KATHARINE—From, To, For, Through—Abandoned To Ourselves
A Poem of the Poems of Our Life Together before Her Death by Jack Carney
KATHARINE—From, To, For, Through—Abandoned To Ourselves: A Poem of the Poems of Our Life Together before Her Death by Jack Carney
Katharos Greek, “pure, clear of dirt, clean, spotless; open, free; clear of shame or guilt; purified" “The serious study of Man…considers what we would have become, abandoned to ourselves. Men, be human, that is your primary duty…. What wisdom is there for you besides humanity?” Jean-Jaques Rousseau “A free man thinks of death least of all things, and his wisdom is a meditation of life, not of death.” Spinoza “Bound freely to trust, Love, we came to care. What matters is the mind we shared. As long as truth could tell, The god we gathered was us.” From “The Husbanding of Katharine’s Life” Note: below, what I consider one poem, are all the poems numbered in chronological order beginning with the earliest, that I wrote from, to, for, and through my Other Half, Katharine, who I met in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia in May of 1989; and who I married in Maryborough, Queensland on July 4, 1993; and who died in Brisbane her hand and Mind as mine on December 17, 1996 where she remains to this moment for as long as forever is. 1. FOR YOUR BIRTHDAY (circa 1989, Lower Beechmont, Queensland) How time’s muse becomes you. My hands rest full of your essential curve That returns my mind through your flesh. I keep the compact to mean your sweet fact: Breast rise, ass surge, calf lilt, Your belly’s most deft swell. I ache to erect this ancient arch, For I love that which brings the world accurately back. And you do, as I occur and come clear, Intact within your nubile mind. You remind me to be what I understand, You bring me round to your universe: One constant turn through your woman to my man. 2. TO RENEW WHAT MATTERS AS YOU (circa 1990, Lower Beechmont, Queensland) The proud flesh sensed as thought taut with blood, On top of you, the side of you, under you, in you In all ways I turn to you even as I turn my way, For I claim the earth’s occurrence in my hands Full of your body’s coming home to my urge, As round and round you return me enriched As I enter the dark through your apt passage, Pushing my choice to renew what matters as you, True as the full moon breaking its light free, Releasing our vision in the sweat of joy, Garnering the far stars in our conceived minds, Fostering the forms with what we are and care to do. 3. THE THOUGHT OF YOU DOES (circa 1990, Lower Beechmont, Queensland) West of the gum tree’s reach two days of the moon’s missing fullness turns to face the nape of your neck traced in the flesh of dawn. Eastward from the city’s gritty winks surging up from the sea a towering cloud bank ignites what remains of the night away from you its crest refulgent down the lit coast’s spine the lightning spilt from within what the thought of you does to my mind is its best knowledge. Now dawn plays hide and seek as the Kookaburra calls come out a last star stands forth taut as your nipple caught between my lips. 4. THE LOGIC OF YOUR FLESH (circa 1990, Lower Beechmont, Queensland) The black willow of your hair combs the cut grass fresh from the wind. I’m clear with the creek as it reaches for the pure root of your name. Your breath splices the silence once the whipbird has returned its paired song. You smoothly shoulder the far mountains as they slip their shudder of fire. The lantana’s dark green groin overflows with your magenta flushed blood. A billion ions penetrate you now but I know where your nucleus resides. The sun in my touch is already a flashlight back-glowing your ear lobe. The logic of your flesh is my Archimedean lever and love moves our world. 5. THIS POEM OF AUSTRALIA IS FOR YOU, KATHARINE (circa 1991, Lower Beechmont, Queensland) My hands on the wheel of life and you In the small quick Peugeot moving Our minds through the astounding matter, Sieving the joys of the Lost World Crossing, The southeast Queensland farm country of the hinterland. Between Sarabah ridge to the east and Jinbroken ridge To the west, a rust drop of Nankeen kestrel Beating above black rock outcroppings Among a thousand gradations of green simmering On the hills and sibilant files of pale brown sugarcane, How I took your smile for what the world wears. Do you remember the single horned cow With the huge drooping pink dugs and those white Faces of shifting flesh staring at us With deep brown pools of timelessness And the sun sleek on their soft curves? We stopped for lunch at the Albert river, A three-foot chuckle among uprooted trees, Wash of boulders and snatches of dying grass In the branches of living trees six feet above, Reminding us of the reach of the recent flood. On silver shattered fence posts wagtails spun Long white shafted tails while the galvanised blades Of the old windmill turned the time back and forth As white whorls of high cirrus drifted south Over dark clots of cumulus and intense blue depths. Stale coffee from the thermos and sandwiches Better than the most expensive restaurant, And the scent of your warm flesh mixed with grasses As we tossed a few words to season our pleasure. Tiny black midges gathered on the back of my hand And a lady bug settled on my book, dark brown Punctuation on a tan shell, as I listened to your fingers Rub on the paper as you turned the pages of our life. On the road again over