I Got No Zen

XVIII

What was the blade before there was steel?
What was the blade before iron?

What was the blade before there was bronze?
What was the blade before stone?

What was the blade before it was bone?
What was the blade before flesh?

What was the blade before it was soul?
The blade has always been flame.

What is Fire burning w/out consuming?
Find inside the feral fire that renews.

XIX

Once there was a harmony, of art & technology
When fire came to grace the caves of man.

There are some folk who tell us that the search
is all.  The hunt for what is simple & ornate.

Most call them fools & in return
are merely called practical.

We learned of fetish & decoration in the making
& shaping of the very first tools.

We cut our teeth on wood & stone.  Chipping, marking, tracking.
Noting the motions of the moon on a slender piece of bone.

Knives & bowls, counting sticks & shields, still with us,
in the blood.  Read it in the cards, in the rituals of seasons.

XX

The smith, the poet & the shaman, have roots
in common origin, each one the builder of a world.

Among the Yakut it has been claimed that
smiths & shamans hatch from the same nest.

Fire was the first great gift, etched on forest by storm.
We first found Iron as fallen stars, divine in origin as meteors.

Ironworking gods of legend were cast from heaven,
tempestuous rebels, firing up their forges underground.

The primordial image of the Maker bound in metal bands,
Prometheus on the mountain with a crow.

A carpenter crucified, a Maker manacled, the Bringer of Light
in eternal flames.  We are caught in what we create.

The maker is intuitive, isolated in introspection,
given to rituals of invocation, drinker at the spring.

Mining & smelting were a magic in themselves,
midwifing minerals from the womb of the earth.

The smith was a bridge between heaven & earth,
a trickster shifting shapes in what he wrought.

Serving the Father by courting the Mother, creating
useful tools & utensils in the search for balanced beauty.

XXI

Any well-cast augury contains riddle, revelation,
& yet another riddle in the dance of the asking & it's answer.

Who makes the sword & cauldron?  The smith is the maker.
Lightning cast in quick eye & sinew, held in the bones.

Fire in the forge, earth in coal & iron, air in bellow's rasping breath,
water for the quenching & the temper, full complement of elements.

Myths of metalcraft & alchemists sustain us,
the marriage of metals, the sword & grail.

Spoken truths of forging the union
uncovered in the original tunes.

we have forged ourselves in this world,
walked through fire again & again,

plunged deep in the water, again & again
striving to find the perfect temper for these blades.

A work of making takes its own time in shaping
arriving only when the time is right.

The myth persists in the sciences,
lightning striking soup to form first life.

XXII

Myths begin to come together, musically,
segues forming links in a finely wrought chain.

To steal the secrets of shaping iron I slipped back into the city.
Seeking apprenticeship, initiation into secrets of the craft.

Another winter in Northern Michigan
trying to build a soul out of iron & steel.

Thunder in the clamor of the hammer on the anvil,
lightning in the glare of steel sparks flying.

In the arc of the hammer, a free swinging grace.
There is power in the forging as the iron takes shape.

Bells are cast in bronze or iron, come
to know the hammer only after they are done.

I wanted to sculpt The Smith in glass, one perilous curve from shin
to sledge, full crescent one second from the shattering blow.

I sought to give shape to living process, an archetypal system
of constellated icons, revealing relationships in open space.

A man can learn volumes about space
from the placement of a single stone.

XXIII

The Farm has become a place where tribes collide,
far-flung traces of community, trainwrecking into one another.

I went to ground there to reveal my dreams of metal to the sky,
to bring all the threads together in a knot that could not be broken.

Slowly I gathered the tools for the work, only to see the dreams
shift to structures of words; mind, tongue & memory all I needed.

I had a beautiful black goat named Lucifer, with a white star
on his forehead and horns like darkened moons.

He died entwined on his mother's tether, neck snapped as she
struggled to free herself.  That day, I lost my job & home as well.

The danger of mythic living is clear in this:  all that you love
is subject to sacrifice when the story demands victim or metaphor.

I was left to skin, butcher & bury him on my own, as penance
for my propensity for smashing the present in pursuit of future.

Homeless again, almost broke I left the farm for the city once more,
in hopeless acquiescence to economy's industrial machinery.

XXIV

The transformation of the American Dream from wide frontier
of possibilities to complacent acquisition almost killed me.

I saw Senator Joe McCarthy standing on Horatio Alger's hands
as he vied against the crowd for a simple job.

The nights grew colder to match the lack of sympathy I found,
every employment opportunity filled in the time it took to walk there.

Experience seemed a useless commodity without the paper
to back it up.  I lost hope, certain survival would pass me by.

I had shucked all accouterments of individual identity,
joined the herd, gaining nothing but the loss of self.

The ritual suicide of shaving my face & cutting away my hair
elicited no response from the gods, even less from potential bosses.

There is a nightmare reserved especially for those who reform
only to find that there is no reward, only naked condescension.

When I had all but given up completely, a minor miracle occurred.
I was given one last chance in the form of financing for school.

I took to it with a serious tenacity born of total desperation
working day & night on a unified field theory of information.

XXV

Inculcated in the Cult of Knowledge, pursuing the source of our
first sin, I found that science had become as strange as magic.

The disciplines that had pronounced God dead now claimed
to have seen his face in the dancing of pieces of atoms.

A cosmology based on holography matched maps of mind & universe
physicists visualizing neural networks of an invisible frontier.

Unlike Columbus, when physics reached the horizon of reason it fell
off a precipice into a mist of mystery filled with infinite possibility.

I felt at home in the excitement of these discoveries,
delving deeply into the farthest realms of theory.

In the span of a century information had increased its speed
of travel from a fast galloping horse to the rate of light.

As dissemination increases in speed, it seems the mass grows
exponentially.  In eighteen months now, we double what we know.

Eventually we become overwhelmed in attempting to assimilate
more than what our language can easily hold.

We planted seeds as we learned to speak & writing invented reason,
industry made teaching a factory job & literacy came into being.

With every leap of language, a shift in myths occurred
a reworking of the world following quickly on its heels.

XVI

The borders of science & mysticism become increasingly diaphonous,
the West mistaking veils for lenses these last three thousand years.

I used to know a trick of extending spirit beyond the bounds of skin
swimming through the life of my surroundings, in awe of awareness.

For several years I knew the web firsthand, I could let the forest
envelope me as a second skin, living within its rythms, incandescent.

All that remains of that talent is a sort of spiritual sonar,
the eyeless sight of the Zen archer blindfolded before the target.

I came to view it as an extension of my neural system,
folded into the fabric of the world like vestigial wings.

In the middle of winter I felt a strange new presence in the web
a new intensity, similar to the old but triggered differently. 

I felt an electric presence edging in, a kinship or receptivity as if
the network of information were aping the web of consciousness.

If even a stone knows a life of its own, in simple calcinated dreams
of a time when they were alone, perhaps this is not so strange.

Fools & fanatics have always known how little difference
exists between the simple task & what seems impossible.

This then is an epic of epochs recollected from the scope of my life
the primal tales retold through one more human set of veils & lenses.