Time’s Ears
I always thought that time was audible, but that time itself possessed an organ for monitoring that which went down within its own audium, evaded the intelligence of my youth.
So it goes. There is little to do by way of belated compensation for so callow a lack of penetration but sit still and listen for the good news that this insight stimulates the present expectation of.
And that what time emits, sound-wise, or what one hears, time-wise, should represent, or shall we say project, itself, with such uninhibited chromatic exuberance, is good news indeed.
We live in fields of copper clouds, it says, of feathered arches, propounding the transformation of the entire of the electromagnetic epoch. That materiality itself hangs together by means of amps and coulombs has been perhaps greatly exaggerated; or so I thought till now. As has, I also thought, the metaphorics by which conscious states are rendered energetic by means of an electromagnetic vocabulary. It was the theurgists of the early eighteen hundreds that resorted to such language, dichotomizing the not-yet-unified, electric and magnetic phenomena as themselves comprising a kind of dipolarity for harmonizing Ceremony. The permission for which, might in fact be reflected in the colors dominant in this image. Does the blueness herein have a name? Can we hear that?
Named or not, it seems to open luxuriant spaces in and around the circuitry of an adequate magician’s virtual skull–the breath-taking flights promised between the acts of a rectified Will–a will tinctured by recipiency, shaped by Charioteering, and modulated locally by the sweetnesses and astringencies of The Art.
The Sky itself is not a stage of final restitution, but with further listening to this trans-neuronic cerulean one hears the blueness dissolve into milk, the milk into entities and faces, the faces into thoughts, the thoughts into the One Thought beyond and yet essentially within all essential pondering and mere ratiocination alike. This thought does not require decryption, but can be heard without mind’s elaboration, as the Plain Text, that sings within the ear that knows it, nothing whatsoever but the Song Itself.
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Charles Stein, Barrytown, NY, 08.06.10
Three Jewels
the choir
was facing
away
if into the arching
tonalities of its wonder
wait
until the echoing corners
sound
then prosecute
perception
further
among the waddling
entities and queerest
curiosities
there are actually persons ensconced so in their thoughtless
entitlements
that they feel they must look back
to find what they cannot imagine
to have heard here
If what they are is what they cannot
think
they are—
tools and graineries
an archeology of wrenches
a black and yellow garden snake
but this is no garden
the leaves
shuffle in the sound of a vast cascade
driving
stepward
toward the consequence
of oblivion
“wings from which we later taper thinking.”
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Charles Stein, Barrytown, NY, 05.06.10
Bird of Paradise
For a long time I thought the earth
was a bird, a blue one, wounded
by a heavenhawk or who
would dare to do that to
this bright broken business
and now the image answers information
it always does, one picture
spoils a thousand words,
nobody knows what I know
nobody knows the bird it is
the bird will be
savagely like a drunken sage
indigo-winged wobbling up
to be new
we hurt nothing.
We are only who we thought we are
and the bird thought too
but the bird was right.
Apocatastasis a feather fall’n.
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Robert Kelly, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, 22.05.10
Navigation Chart to Nowhere (possibly bogus)
or the place itself
for there’d be no
aerial photography…
so certainly, the chart then.
The scrubboard whitenes, the horribly contaminated
puddles, wells and springs; the impossible concentration
of mammal blood, yours and mine included,
in bright sun
in May or anyway springtime the evidence
that instead of cloverleaf, interlocking crisscross
fat brush highway or outdoor parking garage–
parking garage. Familiarity and tedium
the last word of “civilization”
uttering itself.
The thinkers that imagined panpsychism
have their supposition or if you prefer insight
ghoulishly verified
in the point of view, not a point really, but the wingspan
of the last giant avian
hovering
over nowhere
scanning
without report
for a place to land.
————————
Charles Stein, Barytown, NY, 07.05.10
German Expressionism
we were there
on the other side of
whatever side
it seems
that we were
(t)here on
the earth and its urbanity
riven, rifted, breaking
apart suave beauty, the ceremonial
manager
pocketing his take without so much as a glance at
that which
he had engineered so gorgeously, egregiously
too late for that)
he waited for the griffens
to arrive, the hatter rat with the salt, the regal lobster
sailing
interrupt and entering
aerial view
the hatter magus also, his downward arrow,
dorje,
delta–
And the savage masks are poised above his shoulders–
how queer those torqued horses, if they are horses
how lordly their deep savagery
transposed
and do we release our need to reprove the horror?
all parts and anthems
all cries
all untampered-with vitalities
all vitalities stripped down to their final rigor
all rigors unjoined
from their vital corporation
when all the eyes are just too small to celebrate
the happiness
removed from which
these dark and sumptuous seeings
are to be allowed their flows
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Charles Stein, Barrytown, NY, 04.16.10
I’ll See You in my Dreams (03/10)






