Eye Trumpet

The autumn garden is a fury of being and becoming. Birth and rot coexist, and, inbetween, riots the great, yearly going-to-seed.



But still, as Dogen said, there is firewood, and there is ash.



The sky is the color of iron. We launch our hearts at it. At our feet, dirt the swallows them, fallen and red as abandoned tomatoes.

Love apples, some say.

Love is blue says the old song.



The autumn garden is deserted. I came in through the broken gate, past the rusty hinge with its caught feathers. Paradise has become a shantytown. It is fall, fall, fall.



To understand innocence, contemplate the world before and the world after humans, the world before and after history.



Redemption threshes through, jibbering like a troupe of mummers.



I offer an antiphon:

Galaxy, black hole, quark, neutron, star



but there will be no unspelling, no re-signing love.



It is (by some accounts) indelible, irrevocable, woven into the fabric of the universe.



Sursum corda.



What if we took The Cloud of Unknowing's "original sorrow," the quasi-Sartrean that I am, and followed it to its lair ?



Is that the seed that will, in some theoretical springtime, resurrect as Love, a many-branched and many-blossomed that we are ?



In 1974, I wrote a poem called In Vitro. Behind, within glass. I have been writing it ever since.



Is it finally time to begin a new poem, In Vivo ? But then who will play the glass harmonica ?



It's autumn. Time to plow the stories under. All of them.



And to sit here, in the mud and then the snow of the empty garden, and wait.