Residence
This is a weird
universe, and we can't know.
Does our conscience go
on a scale at death?
This is a weird universe
and we can't know.
Will DMT take us to
aliens?
I doubt we're the only
life in this universe.
Will DMT take us to
aliens?
And does poetry make
everything happen?
By which I mean, does it
extend from the vital breath?
And does poetry make
everything happen?
The professor told me:
“It may turn out we can know.
But we just can't know that we know.”
The professor told me:
“It may turn out we can know.”
The one you can never
fool for long,
By whatever name, is the
conscience:
The one you can never
fool for long.
Jerry Austin / 22 April
2015
All Finite Things Reveal
Infinitude
Was it William Bray
said: "We don't
go to heaven; we are in
heaven,
we just don't realize
it."
I could believe that,
today,
as I walked near View
Ridge
Playfield--on the blocks
nearby.
After rain, a half-hour
of sunlight--
rare as peace--enfolded
the yellow
azaleas and dense-pink
flowers
of an ornamental tree.
It was as if
one, without trying too
hard, but simply
by not fighting it,
could see into
the farther universe of
things. Why
farther to see what is
already there?
I don't know. But that's
how it seemed.
Plain sidewalk; plain
lawn, house,
park. Gardens. Rain lit
with sun
on the infinite trees.
Jerry Austin / 24 April
2015
Discoveries
You may as well begin now.
Life
in a year or a thousand
will
be discovered
outside
our solar system.
Plenty
of problems--Big
Problems--
will remain.
But
on the beaches, wind
blends
magic
and a hushing, while the
waves
roll like clocks
readjusted
to a better-sounding tick and
tock--
a music you have known
far
away in your neurons
all
this time. The
universality,
inevitability,
and organization of life
will
restore
knowledge of God.
However
new dangers arise always
from
discoveries
(and here I wanted to comfort,
but
have sworn to
sincerity).
Still
our center, a Paradise
regained,
will in part be with us.
Jerry Austin / 18 April
2015
Dark Patch
Beavers had gnawed and
worked
the timber that high
valley, and left
a flat landscape our
trail now ascended
past. Old now, older
than some tall
trees.... Dark niches
that scare me
do not surprise, but
what much-spooked
in youth, radiated darker
energies
and salience takes me
back, back far
as Roethke's crow, or
elders'
visionary tellings. A
shudder
black-rose-black
vibrated all
throughout my
butterflywinged
wildscapes within, and
far within,
where shared visions of
unknown
ancestors and theirs
much-conjure,
much-raise. Yes, I
remember green
black forest on land
flat as a beaver's
tail, and toothpick
trees, thin as
skinny people, storks'
legs, bamboo,
that didn't split the
dark but furthered
thesterness, its tales
of all the skies
to have passed overtop,
while owls and
golden little birds in
their seasons
raced to ungloom its
niches.
Jerry Austin / 19
January 2015
