XXXIX.
What is mere coincidence and what
is supernature when you storm
my attention with purpose at random?
And so I stop and I dial those
thirty-six digits only to find
you in Italy wishing of me.
The very same trice you flooded
my brain from near nowhere,
I call and I find you wishing
of me. Prescriptions of logic would tell
me dismiss these occurrences as
flukes or chances or accidents.
But remember what I said before,
and of this I’m sure
all thinkable Gods would agree:
there are no accidents.
What was true in the beginning
is true forever more.
XL.
The farthest roots of the tree
buried deep in the earth know
when the wind of the spring
strokes the maximal leaves.
Distance moves from discipline and
we are ours forever.
XLI.
Our new season is coming.
Where I am
and there with you –
there will be no more changes –
only an increase of the fecundity
that has just now begun.
My city is white with
pear blossoms now – pure and
blinding and sudden, but
scattered here and there between
I catch a glimpse of an
anonymous purple tree. I
don’t know its name;
it’s anonymous.
But when I see that color
on trees now, even in North
American spring, my throat
catches and squeezes a drop
from my heart.
You know what I’m thinking.
It’s not jacaranda
-- not here on this continent –
but it may as well be.
Our new season is here.
Saremo insieme molto presto,
mio meraviglioso fratello,
Hernán Gabriel,
il mio bell’amico.
XLII.
My world is expanding –
dilating –
unfolding –
encroaching the borderlands
of Heaven and Hell
and neutralizing the polities
of those archaic kingdoms.
In this newer, bigger, better world,
everything at once fantastical
is now possible, even probable,
even on its way now to happening
and still better yet –
it’s all absolutely free.
The world in a drop of water;
God in a single leaf.
Things once outlawed or futile in
Heaven and Hell are celebrated here
and life is defined by embracing the paradox.
Mad purple blooms carpet the world
in November and angels who defect
from a Paradise that fell are free
to conceal their wings at will and
live on terra firma and walk about in
shoes as men of eye and tongue.
This liberty was never allowed in Old Heaven.
Chance, possibility, endless perfect
symmetry – all is permitted under
this new world regime.
All doors stand open once again.
Eden is reborn.
All roads lead back to the answer.
Yes. Still. Now and Forever.
The answer is yes.
The answer is
Yes.
XLIII.
No need, in fact, no methods hence,
for that barnacle to grow, that
parasite that fed on the living
flesh of prospect and the carrion
of apathy and soul’s inertia equally.
The worm has no more purpose.
No point to masquerade from now
as the Something
behind the Nothing.
Once you taste or even hear that
woe of preordained Gehenna
(that you yourself laid out
years back) you must not
curse your youthful, naïve,
stupid thoughts of all the
time that lay ahead.
Amaranths don’t exist –
only jacarandas.
How truly cruel
God would be and infernal
would be Eden – if the opposite
were what was true.
Even in winter
beneath the black bark
the blossoms are forming
on all of my gifts, my blessings
from Om, my comrades, my
angels, my brothers, my Tree.
The magnolia, the oak, the pear
and the All. The tall, proud,
majestic jacaranda that I fell
in love with in Argentina.
And all this rapture that belongs to
Me, I share with all of those
of which I, to a lazy eye,
have been maundering
the Madness has its Methods
and the Symmetry, its Tree.
I, since Jacaranda, have
the Absurdity of Truth.
The Absurdity
of Truth. And right inside my eye
or hand or heart or gut or tongue
or teeth –
Creation’s esteem.
And I have the Tree.
My proof is
Here.
Yours is too.
The Sun is rising
and as the red sun of this April
Dawn cuts the shrinking night
to morning, here in this banal
little northern corner, the same
light illumines all those violet
miracles that still hang to the
trees in the April autumn
of that country that I miss
so much, my November Spring,
my Argentina.
All with the Eye to Know,
recall:
Knowing is Being
in the shade of these Leaves.
More than mere cogency, this is
My Truth. Dub all those things
I name Jacaranda by whatever
word you fancy. Call the bloom,
the morning, the bird and the sun
whatever it is you like.
