SUPREME SWAN

As an explorer of
Mystical literature
I am aware of its
Symbolic, allusive
And oblique character.

Which is to say
As Evelyn Underwood notes
No direct description
Of spiritual experience
Can be possible to man.

That experience, however
Is undeniably and uniquely
Evidenced by Ramakrishna
As explicated by his stenographer
Mahendranath Gupta, writing as ‘M’.

Human language is an altogether
Inadequate vehicle to express
Supersensuous perception
But Ramakrishna spoke in a rustic
Patois full of beguiling parables.

Faithfully recorded by M
We have an accurate reflection
Of Ramakrishna entering Samadhi:
Lost to the outer world, tears of joy
Flowing from his large round eyes.

The Paramahamsa* spent
Much of his conscious life
In this God-intoxicated state
Engulfed in an oceanic
Feeling of cosmic connection.

The Development of Spiritual
Consciousness, the expository
Line with which Underwood
Subtitles Mysticism, and which
I am casually exploring…

Is simply answered by the Swami
In his heartfelt contention
That consciousness is manifest in
All of creation and soaked in the
The Bliss of Kali, the Divine Mother.

* Sanskrit, literally ‘Supreme Swan’,
an honorific applied to those who
evidence ultimate enlightenment.

UNLIKELY AGE

My mother…
Had she lived beyond 92
Would have been 113 today
May 25th. 2026
An unlikely age.

Well, you might say
We live in an Unlikely Age:
But she did not
Firmly planted, from the start
In the Twentieth Century.

Born in London on the cusp
Of the First World War
She survived the Second
The rearing of two children
And an unhappy marriage.          

With barely a toe
In the Twenty First Century
She was spared Artificial
Intelligence - which would have
Affronted her own mother wit.

CELEBRATION

Simone Weil is explicit:
The uprooted tend to uproot peoples
Who have remained rooted
And call it progress…

The Hebrews were escaped slaves
Who exterminated or enslaved
The population of Palestine
And called it their homeland.

Romans occupied Ancient settled lands 
Then the Spanish and English massacred
Or enslaved populations of color
The World over and called it Empire.

​The uprooted of Europe massacred
The rooted Populations of North America
And now rampage across the World
Seeking more rooted peoples to destroy.

But those peoples who possess
The benefit of a shared spirit
A common identity
And a sense of rootedness will prevail

For Uprootedness is Toxic:
It leads to a deathlike inertia
Of the soul and ultimately to
The death of its own Civilization.

In 1940, as Weil elaborates, France
Fell under the Nazi onslaught
Just as a tree with damaged roots
Collapses at the first blow.

On the 250th. Anniversary of
Its Declaration of Independence
Who can doubt that the United States
Rotten to the core, is ready to fall?

FIRE CLEARANCE

When the rain falls freely
The grasses grow tall 
Such is the cross that I bear
Following each wet winter.

Light rains fall ‘Pitapat’
Heavy rains fall ‘Topatopa’ 
My world exists between these
Two onomatopoeic words…

In sleep my feet point towards
A range of mountains*
Named for the giant rye that
Grows prolifically on their mesas.

These lithic Topatopas
Reference a plant for which
The Chumash had many uses
Midst the split-splatter of rain. 

And a wet winter we had of it:
Now I endure the burden of
Cutting and raking its bounty
Of beautiful bunch-grasses…

*The people of A’whay slept thus.

TODOS SANTOS

I died a little inside
When I stopped surfing
After three decades
Of an inept practice.

I was always a runner.
And for many years
A bare foot runner
Before I arrived in the U.S.

I died a little inside
When I stopped running
After most of a lifetime spent
 Running, running, running.

Now I sit outside my room
In Baja, overlooking an arroyo
On its rocky path to the Ocean -
A grey-blue strip on the horizon.

I am neither planning my next run
Nor checking the tide or the swell. 
I just gaze at the arroyo, its pitaya
Cactus and its wildlife…

I was last in Baja 40 years ago
Long before these small deaths -
Each a modest sacrifice of self
Uncovering a wider consciousness…

Now, am I awakened or regretful?
This is the measure of my
Preparedness for the big one:
How I die before dying…

PARADISE

Paradise is an unincorporated
Township in Clark County, NV.
It contains the Strip and its airport.
The etymology of this ‘Paradise’…

Originates, not with the word for
A Persian garden, but with the name
Of a 1940’s Casino, A Pair of Dice.
Nothing here is quite what it seems.

Vegas is Israel without the Med:
An exotic, invasive urban weed
That has colonized the Mojave
And its indigenous peoples.

To walk along the Strip is to
Be interrupted by stairways to
Aerial malls, linking hotel to hotel.
Within these vast blocks of schlock…

Crowded gambling halls and bars
Act as the City’s digestive tract
Absorbing the hard-earned cash
Of its unhappily hapless visitors.

But from my hotel window
I can see the distant mountains
Washed by dawn’s rosy glow and
Later, evening’s petrochemical haze.

Paradise is thus forever tempered
By the gravitas of the desert -
An eternally stoic land suffering
An excrescence in its midst.

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