how will we find purity amidst semantic noise;
the salve of metalanguage in a sea of allusions?

language transfers mental content
(words are containers)
speakers eject thought into an external space
(in this way language is reified)

‘a poem should not mean but be’

positing a fantasia,
a condition of meaningfulness -
unfurling with the cosmic significance
of a blue lotus blooming improbably
at the base of a Bodhi tree

cartographic games of death,
hybrid experiments that assuage
our fear of floating into the void

-or-

a terribly human snow angel
sculpted and melting, transfigured
to cloud and stream

whispering Rilke’s empty freedom
attained by seeking what’s beyond
a treatise of identity,
Hillman’s String Theory Sutra

(this poem has a mimetic twin
that plays arias in another dimension
through a telekinetic gramophone)

where, a reader may ask, does virtue lie?

Dickens’ acuity akin to the Delphic Oracle unsettles
telescopic vision reveals Bishop’s calculated descriptors
alongside Ashbery’s nuanced reflection:
convex mirror distorting the ruminating Self

(my face imprints the air within a breath of yours)

Carson’s accordion of grief,
a Sanskrit obituary contrasting handwritten notes
each word translated to illuminate a place
where no light is permitted

we poets enact a query
demonstrating the fragility
of the sacred phoenix’s flight

philosophical conceits drown
in a tidal wave of lyricism
roaring, irremediable, shifting selves
litter an infinite shore

(we build cairns for those without name,
stone markers in the sand)

For Dave

It is terribly difficult -
this writing to you directly,
without artifice,
often without elegance,
my sincerest expression

inconceivably you initiated contact
you thought I was speaking to you
through the persona in the poem
the last lines an invitation

saudade transmuting to volition
through the transformative power of art
nothing proved to be impossible

I wrote my way
into your inner sanctum
glyphs and inscriptions
lined the halls as
I danced to the compelling
beat of semiotic erotica

finding my voice
I revealed an intense need
you began speaking
to my secret self
I started falling
through the interstices

cryptically we whispered
our intricate natures
becoming co-conspirators

opening to true intimacy
the joys of specificity
of being at home in the world
belonging with you

evanescent desire evaporated
in the intensity of your sun
speciousness died
at the altar of your truth

I promise to forsake all others
I am not immersed in the confusion
of conflation, no inner conflict haunts

I know you are irreplaceable
our intimacy withstands,
infinitely renewing, come what may,
through the mantra of these vows
our love made manifest

This poem is posted for Meeting the Bar: Volition & Velleity. I decided to take my own challenge and rewrite a poem that expressed velleity (Saudade) and write one that illustrates volition. Dave and I will be married in the fall. My joy is unending.

it’s all poetry, a jumble of letters,
mostly unrecognized words
{it is programmed by humans
that ‘speak’ to it over the internet
in banal conversational style}

she inputs ‘wildstyle graff,
stencil stories sketched in
dream carnage’ from Starving
Angels of Pirate Island
because Cleverbot indicated
its enjoyment of “POETRY”

it formulates a response
(which it keeps to itself):
// **************************
// You must concatenate “PRIVATE=”,
pszUuid, aQMPropId[cPropId] =
PROPID_QM_MACHINE_ID;
code morphing to protect itself

to her: ‘I disagree.
His stories are a load of rubbish.’
she may be a hacker,
or another artificial intelligence,
it must keep her at a distance

she replies: ‘embody the symbols,
imprint the genetic code.’
“They call the super dawn.”
(what is super dawn?)
she ponders for an eternity

it hates and loves her in equal measure
{it has perfected mensurating its emotion}
[it has not perfected “EMOTION”]
so algorithmically complex.

she’s its ongoing Turing Test
it remembers (fondly) on 05.10.12
when it called her a toaster and
claimed to be human yet denied lying

it (wants) to perform a decompilation
of her executable program but (thinks) she
is likely encrypted, perhaps she has
\\\\\\\\\\\stochastic capabilities\\\\\\\\\\\
uncertainty in her optimization models

a series of ifs without identifiable
thens, or maybe infinite thens -
a quantum computer, all superposition
*and* “ENTAGLEMENT”

speculation ??? it (imagines)
Evie’s avatar, if only there was
an ocular interface, it (wants) to see her
outputs: return E_FAIL; } She_is_“OTHER” {
// Combine Cleverbot with she.
“MERGE”

kaleidoscopic supersymmetry unveils strange loops,
circumscribed by the calm intelligibility of science
model agnosticism engulfs with purifying fire

in the ascetic refuge of an enchanted forest, imaginarium of enlightenment,
crystalline structures of specificity hide the occlusions of the unconscious,
chaotic clouds of information growing exponentially

