Into the Cool: The Collected Poems of David Saxton, 1992 through 2007

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Alphabetical List of Titles

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After Walking in Dream

Among the Bodies

and death ?

Angel Time in Manhattan

Anna Maria Island

Authority

The Beat

Being Pressed

Being With God

Black Snow

Brief Song

Certain Powers

Certainty and Change

Charlie's Soul's Destiny

Crazy Charlie: An Elegy for Charlie Watkins

Crazy Charlie: His Dark Origins

Crocus Time

The Dance of the Be

Dharma 5

Each Father's Prayer

The Face of Man

The Fall

Final Etchings

The Find

Flypaper Hopes

The Fool

Forgetting at Good Sam Hospital

Furious Me

Gaea

Gathered in the Light

The God in the Clown's Hat

The Great Escape of You and Me

Hidden Speeches

History Betrayed

The Idea of Hearing in the Buddha Mind

If I Were To ?

Intricate Puzzle

Invocation to the Great Mother

Jesus

The Kali Devotionals

The Lover's Intent

Mumbo in the Jumbo

9/11

No Hope

No Mind

North Point Star Report

Now Time

On Almost Losing

One Life, One Earth

Poet's Postscript

Precious Things

Returning

Rising

The Ritual Dream Journey of the Green Codicils

Rooms Beneath the City

The Scratching of Tomorrow

The Second Coming

The Self is Not Limited !

Sitting With Jack

Sitting With the Unknown Dead

The Song of I Am

Sonnets I-XLV

The Soul in Action

Spring Again

Star Knowledge Caught at Lunch

Stupid Things

Such Silence

This Damp Earth

Time

To Be Old and To Be Young

Watching

While Waiting

Wondering With Spring

The Zoo

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Introduction

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"I peer out at my universe

which looks as vast

to me

yours to you."

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- Jane Roberts

If We Live Again

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The title of these collected works, Into the Cool, is taken from the title from the marvelous book of the same name by Eric D. Schneider and Dorian Sagan. The subtitle of that work - Energy Flow, Thermodynamics, and Life - is meant to reveal the subject of the text which in its way is one of the most fascinating and insightful scientific books I have ever read. Not only for what it reveals about the universal application of the Second Law of Thermodynamics to the phenomena of life, but what it says about the human condition when it confronts the implications and meanings of a universe that is ceaselessly in transformation, renewal, and finally in irreversible decay.

The mind of humankind has always been aware of the Second Law, of course, as its truths are embedded in the folk wisdom of all peoples. Simply review the proverbs and aphorisms of any culture and one is struck by how they refer to the flow of time, energy, and the meaning of that for the experience of the individual and society.

The human can only finally accept the finite and transient terms of its own personal consciousness and need admit that even its own species form is subject to the same certainty of extinction - that the planet itself is on the same course toward eventual disappearance.

It hurts and it terrifies, but it does compel a response that makes for what is unique in the human experience. That response is what we may call the poet's stance against the seeming certainty of the decay and disappearance of all meaning with the assertion that My feelings, my thoughts, my joys, my visions, my love for the world will not die! I will set them down before you and their beauty will make them and me immortal! Such is the vanity of artists, but it is also the source of the heroic and gives humans the courage to go on to do their best to create and engage the cosmos as creative, self-determining agents resolved to serve the highest potentials in themselves and the species, thereby honoring the planet from which they have so recently emerged.

It is in that tradition that I present to you, dear reader, my Collected Poems. They have been created since the 1970s and placed haphazardly before the reading public since 1992. With this publication they have been brought together for the first time for your consideration.

The first work, From the Road at 40, is an assembly of poems I had composed in notebooks for a period of fifteen years. They deal with the challenges of life, political realizations, life with nature, and the challenges of finding meaning in a strange and difficult world. They are simple and straightforward and require no explanation.

The second, The Kali Devotionals, were created in response to my reading and becoming enthralled by the beauty and the spiritual power of the Gospels of Ramakrishna. I was attempting to recast the meaning and the obligation of the person to the divine energy that lies at the heart of all phenomena. In so doing I attempted to reflect the ecological dimensions of this energy as it relates to the eco-holocaust of our time. These poems were created during a time of seeking wherein I thought that some sort of ultimate realization was possible. This belief emerged from my study of the eastern religious classics.

