Anasazi

For René

Red ochre petrograph beneath
a cantilevered
and swallow-nested
rock

A hand print
A starburst
A crescent moon

A new star-swell inconceivably violent
An old death
bright as the full moon or nearly
day and night
slowing fading
its only records
scattered and distant
until telescopes opened
the nebulous nursery residue to view

It is curious to think
of time.

No paved roads
in Chaco Canyon
Thus the hike
miles in dust water mud

past graffiti old and new
sweat and a friend, creek-ford and
on
to see a record
an event
that Europe would not see
Its bull fixed and unchanging in its regular path above a centered church

Time inextricably bound to space and light
to relative velocity and acceleration
a continuum of abstractions and distance

Plague or drought or homogenized absorption
vanished these dead
painters and lookers of long-gone race
road-traces and adobe haunts just there
in oxide desert and scrub

A turning world away Chinese astronomers
in a flux-essential cosmos
ground ink on void-black slate
and brushed the noted-burst
into precisely absorbent mulberry ledgers

Our eyes. Our vision.
The human retina
is sensitive enough
to respond to the impact of a single photon.

Awareness of the event
is something else.
And Objectivity
like self
an illusion

The journey of the photon from source
to receiver
takes time
The journey of the signal from receiver
to Mind
takes time

Time taken
Time traveled
Time woven into the interstices of thought

Sometimes we respond before knowing
act before deciding action
a seeming tunneling out and back in front of time
which is not possible

I decide to wiggle a finger
claiming will
The action, though,
already has begun

Mind is not
what mind thinks

Mind is your voice on the phone
a catalytic web
—silk taut and plucked with
vistas of life lived

Mind is the swallow nesting
in little bowled villages under eaves
of rock

Mind is my knowing
imposed upon
another’s seeing

Mind is emergent
like the runoff
soil too-soaked
after the rain

Mind is stubborn
non-linear
but, it seems, in time

Mind is
the sea-swell
endlessly flowing neuronal cascades

the corpus callosum storm
and calm
after cleavage

Universal Mind
Wrathful Loving
Detached Revealed
The Unknown

Delusion or diffusion
your little lord
merely a god of texts
of rift-strewn localities

so much more infused in all
dissolved
into the reverence
of wonder

into the stuff of matter
energy
and verve
Little local wrinkles in the mass-wrung fabric
eclipsed by awareness
and rooted

into the law
only the law
Those maybe simple rules
that make us
that hold this

Mind is what we know
a long legged crane fly walking on the water
glimpsing or ignoring
the depths below

Mind is a pattern
culled and quilt-threaded
rewritten in fragmented moments
impregnated quanta or bits
dispersed beyond skin-shields and knowing
a viral infiltration of other selves of other matter

Mind is jazz

Only this
A sense of place
An inhaled breath
in the microwave background
the quiet echoes of becoming
and cessation

Mind is science, and poetry,
it is a burrowing
a dug-nestling into the womb
a cradle-blanket carefully knit
of materials only just-discovered

It is an unraveling as well
always imperfect
an open chasm rewoven
comforting in its endless uncovering

All that can be seen of mind
is in the tangled bank
in the exhaled sky
in your eyes – and theirs – looking at these things

One mind
No Mind
Dao a word for the wordless path
from stellar annihilation to cloudy coalescence
to self
—that bio-entangled thrall and illusion—
Atman is Brahman
Tat tvam asi

This – this stuff of stars of earth of mind
This turning and turning and turning
elemental matter and anti-matter bits death-forged and scattered
This is what and all we are
and that stuff tingles in knowing awe
resonantly shivering as an Aeolian harp

You joked that astronomers can be divided
into two roughly equal groups:
those who study the Crab
and those who do not

A dusty cloud of death swells silently outward
one hundred sixty million kilometers each day
radio, optical, x-ray, gamma ray, telescopes
in ground and space paint fractal-laden bit-maps
of Śiva’s deadly dance

In a half-dark hall on step-raised seats
Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar
gave a lecture on Einstein and Monet

two images on the screen,
the left, grain stacks in impressionistic light
the right a sheet of gravitational field equations
describing the space-time distortions
around a collapsing star

He looked a while at the projections
trapezoidal and pale
like a day-glimpsed moon held aloft
And then this old and slight and brilliant man turned
and smiled at the parallel, nodding, assuming, we too
saw the beautiful and the true

A pulsar corpse crushed-atom dense
spins madly at the foggy core
thirty times each second
with enviable precision
Gamma ray bursts
4000 years in coming
spike detectors here on Earth
and course otherwise unnoticed
through world and flesh

At Chandrasekhar’s memorial dinner
I listened quietly at my table
as his widow sang a love song, of a sort
Lalitha’s voice quivered and floated out into the still and sober air
She spoke a while about her husband
about ashes scattered and drifting about the campus that he loved
about a tickle in the nose as
what Chandra left, entered

Metaphor shards
Pantheism piercing depth
phenomenological
engagement

A convenient designation
for what I is