Whatever makes you
comfortable – whatever
fills you up. Whatever
name you choose to use,
I know it means the same as mine;
for my word covers everything.
The name is not important.
All that’s vital is
the Rising.
XLIV.
For those rare and precious souls,
when they truly look into this
eye, and they recognize and
comprehend the abstruse –
when all that’s shining back is
some oblique and fishbowled
reflection of themselves, I am
far and deep behind your
eye as well. I have been since
before the time of fathers.
You brethren souls, you saints,
you prophets and teachers,
you mirrors of my soul
and God, you blessed creatures
I have yet to meet, you friends,
you lovers, you comrades and
mates. Brothers, sisters,
muses and imps . . .
You are my daily bread.
You are my
Jacaranda.
XLV.
There is no need for
Greater Truth. There is
none so great as the love
of these souls. No greater bliss
exists outside the kiss
of comrades. Nothing in the world
so perfect as the bloom
and the branch. God’s greatest
work is the grasping of this
harmony and the insight to
this symmetry. God is
Jacaranda – and the end of
mystery comes when we say
and at last understand of ourselves:
We are the Tree.
XLVI.
Il quarantesimo giorno il sole
si alzerà e distruggerà col fuoco
tutto questo tempo vuoto.
Il quarantunesimo giorno vedrò
l’italia mia.
Abbraccerò il mio compagno.
Bacerò mio fratello ancora
una volta.
Tutta questa gioia,
tutto quest’estasi
. . . e ancora questo è solo il inizio.
XLVII.
The crease in the corolla,
the frailest of the petiole –
nothing less than Fingerprints
of That Thing Most Great And Sturdy.
The Mountain, the Ocean,
the Firmament, Fraternity –
tiny frills that frame Eternity.
XLVIII.
All those streets through which
I traipsed, in every place as child
or man, my ghost will walk, as still
I live, yesterday, today, forever.
I remember knowing nothing of
the world – even its existence outside
of what was held before me, when my
father took us all to Mexico. I was
three. Faintly, faintly, through
dirt and noise, the ghost still walks like
some Lost Boy. Through all capitals
and hamlets. There is no thing
living in all the world that matches
the shade of the olive tree.
As long as I can still recall that
strange and pleasing mintmusk smell
that mixed with the sea and see
in my mind that sui generis green
of those trees that covered every hill
in southern Greece – I am there.
Tasting the rain in Buenos Aires
and leaning on the trunk of the
jacaranda and counting the ants
and being amazed by chance and
the scope of my destiny – I am still.
In a month when I return to Rome
and I walk through those streets
with the Manifestation of the
Promise I made myself four
years ago, perhaps I’ll see my
ghost at the fountain, throwing
that coin and making that promise
the first time around. Like a
memory running backward through
the Future, I know that he’ll see me.
The Promise lives.
It is Rising.
IL.
I find myself
Now and Here;
the best place I’ve ever been in
my life. I’ll stay forever
under the leaves
of Jacaranda.
L.
. . . in the arms
of jacaranda
the blessed Secret
is revealed.
The sun, the soul, everything
is Rising.
LI.
For all the blood and allegory
that has poured forth from
my heart – the tainted, the weak,
the lazy and stupid – the twisted
and even at times,
the perfect,
-- nevermind what’s pure; all of it
is pure. I live and I breathe
only for
this
and those catalysts that have
brought on all this
breath and divinity.
Muse, brother, God, tree
-- whatever. Everything is
true. Soon you’ll see –
the Sun is Rising.
LII.
Do you remember the geese?
One day we were cutting the distance
between – I stood
outside my open door
under a drear, gray February
and a wonderful flood of words
from Milan; balm for
my Georgian soul. You detailed
with a love for the life
so sincere in your throat
the tribulation of cruising
Italian tea-rooms.
Poor little angel.
Anyway – back
to the geese. As you quacked
out your tale, five noisy geese
flew over my house. I
tried to hush you
so you could hear the sound of
geese on another continent.
