Poems
The Soul Within Book 1
Allan Hayes
Octopus
More fluid than her watery world
Liquid in liquid flowing
No shape defined by structure, only thought Becoming what is needed at this time I am the entrance to the cave
And then the cave itself I am
Suction cups are eyes that see through feel Absorbing chemical signatures to know. Each arm a being searching on its own To share what has been learned back to the whole. Then if my stealthy swift maneuvers don’t prevail Black ink will parallelize their eyes and hide the trail.
Becoming where she is no longer there
A rock that moves, the waving kelp with eyes
A walking coconut across the sand
Colors are moods changing at her will
Moving in ripples faster than thought
I am a flounder, I am a shell
I walk on two legs made out of eight
Something I am not, unless I am
Alien eyes take positions where they
Shouldn’t be, but still they see.
These eyes through time have seen
The Ichthyosaurus gliding by,
Forests of hovering Nautilus
Rising and falling where hovering jellies
Haunt eternal time
In a cave where darkness lingers, She gathers herself to brood Seeding the future with new ones who Already know what she has learned, Somehow beyond the genome, Near her already known death time She plays shooing schools of fish Eight waving arms with the glee Of loving life knowingly about to end.
With ancient mind she reaches out a tentacle to know We parted four hundred million years ago A white worm evolved two ways We took our separate paths, and yet We seem to know we share a mind That’s looking back to understand.
Blue Heron
When the fog lifts the heron is there. What have you learned about patience, about silence. Everything is revealed in this moment. In the snow. In the sleet. In the heat. In the cold. Always in the same place.
When the road is there. When the road is not there And the trees have fallen. And the sky has emptied its liquid belly, You are there. You stand in the same place forever.
When we stood up and looked around, you were there. When we lay back down and are gone You will be there.
You have seen the great beasts come and go Did you notice, or are you that still.
If it’s not the same river twice You are the same. The river changes around you. In your quietness you stand Alone in your chosen place Patience embodied into form Consummate stillness.
It’s not your feathers feet or beak That fascinates me.
It’s not the birdness of you, It is the calm patience without remorse.
What do you give me? What do I take away? When you spread your dark wide wings, I stand in awe of your simple understanding you can fly.
You help me feel my place in time. What does it mean to stand apart from it all? For me, you will mean things from the past are always in our midst.
Grey Heron in a Country Graveyard
Your magnificence worn out
You lay to rest in the swamp
Where you stood for years
Now quiet as you were in life
You are in death here where your
Fire fangled feathers lie around you
A tight death mask of silver
In the cold morning fog
You did your peace
You played your best
You stood in elegance
Your feathers wrapped around you
A pall without deity
A shawl for you alone in death
You are encased in gentle stillness
Changed in presence you move forward
Through your death, quietly as you did in life
There is no remorse here
There is only the beauty
Now you enter back Into the universe that brought you here
I feel your presence in my soul
I feel your journey in my soul
Elegy for the gray one I have known Your graveyard the churchyard of the universe
Right here where death Is felt through everything
The place where you lie is a small slew Backwaters golden channel in the marsh
Gently rising and falling water breathes
It is a place of mystery. It is a place of beauty
It is a place where the mallard couples
Bob up and down next to you in the dance that is so old
Boat Dreams
With a rusty hull on a rusty trailer, I wait. We bounced over the glass bright waves
Following your dreams.
Bright sun, blue everywhere.
Now I sit on this rusty bed in the grass. Where are you. Where are you.
Broken mast and molding hull
You used to shine my teak
Now the crows peck and spit
We conquered a churning ocean
Forging, leaning unbridled into the waves
Now I lean against a tree. Where are you. Where are you.
So swift we were. Here, then there. We would find them. They were ours.
You pulled them in with heart pounding. They wiggled and flopped on my deck.
I haven’t felt the cradle of the water for so long. Where are you. Where are you.
I felt the push of the wind And took you into your dreams
Fiji, Palau, the Southern Sea Waves so high we surfed to live A part of you, a part of me
Where are you. Where are you.
I am bright and new, with A strong hull and pointing bow Ready to go where you want Take you to places beyond, where Anything can happen. Where are you. Where are you?
I have dreamed of you in roiling waves Hard to the wind flying silver locks
Searched the old yards, dry land harbors Combed the sea of rumors for your secret Bound at the beam our time is now Where are you. Where are you.
Horizon our starting place, we pursued The sea extinguished sun, slaves to Our yearning sirens and the winds salt breath
Now you rust in the grass, sepulcher of dreams
New dreams would bring life, any dreams. Where are you. Where are you.
Horses on the Hill.
Day to day the images on the hillside change their dispositions to the sun, moving against the horizon defined by a line from the mind through the eye from a chosen vantage point
A shadow, a shade of wind wayward over the quiet water. We see the shadows of things that themselves show us no form.
Do they have no final articulation without the observer casting a spell with the cells of his being?
All the beauties in the mind are only the ones seen when they are seen.
Today a sadness lingered and shifted creating an inner twilight, the cold chill of darkness hovering, passing perturbations shifting the viewing angle.
The horses spun on the hill shadows turning to the other side, silhouettes against the dawn, frozen beauty, forms of beauty on the awakening day.
At night cast in the same poses, their beauty is no less for being dark. The mind can see the beauty when the eye can’t.
Answers
A slice of bread is not the same, perhaps, As the wheat field moving in the moonlight in the rain. But we seek connections in the dance, hour to hour, day to day. Meaning partakes of frivolous decay.
Softly the ocean in the night may set the mood,
Deep black and brooding currents dark and restless. But the fin on the fish on the plate may hint of these, And that may beckon up a deeper day.
