Long before surfers crashed here
or gay cabals claimed the beach
Hal and I came to write great novels
of sex, rewinding Henry Miller.

Shacks are cheaper here in winter
with paint splattered sinks, peeling
doors, spring erupting couches
windows leaking salt spray air
opening into a solstice celebration
for even in California
days shorten, light diminishes.

An eg o-pia in a golden haze
of exploding sunsets
black, red, azure, green flashes
girls strewn around the
lighted manzanita bush,
necking with the drinking boys,
the fashion then, went no further,
went home for Christmas day.

Lines in the mind link contusions,
compact, create unites, untie
knotted anxieties, and tie again
the new into the old

Circles of children, dogs, conversations
around ornately decorated trees
occasions translucent from year to year
blending into one complex vision.

Shacks in the mind stay there
overlay -are not supplanted
by richer rooms- or comforts,
ones own Christmas defined
in the circles of love
giving, needing, lost, regained.

My Christmas, their Christmas
until they passed away,
leaking memories, fading like
oil streaks in the sand,
the good and bad injunctions,
the discrimination long ago
of one child or the other,
inside or outside the circle of love
where lay feeling on this day.

Green red pealing branches
round red tangled bush brought
down from the dry mountains
to the beach– Manzanita,
sacred gnarled aged wood,
ceremonial shape, brings
their Muse, their goddess
their dream, to the beach,
into the sullen sea surging
dark mists of the long ocean
lapping seaweed, vomit of confusion
awakening the sodden, forgetful
youths on Christmas morning.
and their dreams of creation
of possibility, of the new,
muddled.

Dec 24 1997 Kent Bowker

In the caravan of joy the way is always smooth
the light heart all hopeful leads us on.
Despair is back in the luggage train
where we can’t see or get rid of it.
It’s in this balance of nature, of mind
we feel life and deep released joy.

2

Scribblers all disdain evil, desire good,
ignore complex muddy moral mixtures
flowing around our confused lives.
For what evil do we actually see
in our pampered american lives?

3

Our world of comfort is a subtle disease
blocking ears and eyes from the ominous
mummer of the injured heating earth
sounds of elephant and dolphin
crying over savanna and dark sea telling us
the taste of air and water are changing.

I INSIDE

I, like Icarus following Daedalus
into realms of undreamt invention,
flew too high to a myth empty place
of facts, and intelligent mechanisms,
where awe and love are irrelevant,
where Ocham’s razor cuts
and in hubris fell

We attended the cyclotron,
physicists, student devotees.
We made the instruments
prepared sacraments of lead bricks,
emulsions, glowing electronic tubes.

I, Icarus see all dimensions,
can see clouds of probability,
can sense the flow of quanta,
the personifications of the fields,
My young soul rushed in to
experience physical nature,
feel the dualities in reality,
feel the shadows about each fact,
romance in the shadows of facts.

The boat of question passes through air locks
into the chamber we built for creation,
all of black iron and brilliant copper.
We cannot go there, into the empty space.
But we did, once, with the vacuum gone,
crawling between the dead Black magnet coils
to trace paths of violent interaction, feeling the chamber hum,
seeking the holding hand of the universe.

A chill penetrates this inner temple, black and golden.
Intruding we felt subtle fear, a threat, the chant
of the incantation preceding creation,
the secrets of blackness before the light,
and remember the stories, the cost of knowing,
the cost one man paid to see this light.
Pure energy drilled his eyes, and mind,
chilled, and cut, particle by particle,
painless inside, flipping the eye’s fluid
grain by grain into white opalescence.

We looked for the pieces that govern creation,
quest for the creator and destroyer
inside this strange machine of magnets,
electric fields and fluxing energy
transforming the nature of matter,
pulling out strange particles,
the fragmented glue,
the terms of the equations,
the lines of the languages,
we use to know the origins
of fire, earth, water, and air.

2 THE GODS

A ranting salivating spitting
Doctor Teller on the podium
propounding thermonuclear stuff.
Sirens announce the closing gates.
We watched the blackboards
endless trains of white symbols
Oppenheimer, Fermi, Serber
on stage teaching us__

The closing gates keep us out,
preserve us to copy aquiline atomic
symbols flowing out of their hands
rippling over the black surface.
We hear the resonance in their words.
Feel the binding forces, see the orbits dance,
marvel at the beauty in the quantum order.

