Island Walkers
Resolved to sit here and stir the stew
of experience until I can see time
which otherwise like the aether might not be real,
I switch off the lamp, a fake Bodhi tree
hovering over me withholding fake enlightenment
Darkness seems neither an addition
nor a diversion, and like closing your eyes
doesn’t make disgusting stuff go away:
the Afghan poppy trade, radical income inequality,
Butte MT, lite beer, Twitter
Hours pass, or what passes for hours
now sunlight filtered through tons more CO2
than yesterday replaces inky moon-glow
like Descartes I look for what is constant
cannot be wished away, thought away, imagined away
while barbed wire weeds spring up in fields plowed by artillery
then cleverly replanted with land mines
but war’s a party and here’s only you and me
on poetry’s rebel island
walking its disappearing footpaths
not a tour but a series of suggestions
of which much or little can be made
The island’s trees contribute
on an opposite wall in a small room
wood panels are striped by grain
by layers of yearly growth opened flattened with their centers
showing a trunk or branch ending then growing beyond itself
a stubby end like a fire-hardened spear point
surpassed each year by the next
records a flow hinting of influx
the vital interior to interior contact
sometimes called intuition or revelation
much discredited in our age of empiricists
to whom other ‘ knowings’ are mist in Plato’s eye
too much wine with too many adolescent boys,
or overheated passions sublimated by celibates
like Theresa of Avila and John of the Cross
‘If there are no other ways to truth then what is truth?’
White-coated knowers of insects, galaxies, subatomic particles
and paranoid schizophrenia shake heads apparently theirs and walk away
secretly lusting after the most radical of thoughts:
there is no truth, only an endless series of stories, all fictions
a thought that destroys itself and its thinker
for beneath it is disbelief
and the underside of any and all thought is belief
an inalienable link to the body and the world
in supposition, affection and convention
“The Truth comes riding with a stranger,”
reads a sign on the side of a bullet train
speeding past as we walk the trackless fields of the island
so persistently loud the train’s roar becomes silence
so fast its color changes, becoming indeterminate
Reading the sign a walker thinks the letters must be printed
each on a separate car widely spaced
as the message floats steady as on a flagstaff
the windows of the train are mostly invisible
like the spokes of a moving bicycle’s wheels
blurring then seeming to stall and reverse flow
once he sees himself there, a traveler his current age
then in another a decade younger
and another until as a small child he waves to himself
as an island walker
The Dog Star 
4 Responses to “Island Walkers”
This is powerful, centered and beautiful:
“the underside of any and all thought is belief / an inalienable link to the body and the world ”
and “poetry’s rebel island.’
Just grand.
Thanks B. There are changes underway in my writing, which are resulting in longer poems.
An interesting discussion is worth comment. There’s
no doubt that that you need to write more about this subject, it may not be a taboo matter
but typically folks don’t talk about these issues. To the next!
Best wishes!!
Thanks for your thoughtful reading and response. I have written more on these topics, and have sent those poems to publishers. Meanwhile you can find other poems of mine at The Camel Saloon (search there for Donald Brandis poems) and at Amazon (search there for Don Brandis poems).