Our Garden

 Looking back at us 

Paths steps benches bridges they

Complete our garden

Winter's Dawn

 Winter’s Dawn

Through silent blanket mirrorless above

Morning breaks upon lonely branches 

Reminding the roots and the shingles 

What glories of flower are but out of season 

Quiet merges inside like so many clouds

Whose ends hidden by the world’s edges

May tempt the traveler who glimpses Eden

when earth and day meet and part

Sparrows unseen chirping breach the chill

Fulsome awareness fills the mind 

Rewarding the soul’s deprivation 

Fore the rains reclaim the heavens 

Effort’s roots planted ever in darkness 

Demanding faith in future’s fancies

To bring forth eve’s fruit anew 

To taste and to suffer to taste again

Deciding as one must to delight or die 

In that still deeper cold or brighter heat

Or duller chill or humbler joy 

that may await each earnest seeker 

Amidst the dance of steps unknown 

Through pregnant gloom of gray above

The light of dawn still penetrates

Rendering warm new days and songs. 

To Rest in the Forest

To Rest in the Forest

Here will lie Zachariah
For the first time and perhaps the only time
His bodily momentum eventually slowed
The undulations and oscillations some day reverted to the horizon
Flat, and level; still, and peaceful
The opposite of the terrain he craved
Of the state he sought while upright
Teaching himself time and time again to love
Whilst raging on, in every direction
Wandering and wondering and wishing always
For that perfect victory to end all victories
The triumph over all, even his mortal self.

For what is love he too slowly learned
But time and toil, talk and tribulation
It’s pondering unlocking his soul
If only for a few minutes or hours
Before the next eruption
If words to some are a boundary
Deeds the grains to color it in
To Zachariah they are portals
Passages from one wisdom to another
From one experiment to the next
His words are quickly history echoing behind
His deeds haunt him, burning in his wake
Driving him onward lest he be consumed.

Warmed are we who love his trail of fire
Singed as we struggle to keep up
Those that accept his Sagittarian bargain
May grow tall through the years
Like great trees in an ancient forest
Scarred from fiery seasons, but nourished too
From the font of energy and wildness
The many adventures and varied terrain
The spontaneous twists and turns
As he pulls us through this life
Surfing on a still pond beside a pasture
Transforming a branch with a bit of rope
Climbing to the top of every tree, tower and hill.

For Zachariah is movement and flow
Clarifying and carving the stones around him
If a purpose in life is to master one’s self
His purpose is certainly great
Through so many portals now
He has come to build as well as he burns
Uncovering bedrock that does not ignite
Though tamed he may never fully be
And caged he may partly ever feel
In philosophy he finds some solace
One day his ultimate victory awaits
To look back and see not flames behind or others beneath
But the great forest he has nurtured,

In which he might finally come to rest.

Behold Our Random Carpet

Behold Our Random Carpet

Beneath my toes, cracked and bending now

In ways unimaginable when first you beheld them

You who were first and who did behold them

Countless tiny strands cut and disconnected

A tapestry together of all impressed upon them

Arbitrary this inscription of so many jumbled footsteps

Then coalescing for a moment as I think of you, and us

Into a map of love, or life, opaque and total

This gnarly pageant of meaning to which you invited

Blessing me and cursing me too, to behold

As you do, to love, as you do, to have faith, as you do.

Another impression made beautiful and crooked

Vainly inscribed as if permanent this all might be

Or futile as my fear, I also have learned to suggest

That your Gods might not all resemble mine

That the pathways and crevasses the lie beneath you

Are yours alone, as mine may be, as are ours all

Then in that divine moment, similarities do emerge

Between the character grotesque and sublime

That I beheld written into your feet, so many years ago

When I had years enough upon mine to see them

And now to behold them, as I do, to love them, as I do.