John Brown bridge To the calf in the back of the halted truck And the mother, outside, bellowing neck stretched taut, Then the round white stone the size of a human head Set on top of a battered mailbox and the dog Disappearing into dust as it chased the truck Down the long blur of driveway to the road. The Hillview Memorial hall with its red rusted tin roof And Hill’s Hoist in the back, the patient sound Of cows pulling up grass with a grinding crunch And the shores of cirrus clouds that moved In mass over the low brown hills where the family Stood watching what can never be seen, The child on the man’s shoulders and The smell in waves of freshly turned earth. Isn’t it wonderful what we did with each other And this country of yours gathered between our lips? 6. For My Love, My Pure One, Your First California Poem (Laguna Nigel, California, March 31, 1991) Reduced to matter as a man Only, capable of the world As rational discovery, the Pride I take in that knowing, Us, I, finite but unbounded. And I am walking wide awake, Joy in my neuronal ready state, The joust of my mind’s electrons With what matters, such as the sunshine Of your smile, or the half moon 35 degrees up in the east, Pale arc smudging into hazy Blue, the shadow of your shoulder Or the earth’s, soaking up millions Of tons of discrete messages, The passing of mass into time, Happy Valentine’s my love. Identity as existence, to live What I am clearly to its end, That product understood as the good, My nature given back naturally Leading me to fulfil my life. Gazania, treasure flower, named After Theodore of Gaza, how Sweetly its particles whiz At me, as I warm my hands on The Big Bang that pushed its face Into such a beautiful butter look, Such a largesse of life nodding In the sea-wind, that my mind Finds itself fondling Aristotle’s A is A and laughing to the tickle. A blend of bird songs twitches My ears amid dog bark, chopper whup, Plane drone and car sush, As I breath the aromatic exhalations, Delicate flower calling cards That catch me at the top of the ridge Looking east down into the valley Of Laguna, El Toro, Mission Viejo, Cream walls and clay red roofs, Countless shades of suburbia I Call abundant choice due to choice, The mind used to remind itself Of its potency and achievement When used according to its possibility Which I claim as poetry, my person. And everywhere matt greens and browns, The hills’ growth flecked with darker Shades of spun and spinning trees, As cumulus and altostratus pile up Grey-white against chalk-blue Haze softening the dark west mountains, As I come to Flying Cloud Drive, full flaps. Going down now, between the ridge Slopes to the west, the ocean Hovers in the V, a steel blue Fume assuming the horizon’s fine line Defining tilting turkey buzzards with Blood-red heads silent in the Tap of a distant hammer, echoing The intensity of medicinal greens In damp shadows tumbling in arroyos To Aliso Creek foaming white teeth below. A lone snail, caramel, naps In the middle of the sidewalk, Amid silver-gray wood lice Legs all let lawfully loose, As the screech of the red-tailed Hawks rips downwind following Their paired bow-wing dives While Costa’s hummingbird blasts Its raspberry ember into the eye And the clean white morning glory Remembers the root of my sun, Katharos, my pure one, etymology Of my existence, radical liberty. Yes, I carry my dead, learning to Turn their mass into energy, Affording the choice of joy To celebrate the future of my past, Recognising my limits as the speed Of light and my five senses, The excitable neuron and the Fact of objective values. A bumblebee still dazed from Winter wanders about the blossoms As boys pop paper guns and yowl With delight at nothing at all And I find my life in identifying What exists entirely apart from me Our Love, my love, that is us. 7. FEBRUARY 21, 1993 FROM AUSTIN, TEXAS TO BRISBANE, QUEENSLAND FOR KATHARINE, MY LIFE, SOON TO BE MY WIFE My Dearest Sunshine, My Beautiful Fact of How the World Works, This is my letter of love to you, for you, of you. If I die before you, you will have these words to come to as my world and while I am alive may they refresh you about my intentions. I am speaking to you now and for the length of my life about our love for each other and for this life which is now ours together. When I decided to marry you, when I finally acknowledged the supreme value you are to me, I chose then as I choose every moment I think of you now, to live my life as yours. That you are for me, that you are me, I am certain. This is the fact of my love for you. This is my pledge of commitment. Surely as the sun drives all life and motivates every molecule, you, as our relationship, are to me the essential force and law of my life. The rational response to such a fact is to recognise and enact it. This I intend to do with you. And what joy this brings me! Here is a bouquet of thoughts and feelings that emanated from the source of my life I know as you. * I am thinking about my commitment to you as one that is made to the best of myself. And I want to develop that commitment even as I develop our relationship which I am committed to. * I must watch myself that I really attend to and work at our relationship as much or more than anything else I do. This is the opportunity of my lifetime to come into my prime by using the discipline of my other self, you, to draw out the best in me. * I want to use you to become more me. You are my