Conscientiousness

I

"The waiter plays with his condition
in order to attain it." -J.P.Sartre

Without Place or Name
The Body is an object on loan.

Location then
Emergent in the forms of its movement:

Green ocean combed with flecks of white foam,
A sparkling line left on the shore
Where pinpoint holes from buried clams
Pop in the sand on waves’ retreat.

Seen then from the boardwalk
As the parched scent rises
Shimmering off the salt-baked planks
Isolated.

And the cool insouciant wave borne
Breeze tousles a lock of hair
Here.

A sparkle of air
That requires elegance,
White slacks, white shoes,
A straw hat
For its fulfillment.

So that you would appear.
You
Imagined further.

II

"Mind is absorbed into the desired object as oil is absorbed into cloth." -Geshe Gyatso on Shantideva

Expanded
The skin of the bathers,
Shrimp pink and tender,
Encounters on its tightened surfaces
The cold sea.
Hairs in their puckered follicles
Stand on end.
The message of contraction,
Received with oooo and ssss.

The teased bathers leap
Surrender
Take the plunge.

The float, sated and sustained
In rise and gentle fall
Aaaaah. Say

Is this returned
Or yearning?

From here,
Seen across the glassy curve,
The green arched back of the ingoing wave,
The brittle shore is so unimaginative,
So stolid and sad,
Its denizens so angular and conscious.

As for a time
Of wave-borne ease
The bathers yet
Do not renounce a common fate.

Given
Love then innate in circumstance.

You.

III

"In the unhappy realms of sickness, bondage and the shedding of blood..." - Shantideva

Gifts given
Are so difficult to receive
Wrapped in implication
Portents, messages.

From a distant radio
The splendid open voice
Of the great tenor
Long dead, glides on
Gilding the evening’s air
Encore.

Inscribing pleasure’s promise
On the inner ear

And vanishment.

A flickering compromise
With what cannot be appeased
By the solo pure exhale.

IV

"As though hypnotized by a spell, I shall reduce this mind to nothing. Even I do not know what is causing me confusion. What is there dwelling inside me?" - Shantideva

Reliant
On the green and cool emergent,
The pliant,
The delightful
Givens in immediacy

Which seen
In the angled light of sunset

Crystallize
As a martyrology
Of those who must labor, walk and eat
In the sorrow of necessity,
Burned by the secret of absolution
Pouring from the heart
Of a reddening copper sun.

A pure yearning
Requiring the body to be destroyed
In the untouchable donation
Of a wounded mind
Whose love, though unabsolved
Attains a piercing moment
Of luminous splendor
In returning to silence.

V

"Then if my body blazes for a long time..." – Shantideva

But the Grasping Masters,
Rulers over earth and sea,
Eye, ear tongue and touch
Contrive to unify
In legal speech
A Roman Emperor’s feast:
A menu of minute discernments,
Base omnivorous intrigues
From an addicted lust,
Not to quality event or sense,
But to location sole,
Ultimate, continuous, complete.

And the globe so articulated
Under momentary single rule
Is glamorized in the lurid assertion
Of meaning fated realized.

Of this,
Even
The ruin, the bleached wall
Stands with muted gleam
On the headland of the shore;

Does not witness rise and fall,
Remains a partial lustrous monument;
Remains
The implicate fragment.

O unappeased of incomplete continuing.


(For SN)




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Claudia Muzio- Ombra di nube- Refice
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVcIBzMgTaQ