Tuesday, November 14, 2006
Poems by Eric Ashford
Here are some recent poems by Eric Ashford. As I have said before, I consider him one of the most exciting new voices around. You may read more of his work at his various blogs, including She and An Apartment for Open Secrets.
lunes, noviembre 13, 2006
Traveling
I kept on going
through small towns with fancy names
that no one can remember
over the next horizon.
One state of mind merges into
the back roads of another.
People go away and come back
with worn out memories
but you can see
that they have come here
from some other settlement
or city we have heard of
but have not been to
and neither have they.
Campfires still smolder in some eyes.
Faces bear the marks of hard traveling
even though they have never left
the apprehensive parish
their fears were born in.
I have been a strolling bone.
Something an old woman or a crow
might prophecy with-
-not exactly a rune
more a cup of burnt coffee
and some hard baked gristle
you could read
or turn over
but only after you had stumbled along
through your life
long enough to become a signpost
for your heart.
Water
It was raining
before I got up this morning.
The sound of falling water
the laughter of drains;
the chronological dripping
of the timeless sky
all enchant and chill.
Water fills my mind
with a gurgle of presence
as if God were an outlet
for me to splash through
like a running river.
viernes, noviembre 10, 2006
Leaf Prints
The fallen leaves
have left rusty impressions
upon the sidewalk.
Pressed russet prints
on the unyielding concrete
faithfully record
the flight of the season.
I try not to step
on these ghost images.
Believing that if I walk gently
through their painted dreams
Autumn will keep step with my life
and not overtake it.
Family
I am compiling an inventory
of my family tree.
All the knobby crusts and mossy mounds,
the bugs and fungi,
all the seeping slither and sap
related to the panoply of flesh
that fills out
and bursts the buds of being.
Aardvarks, chipmunks
and wildebeest
crowd every familial branch.
There are constrictors and spitball killers.
There are fluffy dandelion seeds
that can never die.
There are hosts of half-eaten moths
and things that go bump in the night
like elephants and dreaming bears.
My family tree cannot be
truncated into just humanity
but must swim and fly
and get by on too many legs
or none.
I ponder sweet St Francis
how each creature joined his congregation
in praise of family differences.
How he showed even the ants
what the outside of heaven looked like
within the one womb
of our fruitful Mother-God.
Ohio Caverns
In the caverns
deep under the wet earth.
Under the sunny wet world
where the sky flew, and changed
the colors of leaves and cheeks,
we shuffled and trooped
into the cavities of the dark.
The guide said not to be
afraid of the little brown bats.
We formed a line
that circumnavigated
a million years
of dripping rock:
mineral columns that
put forth space and silence
like the foliage of time.
Colors set themselves
into striations
and bezels of stillness
the iron bleedings
of a multihued darkness:
pigments only a sunless place
could mix.
The guide asked: Had we ever seen
what the dark looked like?
Then he turned the light off.
Instantly we fell through
our own eyes.
That kind of darkness eats you
more than a bear or a worm
ever could.
It consumes all the parts of you
that you cannot see
and then takes your soul
to where you recall
that your eyes were always
just these caves in the ground
for your own light.
martes, noviembre 07, 2006
There is a Part of Me that is as False as God
There are no parts of myself
that are not put aside and saved.
What cannot be saved is the star that made
a far starlight.
What cannot be brought back
are the atoms it takes to ignite light.
Here, I am burning brightly
whilst there I am unborn, dark and whole.
Here I blossom, but there where the seed is
there is neither beginning nor end.
The long corridor of time,
it gets wider and wider.
There are parts of myself I have not yet met
even though we share the same speeding mind.
I am as false as any notion of God could be
but then I am that which I ponder.
Ego is a two-legged thing like an angel.
The universe can be measured in clichés
and by the smallness of our visions.
How can we weigh a false thing
when we know so little about fiction?
I look back.
I respect and regard
while mind, body and spirit
charge through the outer rings of the known.
I am a bogus proposition, a remnant
but the only real thing left
after the bang went nova.
There Is a Part of Me that is a Stone
There is a part of my life
that is still traveling infinity
as a fiery stone.
A meteorite of thought
set upon an unimaginable course.
Here I am a river:
I carve my way
and am contoured by my path
but there, I am a bedazzlement of independence.
A liberty, undefined and plotted,
exploding outward from every inward reality.
There is an element of my mind
that is as adamantine as diamond
and that fraction glitters imperviously
within a prism of its own vision.
While there, I am a flash and trail of prophecy
spiraling into God.
I am the timely stone
and that which it reveals
as it is rolled away from disbelief.
