It’s after midnight
It must be now new year’s
No, that was 24 hrs ago
When New Year’s Eve ended
No, really, then today is…
Yes today is the 2nd
Then… i missed it?
Yes you did, miss it
Such a shame, i might have
Celebrated, made noise, sat zazen
Silly, silly me, i missed it
Yes you missed it
No going back, i suppose
No, no going back
Well then, onward, no time
To waste, we must prepare
For next year, next new year’s
I’ll be ready for it, just you see
I cannot settle on a book. The one on Deutsche Bank is too lugubrious in criminality and complicity to worldwide used viscous engine oil personality our next president.
The novel about a maine town crime does what many attempted reads do for me, remind me of arbitrariness of details to leave in or take out.
The lady poet inserting into gentleman poet’s life felt too self absorbed and self referential.
I settle on Colum McCann’s “Thirteen Ways of Looking.”
(Silly statements on a Wednesday evening. Like all opinions, extraneous.)
Such an odd feast, Mary, Mother of God.
I admit to liking that God has a mother,
However poorly, at times, in the gospel,
Jesus’ comments brushed passed her —
But more than that, the prospect that
The Creator had a mother, retroactive or
Rethought as it might have been, Mom,
Creating the Creator, speaking Logos
Into matter and language, nursing boo-boos,
Suckling the goo-goo intake of breast milk
la nostra mamma — our mother, hidden, humble,
Let down by eight billion offspring, and the
ancestry of so many more who never called her
On weekends
Mary
Thank you
I’ve forgotten
Your face.
1.
Reading about Lowell and Hochman
Meeting at Russian Tea Room
He is leaving his wife, he tells her
Walking, says he wants to marry her
He reads her “Brooklyn Bridge” on it
After Crane goes off stern into depths
2.
Watching DaVinci on PBS, the genius
Of it, how art breaks through, as
Lowell might compose a line of
Poetry out of mania and alcohol —
Book-worming on Marlborough his
Paean of West Street distress
3.
It is New Year’s Day, strawberry &
Blueberry pancakes, eggs and sausage
coffee brewed and
chocolate donut
from moody's diner
good enough start
to new year
cat on lap
dog
on
rug
Pouring rain
Ensō dog takes
two steps out
barn door, looks
back, decides
he can wait
No sugarcoating what happened in 1890 at Wounded Knee.
[Charles] Eastman concluded that the men who had destroyed the Sioux economy talked a lot about Christianity, but their actions had nothing to do with that generous religion. “I have not yet seen the meek inherit the earth, or the peacemakers receive high honor,” he noted. “Why do we find so much evil and wickedness practiced by the nations composed of professedly ‘Christian’ individuals?” For all their noble talk, such men were no different than the tyrants of the past, eager to take everything for themselves. “The pages of history are full of licensed murder and the plundering of weaker and less developed peoples, and obviously the world to-day has not outgrown this system,” Eastman mused.75
In the end, the Sioux doctor condemned the America he knew. He had given up his traditional way of life for a promise of a better world in which individuals strove for the good of all. Instead he had found prejudice and butchery in the name of economic progress. Bitterly, he pronounced his judgment on the society that had promised so much and delivered so little: “Behind the material and intellectual splendor of our civilization, primitive savagery and cruelty and lust hold sway, undiminished, and as it seems, unheeded. When I reduce civilization to its lowest terms, it becomes a system of life based upon trade. The dollar is the measure of value, and might still spells right; otherwise, why war?”76
(—final words of Heather Cox Richardson’s “Wounded Knee, Party Politics and the Road to an American Massacre, 2011)
No forgetting what we’ve become, turning into 2025.
Here we have a valuable description of our spiritual situation at this time and turning of the year:
27. It is as though we had buried Someone we thought dead, and now hear him calling in the night: Help me! Heaving and panting, he raises the gravestone of our soul and body higher and still higher, breathing more freely at every moment.
(--Fourth Step, The Vision, in THE SAVIOURS OF GOD, Spiritual Exercises, by Nikos Kazantzakis, 1922/23 -- published 1927, Translated by Kimon Friar
Do we hear the calling?
Can we feel the gravestone being raised?
Are we breathing more freely?
bombing Gaza
bombing Ukraine
in other news
christian leaders
say Jesus Christ
will not be
appearing on any
new years eve shows
rather, will be
lamenting the world
he tried to save
covered in dust and blood
stumbling out the town
as warmongers praise his name
Yes
I suspect a spree of assassinations will occur in the next few months..
Hate, when unleashed, goes in many directions.
My name is greed. My name is influence. My name is MAGA/DOGE
I suspect that there will be an outbreak of sanity and αγάπη (agape) in the next few months..