Older they and we grow, and further away perhaps

These memories, and clarities and footsteps before

But never apart, only more inscrutably together

As I watch you and feel that I am watched

As I love your Gods and learn to love my own

As I curse you while cursing really my toes

As I bless you while blessing really my souls

Does the dance of our space so tiny unfold

So vast and deep and hurried and slowed

For what done unto others is done unto us

And all that is done may be all we are owed.

Hear this then my mother, who gave me no choice

But to love you more deeply than I do my own voice

It is after you leave, I imagine with fear

That you might not have believed that I held you so dear

I may yet depart from some worlds you sewed

But let my adventures by no means explode

All that you gave and will give to me still

All that I got and take forward until

In that moment your pageant becomes only past

I hope through those windows above you behold

That I cherish completely all footprints we passed.

Once I feared after death of your watching me still

Of your living inside me and hearing my thoughts

Of the shame and despair you could then endure

Of the worry and anguish it might then inspire

But painstakingly, finally does the obvious out

In me already you dwell, my thoughts are yours too

Forever intertwined, your Gods and mine

For by walking not watching do our toes slowly bend

And far have we walked, together, toward our own ends

These footprints we leave judge not one at a time

But all at once, when a mere bit of carpet reveals

the ugly, the random, the perfect sublime.   

To Read the Sands

To Read the Sands

Does’t within that sweetest smile
Stained not nor yet battered
By waking to chill inheritance
As weeks tumbling into years 
Away run from that easiest mile
While you see me unclothed

It is slowly that you kill us
Or dream it so by taking 
Leave of tethers smiles tied
When hours stumbling into days
Away run what we remember
As dying we forget us 

Are we all the same, then
Why do happy images fade
When quick did a quiet fury
Set fire to the laughter 
Now alight again echoing 
Through this newest vessel 
We’ve called my son

Will you cleave apart, my son
And join them beyond, leaving 
This barren shore I’ve accreted
When moments crumbling into minutes 
See you barely burn to rise 
Upward toward the twinkling light 

And will I ever follow
The scent my soul detected 
Free in foremost moments 
Unconsciously made conscious 
As it smolders ‘neath a flesh 
Made thick through dumb persisting 

While I toil on, building vainly
Wondering fruitless will these piles prove
When the beaches you might dance 
Along sit beside another ocean 
Bounding some faintly known horizon 
Where I never learn to swim

Lo my boy, forgive me
Forgive me when you pause, digging
Forgive me my trespasses
These dunes my momentary cravings
As years drifting into lifetimes
Are made for but the waves

And when you dance upon shores
That you have helped to make
Unending waves rendering your castles
Mere layers of twinkling fragments
May you see like starlight filling 
Up the blackness, bittersweet 
This galaxy you call your own

Should you dare to read the sands.

A Letter to Richard

...and above all, is the sublime. 

Happy Thanksgiving Richard. Thank you again for hosting me last weekend in your city. I greatly appreciated the opportunity to share my ideas and passion for a better kind of urbanism with so many powerful people there. I know we will have a positive and meaningful impact should we persist with this project, regardless of those compromises to the purity of the ideals the various processes and pathways to achieving built results may inevitably demand. We will make a difference, and transform your city.  