Dark moon is pulling on her blood: thought is not a player..
The chemistry doesn’t know what is above it, where
She feels an ancient harmony, and
Embracing a transition of the blood, she
Wanders in the rituals of womanhood, Gazes at the color of future eyes, while
Pulling gently at her swollen breast, she Smiles and takes her visions as reality.
Who cares if it’s a river of her own meanderings, the grasses smell bright green, birds fly where she wants.
They are a part of something uncontrived. Her dalliance persuades the hour to come to life.
We take our meaning not from the things themselves, But from the evanescent shapes cast by our thoughts.
While languoring in the fern enfeathered glade
Late sunlight dapples, lending the afternoon a mood,
She notices a mushroom tilted in the shade;
The caterpillar and Alice, the teasing questions; or
An umbrella in the wind ; perhaps a parachute of silk?
She called upon the evening as a tide that pulled night underwater, Into a receding sleep where Deer approached the river, soft and holy,
Gentle eyes looked at the water, Knowing only what they know, and needing nothing, They proceed, right now, with lips unmoving
And never expect more than is already.
Why does it matter what we are? or why we are? or
How it’s turning out.
If we knew, would it matter, would it change a thing?
Every morning we awake, and need to Take new emptiness and coax it into life.
At the observatory, we look around, and Follow light back into time, where
Nebulae diaphanous are softly reeling, moving
Shapes changing somewhere sometime only marking their intentions with ghostly adumbrations.
And so the mind in restless search for meaning, Looking out between the clouds to distant stars
Can’t find any answers that aren’t ours.
Mare
Mysterious beginnings, my wobbly legs, The hay is hot, it’s new here at least for me
Bright light, little ball, the air in new lungs feels cool
Adolescent girls, awkward and tender, nudging and nuzzling, guiding me tenderly
Out to the moist hillside in the sun to grow old standing motionless in the grass
At night, quiet on the curving hill the grass is sweet blackness and the stars from all the universe are mine
A horse connects the universe to the grass
The stars pour through our eyes over the long night, We wake up standing in the dew with the one sun, radiant and stilling
We come from a time of watching What we are waiting for we cannot say, What we are watching for you would know if you looked in our minds through time.
The saber toothed tiger, the lion, the hyena You would know why we watch, why we stand still.
Lake Turkana
I have stood on the shores of Lake Turkana, I have walked in the shadow of the ghost fire’s plume And I didn’t know that you would love me Because of the shape of my feet in stone.
I lay to rest in the shallow water
Where the silt of the ages covered me
Little did I know that my brittle bones Would jut from dry mud when your heart was alone.
And holding my bones you would gaze through time
To sense my breath on your finger tips, And feel the chill of my ancient presence Out on the plains in the fields of bone.
As you walk in the hallowed halls of the canyon
You feel me around you turned to lime. As the Universe rolls to its final end Neither of us knows how to stop time.
I felt it merely as a sadness An unformed thought like a field of grain I’m fading light at the canyon’s mouth My time has gone into the rain.
In the Cave
In the cave you stand in old silence pocket of unremembered time, did the universe form around it?
Damp moonlight, wet walls, reluctant light there is a sound that can’t be heard.
This silence means something. You stand in a dream that’s gone, clothes fall like ashes, dark silk falls away, a wind is nowhere.
Hold the black walls. Face on the wet walls. My cheek is cold as something very old moves just out of reach.
The Sound is full tonight
The Puget Sound is full this night, Deep breath of water at the shelves brim
Pulling clear water from the Pacific
Tides breathing in constant rhythm
Filling the smallest channels and tubes
On mainland and islands in the San Juans
Clear saline heart’s blood of our world
The patient filling and emptying brings life
The weather flows with magic in response
Calm blinding fog, clouds and sun dance
Bright shades of bluish gray and deep dark rain
Wispy tendrils in the distance falling misty tones
This planet dance awakens the deep-set heart’s feel Thoughts flow, these natural changes are thoughts
Deeper, unbounded when entered openly in The full presence of the only real sublime
Without judgment because there can be none
For Galen
Glaciers moved with the patience of eternity, Slabs breaking off into icy blue seas. Earth’s core fire still spread its holy flame. Little seemed different that day after he’d moved on.
But as the light of morning shined on the spinning earth, The eyes of the ones he’d touched, opened to the new day, Already changed by the gift he’d given Of viewing the world in a different way.
We sense him in the eyes of the Nepalese girl. We feel him in the glowing tent at the glacier’s edge; Walking the valley without end where time stands still Over the lake as evening lay on the silent water.
“Always leave things better than you find them”, Said a voice on the wind in the fading light. He gave to many new ways to see, And he is there each time they open their eyes.
Night’s Chalice
Hear in the long sound of night’s translucent colorings the wind, feel the presence of an open door. the pale evening backing away the mind a chalice to be filled by night
Asleep under a butane sky
My son and I let time unchaperoned do as it will, resistance gentle the branches moving in the wind
The wind may shape the evening or the stream sass up, a present sound birds call in the soul of trees in the stealthy waiting dark where we embrace the fall to sleep
The mind fashions all of these, all that they are in these imaginings. Yet it can never know the truth nearer the souls of these things themselves. Rise up in the moment of pure being saying the moon is a stone of night
With a receding ripple of thought
The water flowing in the dark, the other side, In moonlight the billowing silver surface
Always flowing away.
You can’t know time
But you may feel it taking place
When least expecting
The dawn
Says it has passed.
We awaken in light
We recede into darkness
And then awaken again.