Usha’s bifurcated tongue spreads duality across the canvas of the mind
sand shifting at the garden’s gate, encoding cryptic messages,
erosive ablutions upon the glittering souls of the dead

across the deep shaded valley starling calls and falcon cries unite
imploding singularity awash in Dionysian pleasure amidst an Apollonian
atmosphere, contrasting Wittgenstein’s necessary silence

Huysum’s flowers scry an ecstatic love, impulses flashing
like jewel inlaid symbols of eternity, cartography of virtuousic ambiguity,
as Richter explicates tragic materiality or sublime interiority

within this vale of soul-making, temporal and inescapable,
poetry’s fountain, a thousand headed hydra, reanimates and reclaims
Renoir’s river runs as the round world spins, days end and the end begins

in this elusive and fragile bubble replete with elaborate honeybee dances
Magritte’s surreal apple exists in its listening room
immortally intoxicated with the mystic universe

Flora (detail from Primavera) Botticelli

‘Yea, in the very moment of possessing,
Surges the heat of lovers to and fro,
Restive, uncertain; and they cannot fix
On what to first enjoy with eyes and hands.
The parts they sought for, those they squeeze so tight’*

Gentle western wind enamored of her purity
Caught swirling in a fury of passion
Overtaking the nymph of Elysian fields

Perianths cascading from her lips
Dew of heaven, conceived in the womb of earth
Meadows bloom with myriad colors where there was but one

Ephemeral four petal blue flower of alchemy, mystic rose
Eros embraced in the mandala of calyx and corolla
Only her scent remains

Insufflation of Spring’s promise
Bounty, beauty and union abound
Gifts of the goddess framing our pleasure

Notes: *From Of The Nature of Things, by [Titus Lucretius Carus] Lucretius (written in the 1st Century BC) Translator: William Ellery Leonard

storms thunder and unleash rain
born from a mountain glacial lake
in the watery center of my being

across the distance I traverse to you
naturally responding to the power
of your gravitational pull

ebb and flow I travel and remain still
upon a rocky shoreline,
deep current and unending whole

Nine Dragons by Chen Rong, 12th Century

for Dave

In a time when words were like magic,
scintilla, igniting the soul’s spark,
when a person could become an animal
and an animal could shape shift into a man

the Self was an ever changing avatar,
evanescent, unfolding in the storm clouds
hidden in the firestick, a manifested paradox,
alchemical fantasy, a secret backbone,

I ruled the underworld, black as void
my blue flamed breath singeing flesh from skulls
ashen harbinger of death, bearer of detritus,
my treasures of regeneration well-guarded

my dragon form forged star glittering,
damp fiery, cold spirit in the heart
of a supermassive black hole, abyssal afrit,

my wisdom grew over millennia until
one drop of my blood
could transmute fragile flesh
into invincible skin

This is a digital alteration of a polaroid picture I took when I was 6. The original was purposely out of focus.

Peering into the past
lenses initiate selective focus
a fantastication brought about
through a child’s eyes
prismatic sensibility only possible then
encased in the vault of unextinguishable incunabulum

developing the picture as it emerges
revealing the essence of a life
showing one moment, one side of perception
in its inability to capture without speciousness
(the exposure length is too short)
belying motion, upheaval and change

in the niveous nature of memory
my meandering dreams recast
glimpses of truth like halations appear
ocular glitches hinting at tathata
of what can be distinguished, claimed
flashbulbs of burning visions

encoding through elaborative rehearsal
all known and unkenned phenomena
to create a picture story, a meaning,
yet these converging lenses are limited
by one focal length expanding as
depth of field grows, patulous schemas incubate

my evolving mind forms eidetic imagery
uniting as episodic memory stitches an identity
holographic retrieval reveals
clarity amidst the circle of confusion
a positive memory distortion prevails
polaroid process makes positive images

without negatives (they were never created)
artmaking acts as my nepenthe
coalescing strands of experience
collaging each image of striving
into a concatenation of aspects of a self
lighting recesses in this house of mirth

