Charles Stein’s Dream Wood

January 6, 2015

Charles Stein is a poet and scholar of considerable accomplishment. His many volumes of verse, translation of both Homeric epics, and writings in philosophy, art criticism, politics, and other subjects have won him recognition across several artistic and intellectual communities internationally. He has taught both philosophy at Tunxis and lectured as part of the College’s Proof & Possibility series (see http://site.tunxis.edu/podcasts/2008/12/01/incursion-of-divine-presence”-and-“homer-hierophany-hypertext”-opening-lecture-two-talks/).

11-29-14 Two Poems, Each Ending with Dream Wood

first poem:

“mules” means work

that you don’t want to do

pulling a cart or mule-load up a mountain

the burden of existence suffered

to be carried up the suffered road

that is the task at hand

horses run free from their burdens

fly on the wind with godgrown pinions

plumes aflame, ultimately

but ordinary horses fear fire

fear the absolute of their own liberation, if we are horses

to break free from the harness is within reach, possibly – you buck and whinny shake your head and attempt it

you imagine flight and call on the gods

but fire is fearful

you choose to doubt the feasibility of it

do you have an absolute nature free in the fire or not?

the question abuses the possibility

the truth is not a possibility it flames like the fire of the suns before they were suns

you will be devoured by the flames of your own liberation they put the raw material into a flask and set the flask in the oven

it doesn’t mean you have to have the confidence of a fire walker

the fire you walk is a fire from within

within what?

the matter itself is aflame before the fire that heats the flask

open beyond all inquiry your science will never reach it

it is not among the facts that intelligence seeks ripe thoughts with which to depict it

*

I am of two minds naturally:

the one which treats its own nature as a matter of urgent inquiry

the other that shoots from the root

it is not mule work to attain the stability of where I actually am

but the work of flaming horses alight in the dream wood

11-30-14 Second Poem

how to eek out a niche of “absolute divergence” that leverages everything to a value everything denies?

The egg hatched M.E. (Max Ernst) and hatched ME in the summer when the rotting mat(t)er had to peck at her breast to rid her product of his matrix and set him contrariwise to the work of an impertinent discovery.

There was a moon in it.

2

The Holy Bank is not in Time. What then? The coin of it minted without sovereignty.

3

O come come. The putrescence of polyphony has a sun in it. A face that shines like the sun one minute but later it falls from the thing you thought was the sky – even the sky is the projection of a prodigious illusion – the bigger the astrophysical evidence pretends it to be the greater the distance from the point that demanded it – then went splat – and there was no point to the niche when there was no woods to eek it out in.

4

Ordinary citizen “me” swept away by the citizenRY— the abstract(ed) collective we all feed with our own repaste— All Use is Abuse to cite for the umpteenth occasion in these missives the wizened sorcerer of Gloucester Mass who eats and eats and eats but shines in the Dream Wood

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Photo Copyright © 1882 Vincent van Gogh [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons