This peony is an empty house/ In which each of us recaptures night. —Jean Laroche
In the panting still of night,
a peony, trembling,
fragrant, blushing bright
against the dark matted vines
of memory,
in which lovers, tangled and throbbing,
ground their rapture
into so much favored dust
for peonies to dream upon.
Nothing frightens
a man firmly ensconced
in false power
more than a whisper.
Volume, shouting,
roaring,
these reside within his comfort zone
of conflict,
but a marvelous whisper,
connected to the unseen river of sound
where many whisperers are called to share
and collaborate,
these are the currents
through which the universe
oh so quietly
swallows the small world
of false power
which goes under
kicking and screaming.
In a world
of far too many assassins,
conducting strikes, consciously or un,
on souls
and their tenderest wilds,
we need more whisperers,
those miming the cursive gist of stars,
willing to rise up in choir
and share the stories
while imparting the secret codes
indelibly imprinted into the molten core
of our divine origins—
The whole shebang a song and dance routine
that never goes dull, never grows old—
singers, dancers, dreamers,
stirrers of the heartstock jazz soup
in a bubbling cosmic cauldron,
and mark my words,
what begins as a slow river
of whispering
will become the silver-tongued sea change
upon which new vocabularies
and seasons of being
will turn us inward,
to the angels
and reapers
who were always us
to begin with.
“The already human being in whom I had sought shelter for my body yielded nothing to the storm. The house clung close to me, like a she-wolf, and at times, I could smell her odor penetrating maternally to my very heart. That night she was really my mother. She was all I had to keep and sustain me. We were alone.”—Henri Bosco, Malicroix
The dreamer’s last
and first dreams
are born in the maternal
crook and cradle of a house,
real and metaphysical all at once,
where the slow blue seasons
of breathing,
between you and “her,”
shape the bones
of sound and memory,
upon so much pared
longing.
“It is on the plane of the daydream and not on that of facts that childhood remains alive and poetically useful within us. Through this permanent childhood, we maintain the poetry of the past. To inhabit oneirically the house we were born in means more than to inhabit in memory; it means living in this house that is gone, the way we used to dream in it. What special depth there is in a child’s daydream! And how happy the child who really possesses his moments of solitude!” — Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space
In praise of solitude,
and daydreams,
as the marvels,
awe and terrors
of childhood,
lived beyond the borders
of time,
hold us captive
and spellbound
to the shadows
stalking across the floor
in the house
where the light
in the window
looks out at us
looking in
to secure
favored intimacy
from the company
of dreams.
“He who has realized that sun and stars and souls do not ramble in a vacuum will keep his heart in readiness for the hour when the world is entranced.” — Abraham Joshua Heschel, I Asked for Wonder
With or without words,
to gaze within in wonder–
Training day for stars.
“Fate will have it—and this has always been the case with me—that all the ‘outer’ aspects of my life should be accidental. Only what is interior has proved to have substance and a determining value.” — Carl Jung
He knew from an early age,
or perhaps it would be truer
to say from a timeless state,
that it was meant to be
an inside job.
The outer was simply a pageant
and circus of externals
run by ghosts
and blind assassins.
His quest,
as foretold by his soul,
was to learn to navigate
through the interior world,
the plains and ravines and hinterlands of psyche,
its deep dark forests too,
and to do so abiding faith
and trust in illuminated breadcrumbs,
scattered
here and there
to the alchemy
of paths always forming.
“All that matters now is the ‘deep inner serenity for the sake of creation.’ Though whether I shall ever ‘create’ is something I can’t really tell. But I do believe that it is possible to create, even without ever writing a word or painting a picture, by simply molding one’s inner life. And that too is a deed.” – Etty Hillesum
Where no one can see–
You, created by you, a
deed worth marveling.
John Biscello 