The Brooklyn Rail

DEC 18-JAN 19

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DEC 18-JAN 19 Issue
Poetry

Consciousness Self-Learns

 

1

Plants and rocks lay under night sky; ground is a subject of sky; the relation’s a force.

I combine descriptions with ideas of forces; my photograph of night is like a text of symbols.

Look inside when you are struggling; every cell in your body emits light.

Cilia beat rhythms into space, signaling cells of wildflowers in a field, signaling sky.

I connect myself to it, holding the hand of our friend, who’s sleeping.

When I look at a constellation, I construct lines from indivisible points; I bind seeing to an infinity of points and single brights, at the same time.

I may not recall these thoughts tomorrow, and I’m anxious, as if stars had extinguished.

Then, talking to you about his illness provokes tension, disagreement that stirs in my memory the lost thoughts.

Our difference became a permeable membrane between each person and the whole.

Even though my mind focused within bounds, it’s indivisible from sky I see, because seeing is as a field.

Looking is an innate impulse toward wholeness.

 

 

 

2

Particles flash in and out of being; the border between life and death may not continue in other dimensions; gravity and time flex.

Struggle and freedom elide.

When you arrive at my house ill, I throw my arms around you and lead you to a chair, “What happened?”

“I’m glad your mind is clear, even with such pain;’ I place my hand on your chest and pray.

And I pray when I read the paper, for lost people.

Any transformation is an expressed aspect of this intent.

World is undivided, observer and observed, as particle from its wave nature, as prayer from a compassionate outcome, when prayer is multiplied.

Next week, you find me crying over a fawn whose mother was killed; I drove to town for milk, but when I returned the fawn had died.

“It was very hungry, now it’s dead,” I tell you; “Its mind flows into my mind.”

“I’m weeping, because I want milk.”

 

 

 

3

The dead fawn is a delicate, cosmic holding-position, like the invisible spiral around a crane circling the marsh to land.

Its pattern of being maintains without a fixed structure, whose virtual particles and fields may include my prayers, my compassion for it.

The way some waves continue into space when light and matter are removed, using a latent mentality outside space-time, my fervent wish may evolve physically.

From possibility, feeling for a faun generates photons like rain on matted fur; words, visions, images of milk engage with the baby for a better outcome.

When I recognize this, effects become intentional, hopeful, because love is a measurement.

 

 

 

4

I think waves that condense into particles retain their original information and that coherence among these information waves is lost when an organism dies, like a person swept into the chaos of a party.

He can no longer hear himself or speak.

When no one observes us, not even ourselves, our particles regain their wave aspect.

Our attention that collapses quanta contains a kind of meaning intrinsic to feeling connected.

I sit on the patio and watch small birds calling, fluttering in the rain.

Our friend asks if I saw an oriole on the stones outside his window, but I did not.

Describing a bird you see, which I did not see, is part of collective consciousness self-learning.

Ghosts, angels, phantom birds, crop circles, even hoaxes incarnate some of this wholeness.

Connecting to it is being, wherein through prayer my consciousness binds with the subtle energy of a bird I did not see?

 

 

 

CODA

I love a person leaving who sees birds in other worlds, nearby.

All the good in nature I imagine in birds, their images like quantum leaps.

Goodness is a part of my awareness that sensing a bird intends.

We feel love shape a situation in which our friend’s inseparable on a constitutive level from the immediate.

Worlds emerge and transform, so metaphor uses birds to extend disrupted thought.

I want to learn from what generated the metaphor, the need.

 

 

for Jack Tilton

 

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The Brooklyn Rail

DEC 18-JAN 19

All Issues