by Alan Harris
1996
Cradling love as an infinite infant within
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Free PDF download of this entire book: Heartclips in Adobe Acrobat PDF format (31 formatted pages including color photos) Free Adobe Acrobat Reader is required. |
Contents
(Click on any divider between poems to return here.)
Good Friday
To a Reading by Alan Harris|
If ever rain should sing a hymn throughout and throughin; if ever unfolding buds with tiny pain should bloom big over meadows; if ever hearts in deepest pain should find a silver light-- let it be on Good Friday, our day of holy surrender to more than we know, our bow of reverence to more than we are, our wail of grief for all that might have been, our needed emptying of the cup of self to find an inner morning-- an Easter wherein the Sun of Love will rise again. |
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Word
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No mouth big enough to say it, no voice sweet enough to sing it, but here, riding on every breath, is the Word from which words rain down. |
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Prayer of Unknowing
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O Lord, I don't know what "O" and "Lord" mean, nor do I know what words to silently say into your holy ear (if any ear at all is hearing), nor do I seem to receive replies, and yet I feel in my deeper inside places (which have no places) that, as I'm fumbling for words and stumbling within my soul, a prayer is somehow praying me and giving amen to my life. Uncomprehending, Lord, I drop my words. Amen. |
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Analogies for Love
To a Guest Reading by Paul Meier|
Is love a light beam we shine upon our chosen few of heart, reflected by them upon us? Or is love an inner sea contained by, yet containing us, in turbulence or pleasing calm? Does a new mother perceive in her baby's trusting breath the force of a new volcano? As a cup that cannot explain its tea or a husk that fathoms not its corn, I cradle love as an infinite infant within. |
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A Younger Friend
To a Guest Reading by Paul Meier|
All gosh upmost joy she much so has, kindly exploding out of her ice cream sundae heart topped with quips and smiles while spinning effervescent futures or singing laughinations out of I-dare-you presents or geysering forth with heartacious good will. From upper, inner wheremost emerges bouncing and penetrating she, who can jump a moon or be one without or with a cow or three. Breezy of soul, a dreamer of whims that go wham and ideas that go am, she and her wand zing out angel dust from within to make stiffness and topsies turn dancingly turvy. |
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Divine Mischief
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If Oneness, why Twoness? Is the One a relief for the Two, and is the Two an excitement for the One? A brush against the Divine Cheek? Perfect Oneness rains polarity down into physical creation and conflict-- but later, Twoness sublimely surrenders back into the One Breath. Can there be some mischief here? Might the Two be the One's TV? |
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Walk
To a Reading by Alan Harris|
I walked with you today-- with you and the One inside you who beamed light through your eyes. Your voice seemed more than your voice and held meaning beyond your meaning. Who was in you speaking? I walked with you and mystery today, and now I need to learn Who dwells in you. Perhaps the One inside me knows. |
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Introduction
To a Reading by Alan Harris|
Beneath my friendly laugh, down where you can't see-- worms. Quiet, warm worms from a soiled past. No needs have they, secure in my all. They meditate behind my generosity, ride calm and innocent in my essence, come with me everywhere through anger, comfort, love. I must apologize. Not even a fish would want them. Anyway--here, meet my worms. They have no names. Do yours? |
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Experts and Folk
To a Reading by Alan Harris|
Oh whilliker thistledown, angel-may-care if the pins of all dumbledom fly through the air and tinkle quite prinkly with scatter and scorn-- who am I, I ask you, and how was I born? Universe, schmuniverse, big bang or no, let comets be vomits lit up as they go; let galaxies stretch till they reach golly gee, but where was I, why am I, who will I be? Theological thinkers and scholarly fakes pretend with Godthority, footnotes, and spakes, assuring, demurring to cover their gap, but all they produce is implausible crap. Oh wiffle-ball shuffle-through, devil-be-joke, instead of the experts, I'll hang with the folk who don't know from nothin' how we became we but never were not and will never not be. |
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My Cow, My Guru
To a Reading by Alan Harris|
My brown cow lives in the now. How? Nohow. Quantity and time and hay slide through her unnoticed. She doesn't count her stomachs or her breaths or her days. She seeks no acupuncture treatments, nor does she brew herbal teas. Being the best she can be holds no interest for her as she grazingly meditates with slow-moving hooves and jaws over a grassy pasture. Her Buddhic eyes see out and in all the way. My cow knows an old, old mantra that she neither flaunts nor hides-- when the world needs a moo, she gives it one. As her swishing tail with Zen precision scatters a bunch of flies like unwelcome thoughts, my brown cow's gaze is inly intimating to me, "No how is there to now." |
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Overflow
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Sometimes I'm so full of good feeling that I can't do any reading. Nothing comes upstream. If you are full of good feeling now, throw this poem away. It's a waste of time. Write me one. |
