Across the Silence: Poems by James David Audlin

By James David Audlin

"Poetry," a friend once wrote, "leads us past the indescribable and submerges us in the experience."

Just as the mountaintop has a natural affinity for the sky it cannot touch, so poetry, as the highest form of word-art, has a natural affinity for that which is beyond words: beauty, horror, love, the sacred, and so on.

Poetry improves with age and repeated appreciation, like a fine wine or a well-made violin: the more one reads a good poem the more insight it provides to the reader; indeed, more than any other word-art, it draws us back repeatedly to read it, to read it aloud, to linger yet again before its beauty and marvel at its wisdom.

And, finally, as someone (it might have been me) said, "Poetry is the art of breaking words across the silence without disturbing it."

Good poetry – unlike prose, which tends to revel in its own loquacity – economizes to the point that what little is said does not describe, as does prose, but points to, just as a finger points at the moon; ... for silence is as asymptotically close as we humans can get to the perfect truth.

--from the Preface.

• Language: English
• Publisher: James David Audlin
• Release date: Dec 3, 2011
• ISBN: 9781465841025

James David Audlin

James David Audlin is an American author living in Panama, after previously living in France. A retired pastor, college professor, and newspaper opinion page editor, he is best known as the author of "The Circle of Life". He has written about a dozen novels, several full-length plays, several books of stories, a book of essays, a book of poetry, and a book about his adventures in Panama. Fluent in several languages, he has translated his novel "Rats Live on no Evil Star" into French ("Palindrome") and Spanish ("Palíndromo"). He also is a professional musician who composes, sings, and plays several instruments, though not usually at the same time. He is married to a Panamanian lady who doesn't read English and so is blissfully ignorant about his weirdly strange books. However his adult daughter and son, who live in Vermont, USA, are aware, and are wary, when a new book comes out.

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This book does not contain every poem I have ever written, for the simple reason that most of what remains is in need of considerable work if not terrible beyond redemption – but so many years have gone by since I wrote the versions I have that it would be impossible for me now to rework them. In fact, I have staunchly resisted all efforts to improve my early poems (other than obvious spelling and punctuation mistakes that I would have corrected at the time if I had noticed them), but to let them stand, flaws displayed, as a token to a young poet slowly learning his craft. Since not every poem written is contained herein, only some of my numbered sonnets are included.

The poems are presented in the order in which they were written, from 1970 to the present. To establish any kind of thematic order would be more artifice than art, and, besides, some poems would go nicely into more than one thematic section, and many poems would not fit into any such section. What I have done instead is to divide the book into sections based on where I was living at the time; place seems often to have a lot to do with my poetry. The endnotes often offer some allusions to thematic connections among not only my poems but to my prose works as well. A thematic index also presents a means for exploring this approach to the poems.

I include two addenda: some of my better song lyrics and a few favorite examples of my doggerel. I do not intend that the former be taken strictly as poetry, but since they are verse not entirely devoid of literary quality, I think they belong in this volume. The doggerel, very light verse written more simply for the sake of humor itself than even as poetry in a humorous vein, are not to be viewed as part of my more determinedly poetic œuvre; still they add, I hope, to the pleasure I hope the reader has in reading this volume, and prove the point that poetry doesn’t always have to be so so very serious.

At the back of the book the reader will find lists of not only titles and first lines, but also last lines. I have never seen this done before, but I find that what I think of first when remembering poems, mine or others’, just as often as the beginnings are the conclusions.

As mentioned above, I have provided some endnotes on each work. The meaning of any poem, mine or others’, is entirely personal, and to be found by the reader in the process of reading, rereading, and meditating on the poem as a gift from Spirit, in the same way one might meditate on an ikon or a spiritual chant. For in that sense the vaunted poet is not the originator of the poem but merely an amanuensis for Spirit, and the poet’s understanding of the poem is only equally as significant as that of any reader: once the poem is written, the poet becomes a reader; in the process of reading and meditating on it, the poem becomes every other reader’s as well. Therefore I leave the interpretation of these poems up to each reader, since, at this point, I am a reader with no more special insights into the poem than any other reader. However, I do give dates of composition and some background notes or stray comments of my own which some readers may find interesting; it is absolutely not necessary that one read them, and I would hope that this book is entirely enjoyable without looking at the notes.

The work of a poet (as indeed of all artists) is to put a window in the walls of our dark finite world; that window properly serves two functions: to let light into this world so we can better find our way through it, and to give us a glimpse of the greater world that we will enter once that way through this world has been walked to its end.

Thus it is that a friend once wrote: Poetry leads us past the indescribable and submerges us in the experience. That is as good a working definition as any, even if the goal itself is, appropriately, impossible. For poetry has an asymptotic relationship with the unspeakable truth: even the best poems only come close to the truth, without sullying it with their mundane reality. Just as the mountaintop has a natural affinity for the sky it cannot touch, so poetry, as the highest form of word-art, has a natural affinity for that which is beyond words: beauty, horror, love, the sacred, and so on. Perhaps the commonest (in the sense not of ordinariness but of frequency) of themes in my poetry is the relationship between the ephemeral and the eternal: how quickly one vanishes into the other, how indeed the ephemeral – Thomas Gray’s evening, for example, or John Keats’s daffodil, Ginsberg’s generation – actually calls forth the presence of the eternal; by so doing it suggests that an ephemeral poem yet speaks eternal truth. And of course overall is the evanescent nature of this life and this world; today, as we stand on the verge of destroying both, we need ever so much more to head that eternal truth toward which poetry points, like Gautama’s finger at the moon, like Han-shan’s reflection of the moon.