Doctor Teller rants on the podium.
‘I become power, knowing
the violence in creation
I master violence beyond feeling,
violence beyond restraint, beyond love.
All is consumed, all enters in
the soup, identity of all elements,
flesh, bone, water, love,
all one in the soup of violent creation,’

No one led us here,
We chose our great quest
seeing glamour in brilliant men.
Oppenheimer, a willow man with pipe,
nucleus knowing, singing mantras
of Soma flowing from Pandrapati,
God of the first creation
governing all new creations
without end, forever,
flowing into descriptions,
symbols in equations,
the collisions in the machine.

We looked down on the world
from the Berkeley hill station,
San Francisco, Oakland, a bay, bridges.
All below and our thoughts above,
focused, bending the proton beams,
bending time around and around,
spiraling gyre of emergent mass chasing light.
Wondering at the size, at the silent power
enamored of coincidence of symbol and reality.
Life outside the energy, the community of us,
seems without meanings, washed out,
outside of the school of theorems,
the new sense of the universe.

We are pulled by the minds of singular men.
The eye of Teller, ego bent on power,
powers to burn across the heavens,
our Oppenheirmer exiled-sent to honored limbo.
Our Gods scattered by red-hating Senatores
away to little colleges, elsewhere–
a community broken, but locked in by fervor,
strong wills bending all to one master,
the pulse of cyclotrons, the pulse of driven men,
the pulse of dreams, the pulse of our life.

3 SOME ARE GENTLE SOULS

DRIVING UP THE HILL WE’D SEE deer, rare fowl
Sheltered by the security fences, the walls
around the cyclotron and the growing laboratory
around the new machines we were building.

Driving up the hill at all hours
to feed the machine experiments,
checking counters, scintillation detectors retrieving film,
gentle spirits seeking knowledge, degrees, PhD’s

Driving up the hill, through the gates, layered fences.
Past the armed guards, showing badges, smiling.
Reminded of the ownership, of the power.
Reminded of the limits of expression,
Reminded of the Corporation…

The gentle souls, intellectuals, physicists,
truth seeking, keep private counsel
do their physics, expand abstract wonders
exalt in the crystal clarity of the truth
embodied in matrixed wave functions
embodied in group theory, in the quanta
held in their counters, film , detectors.

Ideas overwhelm the reservations, the dark reflections:
neutrons that take one’s vision,
beryllium dust that spots lungs, and kills,
daily millirad doses on our film badges,
The anemia of those who went to tests
came back to do research or teach
at a distant, safe collage somewhere.

The beauty of physics obscures realities.

And white blood flows in Hiroshima
White blood in the veins of soldiers
sent to trenches near a bomb
by the stupid military, we know
it happened, but it’s secret.

The mind is divided, severed, bright, and dulled
to fit the blanding apple pie, suspicious time.
Apparatchiks, Personnel directors, security men,
Inside the security wall. petty questions, biases.
They scrutinized theorists, Jewish physicists
‘Just necessary these people’, Serber, Oppenheimer, Frank.
They Trust the ‘good’, The blue eyed, and blond,
the experimenters, good old Lawrence,
Alvarez, and doctors killing cancer.
They Trust applied scientists irradiating rabbits
tinkering with thyroids, growing monsters.
They Trust practical workers, engineers
mechanics of unlimited power.

Inside the wall suspicions
‘Do you know any pinko liberals?’
Security everyone’s business.
Fences enclosed the buildings.
Fences enclosed the people, inside and out.
Fences cut through our minds.

4 THE CAVE

A silent presence now spreads
beyond the baked cracked desert,
beyond Oscura’s castellated crest,
growing out, a cancerous wave,
A new wave from glassy hot Trinity,
slower than the quick blast wave
slowly into our life, into our minds
and it split our spirits in twain.

The power to erase all creation,
shakes all creatures on earth,
releases ancient furies
rational thought banished.
We do not know yet, to tremble,
as Icarus knew. The tripartite shrines
forgotten flat stones in Cretan caves.
used to speak of this to us.
Old gods, the trinity of all,
the earth, the mother, and the void/creator
unseen by Christian Moslem Jew
the Chthonic powers are here again.