I’m not sure you did;
as I was holding the phone to
the sky for the geese.
Strange, the things we remember.
I love
you, jacaranda.
Muse, brother, God, tree
-- whatever. Everything.
LIII.
The name is too supernal;
it would break
your human tongue to speak it.
And so we call
the Angel Gabriel,
Capricorn – the Goat.
The Tree –
Jacaranda.
LIV.
It is coming –
this Truth.
Its name encrypted
in everything touched
and tasted, created,
remembered.
LV.
It is jacaranda, oak,
magnolia, olive – as well
the anonymous tree. It brings
with it the Summer,
the Winter, the Moon and the Sun.
It is the love of brothers,
the veneration of sisters,
the womb of mothers,
and the seed of fathers.
It is Joy, it is God,
it is Desire and Love.
This bliss has dwelt in the realm
of Fraternity for so long for me
and for so many times, but really,
it is Everywhere and Everything –
as everything is It. The world
in a drop of water. God
in a single leaf. It is Holy.
It is Alive.
It is Rising.
LVI.
Conundrums faced in winter’s night
are answered now in the light of May.
Aim your adoration outward
and touch hand and your eye
to the All. Revel and remember –
there are no accidents.
Claim more than humble words;
everything is true. Yield to
the Angel of Memory,
the Angel of Possibility,
and the Angel Who Carries
The Message. Yes, give all
your love to the Messenger.
Embrace the fleeting misery;
it is sweet as the permanent joy.
Nothing will die –
the Tree will remember.
No one is leaving –
your bliss remains
my bliss.
Taste of Time
Taste of Creation,
or dismiss these words as doggerel
-- and learn them elsewhere later.
This Truth, this Love, this Life
Never Ending, this Power,
this Knowledge, this One Soul,
this Dawn.
We will live forever
in the very same house.
We already do.
What is coming
is already Here.
As it will be forever
so it is today.
LVII.
It is Risen.
Tommy Sweeny
9 May 2002
4:41 p.m.
What is mere coincidence and what
is supernature when you storm
my attention with purpose at random?
And so I stop and I dial those
thirty-six digits only to find
you in Italy wishing of me.
The very same trice you flooded
my brain from near nowhere,
I call and I find you wishing
of me. Prescriptions of logic would tell
me dismiss these occurrences as
flukes or chances or accidents.
But remember what I said before,
and of this I’m sure
all thinkable Gods would agree:
there are no accidents.
What was true in the beginning
is true forever more.
XL.
The farthest roots of the tree
buried deep in the earth know
when the wind of the spring
strokes the maximal leaves.
Distance moves from discipline and
we are ours forever.
XLI.
Our new season is coming.
Where I am
and there with you –
there will be no more changes –
only an increase of the fecundity
that has just now begun.
My city is white with
pear blossoms now – pure and
blinding and sudden, but
scattered here and there between
I catch a glimpse of an
anonymous purple tree. I
don’t know its name;
it’s anonymous.
But when I see that color
on trees now, even in North
American spring, my throat
catches and squeezes a drop
from my heart.
You know what I’m thinking.
It’s not jacaranda
-- not here on this continent –
but it may as well be.
Our new season is here.
Saremo insieme molto presto,
mio meraviglioso fratello,
Hernán Gabriel,
il mio bell’amico.
XLII.
My world is expanding –
dilating –
unfolding –
encroaching the borderlands
of Heaven and Hell
and neutralizing the polities
of those archaic kingdoms.
In this newer, bigger, better world,
everything at once fantastical
is now possible, even probable,
even on its way now to happening
and still better yet –
it’s all absolutely free.
The world in a drop of water;
God in a single leaf.
Things once outlawed or futile in
Heaven and Hell are celebrated here
and life is defined by embracing the paradox.
Mad purple blooms carpet the world
in November and angels who defect
from a Paradise that fell are free
to conceal their wings at will and
live on terra firma and walk about in
shoes as men of eye and tongue.
This liberty was never allowed in Old Heaven.
