by Alan Harris
1990
Until we understand silence,
we only partially understand words.
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Free PDF download of this entire book: Inward in Words in Adobe Acrobat PDF format (19 formatted pages including color photos) Free Adobe Acrobat Reader is required. |
Contents
(Click on any divider between poems to return here.)
April of the Spirit
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In this April Sunday there is pure spirit scenting all the air like a sweet candle. Spirit runs through me like light through a prism and splashes all my glands with a rainbow of loving. Spending spirit is a joy and a joke, for no end is there to it-- as well spend the sea. When my brain tunes into spirit's primordial hum, there are no surroundings but the starlit cosmos. I sing into the center of being whose bud bursts open and flowers into a fragrant chant for April eyes and ears. Amen says all, sings all that ever will be sung-- begins and sustains and ends our euphonious zodiac. |
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Beneath a Flirtation
To a Guest Reading by Paul Meier|
A trembling in your hand as you speak with it tells me a story far deeper than the message in your voice. Your eyes glance to the side then bounce back to our center, penetrating my defenses with a direct melt. Clever words dance about your acrobatic tongue, and we laugh at their ballet when the sentence ends. Where is your soul hiding inside this communication? What messages are you sublimating into my inner ear? I'm hearing a cry for help and love from deep inside your lilting voice. I would offer to rescue you, but I'm nowhere safe myself. Let us just enjoy our fan dance of foxy phrases and fencing eyes, of flashing hands and smiles, of gambling give and tricky take. Quickly as our conversation may cavort and twist and frolic, its loving undermeaning remains calm as Mona Lisa's smile. |
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Bittersweet
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You hurt and struggle. You are ripped apart like a coupon out of a newspaper. How can you or I mend you? When the spirit bleeds, words are worthless, sympathy simpleminded, blessings empty. I hurt too. My soul slogs along under fearsome boredom and capricious desires. I am a blip in a flippant universe wishing for an exciting peace, a pleasant insecurity, but I waste away in dull comfort. Cry your tears into this saucer as I cry mine there too. Let us mix them now together and drink a quaint communion. We may be maudlin, stupid and sentimental, but love tasted in tears is heady wine against sorrow. |
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Contemplating Shirley
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We worked well together selling mystical books to mystical people, honoring their Visa cards and their souls. Our store was fragrant with packaged incense and alive with hermetic energy from crystals. Our books contained the most magnificent perceptions that money can open windows into. We played music all day of flutes and harps to reach our customers' hearts. In a kind of preheaven we glided through our store hours with no eye to the time or the weather outside. There was the cancer, yes. It sounded an undertone in your voice and added a depth to your eyes. The chemo stole your hair for a while but you kept on selling inspired books on healing and wholeness until your curls grew back, more blond and beautiful than ever. Now your body has transformed into a clear vapor and a few ashes, but I still see your warm eyes and reserved smile as clearly as when body was your instrument of being. I hear your quiet voice, not the words but the quality, and I know you are fine. You left behind a gentler world to come back to. |
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From Beyond
Dedicated to the Memory
of Gerald R. Detmers
(1934-1998)
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Floral gatherings are here tagged with your sympathetic signatures, reprimanding my hastification toward the flimsy hand of freedom that lifts me into the underheights. You may freely glorify or scorn my memory now that I have reached below the neath and behind the horizon of hurry. Burn and urn me if you will, but I am far too far beyond the mold for any engraved fanciness to hold. But let the children chant their games, the clouds glide freely by, the giant world pulse free breaths, for I blend only back into a whole being from my little island of dinky doom. Be, merely be here with me as my brief obituation slides through the air like a telegram of smiles. |
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Job Interview
