SHADOWLAND

We live in a serious time of somber satisfactions

A copper age of closed in skies

where instead of falling

leaves burn on the trees

There was an age of light but now the remaining illumination figures us against the dark ground. Although this is a serious time, it is not without beauty. As colors are strengthened in a dark background, so is our experienced enriched in the presence of the dark ground of being. The dark was thrust upon us from without. But being so done, it has met that dark suppressed beneath our energetic light and thus released deeper comprehension and stronger energy. We had become so enamored of our gaiety and light confusion that our feet sunk our heads. The very frivolity and absurdity with which we danced with rootless and abandoned delight let a strange and slippery unease slide behind its pretense of light and fun. Now our eyes are opening, again to see what is.

Standing in the shadowland

where dark birds fly unseen

a rush of air

A single leaf so brown and fragile

Carves the sidewalk with claws of shadow

Each of us today is completely wrapped up in sticky spider filaments of society and state. All of our actions, feelings, thoughts and time are claimed by the other. Besides power, we allow that because we are lonely but doing so makes us more lonely for we are primarily lonely for our selves. Besides, there is power. One might as well be fried bananas or squid in the belly of a whale. They will take everything they can see and stick to any point of exposed attachment. What recourse do we have, to claim any life as our own?

Early days of winter are in mercy short

soon hope of deep shadows show

with breath of night upon the neck of noon,

We have each a share of darkness where we know

All we have left is our untouchable invisible, where we are too slippery for their suckers to stick. Where we are free is where they cannot see, cannot feel, cannot find us in the shadowland. So we are fortunate in the benevolent nature of reality. Even while we remain slaves upon the stage of light, out beyond the wings, darkness looms. In the back rows...out of doors...through the streets...far beyond the flood of light...there is another...other...other self.

Shadows seek shadows

and shadows deep in shadows drive

Shadows leak shadows

and shadows deep in shadows thrive

As we are limited by the external other, the day other, so are we free with the inner other, that other self who walks alone on the darkling plain. And some cast away the inner self. Even so, I think it still may be, wandering and watching. But I am not them, only me, so I cannot know for certain.

Like an angular fox in heat

the road turns through the trees

driving down in leaf shadowed shadow leaves

damp earth beside a trickling stream

gurgle sounding strange black noise

But I do know an other self who walks the far desert of night, even when near, even now, even as I sit writing and watching the fog from the third floor of an abandoned library, in as much peace as the day allows. A few walkers on the plaza below go from one place to another in the cold, half of them protecting cups from the espresso shop which then must still be open. Here in this vast and elegant building of books and windows there is only a quiet hum of heating and the muted sounds of workmen doing repairs below. This is day as it might be, empty and white, but usually is not.

I had a serious difficulty with the sun,

not that orange glob of winter=s first hazy dawn

but what the daylight revealed,

eyes set grimly in the prison of time.

We walk the dark ground even in the light. This is our source, always secret, always revealed. Creative form printed from this template leave it not only unchanged but enigmatic. The dark ground can never be known although it always reveals itself. We walk upon the dark ground with firm step when we know that ground be there. Solid earth, dark ground holds our weight. Even a tower of light is supported by the dark ground.

Suddenly

after seven weeks of sunny October

the sky gathers grey cloaks

for the fall of November

As little as we know of what comes next, it is something to know how little. Time is not a solid well lit path or a secure place to walk; neither is it a narrow channel between two blank walls. Time is more like a stroll in the forest, going left and right around the trees, rarely choosing or not choosing but letting happen a direction for another step, never quite knowing what lies beyond the edge of the dark, beast or pretty flower. Deeper time is moonlit night and deepest time all quite dark. Are there small animals that make our way cheerful with their presence, like squirrels and birds in the light of day? Like tiny cats who prowl for smaller prey?

softly to the core

of winter=s early thigh

drifting in secret with

the shadows after night

We know little of the present and less of past and future. The familiar and the beloved recede into the disappearing past. The future comes upon us like a tiger leaping from the dark. What was before our birth is wrapped in the darkness of dim knowing; what comes after now is even more hidden. We move through time, stepping from one dark stone to another, shrouded in fog that hides our future steps and dims our past. Whatever the color of the fog, it is a darkness of unknowing. And as we walk through time, if there is any light at all then we must cast shadows, darker shadows upon the dark.

To know what is not is not necessarily to know what is. But in order to know what is it is necessary to know what is not. To know the dark is not necessarily to know the light. But in order to know the light it is necessary to know the dark.

Wherever there are limits

I can create a glow

even in the polished hallway

where no wildfires grow

We know little of our own lives and so much less of others, little of what they do, less of what they feel and almost nothing of what they think. From the dimly lit present, time spreads out its wild and distant wings in a butterfly abandon of incandescent exploration. Of the material universe we, even collectively, know but a speck. Is all the fire, gas and stone beyond our exploration dead in unawareness or is there other light. We do not yet know. Of our personal origins, why I myself and you yourself are here while we are, why?

Melting softly, hard sight sways

and in the narrow light does play

reality so strange and strong

which does no wrong to us who lay

Dark behind us. Darkness is always behind us. Whichever way we turn, the darkness is behind us. When we walk forward, darkness follows. If we step back, darkness retreats. Against the light we are shadows of darkness; against the dark we are bright. Light is only light if it is seen and all the light that is seen is seen by us. Ourselves we are, beings who illuminate small spaces, but all the light there is, in the vasty dark. Even so, do stars shine most in the blackest night.

While softly midnight wicked

did in satin wrap black eyes

and cloak my old cat

in a diamond sash of dark.