Chance, possibility, endless perfect
symmetry – all is permitted under
this new world regime.
All doors stand open once again.
Eden is reborn.
All roads lead back to the answer.
Yes. Still. Now and Forever.
The answer is yes.
The answer is
Yes.
XLIII.
No need, in fact, no methods hence,
for that barnacle to grow, that
parasite that fed on the living
flesh of prospect and the carrion
of apathy and soul’s inertia equally.
The worm has no more purpose.
No point to masquerade from now
as the Something
behind the Nothing.
Once you taste or even hear that
woe of preordained Gehenna
(that you yourself laid out
years back) you must not
curse your youthful, naïve,
stupid thoughts of all the
time that lay ahead.
Amaranths don’t exist –
only jacarandas.
How truly cruel
God would be and infernal
would be Eden – if the opposite
were what was true.
Even in winter
beneath the black bark
the blossoms are forming
on all of my gifts, my blessings
from Om, my comrades, my
angels, my brothers, my Tree.
The magnolia, the oak, the pear
and the All. The tall, proud,
majestic jacaranda that I fell
in love with in Argentina.
And all this rapture that belongs to
Me, I share with all of those
of which I, to a lazy eye,
have been maundering
the Madness has its Methods
and the Symmetry, its Tree.
I, since Jacaranda, have
the Absurdity of Truth.
The Absurdity
of Truth. And right inside my eye
or hand or heart or gut or tongue
or teeth –
Creation’s esteem.
And I have the Tree.
My proof is
Here.
Yours is too.
The Sun is rising
and as the red sun of this April
Dawn cuts the shrinking night
to morning, here in this banal
little northern corner, the same
light illumines all those violet
miracles that still hang to the
trees in the April autumn
of that country that I miss
so much, my November Spring,
my Argentina.
All with the Eye to Know,
recall:
Knowing is Being
in the shade of these Leaves.
More than mere cogency, this is
My Truth. Dub all those things
I name Jacaranda by whatever
word you fancy. Call the bloom,
the morning, the bird and the sun
whatever it is you like.
Whatever makes you
comfortable – whatever
fills you up. Whatever
name you choose to use,
I know it means the same as mine;
for my word covers everything.
The name is not important.
All that’s vital is
the Rising.
XLIV.
For those rare and precious souls,
when they truly look into this
eye, and they recognize and
comprehend the abstruse –
when all that’s shining back is
some oblique and fishbowled
reflection of themselves, I am
far and deep behind your
eye as well. I have been since
before the time of fathers.
You brethren souls, you saints,
you prophets and teachers,
you mirrors of my soul
and God, you blessed creatures
I have yet to meet, you friends,
you lovers, you comrades and
mates. Brothers, sisters,
muses and imps . . .
You are my daily bread.
You are my
Jacaranda.
XLV.
There is no need for
Greater Truth. There is
none so great as the love
of these souls. No greater bliss
exists outside the kiss
of comrades. Nothing in the world
so perfect as the bloom
and the branch. God’s greatest
work is the grasping of this
harmony and the insight to
this symmetry. God is
Jacaranda – and the end of
mystery comes when we say
and at last understand of ourselves:
We are the Tree.
XLVI.
Il quarantesimo giorno il sole
si alzerà e distruggerà col fuoco
tutto questo tempo vuoto.
Il quarantunesimo giorno vedrò
l’italia mia.
Abbraccerò il mio compagno.
Bacerò mio fratello ancora
una volta.
Tutta questa gioia,
tutto quest’estasi
. . . e ancora questo è solo il inizio.
XLVII.
The crease in the corolla,
the frailest of the petiole –
nothing less than Fingerprints
of That Thing Most Great And Sturdy.
The Mountain, the Ocean,
the Firmament, Fraternity –
tiny frills that frame Eternity.
XLVIII.
All those streets through which
I traipsed, in every place as child
or man, my ghost will walk, as still
I live, yesterday, today, forever.