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Through my windows I see your windows and frame, your curtains, shutters, and paint, but I know zilch of the private hassles and jollities in your house. I properly inquire about your degree, your courses, your work history, and then watch you dance your verbal employment jig. But I must not ask into the chasms of your being where lies the real you-- such would be corporate taboo. I do hear that catch in your voice over a certain part of your past. I do see that eagerness to dwell on a fleeting achievement. I am Sigmund Freud analyzing your vocational dreams, and you are Napoleon Hill thinking and growing rich. You are strategizing on your side of the chessboard by all the rules as I offer gambits here and there, then inscrutably castle. Whole dictionaries of words remain unspoken in our 45 ticking minutes, and yet somehow I recognize my story in yours. You and I are each someone struggling to carve out a safe and joyful survival from a murderously mysterious world. We are each a failingly successful, triumphantly agonizing being making small steps toward what appears right. You misread me if you see in me a company man. I am in a way you, on trial, absorbing what meaning can be made of our encounter. You wonder what I am thinking as I speak glibly of opportunities, and I wonder who you really are as you smile with hollow confidence. Will I give you a favorable rating? Will you make us a good employee? Fate has hung you and me in her balance on either side of this empty table. When we go out from our room, we will shake hands, smile pleasantries, and fade back into our respective anonymities, each hoping we have done right by the other, and each knowing we haven't, quite. |
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Lawful Body
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Someone or I built me a body to serve as my earthly house, which, so long as I respect her laws, carries me without complaint. Whoever I am wants too much sometimes and overstrains my body by climbing to futile heights or pleasuring too much, but body keeps me legal, staging strikes and slowdowns, suing for her rights through ills and pains. All around me I see billions of other bodies too, each tethering her curious occupant from straying too far into folly. Lawful body constrains caprice with motherly insistence until, strained and weakened, body herself gravitates into a waiting grave. When earth-given body releases me and melts again into her humid earthy matrix, I will float freely to an ethereal electricity to greet forgotten shining friends. Dust falls to greater dust, indeed, but soul buoys up to radiant Soul like a child rushing gratefully armward into all it knows of the maternal Eternal. |
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May Nocturne
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Half a cool moon peekaboos along through leafing trees over a suburban sea of haunting sounds. I follow the dim white sidewalk, hearing rhythmic whispers from my hush puppies, when suddenly a vigilant Pekinese barks out its puny protest and retreats, chain dragging against wood. Evening's sonic ambiance flows intravenously through me, every outer sound seeming to well up from some ghostly inner depth. As I move along, a faraway car honks a velvet chord into my core. Now a strobing jetliner thunders overhead and reverberates in my belly, the after-rumblings in its wake fading away into a silence too immense and profound for human thought to fathom. I stop beside a fragrant lilac bush and stare at the sky's endless upness. The waning moon seems content to be quietly lunar, lopsidedly smiling from its effortless perch. Aloud I ask the moon, "Where am I?" A startled bird flutters in the lilacs to let me know I am right here. |
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Release from the Known
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Where did we meet? Where before have I seen your steadfast resilience? In the snow on a mountain? Have I seen your eyes in churning blues of seawater? Has your voice laughed in the rain on some porch roof? My knowing fails. Being with you is so far beyond and above knowing that I gasp at the depth, as if I were to emerge out of a challenging forest and stand surprised at the brink of some Grand Canyon, the fragrance of familiar evergreens pouring over the edge into this optical impossibility. In school we learned hard and long, hoping to know our way into a future, but now an approaching endlessness is vaporizing every drop of knowing we ever gleaned and sweeping us away in the singing wind. However unknowing, we can do, we can feel, we can think, we can be, and we can (most yes of all) love. A being is fullest of can when emptiest of know. Witness the majestic power of weather around our deeply unknowing globe, or feel within all your organs the fathomless tides fluctuating under lunar and solar urgings. Breathe, breathe with me, my sweet companion, as we sally confidently into a smiling unknown. |
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Rose Cross
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I survey this rose, seeing into its center, in and in to a divinity fed by rainwater and sparkled by sunfire. Never was this rose merely a pretty flower. It blooms big in the center of the Cosmic Cross, bathed in blood-red tones. The center of the Cross and the center of the Rose, conjoining, reveal and conceal the Crux of Creation. Was there in our universe a big bang with no one in the forest to hear it? Were there thorns before there was a rose? A cross before there were saviors? Look into the center of this rose, dizzily down into the center of your head, for the source of the big bang. Search into the cross's crux; drill into the core of your own hurting heart to find a blazing forth of eternity's splendid light. Now take this rose, this cross. Hold them dear until the next big bang, which no one will hear either. We will know each other then as now, for we will say a secret word, which is _______. Remember? |