Walking on gray cement, I feel dark current beneath my feet. It pulls with gentle insistence. I can feel it in my toes and soles. Always in the cold clear day there is a dark current tugging from below. But it is not only below, it is all around. You can feel it in your chest and throat, in the back of your mind, humming quietly behind the wind of thought. When you know the dark current flowing, that is a prism refracting experience into time=s dark spectrum.

Music above and music underneath

our earthly presence is suspended

between the fiery teeth of heaven

and a warn exultant bath of not

Even flow we in the dark. We are the dark light, the light of darkness. Both light and dark are our domain. Both lightness and darkness come into presence in our awareness. Dark are many colors of awareness. Dark is proper color for entrances and exits, for passageways to secret places. Is not dark the natural color, only destroyed by intrusive light? But the dark is not destroyed, just overlain by the light. A bedrock of darkness still remains, remains still beneath the noisy light.

and so in dimness fades away the day

what intrigues us most

our frozen ghost

like candy in the candlelight

Deeply meet we in the dark. Love is dark in its depths. Clear water from deep wells is pulled up from the shadows. Our dark love is more than whispering breezes, thin and breaking in the sunlight.

Quietly for she is sleeping

I sit on one side of the bed

eating peaches and cream

as happy as a charcoal love marine

Winter evenings bring respite from daylight. Earlier a swift December afternoon glowed a cool translucent sideways sun. Then evendark comes swift and cool and softly fills stone stairways while electric fire grows geometry inside out for night.

Out of the sun=s silent menace

a slice of earth leads off

into a softer shadow light

At least for me I find a long and almost invincible habit of looking at the light; my attention is pulled like a moth toward the brighter parts of the environment. No, not directly at the sun but in daytime I observe mostly the places between the shadows, the sunlit bark of the tree rather than the other side; even in the library I look out at the blue sky from the upper floor windows while walking along or at the oval splashes of light on the floor. Walking to the bus stop on an early winter evening I find myself staring at the bright electric lights along the way or at the illuminated zones of walls and buildings, at lit interiors, even at moving headlights. If I burn a single candle late at night I will watch the flame. But by will I look at shadows and at shadows within shadows, watch not the bright windows but the dark ones, the black bushes, the starless urban sky. It will require a continuation of will and memory to bring about anew habit of vision.

Step and step alone along

the dark road where truth is gone

and love is all that fills

a silence only scented

with secret joy alive.

The dark is perfectly clear; it is a natural color to watch. In pictures and perception there is as much dark as light. Why then are we, or at least I, predisposed to watch the light rather than the dark? The light is hard, less yielding. Is that how it grabs our attention?

Space empty and undefiled

by the beaded threads of light

or belching furnaces of coughing convolutions

wasting its energetic glut of flux

Think of how many darknesses there are. There is the darkness of time, of forgotten past and unknown future. There is the darkness of space, far and far beyond. There is the darkness of the sea, miles deep. There is the darkness of the earth inside. There are many darknesses of the mind, both of feeling and thought, the old stale chewing gum beneath the benches of power, then all we do not know, the personal unknown and the collective unknown. There is the rich darkness of the night where we have what freedom remains. There is the darkness of the heart, of love and hate and the deep wild. There is the dark and trackless forest. There is the darkness of being and there is not the darkness of void. And these darknesses combine and recombine in fragmentation and synthesis. Each shadows the other and each resides in each other.

Space so empty far beyond the stars

like a twenty year old in a woolen blanket

who hopes that noise preludes a mingle

in the forlorn galactic night

I have no complaint against light itself. Day has beauty, from dim dawn where Jupiter and the moon clasp arms in gray conjunction, through the brilliant noon of energy when the very brilliance provides us with a dark escape unnoticed, right through the center of the light, as when a couple meet in such absolute being that, although I see them through the glasses of benevolence, they are unspotted by the regulators blinded in the light. The problem with day is that it has been stolen, raped and chained into a cage where we are imprisoned like rats, like deaf moles, like tasteless worms shrunken and decayed into a crunchy crisp on the sidewalk. Who has stolen the day? It is most obviously the bosses, the police, the accountants, the virtuous old widows staring in anger from behind their blinds, the administrators, the terrible mechanical beasts that grind us into asphalt, blood and steel. Is there a deeper cause? I cannot find it and as another prisoner myself I cast off cause in the end of day. (Am I, am I the cause? By my actions, inactions or very being?)

Who could say it, who could stay it?

The bloom of time=s apricot epiphany

dark stars above the storm

dark storm beneath the stars

Once, long ago, and somewhere not so long ago, the dark night was for fear (or was it?; is this a pseudo historical myth?) Of wolves and robbers in the Northland, of secret snakes, tigers and more robbers in the south. We have largely resolved the dangers of the night, until they are human and partially predictable. But have we done so by giving up the play of day?

It is a solvent of extreme degree

time and night, their invisible union

what a rare of hubris this

that light is and dark is not.

Dark transcends the absence of light. The dark is present yet absent, indistinct within undefined boundaries. A dark room keeps time at arm=s length in winding curling resonance of return and solution, a return to the indefinite present more than a passing away. In all of the darks there are invisibilities of limit which also remove them from the forefront of mind, letting awareness grow in the interstitial inexactitude which fails even to mark off self from other except when wanted in the lonely joy.

As in day so it is in night

the plainest sight is pure and absolute black

clearest, rarest

a thump upon the chest of time

Some of these words were written from a place most lightful, big south windows and mobile reflectors, so much light that few go there in the noon, especially the winter noon when low sun penetrates. But I go there. I sit enveloped in maximal light, a great still wave of light, where every particle of every stone in a large room is revealed. There in utmost light I write about the dark. But these words about the light I wrote in a quiet room at night.

We have all seen the sea gull gray

across the bright sky fly

so dark a mark

Until upon a cloud the flight does stray

and out of shadow shows the eye

white wings so bright