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In the small mill town of Pressley near the Alabama
coast during the summer of 1970, within its traditional blue collar, Deep South
culture, great social changes are astir and a diverse array of characters – a
neglected husband, a disillusioned preacher, a single mother, an abused wife, a
flower child runaway, an orphaned loner and a fatherless boy, through
adventures in birdwatching and catfishing, hallucinogenic trips, adulterous
affairs, fist fights and prayer vigils, seek a way out of their loneliness,
isolation and despair. Rare Birds of Coastal Alabama tells of their
various evolving, disparate, connecting and intertwining stories.
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Saturday, June 27, 2015
New novel by Brian Darnell available on Amazon!
The impedimenta of desire
The impedimenta of desire
Lessons in the course of a lifetime are not
(it seems) so much consciousness expanding
as they are encumbrances shed, yet so few
and paltry that little more light shines through
than in the beginning; each lifetime
threatened by smudges of vice,
the impedimenta of desire
to overwhelm the journey’s
natural divestiture and unveiling.
Aeons it seems, requires the process,
the gathering up, the breaking off,
littering the landscape, a-tisket, a-tasket,
every broken, mortal, humble basket,
until each core of light triumphs
over the entombed, encrusted alias
of Who, by faith, we really are.
O child of God, hide not your lamp
beneath the bushel but let it shine.
You are here
You are here
reads the big X on the lexan-protected
hiking trail map – You are here.
But, the truth is not about
where I am in the woods,
but where I am in the story.
Time, space, perception and being,
as well as components beyond conception
intersect at the ungraspable,
irrevocably fluid point of now.
Where I am is who I am,
path and pilgrim one and the same,
as deeply inseparable as I am
from the Companion Who is even now here
on this ineffable path to nowhere.
O child of God, study the map
to find out just where and who you are.
Saturday, June 20, 2015
The root of courage
The root of courage
Cor is the root of
courage,
Latin for heart
from which it springs.
Yes, a heart and courage grown faint
but only when we coronate
its pretender, its appropriator,
the Vizier we employ
in heartbreaking irony to meet life’s threats,
real and imagined; the very maker
of fear, the saboteur of love,
ever in opposition by dominance,
usurpation of the heart,
the cor, the
coeur, the core
from which all courage springs.
O child of God, yield your head
to the heart’s dominion.
Keep sharp the axe
Keep sharp the axe
It’s not like felling a tree, I’ve gathered,
an accumulation of blows
the more disciplined and precisely delivered,
the sooner the accomplished task.
I am not the wielder of the axe, for example;
I’m more like the tree or both or neither
and when it finally comes down,
I won’t be there to mark it.
Yet, it must be attended to, it bars the way
or perhaps the topmost branches
hold the key to my awakening,
the elusive revelation and relationship,
the axe blows merely knocks upon my door,
my best friend wishing me
in the bright green sunlight
to come outside and play.
O child of God, the purpose of conjecture
is to keep sharp the axe.
Saturday, June 13, 2015
Pitched bottles
Pitched bottles
I’m running low on ink, pen,
stationary, bottles and cork,
the Milky Way moving above me
like a vast blue sea, tides
and currents sweeping away
my inquiries never to return.
Sitting on a rough beach
I seldom pace anymore,
but often soil my knees with prayer,
wondering increasingly
if the shell of sky and ocean
somehow forms the answer –
me without ears to hear, held up too small
and distant against the eternal,
not a climbing path anywhere
among the flying stars and heaving waves,
these pitched bottles merely
a poor substitute for drowning.
O child of God, facing sea and skyward
distracts you from your inherent solitude.
A brief coupling
A brief coupling
Some people think of poetry
as a string of words that rhyme.
It must be, others opine,
musings ingeniously inspired
or stilted profundities, oddly arranged.
Some insist upon evocative phrasing
or words obscure and impenetrable
and yet poetry is not words at all
but a redolence that drifts
through the bars of our cages
or not even that but a dark,
nuanced display at a moment’s notice
on bright, open palms, stolen like a breath
from the reader’s chest,
a brief coupling alluding to, more or less,
the gasping, thunderous truth in us all;
a hint of the ultimate affinity
for which every heart pines.
O child of God, why ever would you endeavor
to put into words what poetry is?
Saturday, June 6, 2015
The ruddy marrow
The ruddy marrow
Love is nothing like a tattoo –
facing outward like a bumper sticker,
its splendor or wisdom
a public assertion of affection or opinion
designed for the elucidation
and edification of others.
Love is a tattoo pointing inward,
a stain on the underside of the dermis,
ink in the blood
down to the ruddy marrow,
an indelible, inviolable, privately negotiated
contract with one’s true self,
nothing to do with advocacy or influence,
identity or display but a personal,
permanent rejoinder, reminder –
the pearls of a secret adherence
never reaching the gawking,
insensitive eyes and ears of swine.
O child of God, keep counsel with your pillow
and enter into thy closet to pray.
The farthest skies
The farthest skies
Wings naturally contract, necessarily,
yet that wavering, faithless bird
invariably predicts and laments each time
a calamitous plummet from the grand heights,
ever astonished to witness,
following panic, its wings unfold anew,
catch the air beneath
and keep itself tremblingly aloft.
Full extension, followed by an essential
recouping,
the gathering of vital resistance
used to climb the farthest skies
and yet, perpetually, through lack of faith,
fear and suffering accompany
our fateful, solitary and majestic flight.
O child of God, hold on tightly.
You’re just along for the ride.
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