The Future, Virgin, Utah, 28 May 8113

What a burden a resurrection would be, what an end
To have to relive an end again, what a weight of prophecy.
What if the thing had not been well finished, what if
The return was to a grim condition again? If this is what salvation
Does for a population, it would seem kinder to leave them damned,
Said the disappointed and badly wounded man. Aimless wandering,
On the other hand, would become quite the temptation then. Resign
Oneself as one may, one feels there is always something to do in this world
Even when at the bottom lies the wonderland of extinction, leading on
To the nothing next. A lusting cricket rubbed his rasping legs together
For all he was worth by the highway in the ditch, strumming
Chords to accompany a confused human lyric one sunset in mid autumn.
Thus farre, sang the silent man, Time heard me patiently: then chafing said,
This man deludes: why keep me waiting at an opened doore?
He doth not crave lesse time, but more and (chorus) more and more.

This diary is done. The full, thousand-poem text of Ghosts of a Common Calendar can be found in paperback or ebook form at Amazon. The centerpiece of the larger project of which this has been a part can be found at asleepingbird.asleepingbird.com, under the title of "Dreaming Permits." Several other selections from that full project, still ongoing, are also available in book form on Amazon. Search for them under Mark Jeffreys, if you like.

Slocan Lake, Profane, 26 May 2019

The prettiest ghost of a moth flies by lilacs
Blossoming in our front yard, white flutter,
Purple blooms. Not quite night but not quite
Dawn, the light rising, bedtime for moths.
Who in the mountains can remain long?
It is almost the end of May, of spring
In the bright palace of our world, profane.
Outside of the temple of the lake, lost waters
Wander, outcast clouds, fallen mist and fog,
Bones and husks of broken hermit dragons,
Rendered insignificant and random, ghostly
Etymologies, the outlines of lost meanings,
There, not there. History haunts all poems.
The uncertainties that govern light and water
Govern moths and clouds, govern the poet,
Compose the dark forests through which sail
The vaporous ships of words. No wonder
The Chinese once believed the trees
Themselves produced the mountain clouds.
Outside of the temple sprawl the dwellings
Of the details and the gods, in the feather
Left in the grass by a crow hunting snails,
In the unrinsed cans piled outside the shed,
In the soggy paperwork left out on the porch
In the damp, in the disused greenhouse, ajar
In all weathers, in the green, stinging nettles
Springing up around the raw tree stumps,
In the oarlight of dawn through the clouds,
In the words that rise to mind, in the pause.
The ghost of the prettiest moth withdraws.

Slocan Lake, Sacred, 25 May 2019

In the dark palace of the sacred, symbols

And thoughts pass through one and another,

Interchange. Rest and return, eternity is

Rest and return. These waves aver that time

Is revealed as real as everything, as never

Nothing, but as far less than what we once

Thought of, not so long ago, as the totality 

Of change. Time is only a comfortable kind,

Sub specie aeternitas, of change, the kind

In which the indivisible unity of the ongoing,

That which is, in all its points and waves,

Partial sameness as partial change, remains:

Cycles, beats, pulsations, when the same 

Part is in the change, a regularity, a return,

A sacred periodicity of days and seasons,

Lunar phases, years, any one pulsing pattern

Or combination of the same, including all

Our rammed-earth, baked-brick, tilted-rock,

Pyramidal, monumental platforms, temples, 

And observatories of heavenly lights dancing

Past to return, those and every subsequent 

Invention of clocks or calendars. Calendars,

Some have said, could be read as meant

First to separate the time that is the sacred,

Is the observed-and-then-awaited return, 

From all the rest, the intervals of the dull,

The not-holy, mundane and thus profane. 

In this sense, in the sense of being sacred,

Time is the eternal, time the circular mirror 

We hold and mist over in hopes of a glimpse 

Of eternity caught in night’s clockface. Time

Is not wholly change. We cannot subdivide

The holy small enough to catch it just at rest

Or to isolate pure change. Purity approaches

The holy, but never enters into the presence

Because every approach to purity is shame.

What are we saying? Time the sacred lives

In the deepest waters of this dragonish lake,

In the quivering lights that go out, never 

To return, as much as in the winking sunlight

On the tips of these waves we watch today,

Or in the bits of moonlight we’ll see tonight,

Or in reflected electric lights blinking on, out,

Whatever keeps coming at us, which seems

To be the same light returning, but is never it

Returning, just more light pouring through us

To the dark palace, light never resting, never

Pure, never wholly different, never the same,

Woven with time, with rhythm, and also with

Random change, the timeless and untamed.

Early Morning Reading in Bed, 24 May 2019

Stranger said, knowing is a kind of acting,

And he said it in classical Greek, so “acting”

Was poieîn, as in also making, as in poetry.

Knowing is a kind of poetry, then, and not

The other way around. Of course, what was

True for Plato was never necessarily true

For everyone. Shi yan zhi. Poetry, expression

Of aspiration, of the will, was often intended 

As “cloaked expression of secret will,” as in

All those Han-era and later poems echoing 

Sorrowful Li Sao, always honest gentlemen, 

In trouble with some fool ruler easily swayed

By vicious court climbers, flown off to exile.