The third piece, The Second Coming, came from my involvement in occult practices aimed at self-realization and self-discovery in service to the world of nature. I was probing the inner worlds of the unconscious in service to creating new forms of self-understanding to assist humankind in transcending the limits of the human form and making an evolutionary leap in self-understanding that would result in a new world or new age for the species and planet that is so needed by our earth at this time. The essence of this occult journeying in service to planet earth is embodied in the Hands of Hope / Sacred Ecology Statement contained within this work. It warrants a close reading and sensitive reflection on the reader's part.

The fourth is My Time with You, a sonnet series created, in service to personal and collective healing, during a difficult period in my life. They are deeply connected spiritually to my love of the poetry of Conrad Aiken, particularly his sonnet series, And in the Human Heart.

The last previously published work, One Life, One Earth, After Ryokan, is a continuation of the occult theme and, like The Second Coming, incorporates trance sessions with poetry in service to the subject of self-discovery. It explores the methods and promise of self-realization held in the Hindu tradition known as Jnana Yoga. This piece may be thought of as an extension of The Second Coming, in that it employs automatic writing to explore the unconscious and its wonders.

Finally, new poems, The Find and 9 / 11:

There is a great painting by Raphael that describes the essential problem that reflective intelligence has faced since the species emerged into self-awareness some one hundred thousand years ago. In that image we are confronted with the two principal philosophers of the west in dialogue with each other as they walk in the city square of Athens. They are Plato and Aristotle. Plato motions heavenward while Aristotle motions downward. These gestures reveal the basic dichotomy the human mind has faced since the project of inquiry about the ultimate nature of reality commenced. The tension this image describes is as to what is primary in the act of knowing. Does the world of becoming precede awareness or is awareness simply an aspect of the presence of the absolute that is known as being, and what is the relationship of the intuitions of these two modes of knowing? Is awareness of and perception of being the end of the project of becoming or is the intuition of the realm of the absolute simply a figment of a living, ever changing mind's imaginative faculties?

These same questions have been dealt with to one extent or another by every people who have come to an awareness of themselves as a distinct species with unique ability for communication and the transmission of knowledge. The answers brought forth have established religions, schools of thought, shaped civilizations, and structured societies. It is in many ways the central question for the human mind and for the life of the person. How it is decided on the personal and collective levels forms the basis of culture and how a society meets the challenges of its continuance and reproduction over time and space.

It is no wonder that this is the central preoccupation of the worlds of philosophy, be it western, eastern, or the oral traditions of preliterate peoples. It engenders myths and can make us mad or saintly, launch wars, explain the working of the cosmos, or make for poets to give their own views on the questions.

The series of poems that make up The Find is a meditation on this theme. They attempt to show the tension of these opposing views as I have come to know and experience them. I have been a student of western philosophy as well as a devotee Advaita Hinduism for some thirty years. I have been doing a meditative practice known as the yoga of self inquiry for years. It consists of asking of oneself WHO AM I? and responding NOT THIS to all temporal constructions presented by the mind seeking to know that upon which mind depends. This practice is an ancient one. Its most recent exponent and exemplar is the renowned and revered teacher Maharishi Ramana (1879-1950).

This practice has graced me with the conviction that there is a place within the temporal, changing mind of the personal self that is beyond the realm of becoming, being that which may be described as the eternal, unchanging self. That in this place lies the promise of a peace that can only be suggested by words. That the phrase, peace beyond understanding, that mystics use to describe what it is they experience after long years of devotional practice, is real.

Now I am not a mystic. I am a poet and an occultist. I see the poet's role to be one of divining and knowing this place yet resolved to return to the world of becoming to try to explain its nature using the tools of language with its marvelous gifts of metaphor, rhyme, alliteration, symbol, and chant to give assurance and hope to others that they are not lost in a world of ceaseless becoming only to