INTRODUCTION + POETRY + MUSIC + ESSAYS + TRAVEL + FICTION + TEXTILE ART + HAAG'S BIO
Siva-purna came to live with
me yesterday. Auspiciousness complete!
Annapurna, Goddess
of food, "food + full":
the white cat and
Siva-purna,
the image and the real
kitten dwell in the eyrie
now. Nisargadatta speaks of silence.
Silence cannot be heard
without
sound, but when the words
have been spoken, the silence
before and the silence after
are not different. Annapurna. Shiva-purna.
"To be, you must be
nobody. To think yourself to be something,
or
somebody is death and
hell." "...mind has its limits;
to go beyond,
you must
consent to silence." The morning
of sunshine and the
playful
kitten Siva pass in laughter
and silence. Siva plays with
his shadow which runs ahead
of his bounding, pouncing chase
-- a shadow of Shiva's shadow.
Once one needed a thorn
to removed a thorn buried in skin.
Now
one needs a doctor,
an assistant, an office, a needle,
a
bandage, a bill, payment,
debt, divorce from the land
where the
thorns still grow,
but will be annihilated in
the course of
"development," leaving
the once admired crimson roses
to
decay unnoticed to soil.
Desire, roses, suffering, fear gone.
I see the sycamores in
Griffith Park, bare brown earth, the shade.
I see my own young
brown legs and desire, even then
walking
for inspiration, walking, walking though
the warmth of a
California
morning, knowing what is, longing
for god, meeting
Siva, myself,
who says "Do nothing." Today,
the mirrored kitten
arches itself,
fights it image. Shiva is.
Siva watches --
laughs with joy.
If you had it to
do over, what would you
do? Take
more solitary walks, adopt more
kittens. Avoid
people, reflections of my own
image, the creation of a sorrowing world.
"Once you have nothing, you
have no problems." "There is only
light."
Sharing my life with Shiva-Purna
the white-footed kitten,
reading slowly the young
Emily Dickinson's letters. Her New England
girlhood has not flowered into
poetry quite yet, but, even
in
the first* letter, perception
is there, in the second**,
punctuation begins, in the third***,
longing and love and
loneliness,
a poet's fare: delicious, solitary.
Lesley, of charm, talent, warmth,
intelligence, eats Indian food today
and marries.
The sky is gloomy, but
in India, when it rains on
one's
wedding day, all rejoice -- including Shiva-Purna and
I --
for it is auspicious
to have gods' tears sprinkled
on Kirk, so
bright and
gentle of heart and Lesley,
his bride. May
Arreguin-Hilse days
be blessed as they help
the gods create the
world.
A garden filled with lilies,
trees up to the sky, lanterns
strung
high, the bride in red
and orange flowers and silks, and
later,
black on white to dance with Kahlo
beauty, Rivera
sensuality -- shadows on
the grass. How Arreguin longs,
for
musical bird-flight patterns, to stroke
each friend, each
luminous masterwork
of joy, wild laughter onto
canvas, marry his
daughter's moment,
flamboyantly alive, with eternity's colors.
Lilies bloom on long stalks.
"What refuses to die cannot be
reborn."
The dance of the river
is still-standing water.
Light shimmers, never leaves.
Tall cedars and pines have cones,
needles.
White and heavy-breasted, by lantern-light
the
daughter whirls through time creating crossings
-- deep,
mysterious -- of pleasurable flesh
promising the dark-bloodedness
of lilies.
Her heart soft as velvet's
designs etched with
sharp scissors
and crushed with fragrant desire.
Conversing with one friend, there
are hesitations, nervousness,
mind gaps, courtesy, politeness,
equal-time consciousness,
stoked-up interest, concealment
of certain urgent/trivial things.
With another friend
words tumble out, grain from a silo,
rushing into careless golden, sinuous,
shifting, sliding,
slippery, sun-reflecting, mounds casually consumed,
stored,
eliminated. Curious phenomena. I
do not favor one friend over
the other, but I wonder
who has hired the guard,
posted notices, toxic warnings, fear.
I felt it for a
shimmering moment or two in the dark
candle-lit air -- a transfer of
power, embodied in the last
ruling nun,
blessings flowing to us, the privileged six,
who
continue the Good Shepherd's
history. She, Marilyn, habit-free,
returns to her
Minnesota family, while we, honoring
rites of
inspiration, settle into our sky-living
glory, amplifying the
universe of
the gods in this titanic
power-grid while unfurling toward eternity.