We erect new concrete steel caves
to placate the unlimited power
the sane and mad have unleashed;
We fear its unfolding use
We fear its deadly residue.

Big Pronouncements, big noises,
grandiose statements on and on,
and I cannot see clearly
any of this
any more.
I mock myself,
these feelings erupt from dark memory,
from having two minds for fifty years afterwards,
all gloom in one mind joy in the private mind
hiding love from power.

Most of us went away still under black security clouds,
still keeping our private lives private,
making livings, making families inventing for the country.
for the corporations making money.
Who are we, what had we hoped for in our wonder?
not these conference tables,
not endless simulations, games computers play.

I watch my friends, their down turned mouths,
Scientists listening to ever new horror
debating merits of multiple warheads
options, hopeless counter measures,
as progress moves faster on
and complexity baffles men,
inside the steel shell of secrecy.
We will not be forgiven for this.

Not knowing the way of gods.
Pandora’s tale of woe forgotten
how good intentions turn black
we didn’t know the best in us
would crack open the monstrous egg.

We will not be forgiven
for dividing work and love,
for accepting progress and practicality,
for accepting nationalism and ownership ,
for dividing this life from love.
We will not be forgiven
for our oaths of secrecy for not speaking
for not telling of radiation, of rusting reactors
of missile roasting lasers, of public lies.

Silent, we retire, leave it all,
Icarus has fallen slowly, aged,
drained, gray, still silent
oaths remembered resented.
And we turn our backs on new men
on the new hot science
tweaking the eye of a new bomb
seeking profits in the codes of life.

so much to say
it tumbles about
cluttering thought

the room is too small
the sentence too brief
nothing fits in easily
speech halts

___________________________

THE CATS KNOW

Today the old dog
was put to sleep,
yes, death, she was
suffering too much
we couldn’t know clearly
but falling down stairs
pooping as she struggled
to walk across a room
but she was a hundred and one
and in just a few days changed.

The light went out instantly
warm stillness remaining
into the earth before it cooled
we cover our feelings
with shovels of clay
but cannot forget
her devotion
always protecting
her sheep, her back to us
looking outward,
The cats know.

_____________________

From Camus, pg 23 of the Rebel
‘Envy, resentment; an auto intoxicant, an evil secretion in a closed vessel, and prolonged impotence’

Essex owns its saga
It flung  forth schooners for a century
from its little river, into all of the oceans
using oak from its hills, and its skills.
But now the polis work elsewhere.
The town rents land, coveted, envied, on a point
jutting far into the marsh, turning tidal flows
around, a center of glorious sunsets
where sea thrust empties and fills
the wide wild grass space
and where there is envy.
that others should have enjoyed
the sky that harbors clouds of birds
majestic storm clouds lightening
heavens rage and sweet calm.

But the townies owning the land
could like predatory landowners
walk on it, disdain the tenants
who felt intrusion, the covetness
and some tenants and owners were angered.

So came the realtors and developers
who feed on anger and thirst for profits
to set fires in the hearts of the town
until they vowed to have no more tenants,
have them simply go away!
Now the ruin avarice brings ravages all
rats gnaw at the edges of a desolate
parking lot where tourists look at the view.

The Pastor is up there giving
an homily for our lost friend
and beyond,   symbols,   a blank wall
we should see through,  a cross,
a tapestry, or a vast vacancy.

We are to focus on the absent
but only see a wall of backs
bare heads, necks, hair, collars, moles
faces left and right stare ahead
not seeing each other
turning backs on the many
obedient, should we worship thus
not seeing each other. Not facing grief.

Why do we ignore the living?
in these white churches
should there not be drama
the Gods there in front
playing out the life, the death,
at the center an amphitheater
where we can see crying
lamentations, and damn the Gods
for it, hold hands, touch.

Face the past, remember.
Stand in a circle, see each other
affirm our presence
the dead is gone.

Low Tide, Conomo Point

1

I wander in the body of this era
find the fluid bathing the mind
Washing logic, dirty clothes
Love, hate , anger, fear.

2

I need so many words
to explain anything,
even the obvious
depends so much
on the other.

