Dear Sign
--Clayton Eshleman

April, 1979, patio of Marwan's house in mountains north of Alassio.
Rain--sunshine--snow the same afternoon.
Out to view the possibly-seeable ocean, some 10 miles away
(Caryl had just told me about Goethe's color theory).

....A cloud the size of a large, wispy shark
....zoomed down, away from its companion clouds,
....circled around us once,
....shot back up

vanishing in roily cloud wash...

According to Gary Snyder,
"Dōgen says: 'When the ten thousand things...advance and confirm
you, that is enlightenment. When you advance and confirm the ten
thousand things, that is delusion.'"

What is the distinction between acts of violence and the natural conditions of death and decay? What distinguishes the Bush administration from a farmer? Or for that matter, Al Qaeda from a farmer? What qualities distinguish what might anthropologically be termed 'masculine consciousness' versus 'feminine consciousness'? Control and force rather than acceptance and gratitude. From Eshleman's Abyssand:

IX

The transformation of mother into imagination versus her evasion
..in a quest for personal immortality.

Where death is in the hands of males, it is violent.

In the bay of the mother, it is integral.

Without ugliness and horror at the base of poetics, form and beauty
..are a sham.

Kali comes up the spinal holy dread of the poem as the sacred duality
..inherent in creation.

Without an appreciation of Her serpent power, the poem salutes
..the evasion of its freedom.