BEFORE MID-WINTER

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I am willing to be ignorant,
to embrace ignorance
as an activity not a fact.

No one instructed me in this.
I was taught to take action,
apply what I know and not wait.

Learning not knowing has
been, is slow, is the reception
of new matter, of transmission
from elsewhere, sitting in
the train, watching the
landscape move.

Not being ignorant for a while
until I know, but continually
unknowing even while actions
are carried out, having an
awareness, a recognised stream
of emptiness flowing always
alongside my Socratian self.

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No wonder we know for
sure that the word comes
from god, or the great tree,

or some thing or being
beyond and behind
or above the word

so powerful that when
we hear it we partake
of its divinity.

No wonder we know
that all words are creations
and being written or spoken

are recreations,
and being seen or said
again, fall further from

their origin; that
the word is only visible
for an instant

it evaporates cannot be kept,
nor resorted to,
cannot be offered as proof

or dangled as enticement;
beautiful words flash from our
mouths as bubbles

from fish,
as seeds in the wind
already in decay

before they convey birth,
everyone knows to ignore
the contamination of interpreters.

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When something issues forth
from the void, from no visible
or understandable source

we know it is sacred
and immortal, because
having no beginning

it can have no end,
we can easily agree
to this, listening when

we speak or read,
hearing only so far back
before words vaporize.

We hear them issue forth
not seeing or knowing
an end for any let loose

to dance away from us.

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The idea or remembrance of something
outside, beyond, not cosmically
significant, not requiring years of
yoga, or fasting, the ontological
recall of something else
of elseness, of elsnessness,
the emptiness into which
such remembrance can come,
undefined, without specific aim,
the idea or remembrance,
the listening, I forget now
what it was I wanted,
or wanted to forget.

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