Gates of Truth are a Waterfall

It's always seemed normal. What everyone does except me. I don't because I can't. I've seen consequences. It's against my ethic to knowingly create situations where others will get hurt. I want relationships of integrity. Love means too much too me to play around with it. An intense woman of intensities, I don't need to take more than my share.

It's been around me all my life. Nothing new. I'm blasé about it.

And then, finally I understand betrayal, this particular humiliation, pain. A breakthrough. Increase in understanding, empathy. To know how it feels helps me to be sensitive, more so because experienced. How a kind of post-traumatic stress syndrome takes over as scenes of deception are played and replayed in their horrifying truth.

I think there is a will in the structure of reality, something part of the energy of the universe's being, towards truth. In all things. The way it works; what really happened. It is not the nature of life to hide its realities. Revealment, over and over of the secrets of nature. Of each other. Of our atrocities.

I think it is there in the core of my being, expressed in the archetypal imagery of my dreams, represented in me thus.

The will to truth.

When I encountered her as the strange and fragile Maat, the ancient Egyptian goddess of truth I understood how old. Always ultimately the truth, a tallying in the hereafter, in the karma which determines the future of the soul.

The ledger of life. When dishonesties are exposed.

The universe has a force of
truth to it.
Incredible. How this is.
But it is.

II

In my inability to comprehend
myself.

I feel like a collection of attitudes, beliefs, feelings, thoughts and sensations which are in constant flux.

Whatever is now is all, and it can be diametrically opposed to yesterday and not seem inconsistent.

When I say I love you, I do, though it is a complex unfolding.

Leafless vines cling to the walls, ready for Spring, the verdant carpet. The concrete waterfall is a melody of its own. Pigeons hop along the top to drink and bathe where the water crests forth. As I sit nearby on a bench, my notebook is sprinkled and I look up to see a tiny wren on the naked branches ruffling its tail feathers. "Little bird!" It shakes a few more drops that fall on the cement walkway in front of me before it flies off to my laughter. My baptized book.

This little notebook
of my truths.

New Café on the Block

I'm at a new coffee shop that hasn't quite opened yet across the street from where I live where I have been given a free Americano with frothed milk and it's delicious. They sell Bodum here. A little pricey, but the coffee is excellent and while the shops are a bit distracting outside there is a good view of the magnificent sky. It is the sky that I need to see when I write - which made writing a challenge in Gideon's basement! When I had the money, I went to an Italian café nearby and wrote. That's a little far now, but perhaps this café, where I am now, will be my "spot." Here's a cell phone pic to show you...

(click on photo to enlarge)

Still Life

I would never have left, that's how it was.

But I am shifted into the expanse of light.

There's no attitude I can think of to express this.

The streets are busy, and I walk them, Spring warmth. I can't say if it's love. It's very strange to be here, where it's incipient.

I'm not sure how we stay together when we do, or how we fall away from each other.

There are many ways of being. It's pointless to talk about singular, unitary things. Fluxes and flows. There is a trajectory, though. That's what's most surprising after many years. A path in the pathlessness.

I don't know how I ended up there, or why it was over. Or why we never spoke. Or why there was a significant effect anyhow.

It makes me aware that most of life goes on under the surface.

Which is strange, when the pathways map these routes to and fro.

Nothing was stable, but everything remained as it was, only more so.

I don't mean to sound vague. All the things I thought weren't close to what was unfolding in the underground ways that it was. We didn't understand, but we knew this had to be.

I can't fathom a design, but perhaps there is one in an absent fashion.

An inner directive.

Of which we're hardly conscious, except in retrospect.

Nothing stays still.

The Path

Now where?

The life of the writer!

Agility, especially in uncertainty. Move nimbly when required.

There is nowhere to settle, at least not for long. The path continues, and it must be traveled, step by step.

Resting. Missing. Mourning. Dancing over the edges.

Adrift

Out of the fertility of the ocean, sea tides within, rhythms following the moon's wake, I sought you.

My planet of fire.

You'd disappeared into steaming mist. I lost you in the clouds. Perhaps you'd transformed into the raptor flying overhead. Or the dark loam of the shore looming.

You were always only figments,
imagined.

Pink roses
falling in the wind.

What could be fired her desire, kept her enthralled. Only now she sees what is.

For love is beautiful and painful, this is its nature. "A great love carries within it a mourning for love." [Edmund Jacobs.]

The way the processes of love unite what is disparate, the longings and communions, and hold us to our wanton paths amidst the fluxes of the heart.

Venus
adrift...

Titles

Sometimes I have trouble with titles. The Red Flower was the only one I could ultimately use because those were the first three words of the poem (which I hope you get, how it was written I mean), and that's okay when you can't come up with anything else. The Red Flower seems to be part of another series, a 'Vishnu, The Preserver' series perhaps, who knows if a theme is developing. The Venus Poems are continuing to develop. Mostly I'm fine with the titles I choose. Though In the Throes of Love... really was a bit much, sort of 40s romance, or I thought, this morning Venus in Lament would I think be better, since she's left being Celestial Aphrodite and entered the realm of Pandemos, where there are no rules and it isn't altogether fun, but why give away the last line? Oh, it's so impossible, this naming of the words of love that poetry is...

The Red Flower

(I think this poem goes with what may be a "Vishnu" series, the first of which is Vishnu on Chinese New Year.)


The red flower spirals
or it's a fractal
folding.

His heart is a window
box with a red flower

Beating. Petals spiral in, or out,
Magritte-like.

A map in water, a warehouse, snowblue.
Lost pink dancing slippers,
a church in black and white,
a chorus singing carols.

Quarantine. Insolence. Defiance.
Burlap and cold steel.
Madness in prison.

I heard the message,
its jumbled sanity.

Fragments of patterns,
like this poem,
torn from the epic.

Worlds within worlds.

Bullets and blood, the heart floods.
Five billion dying in biological warfare.
What was that movie where he dreamed his death,
unable to save the world.

Saviour, the preserver.

We'll all be saved on a microchip,
says the prophetess.