Train's Light and Other Recent Poems
From Kenneth Rose, The Speaking Fountain, forthcoming 2023, and Ray of Blue (2020)
Train’s Light
You were nothing other than the divine Yet tears traced your cheeks You lurched toward the subway station You walked in a dark mist Red lights from the traffic signals Red lights from the stopped taxis Pierced the clasping cloud Quietly suffocating lower Broadway Your head shaking side to side Your eyes pulled closed by that pain The pain known by us all The suffering without boundaries The suffering in all directions The questions without answers The roads unchosen back then The doors closed now You pulled your coat tighter You dropped down the stairs You sidestepped the crushed coffee cups You regretted the flicked cigarette butts You gazed into the deep dark tunnel You waited for the train’s light to appear
Into My Openness
I am existence I pull strength through these leaden rocks from the earth’s core These eagles fly up from me and spiral by my wisdom This sun glances downs on all of this because I see it shining up there I am the solitary elder brooding of old in the blue shade of that mesa over there cooled by sprays of lilac and piñon When I roll this up by turning within, when I, existence itself, meditate, all of this vanishes, and my stillness is the end of experience Wanting to know myself when looking within, I see only a borderless expanse that no sense no mind no instrument no tool no matter how fine can measure In this stillness, shimmering in the soft flapping sheet of being, a sainted happiness spirals lazily outward broadcasting the knowledge that adapts sky to earth and wing to air Who planned all of this! Who hangs it all together! Existence—I myself—did, just by being, not by trying Only by keeping myself open like the worn slopes of these hills spreading away from this river rushing high and white beneath the cottonwood trees, only this gesture of unmotivated generosity allows all of this Nothing else That eagle circling that mesa remembers this and flies in the reckless bliss of gratitude and praise into the sun and into my openness
Rhapsody over a Sunflower
Reading old poems from Ginsberg this morning so many years later This one’s his rhapsody over a sunflower held aloft by Jack sitting on an iron pole by a battered dock in an end-times train yard littered with the leering shards of shattered industry beside a grimy stream Beat souls, lost souls, their fast-coming future fame a distraction from their complaint, from their cry of loss sourced in the beatific light Who scrambles up to the lighted heights like that today?
Massive Souls
In Memory of Ascended Spiritual Teachers
Massive souls rising above us in invisible space guide us upward toward where they’ve gone ahead. Their long faces stretch like giant sequoias upwards above us into clearest sky where their silences turn to chant. Like saints of old carved into temple columns gazing intently upon us in their unchanging stillness as we pass under them. Watching us from a land of changeless stability as we waver in a watery world of shifting shapes. Our thoughts shimmer and dissolve in our soul’s waters while their subtle impulses are aged stone beneath its waves. Lost in a sharp day of jagged edges and broken paths our direction is sure though unseen when we hold them close. The wobble of water over their images fixed in ontological rock recedes when we stay still with them and allow transience to pass.