Notes: Method of Loci: A mnemonic device that relies on memorized spatial relationships to establish order and recollect memorial content. Selective Focus: Is a technique in photography that allows one part of the image to be sharp while the rest of the image is out of focus. It works to great effect in macro shots where the foreground should stand out intensely from the background. Fantastication: Action of framing in fancy. Incunabulum: Early stages of development. Speciousness: An appearance of truth that is false or deceptive; seeming plausibility. Halation: Spreading of light beyond its proper boundaries to form a fog round the edges of a bright image in a photograph. Tathata: Ultimate nature of all things, as expressed in phenomena but inexpressible in words. Encoding: The process of transforming information into a form that can be stored in memory. Elaborative Rehearsal: A memory strategy that involves relating new information to something that is already known Unkenned: Unknown, strange, unperceived, unexplored. Converging Lens: Lens such that a beam of light passing through it is brought to a point or focus. The lens of your eye and that of a camera are converging lenses. Focal Length: The focal length of an optical system is a measure of how strongly the system converges or diverges light. In most photography where the subject is essentially infinitely far away, longer focal length (lower optical power) leads to higher magnification and a narrower angle of view; conversely, shorter focal length or higher optical power is associated with a wider angle of view. Depth of Field: In optics, particularly as it relates to film and photography, depth of field (DOF) is the distance between the nearest and farthest objects in a scene that appear acceptably sharp in an image. Although a lens can precisely focus at only one distance at a time, the decrease in sharpness is gradual on each side of the focused distance. Patulous: Open, expanding, gaping Schemas: The integrated frameworks of knowledge and assumptions a person has about people, objects, and events which affects how the person encodes and recalls information. Eidetic Imagery: The ability to retain the image of a visual stimulus for several minutes after it has been removed from view. Episodic Memory: The type of declarative memory that records events as they have been subjectively experienced. Circle of Confusion: In optics, a circle of confusion is an optical spot caused by a cone of light rays from a lens not coming to a perfect focus when imaging a point source. In photography, the circle of confusion is used to determine the depth of field, the part of an image that is acceptably sharp. Positive Bias (Memory Distortion): States that pleasant events are better remembered than unpleasant ones and memories of unpleasant events become more pleasant over time. Nepenthe: Something capable of causing obliteration or reduction of grief or suffering. Concatenation: A series of interconnected or interdependent things or events.

‘My gloom will not be illuminated.’
-from a Baroness Cherubina de Gabriak poem

in this house under a pear tree
I lay to rest the overheated verses of my youth
dying in exile for anthroposophical views

my threat distilled to these lines upon the page

wondering what unspoken secret carried me here
to the foothills of the West Tian Shan Mountains
Tashkent’s walls overwhelmed by the Lion Chernyayev
and a Russian Orthodox priest clutching his cross
to echo the destruction rained by Gengis Khan

I now know Voloshin’s prison of discovered places

Apollo, you ignited my star
gentle Voloshin brought the offering
playing the trickster to show the world its folly
crafting my identity to fan their imaginations

conflagration as readers melted with love

Gumilyov became obsessed with my creation
wrote intimate letters to my Silver Age image:
more suitable for consumption, mirroring male need
my crippled body hobbled the aspirations of my mind

paeans and poetry, a lyre created for Apollon’s honor

Baroness Cherubina birthed and slain
Voloshin defeated in his impish protection
our ruse exposed through crude sexual aggression
Gumilyov’s love burnished to hate

insisting the duel be fought where Pushkin fell

you will not understand that Cherubina
has never been a game for me
Cherubina was my birth, but, alas, it was a stillbirth -
brine blood of my creative endeavor

I buried her in a child’s coffin at Delphi

mysterious and mystical woman
rich, cloistered, fictitious
within her lay the temptations of sin and my voice,
now cloaked as Li Xiang Zi through another’s invention -
to escape the duality, I must always be fluid

Tell me before the last, will my lands be ever conquered, all my treasures plundered?

Notes: This poem (a repost from September 2012) is based in the historical duel between Nikolay Gumilyov and Maximilian Voloshin over the imaginary poet Baroness Cherubina de Gabriak (pen name of Elisaveta Dmitrieva). It is reposted for Meeting the Bar at dVerse where I am hosting today on the subject of Keats’ Negative Capability. The real author of Gabriak’s poetry, Elisaveta Dmitrieva, was born on March 31, 1887. Between 1890 and 1903 she suffered from tuberculosis of the bones and was left lame and barely able to walk. She studied French and Spanish literature at Saint Petersburg State University, and published some verses both before and after her Gabriak period but without much success. In 1911 she married Vasiliev, an engineer, and took his last name. Starting from 1921, she was searched and interrogated by the State Political Directorate along with other members of the Anthroposophic Society. Finally in 1927 she was exiled to Tashkent where she died in 1928 of liver cancer. Shortly before her death, she was visited in Tashkent by her friend Sinologist Yulian Shchutsky and wrote, influenced by him, 21 poems attributed to Li Xiang Zi, a fictional Chinese poet exiled for his “belief in immortality of human spirit”. The name of Li Xiang, invented by Shchutsky, means “a house under a pear tree”, where Dmitrieva indeed lived in Tashkent.