Of course these themes appear in prose, but there writers can describe events or feelings on the part of their characters, with which readers can identify indirectly; poets, at least the best ones, seek actually not to describe but to evoke directly these inexpressible matters, to make them real for us even when they are not otherwise a part of our experience; in seeking this goal poetry has more in common with magical incantations. (The only genre of prose that comes close in my view is that of science-fiction, for what could be more impossible than for a human, in a human art form, to portray convincingly for us the reality of the Other unknowable by humanity, the utterly inhuman, the utterly alien? It amazes me that some people think science-fiction by nature cannot be poetic; I like to think my science-fiction novels are not lacking in verbal euphony, and I take some pride in the science-fiction poems included herein.)

Another earmark of poetry (need I qualify that by saying good poetry, or is it self-evident that bad poetry is merely versified prose?) is that it improves with age and repeated appreciation, like a fine wine or a well-made violin: the more one reads a good poem the more insight it provides to the reader; indeed, more than any other word-art, it draws us back repeatedly to read it, to read it aloud, to linger yet again before its beauty and marvel at its wisdom. And, finally, as someone (I don’t remember; it might have been me) said, Poetry is the art of breaking words across the silence without disturbing it. This is so true that the title comes hence. For good poetry – unlike prose, which tends to revel in its own loquacity – economizes to the point that what little is said does not describe, as does prose, but points to, just as a finger points at the moon; this Lessing correctly pointed out with his own finger is the métier of all great art, for silence is as asymptotically close as we humans can get to the perfect truth. At least with my own poetry I think there frequently is an inverse correlation between length and quality.

Each poem finds its natural place somewhere between the two poles of perfect communicability and perfect beauty. If a poem is only comprehensible to the poet (and perhaps certain friends or relatives who are in on the inside joke), then, beautiful though it may be, it says nothing. Yet, at the other extreme, a poem that is completely comprehensible in meaning is uninteresting and unlovely. Most poets, I think, tend to stay near a certain point between these poles; my poems, however, seems to find their proper balances at several points on that spectrum.

Sometimes when I read the works of the greatest poets I despair at the thought of mine being compared with theirs, but then when I look at these that came to me I am reassured to find that they are not that awful after all. These feelings are rooted in my belief that for me poetry is not only the most sublimely difficult – since not only every word but its placement on the page and its sound in relation to the sounds of the other words must be absolutely perfect – but the most deeply personal of all forms of word-art. Like tightrope walking without a net, there is the greatest potential for supreme success and for abject failure.

This collection therefore seems to me to come close to an autobiography of not the outer events in my life, but my own inward spiritual growth. Definitively explaining how these verses came into existence is beyond my capacities, other than to point at the Sacred Muse; I prefer to let each poem speak for itself.

TYPOGRAPHICAL NOTE for Smashwords Edition: Since Smashwords doesn’t allow tabulation or multiple spacing, a small symbol (·) has been used in some poems to position the words correctly. Please ignore this symbol when it appears.

The Finger Lakes 1970-1975

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Click on the N for Notes on each Poem

Click on the T for the Table of Contents

Wander in a Lonely Land

N T

The utter fastnesses of my soul

of jagged mountains deep clothed in black

and rocky plains and cold stars above

a wind lonesomely moaning

as I stand naked,

dwarfed by the mountains

and shivering as I gaze solemnly

being whittled by the alien wind

until I am all sharp and pointed

such that I bleed when I rub my hands

together to warm them

but the blood disappears in the wind

and I have no more

and I am as cold as the lonely land of my soul.

Yesterday and Tomorrow

N T

And the stars come and the momentous

feeling crying from the overflowing

Never has my mind hoped for love

in the remembrance of sonorous soft

why do they trouble my opening

childlike abandoning of little hopes

In squalor the demand for a really

perfect hope and feeling comes into being

always in the indigenous eternal (songs

that remember the hope of time) why does

it follow the never of anywhere is it

because only nothing has life that

cannot be realized shock of hope for

the feeling of sadness oh my God

Sharing a nothing that if we only

had a never oh yes we always don’t

come into the presence of yesterday

Why don’t we wander at another thing

like tomorrow. Heart is overly singing

to a kneeling polite little sliver

of exacting purple magnificences

Why does a little child come every day

at the old and new to search for an

answer to something that was never there

To come again in the little each why

of a not especially new opening and

each of us winds up a song of nothing

that we opened in ourselves because we

cannot even see a spirit that takes a

hope soon into its own hopes

and waters it for another year.

You are me I am you

N T

In the spirit the magic sleeps

in an apple movement comes

into purity comes thought

and all is the same.

Sometimes I can’t feel another

sometimes we’re alone together

sometimes I fear we are lost

but it is not so;

Soon the time will come together

soon