WOMEN ON THE VERGE

Reading Annie Dillard’s
The Writing Life
I was reminded of the willful
Doctrinaire, prescriptive and 
Didactic Simone Weil.

Dillard is incredibly
Hard on herself, Weil on herself
And others. Both characters are 
Shaped by the Self-Crucifixion
They suffer for their Art. 

They share the soul struggle 
Of putting Words on paper.
But Weil recognized that
The beauty of the world 
Is not an attribute of matter itself. 

It is a relationship between the world
And a sensibility that stems
From our body and soul:
What we experience of its beauty
Is destined for our human sensibility….

She is fed by the foment of the 1930’s 
Dillard by the natural surroundings
Of cabins on the shores of 
Cape Cod, Puget Sound and 
The banks of Tinker’s Creek. 

The imagined kinship between
A Marxist, mystic and soldier
And a literary Romantic is sparked
By the extreme rectitude which they
Impose on themselves…

And the struggle to express
Their profound connection
To a fragile world that for both
Is tantalizingly liminal 
And gloriously present.

A TALE OF MICE

Two plump field mice huddled
Together against a wall.
A probe with my toe
Did not elicit much movement.

Despite their moribund state
I closed the fire door
Limiting any escape 
To the track beneath.

I returned a day later to find
Both dead, but no longer
Entwined. One had moved
Behind the adjacent door.

With a gloved hand I flung
First one, then t’other
Into the deep grasses
Alongside the house…

Bolstering the food chain
By several ounces for
The benefit, I thought
Of those whirling vultures

That paint elaborate scrolls
Of an arcane cursive script
In the skies above…ever
Seeking more dead flesh.

A FOX TALE

We were alerted to a cosmic event
By the wheezy rasp of a Fox.
We had gone to bed in full knowledge
That an eclipse would occur that night.

At 3 a.m. the full moon was overhead.
Moments after earth’s shadow closed
Over the glowing orb it was flattened
And turned the color of brown paper…

In a Cosmos of exploding stars and
Fragments of space time where gravity
 Is so dense even light cannot escape
Our little moon is a pallid protagonist.

But veiled by our planet’s silhouette
It briefly acquired a menacing mien
A Luna transfiguration, stripped of its
Familiar fairytale face - an alien moon.

A lost friend in the vast unknowable
Galactic reaches of the Milky Way. 
Like the fox, we were unmoored:
The tenuousness of our reality revealed…

FREEDOM

Unlimited freedom of expression
For any opinion whatsoever
Without any restriction or reservation
Is an absolute need for the intellect.

The intellect serves the soul
And when the intellect is uneasy
The entire soul sickens
From this lack of freedom.

A healthy society has similar needs
Save for ‘Opinions’ that attempt 
To persuade an abrogation
Of said freedoms…

The distinction between the two
That which is external to action
And that which is part of it
Form an eternal dialectic:

Theory and Practice;
The Woke and the Unwoke;
The public need to fence in
The essential need for freedom.

Thoughts purloined and short-stacked
From Simone Weil, Le Enracinement 
(The Need for Roots), 1949

PITVILLE PUMP ROOM

I would like to reminisce.
Do I hear a collective groan?
About my jolly old College Days…
Or was that a scarce hidden moan?

Ignoring any such disapproval
I will plough ahead: It was the fall of ‘65
Freshly released from Grammar School
Where I emerged but barely alive.

Degree programs in Architecture
Town Planning and Landscape Design
Were on offer at the highly esteemed GCA*
A joint first year - a tasting-menu sans wine.

The Government picked up the tab
And offered a stipend to pay for a dorm
Which was not of the ivy-covered type
Instead, an in-town YMCA was the norm.

I had my fixie for the few mile commute
But first, I watched an episode of ‘Get Smart’
(The Y had a TV room in the basement)
Edifying? No, I was studying at a School of Art!

Classes were held in the upper floor
Of an 1825 neo-classical Greek pile
Set in a park-like setting just out of town
Where I toyed with the menu for a while.

‘Twas a new program with great ambition:
Turns out the courses were undercooked
Which I skated through and left untouched
My talent and intellect totally overlooked!

Push came to shove soon enough
I left the college leaving nary a mark
Now barely remembered and unregretted
For isn’t college meant to be a lark?

*Gloucestershire College of Art

EGREGORE

The idea that a collection of
Shared thoughts
Can have a psychic reality
Poses a challenge
To rational thought.

All psychic phenomena
Share in this difficulty.
How can we believe in ghosts
Or God without having physically
Experienced them?

Some get Lucky.
Simone Weil made contact
With her God at an early age*.
She could then speak authoritatively
About matters of the spirit.

She was emphatic that
We must empty ourselves of
False divinity, give up being
The center of the world and open
Ourselves to God’s presence.

All I saw as a child
Was a ghost at the window
From my upstairs bedroom.
A workman appeared on a ladder
Painting the window frame.

In 1953, our house was new.
I saw the apparition a few
Years later; perhaps the painter
Died a sudden death, falling while
Intoxicated with paint thinner.

The experience led me to an
Early obsession with ghost stories.
Then to a wider consideration
Of the occult, mostly as limned by
Colin Wilson or Dennis Wheatley.

Now, my inner journey
Is marked by a tenuous
Connection to my lineage
The certainty of impermanence
And the fragility of my soul…

While I continue to
Build an Egregore
With fanciful thoughts
Wrested from my attention
To the Urban Wildland.

*Simone Weil, Waiting for God, 1950.

