PROSPECT PARK

There was a high wind in the park last night:

Sundered tree limbs lay scattered along the path

Hearing wind still whistling through the tree tops 

I watched as their filigree shimmered at first light.

From the brownstone to the eponymous park

Then, passed by spandexed runners left and right

All having left our beds long before the sun’s pale rise

We moved counter-clockwise in the vanishing dark.

Past other early risers - their dogs frolicking in snow

Flocks of birds flitting around a part-frozen lake

Neo-classical park buildings looming in the mist

Onwards to Grand Army Plaza in the dawn's early glow.

We emerge from this skeletal, sylvan spread

(Scene of the Battle of Brooklyn in 1776)

To confront the urbanity of the Plaza

And a vast shrine* to a more recent war’s dead.

Its Triumphal Arch affronts the senses:

Bombastic statuary saluting the Union’s valor 

Atop an arch of fine-hewn stone that stands

Athwart these precious woodland experiences.

* The Soldiers' and Sailors' Memorial Arch was built between 1889-1892

 to shonor Union soldiers and sailors who died in the Civil War.

AWAITING A STORM

This Morning…

I must go down to the seas again
To the lonely sea and the sky…
And a grey mist in the sea’s face
And a grey dawn breaking.*

As an atmospheric river sags to the south
The morning broke cold, damp and drizzly.
Me, shivering as I rode my bike
To a lonely beach north of the estuary.

Through empty riverine parks
Past windowless industrial buildings
Through Ventura’s oil fields, littered 
With tanks, pipes and pump jacks, I rode:

Then, ghost trees with whitened trunks
‘Midst flotsam and homeless encampments;
Off-shore wind whipped waves; the lagoon
Festooned with Egrets, Herons and gulls.

This Evening… 

A Wild sky to the West
Hangs over seven misty mountains
As the sun sinks into one dead ocean
And it’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall.**

*John Masefield
**Bob Dylan

GOD ONLY KNOWS

Right off the bat
Thomas Merton writes
In his Asian Journal
‘Why do we travel?’

His journal consists
Of thoughts, quotes and
Observations as he flees
From West to East.

After twenty-seven years
Immured in a Trappist
Monastery in Kentucky
He is permitted to leave for Asia.

Already steeped in
Buddhist spirituality
He is intent on visiting
The Dalai Lama in Dharamsala

But he finds a greater kinship
With Sonam Kazia
A Tibetan Magician
Who vouchsafes…

“The Highest of Vows is made
When there is no longer anything
To be accomplished
Nothing is vowed: No one vows it”.

Merton sought an alignment of
The Buddhist notion of Sunyata
With the Christian Kenotic
Tradition of self-emptying.

He understood
That it was the Tibetan Magician
Who could lead him further into
This realm of Christian mysticism…

In Bangkok, as he journeys on
From the Subcontinent
He is electrocuted in a hotel room
While preparing to hold a Mass.

As an eloquent and esteemed
Opponent of the Vietnam War
Many in the State Department
Considered him a threat.

It is Bangkok in 1968: the CIA
As ubiquitous as Holy men in Tibet.
Each operative a rogue
Operation waiting to happen.

Is he confronted with
A very Western tradition:
Assassination
As political sacrament?

Only God Knows.

MERE ANARCHY*

I have some inkling
Of the composition
Of the genetic swamp
From which I arose.

I knew both my parents well.
My maternal grandfather
Was briefly present while
Both grandmothers long survived.

My father’s father died
In the mid 1920’s
As my father entered his teens.
His maiden aunts substituted…

All were Londoners by birth.
None of them died there
Ending lives ruptured
By World War II.

My parents were evacuated
To darkest West Surrey
Safely away from the bombs
And the rockets of the Blitz.

And it was there
I was born a few years later
Close to an old wool town
In the middle of the County.

The epigenetic imprint of this
Dislocation from London
Is unknowable, but I suspect it led
Me to the diasporic city of L.A.

And then to the foothills
Of the Santa Ynez mountains
Sixteen years ago, and the rewilding
Of old pasture lands in Upper Ojai.

The center cannot hold
In a decrepit Empire:
I was fated to be flung, ever further
Into its widening gyre.