3

The morning sun inflamed uncut grasses
outside, tall waving, fuzzy seeds,
heavy from a wet late summer

Reminded me of old monks yearning
reaching for words, like seeds
seeking to plant elsewhere,

Before me is life, its meaning
beyond dreams of transcendence
its growth its seeds its transits,
yellow tints, soft oranges,
glittering dew, light in the tangle.

4

The shrouds tighten
when our boat heels
as we tighten when aging
in a wind unrelenting.

Every year the patch of sky
grows smaller as the trees rise
enclosing my space, my vision
my eyes are sun pained
after days on the water.

posted by Kent at 10:37 AM 1 comments
Sunday, February 22, 2009
Birthdays,
How many things can we say
in celebrating birthdays?
count years pilling one
on another, pretend some
are more than another,
an accumulated wisdom
here, a step to somewhere,
achievements and losses too
until what counts truly
is continual love
and the sweetness of life.

Cyclops, by Mestrovic

Tuesday, November 11, 2008

The angry man is having tea
his flaming flowers wilted
long ago in his hot house of being.
(Light strikes tips of grass -
yellow glowing greened spots
beyond the enclosing windows)
A politic boils, and wanes with
so much discontent flowing,
the walls of Byzantium falling,
so much he thinks is wrong now
that was good and right once.

The fragility of the angry man
colors his room in gray thought
in complexities, of questions unmade,
as raw wide brush strokes across
banal landscapes, his blob of liberation
is only a thought, a move undone.

He’s stuck, this man resenting
striking out, his loss an eye
seeing less, just one thought
thriving, his freedom a curse
a presidency all tawdry, gone.

7/12/2008

Dubrovnic, small, enclosed

GAZA

(this was composed in Oct 08 before the recent bloody killings by all the enraged,  which make the metaphor even more painful. KB)

Between the ocean and the wall
(container of procreation, feeding, multiplying
and hideous thoughts I’m afraid of
and ashamed to find, of limits
and the end of possibility)
a sea of people encased
in the thin concrete strip called Gaza
where there is no free land
and little water no room for the newborn
for the young men and women
whose only freedom is in loving or dying
no jobs, nothing to produce or dream
education hijacked by mystic belief
and reality offers no hope
I cry for them.

An animal shelter collects unwanted
cats and dogs and saves them
from being eaten in the backwoods
of city jungles, starving in plains
of asphalt, lonely places.
The shelters are full,
more come than go to homes.
The small house of cages fills
this little Gaza, with its sound
of intermittent growls, hisses.
Cats rub against each other.

Gaza is our future, I cry for us.
The walls of our Gaza contains
all of us, the billions of us
programmed with rampant desires and despair.
We all need fulfillment, loving,
merging into another, creating children
filling each square foot of space
that might have been used to grow
wheat, peaches, olives and oil.
Now feet trample all to dust
that’s not covered in hard top
around concrete block houses
rising up to house the families
who’ve never known space between people.
The crunch, the slum, the piles are normal
and the old biblical demand
“be fruitful for there is room in heaven
for all on earth now and ever more.”
sanctions filling Gaza.

Why is the world to become Gaza?
Can’t our species evolve fast enough to stop it
change our inner brains, outer beliefs?

Why such dark views?

we don’t live in such a space

imprisoned by another power
we believe growth is good
preserves prosperity
needs more consumers
needs more workers
brings in the harvest
fills the factories and mail rooms
provides all the luxuries
of past generations.

The walls of Gaze are everywhere now
our breeding waiting to enclose us.
We hear the grinding of a back hoe
scraping granite ledge, air hammers,,
sounds of encroachment
our world filling.

Jan 30 2009

How do you remember a child you never see,
who denies you, and decades pass.
We get older together far apart
our memories age, get entangled
turn conceptual and get mixed up.

What do you look like now,
and how do I, to you?
We’ve no real knowing of the other,
beyond blind love and hate,
and the blood line sameness,
the small shared dialog is missing
of friends gained and lost, the silly things,
the foods we like, the bars we go to,
sailing skying, the foreign explorations
all of this, our mutual interests,
exchanged sadness and happiness
telling of hurts and victories,
all this, over decades, are missing,
so the fading memory of our pith and moment
have but thinned, sterile content
all sentiment and stick figures.

This disease of alienation
running in our families
does close in sadly
when the final meeting is silent
and death ends separation.