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JIM LYLE
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JIM LYLE
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| POEM FOR VACANT LOVE Sometimes, midst tedium, humdrum, and mindless tasks... when making beds, paying bills, matching socks, while chasing dust bunnies, cleaning, and organizing... then, unannounced, my hands have no need direction from my brain; every synapse, nerve, and ganglion snaps and dangles… and my brain is loose... about you. Lyrics of old love songs drift through my mind singing, stumbling, garbled lyrics, and mumbling old quotes, within brackets, retractions, and… no! grammar doesn’t matter because there are no borders, dams, walls, or belts. All at once, unannounced, you flow into my heart, fill my entire mind, and dismiss reality. My pulse pounds, muscles snap, tendons tighten, and everything else stops... Those times! That feeling! These questionable gifts! Here and now, are the times "when" and the reasons "why"... I send you these memories… knowing they make you hate me because you know they were real. Please understand… I need these small visits: after all they, are all of you that I have. And... this is how I remember... It is how I hear your voice, feel your touch, see your face; It is the soft foundation of my brittle sanity. Together, they are my companions inside loneliness, they are the unfailing presence of your absence… and, for a brief time, my way to dust the past . I am hungry! I need to eat something more than words! Only the cause, can quince that thirst. The juice of other flowers will not serve! No! Never! Not even as we grow old… apart. © Jim Lyle 24 June 08 |
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| WHEN THE ROCKS CRY OUT! "And the earth was without form and void: and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters." Once upon before when; when before was as impossible as after... there, within a nothing of unstirred dark soup, lacking pretext, sequence, or flavor to order reason… there, where even proto potential lay dormant; there, some how, and some where, some speck, spark, or sliver, some bump, bang, or bruise, (whether minute or gigantic) and totally devoid of parameters ordained or accidental; some whatever began to organize and gather meaning by parsing distance, swallowing volume, and winding the tick of time. Possibly there was a reason we can’t measure; possibly specific maybes weigh more than general nothings; possibly the then too much of everywhere gravity gathered into an increasingly crowded crap-shoot potential and tripped a heave and pull and suck which awakened space-time traffic jams.. Whatever it was that was, began to drain to centers within maybes until, in some unreferenced sequence, the enormity of nothingness rushed, drained, and centered into one infinitesimal but limitless un-dimensioned sink… and….. everything exploded! Which ripped the shroud of becoming by flinging fireballs and pinwheels of fiery un-calibrated energy… and dark matter became light! Which, is when and where a what became a there. And there! At that time. At that place. In whatever and wherever "there" was, then birthing energy coagulated into clinging clumps of self. Mass built, stuff to stuff and gunk to gunk. Beat patterns of accidental harmony congealed into curds of existence, adjusted equations of mass over distribution, unfolded in dervish spins, and stirred spiral whirlpools of bits, eclipses, maelstroms, and eddies into games of multi-banked celestial billiards on an infinite un-dimensioned felt. And with mass and weight as the only metronome, this shimmering stew became galaxies. Wandering planetoids marked time with waiting invitations to pirouettes and celestial promenades of broiling, sparkling, incandescent light shows and chaos . Then, after time without meaning or measure, the side show skirts pulled in as heat dissipated, shrunk, and all the matter congealed. Elements and compounds form, particulates cleave to each other, dress according to the nesting of their atoms, and shape themselves, mate, and marry into complex families and clans whose valence is the crest of their crystalline heredity. Then the drops and blobs of matter grow old and round; and condensing gases seep into cracks, hiss through fissures, cool, and solidify. The backwash cracks, ripples, folds, and freezes into coagulating mass. Then these nail clippings: these clumps and clots from the grooming of time; these stars, planets, moons, asteroids, and comets join in compound family relations and affinities... one to several.. or one to one... or in many to multitudes... in orderly orbital promenades. Even time itself grows old; Eons come and go, and the covers rumple. Layer upon layer of long pressed sediment sags, and beds shake and wiggle from accumulations and insulation. Weight