative sage quietly fly fishing for trout, a Norman Mclean say, to produce more and more and more imagination. A chain reaction of imagination that will drown the world choking on trivial shit, like a Biblical Flood.

[3]

I enter the forest and leave my other selves behind me. The forest has changed as I have changed. The undergrowth is thicker; the forest floor is covered with new ferns – in this section mostly the Christmas fern. And the bronzed birches of winter have transformed themselves entirely by donning green leaves, which are shaped like some early man’s flint arrowheads. The wooden bench in the first hollow, on which I had lain and gazed at the cold blue winter sky, has rotted and collapsed – is this the intelligence of nature taking over the intelligence of man?

Walking up to the clearing on the top of the hill, I notice a section of rotting tree trunk shaped like the head of a primal bird or fish. I immediately pick it up. It will be a nice addition to the other piece collected on a previous trip that resembles the skull of a wildebeest. The piece of bark underneath is crawling with ants, termites and other insects I don’t the names of. I take them with these pieces of wood, these Renewable Sculptures. A lines from Ecclesiastes – that slim chapter of the Old Testament, perhaps the only one worth reading in that book – will be the motto for this gallery of sculpture: ‘All go to one place; all are from dust and all turn to dust again’.

As we dine alfresco, overlooking a cemetery, (Most of the dead roasting over hellfire) My thoughts run from this street Of ramshackle houses, their boards leeched

Of color, porches dusty and upswept, Weeds growing in the sidewalks split Wide open, all the heartbreakingly beautiful Flowers in the late evening sun

And our talk on the ideas of self (eating tasty salmon) & unconscious (wanting to run up rivers like a salmon) & private property (I have lost my heart) & the common law (birth ends in death)

To the City of Frogs (in Mexico) To the Alley of Kiss (in this city) To the green balcony (Lorca dreams there) And kiss, repeatedly, the Beloved Air, which keeps us alive!

A thousand question and possibilities when the door opens. Should you enter or leave? Does a dog curl up at the feet of rainbows? Where is the city of love and what is the route to it? Gentle passion that unfurls like seed in dew covered field of grass. Then the heart leaps, runs up and down staircases of ribs all night breathlessly, filled with anticipation and fulfillment. Wonder too is born for to a lover everything happens as if it is happening the first time – last night’s rain dropping over him from oaks waving in the wind, a cardinal flashing by like a red rocket by his window, grass bending under the soles of his feet, the taste of a single drop of water snaking down the nape of a beautifully arched neck.

The world passes by him, a river, the surf of moments, a circle of light and shadow – he is the stranger on the street, looking at the sky, whom you pass by and perhaps in passing notice how his soul has become joy. This is because love is exploding out of his chest like fireworks on the day of liberation – liberation from the limiting cage which one can call the Self. He scarcely walks on the pavement for his life is a stone that is skips over water before he sinks into the universe. One who said only lovers and poets could see God is wrong. Only a lover can see God. The poet merely writes about the footprints of a lover he sees scattered randomly on wet cement.

How does one, a poet or otherwise, become a lover? By opening the door and burning down the house!