 *Leaning lightly on W.B. Yates’
The Second Coming

YOUNG & OLD

I first saw a mountain lion
As it loped across my path
While I was running
On holiday in the Berkshires
Thirty years ago…

Then, just this year
I saw a second:
A young Apollo, golden-haired
Stands (on the edge of our driveway)
Dreaming on the verge of strife…*

Inside that young golden-haired lion
As Shel Silverstein mused
There’s an old man sleepin’
Dreamin’ waitin’ for his chance…
Wantin’ to show you a slower dance.

Upon a time, like two weeks ago
I saw a third mountain lion
Fully mature, grizzled even
Insouciant in its confident presence
Standing just beyond our pool…

On the gently rising meadow
Fixed in place (our place)
Looking through the sliding doors
Of the kitchen
As we finished breakfast.

Practiced in that slower dance
It then turned away
With studied nonchalance
And padded up the slope
Brushing by the Toyon bush.

*Frances Cornford, On Rupert Brooke.

DATURA PATCH

There are entheogens in datura
That will dry your throat 
And make you mad
But also show you the Gods…

‘Every object has a hinterland
Only revealed by consciousness
When every thing becomes relational…
Cleaving to its symbolic tendencies.' *

Datura is a sacred plant
Now much maligned:
Mostly sequestered in roadsides
Ditches and waste lands.

There is a wild datura patch 
Which lays between the oak grove
And an oil-pipe boundary gate
Where it is lovingly tended.

Even now, after heavy rains
There remain a couple of
Bedraggled trumpet blossoms
Nestled white beneath grey leaves.

Its hinterland extends far beyond
History to the aboriginal beginnings
Of these once untrammeled lands
Where it enriched the Vision Quest.

Juice from its pounded root
Was drunk by Chumash boys
At puberty to elicit dreams
Which revealed their spirit helper.

Its potency remains within
My consciousness as a vivid
Source of connection to a past
Where people and plants are conjoined…

In symbiotic relationships
With all that is.
Empowered by their vegetal helpers
Spirit walkers then navigated this Arcadia.

*Being a Human, Charles Foster, 2021

LURCH & STUMBLE

Circles scribed on the pavement
Marking trails where spirits wander
Leaving walkers left to wonder
‘Long the shores of Wild Vancouver…

At Cultures dead and dying
In this greatest coastal City
Full o’hidden shame and pity
‘Long the shores of Wild Vancouver. 

Making slight accommodation
These circles mark the tragic history
Of lands still wrapped in mystery
‘Long the shores of Wild Vancouver. 

Enjoy the walk, ignore the whispers 
Never mind the dead and dying
Amidst spirits quivering and a’crying
‘Long the shores of Wild Vancouver. 

Anthropologists commemorate
What’s long gone, done and dusted 
Tribes and tribelets all broke and busted
‘Long the shores of Wild Vancouver. 

But there will come a time
As our buildings rot and crumble
We walkers too will lurch and stumble
‘Long the shores of Wild Vancouver. 

THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF DREAMS

The Carrizo Plain
Is the beating heart
Of pre-contact California
Pulsing through a giant rift

Severing the Plain from
The embroaching mountains
Of the Temblor Range
That rise to the West.

It is a landscape arisen
From the lithosphere
In the tortuous writhings
Of its plate tectonics.

And in this rift flows
The supernatural power
Manifested to the Chumash
In psychic revelations…

Hard won in Vision Quests.
Sequestered in the extravagant
Lithic morphology of this place:
An archaeology of dreams.

WORM ALERT

This morning, while pumping gas
I saw a sticker on a Honda that read
Stand for the Flag, Kneel for the Cross
From its antenna hung stars and stripes.

Origin stories are the armature
Upon which humanity hangs
Its hopes and dreams
For this world and the next.

There I was reading the text
Of the now and future America
In which fundamentalist belief
In Christianity and America are conjoined.

Each origin story is as unlikely as the next
But all reflect a primal desire
For the blessings of a supreme being
And an assured place in community.

The Honda’s message can stand
Alongside the fanciful imaginings
Of Scientology’s L. Ron Hubbard
And of the Mormon’s Joseph Smith

Of the green Goddess Gaia
And other Earth wisdoms
Twined around an Axis Mundi
Set betwixt the Celestial Poles.