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On Leaning
To a Reading by Alan Harris|
Some think they leaned upon a stronger will when all that happened was this will had shone a light beam on some girder, deep and strong, within their own divinely buttressed soul. Mistakenly, they felt this other will support their own, when really, all are leaning safe upon the same Eternal Strength which none of us can own, but all may share. The light beam shows it's safe to turn within. |
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War Baby
To a Reading by Alan Harris|
After I came beginningless into Illinois in 1943 as a first-born joy, I drank World War II in with my sweet mother's milk. Bombs were dropping quietly behind her caring embrace and exploding in her goodnight kiss. I breathed her worried love and thought it was air if I thought at all. Twenty-five times my father thrust his B-17 "Spot Remover" carrying ten trembling airmen through German defenses and sowed the karmic seeds of a quick explosive harvest-- while I was piling up wooden blocks and hearing rhymes about moons and spoons and thumbs and plums. So much war-worried gentleness was transmitted by my mother's reassuring smile that perhaps I heard small voices back in my throat screaming for mercy as they laughed. My father came home a new stranger who wanted to be king of the little home my mother and I had shared. Who was this intruder, this usurper? He wrecked our delicate bond with his love and his jubilant grief after peace was declared with Hitler tucked into a coffin. I wanted to play with cars and building blocks like before but my father dared to order me around like a bomber crew and have me bring him things. Wasn't it about then that I learned to kill flies? |
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Washing Windows
To a Reading by Alan Harris|
This morning we two are washing our upstairs windows, a yearly drudge-- you indoors, and I out on a ladder. Each other's face appears begrimed through window after window as we wiggle them free from their filthy aluminum tracks. We do lose our patience, let's admit, if the other of us turns imperfect somehow or startles the first with a near-fall or a near-drop. Danger and caution are dancing. Suburban cleanliness fails to fool me. I feel underneath this dayness an expansive nightness where one's essence may freely float between shadows of shadows or bask in uncanny glimmers of glory, having seen no shape, thought no thought. Day distracts us. When we think to be simply washing windows, an inner mysteriousness guides our hands from far behind our eyes. Day has dangers, but night is as safe as Allness. Wipe your glass clean, yes, but be not deceived by what you see through it. I could settle for a diet of only days-- our windows, their cleaning, shaky ladders, plus countless other depthless decoys that dwellers of the eye have come to accept. But I won't. I must be soft into knowingless night, where quiet bumpings and strange bewilderments flow, merge, disappear. My appetite is for the fruit of freedom growing upon hidden trees of maybe. Wipe your window, yes, in bright daylight-- but I insist on washing my side with night. |
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When Poems Are Still
To a Reading by Alan Harris|
It is calm of times now, poems having disappeared like a mist. Yesterday's nagging scintillations that promised a tryst of wordings now lie content below any saying, any art. Quite free from poetry is almost any peace until some brazen poet arrives to stir up some alphabet soup-- but the very deepest calms, like a sea bottom, lie mute beneath all chop of words and wind. Today let there be rest from poems and from other twistings of the mind, for it is calm of times now, free enough for wordless breath, and breath, and breath. |
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Spin
To a Reading by Alan Harris|
Mr. Forever tossed me out for a little spin toward the ground of being, and zing! here whoever I am is, alive and spinning planetwise. From earth not far can I seem to stray nor live beyond my time nor see beyond my sight since Mr. Forever firmly holds the string reining in the yo-yo that I am. |
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Dressed
To a Reading by Alan Harris|
At birth my mother dressed me in the world which I have worn ever since despite some fraying sleeves and tight belts that I can deal with until the main button pops and off of me the world falls in a useless heap. |
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The Inside Door
To a Reading by Alan Harris|
What, to go out through the inside door, is gained and lost and revealed? What if some organ resigns early or an oncoming car presents crashdom when yet no I in me prefers cessation? From jelly and muscle and bone did birth make me me? Get away, I heartily say-- I rode this body into solidness and trained it in the school of earth. Down it goes, you say? Slips off me overcoatlike? Whoever in me is my inner me says "Wasn't that life a honey?" as out I slip through the inside door and maybe muse "Well, well, well" spaciously for 800 years or so until some earthbound man has too many beers and gets his wife or his woman gently to beckon me down to her womb for another grade in school. |
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seeing you
To a Reading by Alan Harris|