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Silent Exchange
To a Guest Reading by Paul Meier|
Settling down to meditate in my book-lined alcove, I gaze at Buddha on the shelf, sitting palms up, cross-legged, calm. What is he? Where is his mind? Deep oceans roll between us, the Buddha and me, even though his cast iron likeness is solidly planted before my eyes among amethysts and books. His sloping shoulders and benign face reveal a radiant humility surely possible to humanity, yet seldom found in bodily beings. Where is your mind, Lord Buddha? Your focus seems a thousand miles within as you meditate here in silent serenity. May I somehow join your journey? What must I do to walk your path? A sunbeam shines now through the nearby window and rests on Buddha's heart. "Look within," he whispers innerly. "Look within for a pattern of being that will respond to your aspirations. Consciousness is supple and supportive if you discover and respect its laws. "Bliss abides in every inch of space, and will be found hidden in the obvious. "Master nature by obeying her perfectly. Examine her ways, ask her secrets, and use her for the benefit of all. Blessings accrue to the workman who skillfully unfolds a subtle pattern, then shapes from it a living temple to truth. "You live in the pattern and the pattern lives in you, as the flower hides a seed and the seed hides a flower. "Proceed now into your peace, into your meditation. Leave my sunlit statue here and turn to your inner light. "Slip softly into the shining sea of possibilities, releasing love into life as life releases you into love. "I will be here when you return." |
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Siren
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A siren in the summer distance wails poignantly up and down, growing nearer and louder before fading away beyond hearing. Was it a policeman chasing a speeder? An old man rushing in an ambulance toward his last broken breath? A fire brigade hurtling toward heat? Sitting in a lawn chair by my driveway, I offer a moment of silence to the siren and to whom it has singled out for justice or help or death. "Who was it?" I ask the evening sky. No reply--no sound now but a breeze rising in the maple trees and a low howling from the neighbor's dog. Who, indeed, was it? Someone I know? My best friend? My relative? My neighbor? Will I find the answer in tomorrow's newspaper? The mystery of anonymous tragedy grips my soul like a magnet. A siren seems to drill a hole in my heart to let love flow out to the victim. In the wailing of a siren I hear an anthropomorphic moan of failure, a human weakness confronting a greater law in tooth-gnashing agony. Sirens will wail on for humanity of the future. Speeders may give up or escape, old gasping men may live or die, fires may burn or be quenched-- but when a siren splits the air, I turn within to nurse a pang within my own heart. As with the tolling of John Donne's bell, the siren wails for me. |
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Sunday Profundity
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As the sun pulls up the blanket of night to its western chin and sinks into slumber, our neighborhood transforms into a blend of haunting sounds. An owl cries out--bats flit by-- something whispers in the grass. A distant rumbling train wails out, then wanes undulatingly away. Two hidden toms of a feline triangle howl their indignity into the dark. A throaty sports car rushes by with radio booming to replace the dangers of silence with the safety of din. The neighbors sit and gesture indoors like a mute puppet couple between the curtains of their lamplit picture window, their children eating popcorn near a vacuous tube that splashes youthful eyes with artificial color. No boundaries here outdoors except the neatly folded edges of the universe, tucked in behind a sea of gleaming stars. When Monday morning opens up its brilliant eastern eye, a thousand fervent birds will thrill and trill their greetings through the bedroom window glass in rows of mortgaged homes, alerting sleeping citizens the coast is clear once more for them to venture outside (after coffee) to their dewy cars and motor off into their week. |
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Thanking the Sweet Silence
To a Reading by Alan Harris|
An exquisite calm has set in after weeks of chaos in my being. That thunder, formerly so rockingly loud, is now a muted murmuring in the distance. My new peace is no more explainable than the prior violence of vibrations that was ripping my heart out by the roots and leaving me to decay on an uncaring roadside. Would that there were someone to thank, even myself, if I somehow caused my own release from those taut janglings and knifelike fear into a timely if startling serenity. The planets and stars are so hushed, so calm that there seems little reason for any iota of human stress and strain. To emulate our silent orblike brothers would seem enough to find peace of soul and mind. But every orb has earthquakes, storms, and seething fires. Its quiet, beaming benevolence through clear skies may be a billion cataclysms deep. Thank you, silence, from the depth of my tumult as well as the pinnacle of my euphoria, and may you permeate my porous existence with a tempered bliss from deeper down than death. |
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