Pond Song 4.29

Now that we thread the edge of the ‘that it is at all,’ we prize newly the excess of life we also lived before mindfulness, and which is the absolute sweetness of simply being at all. 249

happy solsticial birthday dad__an early trip to this small pond

glassing and brimming with high clouds__in your absence the broken sound

of crows repeats the horizon__O silent one by watching you

I learned to play in solitude__today on the other side two

ducks swim apart out of the dazzle__and shatter they made of the shallows

where the tide pours in and out__voluble now but that’s how it goes

Pond Song 4.28

Coming to be is hyperbolic happening. G&B 249

after hard rains high clouds__bright gulls over mudflats

hot breaths of offal and lilac__the nose distinguishes and that’s

metaphysics or the ground of it__this beautiful June Sunday

big bees vibrate the beach rose__heady perfume has a way

of intimating the ultimate__a herring gull shakes his head

ripping morsels from the ooze__the original nothing is not dead

The finitely dynamic does not arrive from the stasis but from a more primordial energeia. G&B 248

nitroblooms not lilly pads__razor-edge of a crow’s flight

across the pond tall grasses__butterflies ash white

zig-zag over the shallows__not the garden of Monet

the vigil kept each Sunday__to visit master of way

mallards patrol the emptiness__then it catches my eye

rising falling quacking chanting__old Bai Juyi by and by

“It is the poesis, the potency, in the first Monet that gives rise to the non-identical repetition of all those that follow.”  Conor Cunningham, The Genealogy of Nihilism, 203.

Note: In Pond Song 4.27, I contrast South Mill Pond and Monet’s garden. To say X is not Y is to suggest that they share something that transcends them, and the comparison is based on that. They are “the same” with a distinction that shows up  in the non-identical return to the pond.

for J. G.

There is no return of uncreated soul to uncreated origin; there is the opening to a communion of soul and origin, a communion ultimately a gift of the origin, since everything that is, though finite, is also such a grace. G&B 273

June warmth blur of memory__gulls float between nitroblooms

Henry Thoreau is just not here__nor his crowning fact looms

his god-man but a gull’s cry__the greenish sparks that fly

from a duck’s head way out there__on the public bench I pass by

a homeless woman in a hoodie__the rich voice of Maya Angelou

shine of plastic bags at her feet__there is this mind passing through

Every issue of the origin can only relate to it via its difference from the origin. G&B 249

grey sky in new tall grasses__the pond full at neap tide

emerald archipelagos of algae__shimmer to the other side

we have polluted the waters ___at the edge from elsewhere

a tennis ball’s acid green__shouts of love split the air