So too we drape the armatures
Forged by the Abrahamic traditions
Those of Buddhism, Hinduism
And ancient indigenous faiths.

But an evil worm has appeared
Birthed in this, our Modern Age
Squirming and wriggling as an amalgam
Of Fascism, Zionism and Neoliberalism…

Where plenary power subverts
Apartheid Fundamentalism kills
And the Markets’ demiurge feasts
As it Tunnels through Society’s flesh.

THE FLIGHT OF ANGELS

Thomas Aquinas calls it
 The Ministry of the Angels:
The mission of winged creatures
To deliver Divine Enlightenment
To earth’s sentient beings…As bees 
Carry pollen from flower to flower.

But the banishment of Angels 
Has been a requirement of Modernity
Over five centuries or more…
Now the condition of the planet
Demands their reinstatement
For it is they that can Awaken Us. 

Einstein’s existential question:
‘Is the Universe Friendly or not?’’
Is answered by Aquinas’ notion
That Angels embody love -
It is their love that renders it
A place of benign plenitude.

Called upon at times
Of deep reflection and silence
Midst the tumult of endogenous noise
They announce a divine silence:
It is in such moments of Quietude 
That these Spirits may heal us…

WALK, DON'T RUN

I sleep, I dream and awaken:
After a cup of Tea
I begin a walk over the Hills
Through rocks, trees and scrub
In the tentative light of dawn.

There’s a place on my walk
Where it is necessary to jump
Over a seasonal creek;
Dry now, but its crevice
Prepared for Winter’s rains. 

This forms a gap
In the continuity of the walk
A necessary pause
To prepare for the action
Of leaping from rock to bank.

This used to be my run
Now downgraded to a walk
But the frisson of the jump
Remains the same.
Always the risk of a fall.

A mad scramble out of the ditch
Fighting the gravitational pull
Of its flow line, grasping for the
Further bank: this is the scenario
That runs through my mind.

It is a necessary hazard.
How else to make the traverse
Over to the steep and rutted
Track that takes me down
To the valley floor…and home?

FORMLESS AWARENESS GOOD, CONSCIOUSNESS BAD

The psyche is synonymous
With the duality of Consciousness: 
Subject and Object.
But Formless Awareness is 
Who we really are.

The distinction between
Consciousness and Formless Awareness
Is simply that of Duality and Non-Duality. 
Consciousness Is focused on ‘things’
The materialism of our false identity. 

The identity theft of the psyche
Has been going on for so long
We don’t recognize ourselves.*
Thoughts and emotions steal our 
Awareness by day, in dreams by night. 

The psyche identifies with forms
That arise in awareness
Of the thoughts and things of this world. 
Consciousness dissolves into wisdom
When we descend into dreamless sleep.

The true nature of mind is
Utterly bright and utterly vivid.
The Real Self is selfless and formless. 
Buddhists aspire to this luminosity
Of the Irreducible Self.  

Buddhism teaches that if you realize
The formless nature of your Being
You will transcend Death.
By relinquishing the false identity 
Of the psyche, Death brings Immortality. 

*Dream Yoga, Andrew Holecek, 2016.

MYSTICAL MECHANICS

The consequences of Quantum Mechanics
Were unacceptable to many physicists
Including Albert Einstein.
Experiments were devised to demonstrate
Their ineluctable absurdity.

Nils Bohr used to say that
The significance of QM
Always made him dizzy.*
Wrenched from the balm of common sense
Cast adrift from the calm of classic determinism.

If randomness, complexity and irreversibility
Prevail in the sub-atomic world, the impossibility
Of a single divine point of view
Surveying the whole of reality
Is made ever more manifest.

When we sunder the connection
Of the world to its description
We enter the realm of Quantum Mysticism:
Where the sensations of our body
And of our minds are taken to be illusory;

Where the world is a dream
And our dreams are the world;
Where the phantasms of aging, sickness and death
Are renounced in the pursuit of a Reality
That transcends the physics of the quotidian.