Love, when unfettered, circles the world with kindness and compassion.
Our name is lleno de dios. Our name is Sierva del bien, Siervo del bien.
World is paused, world is poised, world is civil twilight near dawn.
We, you, me — all will have to choose, all will be the chosen, no escape.
You will find me here. You may shoot me. I will fall to ground. Bleed out.
Be happy with your assassinations. Be content with self sacrifice. Dream.
It has come to this. I will be dead. And you, you are tomorrow.
Que Dios tenga misericordia de la tierra y de todos los que habitan en ella.
I cannot say i have found God
That is too far a shore
But i have found sleep
Prayer leads me there at night
As words and chant drift
Through my fading consciousness
God sleeps within consciousness
Please forgive my slumber
I cannot do other
The well-kept empty house across the road has two outdoor lights, one in front, one on side, twenty-four hours a day, unoccupied now almost two years, the owner regularly pulls in, goes in, confirms security, goes home next door, and the house keeps its counsel.
Quietness dwells there.
We keep watch over it. Unofficially. I imagine an order of contemplative monastics keep their vocation in the gray monastery, keeping silence, chanting psalms, contemplating the inexerable emergence of holy writ, holy acts, holy mind.
Evening mountains veiled in somber mist,
One path entering the wooded hill:
The monk has gone off, securing his pine door.
From a bamboo pipe a lonely trickle of water flows.
--Ishikawa Jozan (1583-1672) dialyzen
There are two earths.
One turns with financial wrangling, power generation, social experimentation, self-centered excess.
The alternate earth cultivates consciousness, looks into the unexamined, chooses silent colloquy with nothing there neither audiencing nor phoneticizing.
It rains and drizzles all day. Foggy mist hangs between branches in lowering daylight. White truck and red car climb road towards Hope at top of hill.
Suddenly, the lights on gray house are off. Nones is over and Vespers soon. Horarium is kept. The lights come back on. A signal of sorts to watchers.
There, lower right-center, just under neck of lamp, a single light, off across road, through drips and branches, as though some sanctuary light, the abode of stealth monastics in a dedicated yet desultory life of hidden prayer.
I can only sit here and glance.
I see no one.
No one sees me.
Neither cenobite nor eremite, just mysterious lights on fantastical monastery.
Keeping the hours.
Holding fast to the insubstantial soul.
Somber mist
Gone off
Lonely trickle
Yes
To what
I cannot
See
Yes to
All
That
Is now
Me
Yes to
All
Befuddling
Facts
The ways &
Acts of
All my
Kin
I’m willing
To begin
Again to
Sinn
So needed
To regain
Yes, to
Sinn
To see
What actually
Is
Taking place
To feel
You there
To touch
Your face
On this date in 1890, the massacre at Wounded Knee. The sorrow of it.
Today, the death of Jimmy Carter. The joy that such a decent man graced us.
The realization that this world we live in, this earth we live on, are both beyond comprehension — both the revelation of incomprehensibility.
From Merriam Webster: "Attacca" -- imperative verb, at· tac· ca əˈtäkə, -akə : attack at once —used as a direction in music at the end of a movement to begin the next without pause.
--by Frank O’Hara
To take up where you left off!
without a breath of separation
your new movement is begun.
The heart pulses on, developing
a future. You do not rest
your lips, your ears, your fingers.
The field is full of daisies
and the sun is shining greenly.
It is a musical development,
taxing and inspired, before
the old love has echoed away.
To the eager suggestion of a new
face. It will be a great movement!
begun warmly and without a pause.
You have carried yourself to a new
world, put off the final applause.
--From issue no. 79, The Paris Review, (Spring 1977)
There is no recognizing the transition as listener. Only the conductor manages the slide through.
As in moment to moment so too from this life to whatever is beyond this life, attacca, no pause, no recognition one thing has ended another begun.
I fall asleep. I awake. It is a blink. Cat arrives on chest. Light through fog behind branches from road outside window. Hours later, it is noon. I will fetch another coffee.
French nuns from Neumz allow free listen to their Gregorian chants of final Sunday liturgy. Credo plays.
Are we moving through the shadowy end of something unbelievable? Is there a slide into a new time a new year? Will it be Einen guten Rutsch ins neue Jahr!
O'Hara says for us:
It will be a great movement!
begun warmly and without a pause.
You have carried yourself to a new
world, put off the final applause.
That sudden silence.
What will follow?
Asked
How to find God
Say
Don’t know
For extra credit
Sit down
Eyes four feet
Shuttering ground
If after twenty
Fifty minutes
You think I’ll
Ask again, don’t —
In another room
Water, sip, don’t think
Look — (congratulations)
Cum laude, sic
vel
graduale
sive
subito