Yesterday, I was blessed to be able to celebrate Thanksgiving with all of my closest family members and friends, gathered around a table that my wife and I created in a house of our own, for the first time in my life. We only became homeowners in August, after nearly 15 years of marriage, during which world travels, studies, work and experimentation forestalled our planting more permanent roots. My child and two god-daughters feasted happily behind me at the kid's table, the people with whom I have built my life and identity and to whom I most owe the creation and nurturing of my character, arrayed to either side in front of me. I sat at the head of a table. Proudly, my father watched me deliver the prayers and start the toasts; sentimentally, my mother watched me delight the children during the meal to keep them entertained despite their accelerated schedules. I want to believe that the grandparents I buried last year, only a few months separating their departures, were serenely watching the sentiments in my soul, fulfilled in their turn that I have finally aspired to the mantle they lived and revealed for me while it was my turn to be among the delighted. After the meal, I took my son and godchildren to the family room in the basement of my house and watched with them for the first time, Raymond Briggs' The Snowman, the animated classic first released in the year I was born, four years after the book by the same name was first published. As the sublime narrative unfolded, they asked me simple, innocent questions--what's under the blanket?, is that a whale?, where are they flying?, is that the north pole?--at first nearly breaking the spell, but then as the totality of the moment and their relative place in it slowly hit me, rendering it even deeper than I had previously known. My own father, who did the same ritual with me as a young boy and nearly every year thereafter, had quietly slipped in to join us. He no longer needed to watch the story. I could see him in the corner of my eye, watching me and my children. And as the climax of the narrative began, with it's hauntingly beautiful score and poetry by Howard Blake--the great, transcendental flight across a world devoid of time and boundaries, to the place where the spirit of Christmas lives, our analogue for the positive, creative force of love and resulting atmosphere of generosity and community--I began to silently cry. This was a sublime moment. 

And so, this morning as I now celebrate and enjoy that the memory of that evening will remain with me for as long as I shall live, and contemplating out latest discussion, and the three qualities of "art" that I laid upon you, the following crystallization occurred to me:

 

Heaven is when and where my soul would contentedly reside forever, were it not for the march of time. This is what I mean when I declare the sublime. 

 

If I reach similarly apt descriptions which for me capture the "aesthetic" and the "didactic", I will share them with you as well. 

I believe it is unfair to expect that a mere artist or architect can fully represent the sublime in his or her work. It is the most potent and fleeting of the artistic qualities. All of the context I provided above is necessary for it. And as a relatively young man, I have so much farther to travel into its depths. It depends on the one experiencing the world to be ready for and capable of it. For those blessed or cursed with apprehending it regularly--the poets--we discover that in fact, it is possible anywhere and everywhere given the right events. Thus, we can only memorialize our experiences and set out contexts conscious of what and where gave rise to it for us, hopeful and trusting that others will be inspired as we were, or will remember experiences similar to ours, that may have taken place in similar environments to those we experienced. 

If you'd like to see The Snowman, it is available at no charge here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZE9KpobX9J8

And if you're interested in the poem that accompanies the climactic scene of the boy and his Snowman's flight, I have transcribed it below:

 

We’re Walking in the Air

by Howard Blake (1982)

 

We’re walking in the air

We’re floating in the moonlit sky

The people far below are sleeping as we fly.

 

I’m holding very tight

I’m riding in the midnight blue

I’m finding I can fly so high above with you.

 

All across the world

The villages go by like dreams

The rivers and the hills, the forests and the streams.

 

Children gaze open mouthed

Taken by surprise

Nobody down below believes their eyes.

 

We’re surfing in the air

We’re swimming in the frozen sky

We’re drifting over ice, see mountains floating by.

 

Suddenly swooping low

On an ocean deep

Rousing up a mighty monster from his sleep.

 

We’re walking in the air

We’re dancing in the midnight sky

And everyone who sees us greets us as we fly. 

 

When I speak about the "cultural memory" that events and places like the farmer's market, the pumpkin patch and the Christmas tree fair manifest, it is my own experience and deep, fond and now sublime memory of growing up and passing through this life that most deeply moves and convinces me that these places are the most worthwhile focuses of the urban spaces we will create together. The sublime is the most valuable quality I have experienced. It is the place my soul could reside forever. There is no worldly value that could describe it or for which I might trade it. It transcends the mere markets and consumption, work and play. And it is where people come together to form deep bonds of community and hold the events they will remember and cherish forever, that the sublime most reliably will take shape. Without such public spaces and opportunities and the will of the operators to create and support such events, life is diminished. 

Best,

[Galxzdfndr]

The Sublime

Heaven is when and where my soul would contentedly reside forever, were it not for the march of time. This is what I mean when I declare the sublime.