THE CASE FOR ANGELS

In the Wim Wenders’ movie
Wings of Desire
Angels appear as well dressed
Gentlemen of a certain age.

Not young, on the cusp perhaps
Of middle-age, but not yet
Gone to seed
Spry and kind-hearted.

They infuse those they
Invisibly touch with Hope
For the future and a profound
Thankfulness for the moment.

Wings are a signature accessory
But soon cast aside.
Theirs is a lonely but fulfilling job.
One such aspires to become human.

He meets a fallen angel who has
Happily renounced his angelic identity
And is thus reassured
Of his impending conversion.

Trading eternity for the paltry
Human lifespan he falls in love
And lives happily for what remains
Of his three score years and ten.

Set in a still divided Berlin
Still too, recovering from
The ravages of WWII
It is a deeply affecting film.

The premise is fanciful
But angels have a certain
Credibility that spans millennia
Of human existence.

As brokers who negotiate
Between the sacred and profane
They fulfill a vital role.
Who are we to deny their presence?

  Wings of Desire (1987) has been meticulously
restored in 4K and released by the Criterion
Collection in 2023. It was shown
at The Ojai Playhouse on January 29th. 2026.

IN THE DARK

Light is the delineator
Of shape and hue describing
The material realities that
Configure our world.

Seeing in the night
Requires some time
To become accustomed
To an absence of color and form.

To practice meditation
Is to step into the shadows
That gather on the threshold
Of a fathomless dark.

Here, the shimmering ego
Must be diminished to allow
Our spiritual intelligence
To emerge in the stygian gloom.

To enter this profound
Inner world of negation
Is to renounce any awareness
Of materiality and bright presence.

Shadowy figurations slowly reveal
Themselves in this colorless realm
As our spiritual awareness takes shape
Within the clouds of unknowing.

EMELLE KAYDAY

There was a Picnic, Put-together or Party
In the East End of Ojai on Sunday.
It was a neighborhood get-together
Held almost incidentally on the day
Before Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

Nevertheless, it was a penumbral event:
Darkened by the juxtaposition that much of
The wealth evident in Ojai’s oaken enclaves
Collaterally descended from enslaved labor…
The weekend’s celebrant from slaves.

I spoke with a woman from Mozambique
And vacuously asked her, ‘How’s the surf?’
The country was long an entrepôt for slaves
When it was colonized by the Portuguese
Who maintained their hegemony for 470 years.

After a decade of the Mozambican Civil War
The Marxist FREMILO party rose to power
And established Independence in June, 1975. 
In a matter of days she said, 300,000 colonials
Most of Portuguese descent, fled the country.

The white man arrived in N.E. America
In 1620, and has since colonized the territory
Now known as the United States. In one year
The U.S. has deported 500,000 ‘illegals’
Many have some plausible claim to indigeneity. 

I still have a dream. I have a dream that one day 
This nation will rise up, and live out the true meaning
Of its creed, ‘that all men are created equal’…
I will not be satisfied until justice rolls down
Like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.

MLK, 1963

OF POWDERED BONE AND CLAY

The light in Celtic Consciousness 
Is a penumbral light - the shadowed
Light of the soul, glimpsed only
In rents within its veiled darkness:
It is a glow that suffuses the land. 

The shape of a Landscape
Is an ancient form of consciousness.
The mountains sit in contemplation
While it’s drainages feed the streams 
That run toward their oceanic destiny.

Below the surface, the Earth lives
In an Eternal night, while we trammel
The fragile skein of its verdant skin
Bending it to our will, in bouts
Of egoic subjugation and ruination. 

Our presence is suffused with Landscape.
As individuals, we are possessed by it.
We belong to the Earth
For we are made of its clay and fired
In the imagination of the Earth’s soul.

When we belong to a place we become
Enfolded within that landscape’s soul.
Seated in stillness, like the mountains
Our spirit is revivified, connected again
To its terrestrial  beginnings.

Like Awen Ditty this piece was inspired by
John O’Donohue’s
Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom.

COSMIC INTERTIDAL ZONE

‘Imaginal’ is that noetic knowledge
That springs directly from the heart. 
It’s what St. Paul meant by Faith.
Faith is the substance of things hoped for…
The evidence of things not seen.

Cynthia Bourgeault* limns it as
The luminous perception of the 
Invisible golden thread. 
For her, the Imaginal is a confluence:
A cosmic intertidal zone. 

She references our old mate
Valentin Tomberg, the esotericist
For whom in a quantum world
Matter is energy - a condensed psychic
Force - which in turn becomes ‘spirit’. 

This Spirit is manifested by Love
Prayer and Attention: emanating 
From within the Imaginal World
Like a perfume or a tincture
It is subtle, even subliminal, yet Angelic.

*Cynthia Bourgeault, Eye of the Heart,
A Spiritual Journey into the Imaginal Realm

AWEN DITTY

A sacrament is a visible sign 
Of invisible Grace.
It exists in a world where
The Divine has no face.

But the unseen is unfurled
And is expressed best
In the prosaic manifestations 
Of a Reality at rest…

In our cultural acts of creation
Where the anxious and extreme
In film, novels, and the like
Are buried in a living dream.

Dazzled by this reflexive media
The devil is interred, I like to think
And the beneficence of the Holy
Becomes meat and drink:

Where the soul is revealed 
In the folds of the forbidden
Deep within the shimmering arts
All rendered in the hidden. 

It is the experience of such work
That nurtures our wizened soul. 
We remove the pallid and the putrid
And we again are made part whole.

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 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 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 honor 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.