What does it matter? I
look at Karen's lake in the picture
on my desk and wonder
if I will ever move again. Will
I
move to India? Will I ever
sit in a sacred cave
meditating?
Will I ever get beyond this
body's desires, fears, fragrances,
playfulness,
scourge, to see its beauty and its
wisdom,
emptiness, awareness, its pure light
of consciousness, its
ignorant knowledge?
Dwell with me, risible Shiva
Steadily, progressively, the mind's bits
and pieces go dormant.
Automatism! I thought.
I do things so quickly,
so
automatically I don't remember -- but now
an even greater problem:
chaos -- the breedings
of a scrambled brain. Things,
not what
they seems, are not where
they were. My gyroscopic speed,
searching, grasping, increases exponentially. When I stop
the
world stops with me. Blankness reveals
the Witness in a void.
Perhaps Nisargadatta speaks of aging.
For the kitten, new in
the world, each perception surprises.
Suddenly two
kittens! one warm, furry, prancing,
the other
hard, impenetrable in the deceptively
identical space, all
surface, no piercing claws.
Then, ignoring the unyielding mirror,
the Light of India, with only a
shadow-suggestion of a kitten
feinting,
incites Shiva-Purna to leap into the picture,
onto
the furniture, to catch the other
kitten. But the glassed-over
photograph
is as impenetrable as the mirror.
Marking time, letting the days
go by in trivialities, like Emily --
driven
to poetry, by her idle,
self-chosen isolation, writing
emergency letters begging others
to write to her, a form of
madness -- finally, writing Nada Brahma,
god's music, trimmed
anguished, nothingness transmuted to
words lasting a century or
two. Sunshine, snow, wind, rain, thunder, lightning,
her's
perception's power, not what she perceived:
lashed in human bondage,
seeing
the miraculous. Beyond the unknown is liberation
I am the pencil, the
cause of a picture, highly complex. Yet,
the
graphic, the drawing point
is fine, sharp, simple. It can be
honed
to invisibility, but still trace intricate
views of the gnome, cosmos,
god. Hold it unmoving, still against the
fabric of the moment. Do
not tap even a dot. Purge the
sky of your consciousness. Every
point left
by the pencil is you,
not you. Lapse from time
into
eternity.
The dawn does have rosy
fingers that creep across my wall, down
my
computer screen, creating vibrating
patterns of shimmer through the
cottonwoods quaking,
even in the still cool, smog-obscured dawn.
With no interest in knowledge,
omniscience sets in. So agreed my
father,
uneducated, who, laying a hand
upon its cover, knew a
book's contents.
I, of course, did not believe him.
Facetious,
silly, very smart, some
mistook him for a holy man, I
never did.
No sign of progress in
spiritual life graces my awareness, I struggle
each day not to fall
asleep, not to succumb to insidious anxiety,
a lack of energy, ingratitude for momentary
pittances of joy. If I
eat I feel as if I have
loaded my body with shit.
If I don't
eat I think of
nothing but food all day long. Age?
Hurting hand?
Decayed teeth? Pessimism?
Shiva-Purna fills me with laughter,
annoyance.
I live on.
In a leisure mode, I
stride around the emptied room. The kitten
stalks me stiff-legged, head tilted.
When I sit to write, heavy,
somnambulant,
the kitten curls its warmth and sleeps.
Less
than a point in
space and time, I am too small
to be cut, too
short-lived
to be killed. When I believe this,
I shall,
stiff-legged, fearless, tilt my head,
look every other way,
investigate,
experience, cease to repeat, in a leisure
mode give up suffering.
"You are quite satisfied with
pleasures. There is no place for
happiness."
Consider the dawn of each
day, and the disasters there
of. Consider
six decades, almost seven, and the squeeze.
Will
you tire enough to
change, to invent new worlds, dream new
problems? Early on, you learned
excessive carefulness. Now,
perhaps, anger will yank
a modicum of cooperation from the Universe.
"Sooner or later your physical
and mental resources will
end...you will
be fit for conscious Yoga."
Entr'acte V
INTRODUCTION + POETRY + MUSIC + ESSAYS + TRAVEL + FICTION + TEXTILE ART