as it were

Sebastian Mercier: "One lives with light and pleasure in spaces hitherto lost and really quite dark."

The natural light of the mind is the same as that which fills the quiet rooms, until one does not know what is 'inner' and what is 'outer'. Do I have a 'clear and distinct idea' of what it is, or is it only a faint image in the mirror or my mind's eye that I see, one that carries the burden of memory and desire? The past lives on in other rooms, as it were. Is it, then, the light within that fails?

Start the week: A poem starts of as a small, momentary reflection in a mirror around which we build something more significant. The open work. What holds, and what gives? Partial, fragmentary truths, subject to revision, doubt...that seems to be the quintessentially modern, western approach. As opposed to? Cliches, standard formulas, tired generalizations, sayings of the elders, inherited wisdom, the well-worn and slightly tattered religious insights, and the 'timeless' truths of the 'east'.

An emptiness at 8 pm in the Cedar Bar.

---Ginsberg.

The dark, sad opaqueness of an 'interior' life. Confinement. How late the light is. The way in which we're unaware of ourselves is sometimes mystical; mostly comical.

I go inside the tree.

Indoors for this ash

is through the bark:

notice its colour-asphalt

or slate in the rain

then go inside, tasting

weather in the tree rings,

scoffing years of drought and storm,

moving as fast as woodworm

who finds a kick of speed

for burrowing into the core

for mouthing pith and sap

until the o my god at the heart.

---Jo Shapcott.