“Suspicion derives directly from the temporal finitude of eroticization—I can no more escape it than I can shirk my flesh.” Jean-Luc Marion, The Erotic Phenomenon, p. 152
Down by the water
after sundown, listen to
the ducks call. Refuse
to see the beloved
face. The ducks in the darkness
call. Accept the void.
We reached the glory
of our flesh last night. We part
confused and happy.
Listen to the ducks.
You have nothing to say, she
has nothing to say.
Work-in-progress
Listen to the grass
grow now as pale summer wanes,
the silence moving
you to kiss goodbye
one more time. So let love be
which knows no let. Snow
will keep the grass till you come
remembering this time.
You may change and still
return to this place to find
yourself in another.
“To love without knowing whom I love remains a loving and a knowing that I love.” Jean-Luc Marion, The Erotic Phenomenon, 111.
Here I am down here
alone in the rosy dusk
at the hurricane’s
far edge. Pale swans bob
in the high tide, some softly
croak. It’s a habit
of mine to visit
this place. I am a lover
without an other,
passive, expectant.
We will see what happens next.
The wind is rising.
“In coming to what seems most intimately one’s own, one comes upon what is not self- owned.” Desmond, Intimate Universal, 74..
Rain tapping my hood,
first sign of the hurricane.
I watch the swans float
in the salt grass and
taller grasses, brown and gold.
What am I that I
find peace as it grows
dark and the rain drops thicken?
The swans, water, wind
compose the world now
where I’m a witness to the
only self I own.
“Beauty is a between happening in one sense, but in another sense there is no between separating the universal and the particular in that the beautiful between is (metaxologically) the intimate universal.” IU 100
Work-in-progress
Dry thunder over
the Bay. Mountains of clouds drift
apart. Gaps appear.
The Bay wrinkles, bright
in the late afternoon sun.
The mirror she saw
and wondered about
reappears. Her question shines.
Beauty contains, says
the philosopher,
the co-presence of its source.
I can believe it.
Work-in-progress
“The between-being of the beautiful, in the richness of immanent incarnation, communicates the abiding mystery but in no way dispels it.” Desmond, Intimate Universal, 85.
Couples are common
in the park this time of year.
I hear them whisper
between incoming
waves, voices rising, falling.
Strange intimacy!
And I am other
to myself, defined by death.
As the night deepens,
the place grows empty.
One last look at the horizon‘s
cold open spaces.
Pray for me. I pray
for you, whose beauty reminds
my still avid mind.
Form in its splendor is to the fore in beauty, shining with the sign of universality, but attending to the strange intimacy. William Desmond, The Intimate Universal, 100.
A beautiful dusk,
a muggy late summer dusk,
sometimes a rare breeze
off the Bay. I sit
where I can view the sailboats
plunge and come about,
before returning.
I see them safely into
dock, and then come home.
Only home is not
home. I hear the rising wind
whine in the rigging.
“The public is as much intimate as universal, the private is as much universal as intimate.” William Desmond, The Intimate Universal, 39.
I am one of you
in the park on Labor Day
at sundown: crickets,
their sad ecstacy;
the harmonica man, going
over his song list;
the volunteer, dead-
heading pale summer roses;
the patient mother
with impatient child.
Tomorrow time will give back
the rest of our lives.
So you don’t say, yes,
I’m lonely, so you don’t see
the beauty around
you this evening,
the Bay’s utter calm, the lights
going on one by
one on the far shore.
Distances disappear as
the Bay fills with stars.
Work-in-progress
“This practice of ‘dying’ to oneself through the self-negating act of love…is indispensable for achieving one’s self-awareness of absolute nothingness.” Takashi Morisato, Faith and Reason, 169
Down here at nightfall,
the air clear and chill and free
of insects, I’d say,
“Bring on the cold, cold
suits me, solitude has made
me.” Were it not for
my beautiful friends,
I’d relish praising the emp-
ty absolute cold
of my death poem,
but what comes is a song to
flesh and this hard life.