*Order out of Chaos, 1984, Ilya Prigogine

SIMPLE RULES OF ENGAGEMENT

We were clannish
Growing up in Housing Estates
Like Milford Lodge, Cherry Tree Road
And Amberley Lane…

Public Housing funded by
Hambledon Rural District Council:
Semi-detached and flats that Thatcher
Later sold to their tenants in 1980.

Except some, like my parents
Who continued to  pay rent
Preferring to remain
Wards of the Council.

Long before that, we little boys
Banded together to preserve
The primacy of our post WWII fiefdoms
In short-trousered armies.

Under towering English oaks
’Midst a tangle of ‘A’ and ‘B’ roads -
For the village was not much more
Than a Roundabout and a By-pass…

We fought battles.
Wrestling, punching and kicking
The outlanders - other young boys
Branded by their alien addresses.

We survived, well enough
To fight another day
Bloodied but unbowed.
No one died…

That I remember
Although I was told that
One boy I had ‘beaten-up’
Had a heart condition.

I was chastened and agreed
To lay-off as we did with other kids
With more visible impairments, like
Glasses or were crippled in leg irons.

AFTER. EDMUND. BURKE.

All political  power 
Derives from the people…
Who give their Consent 
To be Governed. 

That consent is always 
Coerced: by violence
Charisma or custom
For we are an unruly mob. 

Then we pay obeisance 
To our chosen one:
Our King of Kings
Our Shahanshah…

The light that we shine 
On them is diffracted
Upon our beaming faces:
It is the joy of the bridled. 

Circumstances sometimes
Arise, however, to disturb
This happy state….
There is unrest in the land. 

The Chosen One
Has departed from the
Instructions of the people 
By whom they were anointed. 

They pursue tyranny 
And usurpation: the light
They mirrored no longer
Embowers our faces. 

As the shadow gathers
The mob must then consider
Its power: lurking, coiled
In its endarkened lair. 

SIMPLY PARAPHRASTIC

The Brain has a hundred trillion
Neural connections, making it 
The most complex structure
In the known Universe -

There are your thoughts
And then there is the
Background noise: like
The book I am reading.*

It would be easy to imagine
Perhaps, that they resonate 
Within alternate hemispheres
Of the Brain…

And then alchemically cohere
In a transmutation like this 
Shortstack: but the Brain
Is beyond knowing…

Let us return to the ability
Of some biological systems
To self-organize
And to possess a History.

In certain slime molds
It has been established
That constituent cells both
Communicate and systematize.

There is a bifurcation point
At which these cells transition
From determinism to free-choice
From equilibrium to instability. 

It is difficult to disentangle
Order and Chaos: Yet Free-Choice
Appears to exist in biotic systems
Resulting in an ordered randomness.

Social structures, like ant-hills 
Are the result of a few decisions
Made in conditions of instability
Ordered by a process of aggregation.

How do such complex systems 
Manage to avoid permanent chaos? 
Ants communicate by depositing
Hormonal attractants

Resulting in an incremental
Aggregation of structural stability.
Nothing to do with Democracy
A lot more like Ant Anarchy. 

Ironically: the faster that feedback
Exists within a system the greater
The percentage of failed fluctuations
That then bolster the system.

We are experiencing a period
Of Global Instability, yet within 
This precarity there remains
Hope for an emergent stability. 

Here in the Empire of Chaos
We are again ruled by a fringed blob
Dispensing failed fluctuations - 
Thus bracing the system’s solidity. 

*Order out of Chaos, 1984, Ilya Prigogine.

BIG & LITTLE

Big Thought

Did consciousness trigger the Big Bang
Or did it flow from the Beginning 
Of Space and Time
Like smoke from the barrel of a gun? 

Little Thought

Sebastian Junger makes a good point:
To survive a near-death experience
Is not to be returned to Life
But to be introduced to Death. 

Subjects report traveling
On shamanic journeys free 
Of their bodies, as Spirits seeking
A place of refuge in the Cosmos.

In such events, survivors
Also tell of
Experiencing a kind of universal 
Consciousness where boundaries melt.

These are the boundaries created
In order to enshrine our sense of self:
We defend them with stress and tension
Until they fade with approaching death.

They are: Shadow & Persona
Body & Mind
Life & Death
Self & Everything else*.

Remove these and we are bathed
In a Universal Consciousness
Which passeth all understanding…
Why wait ‘til the moment of Death?