turns in seismic slumber and the frame breaks. Metamorphic blankets and sheets of stardust solidify. The growing weight creates heat and pressure which, in turn, causes fountains of life gases to spout from geologic ulcers. Lava relieves itself; hot magma candy melts the smorgasbord. The rind cracks and the skin ruptures as rigid igneous spines and slivers of petrified time puncture the crusted skin, which then cracks, collapses, leaves gaps, traps space and carves channels for the rivers of mineral bounty. The history of this process is written in metallic calligraphy with inks of Gold, Silver, Mercury, Iron, Bismuth and these in turn cause all the other elements to push into cracks, sleep in caverns, pour into canyons and pressure pack oozing particulates into geodes, vugs and welded seams. Then, baked in seething scald and pressures from earths heavy mantle, these soups plate on igneous remnants record the chemical metaphors and the valences on all the silicon tablets. Diamonds are born in upwelling vents rising from the molten heart. Quartz crystals adorn hidden tombs. Soft Calcite and splintered Serpentine mate in buried heated pressure, flow together, and mate to spawn Jade... tougher, heavier, and harder than either parent. Wild from super heated caress, sleeping strata wakes, seethes, throws geyser spouts into air, while the poisonous bubbling springs color caldera edges with the sediments of their chemical heritage. And, as the gas condenses, oceans form and their breath rises, cools, falls in varied stews of rain, which begin to etch the land while water percolates into fractured cracks and erodes its bed. Plains crack, fold, stand abrupt, and wear away… they do this over and over and over again. Vast continents float, collide, mate, divorce, drown, rip, flood, and dry; Multicolored agate sleeps in layers and tells frozen time in stratified clocks. Elemental history melts, burns, drowns in hissing liquid fire, congeals, and displays the calligraphy of creation. And all of this has lain waiting our cryptography, …for eons. Drip by drip by drip water builds the stalactites and stalagmites, festoons the chambers, and plates the halls with pillared carbonates. Crystalline columns of Selenite grow for millennia in dark, closed, roasting caverns. Percolating water soaks through rock, licks hidden metals bleeds mineral blood, weeps sulfur and iron, becomes hot sulfuric acid, which then erodes, eats stone, consumes slick carbonaceous slabs and forms hot toxic underground lakes… which have never, ever, seen sunshine. But in Montana, in our lifetime, when cutting a mountain road one of these primordial incubators was opened by accident. Its toxic acidic lake was filled with life: spaghetti like strands of bacteria were drinking acid and eating stone, and they were abundant, and they were thriving, and they were living, and they been so in darkness for untold incalculable eons of time. This Life; entombed by chance and opened by chance... this simple life, in genesis and endurance., may be the oldest living thing on earth… ever! And now… the other animals, those that cover the earth, mold metal and wear nature's jewels; that assume eternity and deify their own ignorance; that hold unproven dreams dearer than reason, flesh, or blood; that end each other's lives over words: that believe a cosmos bloomed in seven days; Those animals!!! They may have a far different Eden than they confess… Genesis, in any sense of beginning, may have been in some hot dark cavern drinking life from the drip of acid: waiting, the destiny of the spinning nebulae… waiting, the dance and whirl from soil to planet to stars… waiting, the boot strap from bacteria to intelligence… waiting the final evolution, and the simple surgical slice of bulldozer steel. The Man said that, "rocks would cry out:" we should listen! They do not sing the praise of heaven, or truth, or men. They sing in valenced attractions and dance in elemental groups. They sing equations of chemistry and compounds and amalgamation. They sing structure, and radiation, and crystalline mathematics. They sing cantatas of the periodic table and, grown large, they whirl in interlaced galactic ballets with other creation. The stage can change; the costumes may change, and the audience will change, but... the Aria and the Ballet and the Orchestra remain… And when the rocks cry out… the Opera is Evolution. © Jim Lyle 2003… rev March 2010 |
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| Send poetry to me by e-mail. Or mail me a floppy or paper ms. c/o Main Street Gallery, 325 N. Main St., Lakeport, CA 95453. Send me also a few paragraphs about yourself if you feel like it. I will put up any poems that I receive that I like. I will not be able to return manuscripts. Sign them and mark them with a © and the date to keep your copyright. | |||