I remember knowing nothing of
the world – even its existence outside
of what was held before me, when my
father took us all to Mexico. I was
three. Faintly, faintly, through
dirt and noise, the ghost still walks like
some Lost Boy. Through all capitals
and hamlets. There is no thing
living in all the world that matches
the shade of the olive tree.
As long as I can still recall that
strange and pleasing mintmusk smell
that mixed with the sea and see
in my mind that sui generis green
of those trees that covered every hill
in southern Greece – I am there.
Tasting the rain in Buenos Aires
and leaning on the trunk of the
jacaranda and counting the ants
and being amazed by chance and
the scope of my destiny – I am still.
In a month when I return to Rome
and I walk through those streets
with the Manifestation of the
Promise I made myself four
years ago, perhaps I’ll see my
ghost at the fountain, throwing
that coin and making that promise
the first time around. Like a
memory running backward through
the Future, I know that he’ll see me.
The Promise lives.
It is Rising.
IL.
I find myself
Now and Here;
the best place I’ve ever been in
my life. I’ll stay forever
under the leaves
of Jacaranda.
L.
. . . in the arms
of jacaranda
the blessed Secret
is revealed.
The sun, the soul, everything
is Rising.
LI.
For all the blood and allegory
that has poured forth from
my heart – the tainted, the weak,
the lazy and stupid – the twisted
and even at times,
the perfect,
-- nevermind what’s pure; all of it
is pure. I live and I breathe
only for
this
and those catalysts that have
brought on all this
breath and divinity.
Muse, brother, God, tree
-- whatever. Everything is
true. Soon you’ll see –
the Sun is Rising.
LII.
Do you remember the geese?
One day we were cutting the distance
between – I stood
outside my open door
under a drear, gray February
and a wonderful flood of words
from Milan; balm for
my Georgian soul. You detailed
with a love for the life
so sincere in your throat
the tribulation of cruising
Italian tea-rooms.
Poor little angel.
Anyway – back
to the geese. As you quacked
out your tale, five noisy geese
flew over my house. I
tried to hush you
so you could hear the sound of
geese on another continent.
I’m not sure you did;
as I was holding the phone to
the sky for the geese.
Strange, the things we remember.
I love
you, jacaranda.
Muse, brother, God, tree
-- whatever. Everything.
LIII.
The name is too supernal;
it would break
your human tongue to speak it.
And so we call
the Angel Gabriel,
Capricorn – the Goat.
The Tree –
Jacaranda.
LIV.
It is coming –
this Truth.
Its name encrypted
in everything touched
and tasted, created,
remembered.
LV.
It is jacaranda, oak,
magnolia, olive – as well
the anonymous tree. It brings
with it the Summer,
the Winter, the Moon and the Sun.
It is the love of brothers,
the veneration of sisters,
the womb of mothers,
and the seed of fathers.
It is Joy, it is God,
it is Desire and Love.
This bliss has dwelt in the realm
of Fraternity for so long for me
and for so many times, but really,
it is Everywhere and Everything –
as everything is It. The world
in a drop of water. God
in a single leaf. It is Holy.
It is Alive.
It is Rising.
LVI.
Conundrums faced in winter’s night
are answered now in the light of May.
Aim your adoration outward
and touch hand and your eye
to the All. Revel and remember –
there are no accidents.
Claim more than humble words;
everything is true. Yield to
the Angel of Memory,
the Angel of Possibility,
and the Angel Who Carries
The Message. Yes, give all
your love to the Messenger.
Embrace the fleeting misery;
it is sweet as the permanent joy.
Nothing will die –
the Tree will remember.
No one is leaving –
your bliss remains
my bliss.
Taste of Time
Taste of Creation,
or dismiss these words as doggerel
-- and learn them elsewhere later.
This Truth, this Love, this Life
Never Ending, this Power,
this Knowledge, this One Soul,
this Dawn.
We will live forever
in the very same house.
We already do.
What is coming
is already Here.
As it will be forever
so it is today.
LVII.
It is Risen.
Tommy Sweeny
9 May 2002
4:41 p.m.
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