A VISION OF NOW

     There are times when I run across something interesting in a magazine of sorts while siting in waiting rooms.  There's a bit of an internal struggle to either rip it out and take it with me,  let it be, ask if I can have a copy of the page or just take the whole damn book with me.  It really depends on the interest of the article.  Shame on me right?  So what do I do with these things you may ask?  Usually,  I place the article in whatever book I'm reading at the moment.  If I have no book and just reading from my iPad,  upon returning home,  I will walk over to my bookcase and pick a book to drop it into.  Never,  never,  ever just throw it away.

     This morning I was needing a little help with a meditation.  I went to my bookshelf and found my "wheels of life".   Glancing through the pages something wonderful happened.  One of my thieved articles fell out and it was a poem.  I thieve poems more than anything.  I'm going to share this with you today.  Enjoy!

A VISION OF NOW

Here we are, my dears, the autumn of twenty-o-five.

And it's very strange.  The sultry summer lingers

Into October; the foliage that by now was always 

Bright is drab and withered; and we are far

Too dry,  except where hurricanes rage and floods

Carry off our houses.  Is this then our last Autumn?

The radio is insisting, "log on, log on."

And the Television is pleading, "log on, log now."

And signs and portents are everywhere,  although

They are bewildering, because no one knows how

To interprete them.  Persons of faith are tremulous

And unsure,  while those of science apparently

Cannot read nature's peculiar new vocabulary.

Each of us proceeding at a different pace,

Stumbling or running,  aimless or headed straight

To a distant remembered door.  The spendthrifts

Sing Auld Lang Syne and tip up goblets of fine

European brandy.  Others are creeping and

wandering, weeping and wondering.  For we are

The new refugees,  going nowhere.  We are the 

Old and horrifying pitiful dream come true.

Hension of the present whiteout all the tribes,

human, animal, floral and stones, river and dry wash,

at the table taking part in talk.

Nor do the disciplines convince me.  Science

cannot be kept safe from poetry,  the cyclotron

must deal with St. Francis and his little flowers,

and the wolf cannot escape the fore of the lupines

blue with spring. 

I also believe in the wisdom of microorganisms. 

Scholars of dung heaps command my attention.

Years ago, I concluded that all concentrated

forms of energy in human hands become dangerous.

The state mutates into the tsar,  the lane

becomes the sterile corridor of the freeway,

the fire morphs into a nuclear pile,  the songs go

corrupt and become propaganda.  Freedom becomes

slavery and valor descends to shock and awe.

God becomes the church.

I do not know what art means but I know 

what it is.  Edward Hopper is in Paris between

1906 and 1910 and he is lovely because he is always

lonely and will always be lonely.  

He is the figurative painter, an idea then slipping 

from fashion,  but his paintings capture desolation so

complete it will take decades,  until the summer of 1945

to replicate what he sees in his mind.

The young woman has dark hair and sits on the 

floor with a white sheet under her,  one half

pulled from the bed.  Her chemise is awry,  black

hair blooms beneath her legs,  and one foot 

basks in a shaft of yellow light penetrating her

lonely chamber.  Her lover has left, or more

likely has never come.  She is warm and the 

world is cold and so slowly,  ever so slowly,  she

will become chilled and become one with the world.  

-Hayden Carruth, from "The Beginning of the End." 

Published by Harper's Magazine/ January 2010