Or not. I have to think some of those poets

Sighing into their flower-petalled calligraphy

About being exiled hermits were hypocrites.

I doubt that only honest, wise counselors

Were unwisely rejected or that only the same

Wrote fine poems on retiring to mountains 

And rivers to drink wine in the moonlit quiet.

Anyway, one plausible etymology for poetry,

Shi, in Old Chinese has it something closer

To “rituals sung by the eunuchs,” recitative.

It’s a long road from shi to song swordsman

Li Bai. Well, so? Not every classical Greek

Poet made much of a maker and doer, either.

Poets everywhere, revolutionaries included,

Still sometimes sigh into their cups, rather

Than knowing, making, or aspiring much. Ah,

We try. Sometimes, we try. That should be

The proper, cosmic etymology of all poetry.

“Poetry,” from the human for trying, “We try.”

Violet Green Swallows Over the Lake, 23 May 2019

What we had assumed was a lumberyard,
Certainly some sort of industrial operation
Involving forklifts, trucks, sheds, piled logs,
And myriad redolent pallets of sawed wood,
Which we knew had, before that, been old
Loading docks in the decades of silver ore,
Before the road-cut had been blasted out
Of Cape Horn, now stood stripped and bare,
Twenty acres of weedy concrete for sale,
Hedged in stern signage, chain-link fenced.
One house-sized hulk of a cinderblock shed,
Right at the shoreline, tagged in black graffiti
Of no distinction, now occupied by swallows,
Dozens and dozens of nesting swallows,
Shooting in and out of its windows and gaps,
Was the only structure left. For sale! We said
To ourselves in our foolishness, as if
We would ever be so rich or likely to buy this
If we were. On an unexpectedly sunny day
In late May, a dog barking far away, a mower
Mowing a lawn in Slocan village somewhere,
Small waves lapped up against crumbling
Arrangements of natural rock, rusted rebar,
And slab cement. Weedy species flowered
Weedily everywhere, white and yellow, blue
And bits of red. Unbearably beautiful poetry.
What is negated must have a meaning, must.
There were no boats on the water between
The far shore’s steep, provincial wilderness,
Whose Heaven and Earth delighted in trees,
And the gutted, swallow-haunted shed, not
That the lake was in any way empty of waves.
We know we have fewer and fewer decisions
And those that remain remain mostly hollow
But haunted by perfectly natural hungers.
Should we change? Go swimming? Stay?
We know, we know. We’ll spare you more
Allegory. Louise Bogan put it most crisply:
“To escape is nothing. Not to escape is
Nothing.” Twenty acres for sale at this end
Of an industry, at one end of the marvelous
Lake. Swallows flew in and out of the shed.
For a species devoted to meaning, meanings
Were never not strange. Things will cling
To their thingness, and words remain things
That mean things, waves in waves. We half
Understood that this meant it’s not meant
For us to understand what these things
Mean, but we should have gone swimming,
Just swam, and not gotten lost in the waves.

The Star Taker at Dawn in New Denver, 22 May 2019

The world doesn’t note anniversaries,
Despite its many oscillating parts. These
Patterned words of ours express a dementia
Spreading in our corner of the universe, but
The full mind of the universe is patternless.
Anything we can draw a circle around is
A game, Gödel. That’s why we can’t explain
Ourselves without reference to something
Outside we can’t explain. That’s our game,
Which is not nature, never, except our nature
Is game. Eleven years ago, yesterday, we fell.
We fell, we smashed like crockery on rocks,
All of us, all ghosts of these calendar poems,
The body, the self, the soul, the shadows
Of the mind: awareness, puppetry, thoughts,
And many of the words, but not daughter.
Daughter would come much later, in part
Because of that fall, the fall that forced us
To exit the desert, that lured us north, then
Far back down, around the world to marriage
In the Southern Hemisphere, then back here
To where daughter would be born at the end
Of half a century and one long northern year.
Personal history. Circular as an astrolabe,
As precise and forever slightly inaccurate
As the finest brass armillary sphere. Why
We keep dates, why we convince ourselves
They return, when at most they only rhyme,
Is a question for heaven, not for star takers.
The world is irreversible, is not a palindrome,
Not the ghost of a poem. Last morning, we
Woke up in pieces, bits of dream, memories,
Inexplicably overwrought emotions, germs,
Commensals, notions, parasites, the whole
Self-reassembling, woodsy, dark ecosystem,
And one thought in us focused obsessively
On the number one. One. Nothing is one.
Take a breath. One. Another breath. One.
None of them the same. No two one
Of anything completely distinct and identical
Anywhere in our known universe, and yet
We count them, all the same. It’s technology,
Our game. It works without us knowing how,
And we tot up all our wonders, observations,
And we render them as poetry, as devices,
As finely tooled machines. One is an analogy
To another one, to any such one. One works.
In our star charts, we’re still here, counting
The echoing years. One. Eleven. Thousands.
The world lets us measure it but, outside of
Our circle, notes no anniversaries of its own,
Despite its many oscillating parts.