Poems
All things, to all things
perfectly indifferent,
perfectly working together
in discord for a Good beyond
good, for a Being more
timeless in transience, more
eternal in its dwindling than
God there in heaven.
‘I’ am a crowd, obeying as many laws
As it has members. Chemically impure
Are all ‘my’ beings. There’s no single cure
For what can never have a single cause.
Somewhere between brute silence and last Sunday’s
Thirteen hundred thousand sermons;
Somewhere between
Calvin on Christ (God help us!) and the lizards;
Somewhere between our soiled and greasy currency of words
And the first star, the great moths fluttering
About the ghosts of flowers,
Lies the clear place where I, no longer I,
Nevertheless remember
Love’s nightlong wisdom of the other shore;
And, listening to the wind, remember too
That other night, that first of widowhood,
Sleepless, with death beside me in the dark.
Mine, mine, all mine, mine inescapably!
But I, no longer I,
In this clear place between my thought and silence
See all I had and lost, anguish and joys,
Glowing like gentians in the Alpine grass,
Blue, unpossessed and open.
Thus-Gone to Thus-Gone, I with a Buddha’s hand
Offer the unplucked flower, the frog’s soliloquy
Among the lotus leaves, the milk-smeared mouth
At my full breast and love and, like the cloudless
Sky that makes possible mountain and setting moon,
This emptiness that is the womb of love
This poetry of silence.
Up here, you ask me,
Up here aloft where Shiva
Dances above the world,
What the devil do you think I’m doing?No answer, friend—except
That hawk below us is turning,
Those black and arrowy swifts
Trailing long silver wires across the air—
The shrillness of their crying.How far, you say, from the hot plains,
How far, reproachfully, from all my people!
And yet how close! For here between the cloudy
Sky and sea below, suddenly visible,
I read their luminous secret and my own.
O you the creator, you the destroyer, you who sustain and make an end,
Who in sunlight dance among the birds and the children at their play,
Who at midnight dance among corpses in the burning grounds,
You Shiva, you dark and terrible Bhairava,
You Suchness and Illusion, the Void and All Things,
You are the lord of life, and therefore I have brought you flowers;
You are the lord of death, and therefore I have brought you my heart—
This heart that is now your burning ground.
Ignorance there and self shall be consumed by with fire.
That you may dance, Bhairava, among the ashes.
That you may dance, Lord Shiva, in a a place of flowers,
And I dance with you.
Pully, hauly, tug with a will;
The gods wiggle-waggle but the sky stands still.
Soles occidere et redire possunt;
nobis cum semel occidit brevis lux,
nox est perpetua una dormienda.
Da mi basia mille.
Suns are able to hide and return;
when once our short light hides,
there is one perpetual night.
Give me a thousand kisses.— Jacob Lauinger.
Everyone talks of sex; take none of them seriously—
Not whore nor hermit, neither Paul nor Freud.
Love—and your lips, her breasts will change mysteriously
Into Themselves, the Suchness and the Void.
Aldous Huxley. Island. 1962. Pages 30—31, 68, 86—87, 131, 162, 164, 234, 238, 243, Vintage 2005 Edition. Copyright 1962 Mrs Laura Huxley.