Poetry
by Eric Halliwell
At
the Window Pane
"The natural initiation may come to
a person at any time of his life. It does not come to everyone,
but only to some. And for this initiation one need not go to
a teacher; it comes when it is time for it to come. It comes
in the form of a sudden change of outlook on life; a person feels
that he has suddenly awakened to quite another world; although
he remains in the same world it has become totally different
to him." - Hazrat Inayat Khan (Three Aspects of Initiation)
The wide-eyed boy will linger at the window
pane
looking out at slants of raining sadness.
But there's rhythm from a dark
symphonic horn, and yes, a gladness;
a basking-in from rose and thorn
blood vermilion dance
to eclipse such sadness
as descants close the arc
(like the ocean does the sand)
a divine madness brings round the circle
(It's romantic when the Ring does the asking)
Which band symbolic born,
slips around his finger,
as he holds his own hand.
top
Logic
Is the Mystic's Best Friend
contrary to fascist rumor
logic is the mystic's best friend
I will now demonstrate in the streets
this interesting metaphysical truth
let's logically examine this world
and the hypothesis
that it actually exists
well if it exists I say that it then
has to be measurable
yes on its own solid terms
(because internal contradictions at the
core
are a symptom of irreality)
all right let's go for simple
we won't measure the coastline of England
let's just measure a normal circular candle rim
before it's lit of course
so right off the batty
(pardon the foreshadowing)
you have to decide at what level
you want to measure.
or how small does your measuring tape have to be
because thngs change direction on the way down
I refer of course to the obvious fact
that under a magnifying glass
or certainly a microscope
what looked either a straight line
or a measureable gentle arc
(reducible to an interesting equation)
turns jagged edge on you
and when you zero in
(more foreshadowing)
on a given surface to be measured
it's hard to resist the temptation of a
bigger blow up
for more precise jaggedy measuring
okay the trouble is
where do you stop?
at the molecular level?
atomic?
subatomic?
and here it gets really confusing
because on the sub-atomic level nothing holds still
the electrons and also the leptons in the nucleus
are zipping around
and one moment the measurement is from
here to here or was it there?
and the next only God knows where it is
always assuming that God would bother
knowing such a thing if as I suspect
it has less proximity to relevance
than the sex of a stapler
so back to measurements
if it isn't pinnable down
down to the last lepton's leptons
well then clearly it's impossible to measure
it
reminds me of the was it Hindu creation
tale
of the turtles stacked up on each other's backs
until finally the last turtle holds up the earth
and some wiseass asks
what's holding up the bottom turtle?
And this angers the turtle priest
who impatiently insists
it's turtles all the way down
so unless you fancy a hypothesis made of
turtle down
let's just quite logically dismiss this creation
as anything to be confused
with anything non-mystic scientific
top
I
Was a Prince
I was a prince who found you in a pond,
secure beneath a lily pad to hide
your creamy body from the sun and me.
You squirmed out of my grasp and dived so deep
I dared not follow so I placed a net
which looked quite like a lily pad and I
disguised myself and sat on top, a frog
as any fool could see--when you came up
I quickly kissed your lips and magic things
occurred like in the fairy tales, to wit
I did become a frog and it turned out
you really fancied frogs' legs but I squirmed
out of your grasp and dived down deeper than
you dared to follow so you placed a net
which looked quite like a lily pad and when
I came back up again to sit on it,
you kissed me back into a prince once more.
And it turned out you fancied princes too.
So you, apologizing for the frogs'
legs dinner episode said, "Still, it was
a lot of fun." And so we lived and dived
quite happy ever after til one day.
You were especially hungry and you knew
that when I was a frog you were supposed
to kiss me but you ate me and you said,
"It was a boring game, after a while."
top
After many years as student,
carpenter, student again, half a nurse, and then elementary school
teacher, Eric has renounced the normal (i.e. work) world to live
in Guatemala on Lake Atitlan writing poetry. He remembers an
interview on public radio in his youth. It was with Yevgeny Yevtushenko,
the Russian poet. He was explaining that a poem was an ambulance
responding to an emergency in the reader's psyche. Kind of a
Catcher in the Rye thing. Call him compulsively helpful, he doesn't
care. He credits E. E.Cummings for that . Eric's poetry has appeared
in other publications, including Gentle Reader, Penwood Review,
and Ascent Aspirations. You can reach him or comment on his poetry
at estlin3@yahoo.com
Send a message by using the Word
Catalyst feedback form.
|