when I look you in the eye I find history and mystery not to be known even as your own eye presses me like a white daytime moon nudging soft against an open sky right in front of outer space leading to everything else that flies and falls including any flying-falling maple seed to bring an unfoldment of up and down (now don't the sprawling-upward limbs and thirsty spreading-downward roots trace out a delicate explosion so slow so sweet that the tree has to yes die to go bare to fall to rot to sleep to have been all of what a tree is all of?) but how I look at you my very alter-life is as moon over healthy tree at play in sunlight in behind your eye behind your inner eye behind the innerness of your inner eye behind even behindness all the way back to here I am across a table from your most amazing being wondering if you see what journey is behind me all the way to here |
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Here and the Ground
To a Reading by Alan Harris|
The shiny car you drive is going into the ground. All the neighborhood trees are going into the ground. Buildings, all of them, are going into the ground. Your sofa and your dog are going into the ground. But soul--have you a soul that won't go into the ground? What force can keep your essence from going into the ground? Suppose your body quits and does go into the ground-- where will your soul then be? My own says, "Here, right here. "The love that makes life life is dwelling in your here, and all you ever gave is coming back to your here. "Thing and thing and thing may be going into the ground, but where can your here ever go except--exactly here?" |
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Commuting past the 'Hood
To a Guest Reading by Paul Meier|
The 'hood is the 'hood is the 'hood, where a throb in the heart can keep time, keep time with a sturdy song too blue for the too too. |
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Through the train window I notice inhabited shells south of the tracks-- hollow-windowed, mottle-roofed homes. Open-hooded engineless cars rust under giant cottonwoods littering broken sidewalks leading to front doors opening into TVs never not on. Perhaps some brutal mothers feel free to batter TV-addled children in these houses, loose cages to be escaped for safety in the streets. Perhaps some fathers are secrets or stray away or land jobs in fall-apart factories for just enough cash to prolong starvation. Within this silver train suburbanites glide safely past the 'hood with eyes in newspapers or closed in sleeping bliss, unaware and uncaring that south of these tracks might thrive a rugged richness not understood by well-fed hardwood-floor owners accustomed to gourmet coffee. Further on, west of the city, suburban houses appear all slick and pretty as polished pain, some of them transmitting false alarms to uncaring cops, some of them serving as highly mortgaged coffins for lives deceased at the roots. Hand-to-mouth 'hood dwellers grapple and make do and laugh, clutch most any prize and die, few of them ever aspiring to climb a dollar ladder or pass away like moneyed mortals, trusts all set up, who shatter as richly as a falling chandelier. |
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Interpreting Geese
To a Reading by Alan Harris|
A flock of Canada geese flies overhead, honking whenever honks are needed. One goose veers away on its own to the left. Another splits right. Zen awareness might say, "Ah, yes: the goose and the goose and the flock. This is." A philosopher might see three divergent realities coming into being above. An ornithologist might ahem and expertly affirm, "Yes, geese will do that." According to a poet: "Feather-flung loners, ecstatic with freedom, fly straight to their unknowns." Hunters say blam. |
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Christmas Awakening
To a Guest Reading by Paul Meier|
From the mantel, stockings packed with Christmas tinyness and sweets dimly hang at 3 a.m. Cold wind outside shakes and snaps the house. The dog is asleep on the couch. This artificial tree, lights off, points second-floorward with wrapped bounty beautifully beneath it, testimony that goods are good and glitter is better. The dog sighs and turns over. From underneath, the furnace exhales warmly upon tree ornaments livingly aquiver. All else is motionless, and less, except for the dog now snoring on the couch. What if this-- right here, this instant-- is Christmas? What if this quiet room is flooded with the future? What if an unseen star is shining here, lighting the way to a new beginning? What room, I wonder, is this? Do we have here a manger? The dog sleeps deeply. The room is ready. One waits. |
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Above poem is included in the
Christmas Reflections PDF book Holiday poems to print for gifts or for keeps Free PDF Download - 2.0 MB, 18 pages Requires Adobe Acrobat Reader (also free) |
How I Clean
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As a vaccer I'm a slacker; as a hacker I'm a stacker. I have trouble sorting rubble till it's double triple double. I go all out till I stall out, then I haul out all the fallout. |
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Griefs That Stay
To a Guest Reading by Paul Meier|
Some griefs (and you know yours by name) twist so terribly deep that instead of crying you carry them like inoperable bullets inside your flesh and feel their twinges every few seconds without letting on to even your dearest-- damnable, beautiful griefs that fit you like a bone. |
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Sharing Copedom
To a Reading by Alan Harris|
How do you cope with nopes, with fallen hopes, with must-haves that go poof in the night? Do you glum out and turn numb? I do, for a while. Join me. How can you know what you don't know? You need answers, but all you hear is the inside of your head. Do you worry? I do, for a while. Join me. Is happiness just beyond the next locked gate, and no one around with key or hammer? Do you fantasize with fruitless wishing? I do, for a while. Join me. When trouble somehow dissolves and leaves you breathing free again, do you smile a breath of thank you into the One? I do, for a while. Join me. |
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