*Kathleen Dowling Singh

LAST CALL OF THE WILD

It’s been a long wait.
But I didn’t have to travel far.
Not much more than fifty yards
From the house.

In 1973, Peter Matthiessen
Journeyed to Nepal for a glimpse
Of a Snow Leopard. 
He didn’t see one.

But his companion did.
Peter wrote a beautiful book
About his failed quest - 
Full of poignant regret.

I have run the neighborhood
Trails at twilight and at dawn
Under oaks where cougars perch
Waiting to pounce on their prey.

But I had never seen a mountain lion.
No doubt they saw me.
But they decide when they will
Be seen by us humans.

Having been alerted by the 
Anxious skittering 
Of a doe and her three fawns
Running for their lives…

…Fleeing to the right
I looked to the left:
A mountain lion, alert but
Stock still, at the edge of the drive.

I was in the meadow early
Weeding dried thistle and mustard.
I saw its coat draped over a muscled frame
The color of the pale grasses in which it stood.

I eyed its long tail, dipping
To the ground; its black eyes locked on mine
Before it nonchalantly turned away
Towards a line of dense brush…

 …Which marks the foot of a slope 
That serves as the site’s eastern flank:
Finally, visceral confirmation that we share
This wildland with its apex predator.

In The Snow Leopard
Peter Matthiessen’s companion
Was the biologist George Schaller.

LONG STORY/SHORT STACK

The oldest known human remains
In the area now understood
As the United States of America 
Were found in 1959, on Santa Rosa Island
Off the coast of Southern California.

Protein analysis and radiocarbon dating
Suggest they are 13,000 years old
In a time of a declining Glacial Maximum
When Pygmy Mammoth still roamed
Across the agglomerated Islands.

These ancient peoples had arrived
On reed rafts and canoes that floated
Down the Kelp Highway which flows
From Siberia, along Beringia, and then
Down the entire west coast to Peru.

There remains a deep ocean trench
(The Hueneme Submarine Canyon)
That separates the Islands from the coast:
Legend has it, that as the waters rose
The Chumash fled on a Rainbow Bridge.

The Islands and the Transverse Ranges
Were uplifted together
Around 3 million years ago
Establishing a climate with wet winters
And hot dry summers…

These ‘Mediterranean’ conditions
Fostered sclerophyllous vegetation
Like Chaparral and sage scrub
Inured to drought and resilient
To the occasional cycle of fire.

Diversity was further increased
By the mosaic fire regime the Chumash
Used to drive an ecological succession
That awakened the soil to produce
Its bounty of seeds, nuts and fruits.

Over countless generations
The footprint of the Chumash
Expanded from the coastal fringe
To the foothills of the Santa Ynez Range
And beyond to the desert plains.

The arrival of the Spanish in 1769
And then of the Anglo Americans
In the mid-nineteenth century
Denied the Chumash their lands
And ultimately their lives.

The brutal destruction of
These primal colonizers, their culture
Magic, medicines, and mystery
Remains as a dark genocidal stain
On the fabric of California.

WHAT I DID ON MY SUMMER HOLIDAYS

Glaciers scoured the North American bedrock
From the Sierras, the Rockies and points East
During the last Ice Age between say, 15 and 25
Thousand years ago, the Glacial Maximum.

They left behind evidence of their activity
In drumlins, U-shaped valleys, rifts, moraines
Aretes, cirques, horns, glacial lakes
Gravel ridges, glacial till, eskers and erratics.

Up until 1850, at the end of the Little Ice Age
Over 80 Glaciers remained in their
Eponymous National Park. Now, almost all
Have been reduced to perennial snowfields.

The Park, absent  its signature feature
Remains a showcase of meltwater creeks
Alpine meadows, dramatic valleys and lakes
Edged by glacially carved mountains.

It is also home to an estimated 300 Grizzlies.
I rode a bike through the Park for 5 days:
Didn’t see a Grizzly or a Glacier and its famous
’Going-to-the-Sun Road’ was shrouded in rain.

The best of times, the most disappointing of times
Balanced by the physical and emotional jubilation
Of pedaling through mountain landscapes fully
Engaged in elevational, scenic and climatic changes.