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NETS
I CANNOT PASS
As
far as sensual hindrance will allow
the room is still.
Shapes
along the fender go.
An evening tincture falls.
Silence’s
centre, ancient texts assure,
is vacancy
in
all that the marauding eye
invokes the mind to see.
But
novices, serving their interval,
are told, ‘Let
eye
and ear and touch prevail
awhile. In time
you’ll float
‘on
seven minute sounds and disappear
self lost
into
the void. But to adhere
to right progression: slowly first… .
‘In
time your knowledge and your ignorance
will both be one.
But
you’ll be smitten to that trance
only when sense is done.
‘And
body is killed only if credences
of body’s wants
are
given their due hour. There is
a way to master sense
‘before
you murder it. Probationers,
know that the eye
reports
a livid rottenness:
mark well now what you see.
‘Life
is a lurid snake hung by the tail
in a dank wood,
a
decoy senses will extol
because its hues gyrate.
‘It
is illusion then, and death belongs
to this first state.
Yet
set the eye free here and learn
the art of binding sight.
‘Before
you pass from world look on the world.
Look on this plant.
The
emptiness between grows slowly wild,
the vision won’t relent,
‘your
penetration to this thing repels
the petty day;
a
tempting field between you pulls
both it and you into
‘a
new existence of direct perception.
And in your blood
you
know why plants lean in the sun,
you feel a thickness load
‘your
stems, when autumn promises the end
and weed-heaps burn.
You
know why cities bed in land
deserted in the sun.’
The
novice follows to the book’s conclusion.
His senses dumb,
disturbed,
not ready for extinction.
I close the book and own
as
far as sensual hindrance will allow
the room is still.
Shapes
along the fender go.
An evening tincture falls.
Alan
Marshfield
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