I am the space revealed by water
as rock erodes
into the bright impossibility of truth.
copyright, Eric Ashford
lunes, noviembre 13, 2006
Traveling
I kept on going
through small towns with fancy names
that no one can remember
over the next horizon.
One state of mind merges into
the back roads of another.
People go away and come back
with worn out memories
but you can see
that they have come here
from some other settlement
or city we have heard of
but have not been to
and neither have they.
Campfires still smolder in some eyes.
Faces bear the marks of hard traveling
even though they have never left
the apprehensive parish
their fears were born in.
I have been a strolling bone.
Something an old woman or a crow
might prophecy with-
-not exactly a rune
more a cup of burnt coffee
and some hard baked gristle
you could read
or turn over
but only after you had stumbled along
through your life
long enough to become a signpost
for your heart.
Water
It was raining
before I got up this morning.
The sound of falling water
the laughter of drains;
the chronological dripping
of the timeless sky
all enchant and chill.
Water fills my mind
with a gurgle of presence
as if God were an outlet
for me to splash through
like a running river.
viernes, noviembre 10, 2006
Leaf Prints
The fallen leaves
have left rusty impressions
upon the sidewalk.
Pressed russet prints
on the unyielding concrete
faithfully record
the flight of the season.
I try not to step
on these ghost images.
Believing that if I walk gently
through their painted dreams
Autumn will keep step with my life
and not overtake it.
Family
I am compiling an inventory
of my family tree.
All the knobby crusts and mossy mounds,
the bugs and fungi,
all the seeping slither and sap
related to the panoply of flesh
that fills out
and bursts the buds of being.
Aardvarks, chipmunks
and wildebeest
crowd every familial branch.
There are constrictors and spitball killers.
There are fluffy dandelion seeds
that can never die.
There are hosts of half-eaten moths
and things that go bump in the night
like elephants and dreaming bears.
My family tree cannot be
truncated into just humanity
but must swim and fly
and get by on too many legs
or none.
I ponder sweet St Francis
how each creature joined his congregation
in praise of family differences.
How he showed even the ants
what the outside of heaven looked like
within the one womb
of our fruitful Mother-God.
Ohio Caverns
In the caverns
deep under the wet earth.
Under the sunny wet world
where the sky flew, and changed
the colors of leaves and cheeks,
we shuffled and trooped
into the cavities of the dark.
The guide said not to be
afraid of the little brown bats.
We formed a line
that circumnavigated
a million years
of dripping rock:
mineral columns that
put forth space and silence
like the foliage of time.
Colors set themselves
into striations
and bezels of stillness
the iron bleedings
of a multihued darkness:
pigments only a sunless place
could mix.
The guide asked: Had we ever seen
what the dark looked like?
Then he turned the light off.
Instantly we fell through
our own eyes.
That kind of darkness eats you
more than a bear or a worm
ever could.
It consumes all the parts of you
that you cannot see
and then takes your soul
to where you recall
that your eyes were always
just these caves in the ground
for your own light.
martes, noviembre 07, 2006
There is a Part of Me that is as False as God
There are no parts of myself
that are not put aside and saved.
What cannot be saved is the star that made
a far starlight.
What cannot be brought back
are the atoms it takes to ignite light.
Here, I am burning brightly
whilst there I am unborn, dark and whole.
Here I blossom, but there where the seed is
there is neither beginning nor end.
The long corridor of time,
it gets wider and wider.
There are parts of myself I have not yet met
even though we share the same speeding mind.
I am as false as any notion of God could be
but then I am that which I ponder.
Ego is a two-legged thing like an angel.
The universe can be measured in clichés
and by the smallness of our visions.
How can we weigh a false thing
when we know so little about fiction?
I look back.
I respect and regard
while mind, body and spirit
charge through the outer rings of the known.
I am a bogus proposition, a remnant
but the only real thing left
after the bang went nova.
There Is a Part of Me that is a Stone
There is a part of my life
that is still traveling infinity
as a fiery stone.
A meteorite of thought
set upon an unimaginable course.
Here I am a river:
I carve my way
and am contoured by my path
but there, I am a bedazzlement of independence.
A liberty, undefined and plotted,
exploding outward from every inward reality.
There is an element of my mind
that is as adamantine as diamond
and that fraction glitters imperviously
within a prism of its own vision.
While there, I am a flash and trail of prophecy
spiraling into God.
I am the timely stone
and that which it reveals
as it is rolled away from disbelief.
I am the space revealed by water
as rock erodes
into the bright impossibility of truth.
copyright, Eric Ashford
