in dusk and dust and dreams

i see beginnings and endings in a tangerine hued cloud of dust. a million grains of sand and salt dance wraithlike, rising and falling, curling in on themselves and then exploding in impossibly synchronous calligraphy. each grain a minuscule world containing a single sunbeam. a ray of light that has pierced first the emptiness of space, then the thickness of this atmosphere until finally low and thin, barely making its way across fields of young grass, it somehow finds this cloud hovering above the asphalt and settles inside the crystal heart of a solitary grain of dust at dusk - and dreams.

bringers

"cover me over
in dusk and dust and dreams.
cover me over
and leave me alone.
cover me over,
you tireless, great.
hear me and cover me,
bringers of dusk and dust and dreams."

carl sandburg

the blurred form of an evening

the blurred form of an evening sky rushes past the night train. by the yellow-orange light of a fringed table lamp, a man pushes his face closer to the window. a small cloud of breath ebbs and flows from his mouth across the glass - a humid tongue of moisture.

stations and signals flow by the darkened window frame in sudden jarring colour-filled moments. an illuminated sign, a wall of brownish-red bricks, light flooding from an opening door, someone peering from behind a curtain.

life is like this.

window

night from a railroad car window
is a great, dark, soft thing
broken across with slashes of light.

carl sandburg

the clocks pick off the points

(courtesy of nature remains)

"row, row, row your boat,
gently down the stream;
merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily,
life is but a dream."

time flies - if it is used as a measure of your life.



(image courtesy bitze)

"among prominent philosophers, there are two distinct viewpoints on time. one view is that time is part of the fundamental structure of the universe, a dimension in which events occur in sequence. the opposing view is that time does not refer to any kind of "container" that events and objects "move through", nor to any entity that "flows", but that it is instead part of a fundamental intellectual structure (together with space and number) within which humans sequence and compare events."

carl sandburg wrote:

in the cool of the night time
the clocks pick off the points
and the mainsprings loosen.
they will need winding.
one of these days
they will need winding.


with time measuring the unmeasurable. with space defining the undefinable.

here we are.

what a strange place to call home. what a strange way to define the sacred space we know as home. if, as teilhard de chardin says, "we are not so much human beings on a spiritual journey, as spiritual beings on a human journey", then what can we make about this agreed upon artifice - time and space? what purpose does it serve?

"raptly as one who would divine the perilous eyes of sleep, and the dreams and mysteries which lurk therein, i sought to fathom the gulf-enclosing orb of the crystal: void for a time, and hollow with light it was, and transpicuous like the orient sky that is made clear for the colours of the dawn. but soon the light was centered to a star, and the crystal itself, as if pregnant with the Infinite, became a tenebrous and profound abysm, through which a teeming myriad of shadows, vague as incipient dreams, or luminous with a glimpse of vision not prefigurable, fled in an ever-changing phantasmagoric succession about the star: from out those vortical and swirling glooms, where only the central star was constant, i saw the pallor of innominable faces emerge-faces that broke like bubbles; and forms that were strange as conceptions of an alien sun, with the eidolons of things which were imageless before, swam for a little in that phantasmic wave. but all the multifold mysteries which were manifest therein, i knew for the hidden thoughts and occluse, reluctant dreams of mine under-soul — thoughts and dreams now shadow-shown in the gulf-revealing orb of the hollow crystal...

thus, in the crystal of time and space, whose gulfs contain all that we call the infinite, may God behold the manifestation of all the multiform mysteries, and all the secret thoughts and dreams which abide in the centermost sanctuary of his being. and naught may appear to him but these - his thoughts and dreams forever shadow - shown in the immeasurable orb of the hollow crystal of time and space."

from the crystals written by clark ashton smith

the muffling of winds

hoarfrost and silence:
only the muffling
of winds dark and lonesome--
great lullabies to the long sleepers.
carl sandburg