beautiful tool. When I come to you I pass myself and when I go through you I surpass myself. We build upon each other, each other. What we sum is exactly ourselves. The world is large with us. You are my mind, naked or clothed with thought. You are wholly there in every part. I am equal to more than me with you. You are my marketplace, the even challenge of equal exchange. There is nothing of you I want to change. I only want to exchange everything for you and you for everything. You are happiness engendered, pleasure’s truth. You apply all the laws of physics into the proof of yourself. Your every why is a how. Each star knows what to do with you. Undeterred, my inertia continues along the straight line of our joy. When I take you in my arms the world follows and enfolds. * The wonder of it is why it took me so long to act on the obvious with you. You were always there waiting for me to realise what you must have already known that I knew. You were the maturity I had to acknowledge and grow into. * As I nod toward sleep suddenly I see your face nearer than mine could possibly be in any mirror, and it is filled with a smile of shining tenderness, and then you are in my arms and we are awake with the knowledge of life—and it is as if we have just met as I stepped off the world of my habits into sheer time intense with you. * I want to pay particular attention to you as my vision of what is, was and will be. To actually see you fully in all tenses, see your loveliness changing in the time I can be in part responsible for. * You called again yesterday morning, and I woke to a dialogue of joy, our love’s insouciance, a sprig of sunlight, a sheen of spring. * I remember your nipples tutoring the Big Dipper here and the Southern Cross there, pointing to the brilliance of the constellations of meaning, ours, as my penis points too, to be at home in you. * Our joy is contagious. We mirror the future. We are planning our fate together, laughing with it. We hold, easily, our lives in each other’s hands. We are learning what to do with each other. * I am so interested in you, what lies between your past and its future with me, as I summon the moment into a monument of your presence which is my commitment to the furthering of our lives to come, together. * I think, therefore, I love you. The future—so full of you that it encompasses my past. I have the sheen of you on the fingertips of my every thought. The particular you, locus of my effortless love, that clear flow under the bridge of my desire to know the world as us. Always I have known your touch, the world that aches behind your fingertips asking me to be true to its law, the mutual exchange of life for love. When I speak your pure name the sun dissolves on my tongue. When I die I will make my due and it will be you. And what I was will hive in your eyes as the light still coming from that no longer sun now alive as your sight of what is. The work of my world is the effortless love of you. Our music as the score of stars tonight, Sirius, Betelgeuse, Polaris, all clearly moving to the law of identity in my mind moving in yours. Only now as I stand outside myself found in the love of you do I know how little I knew of me. * You are how the world works, A factual audacity. Fresh Smile, sunny metaphor of understanding. Freedom is your comeliness Which truth uses as your proof. May this marriage be reality’s mirror, The apt expression we opt for, Agape spanning the synaptic gap. The mind we share is our market Founded on the economy of care And your supply demands more than me. You are my sunshine, my only sunshine, You make me happy when the skies are blue, So the old song goes that nourished my youth. Now the song is you. My seed Turns to your light and death learns the lesson of life. Finally, I want to see you as you are For your truth is so beautiful, whether Particle or wave, reality caught collapsing Into a choice which I now want to make. You and I, exchange of joy for joy, Your light bends around my mind And between the flow of your thigh and breast I settle into the universe as my part Comes into your whole and I play At being completely me. The flutter of the small yellow butterfly Fans the summer in your brown eyes. You are the fragrance of the future, Assay of the flash when our flesh meets, And I love you so, history of the instant, Beautiful thermodynamic climb of desire, Life understood as sweet reversal of the Second Law. * That our marriage may become the marketplace of joy. Freedom is our sovereign State and we obey The law of identity through each other. We have found ourselves equal to our exchange, We trade in love. You are my vital principle, And we share the mind emerging from our matter. * May we always attend to each other’s end As our first means and final meaning. My Sunshine, my life, my wife soon to be, I love you so, for the good of our whole. ************************ Final Notes: Katharine and Jack were married July 4, 1993, our “Interdependence Day”; Katharine took her last breath on December 17, 1996, which is still breathing in Jack now as then and will until when. Photos, from left to right: Brisbane, Queensland, 1990; Mission Viejo, California, 1992; Brisbane, Queensland, 1993, after our marriage.
“Love is the active concern for the life and the growth of that which we love. The affirmation of one's own life, happiness, growth, freedom, is rooted in one's capacity to love. Immature love says: 'I love because I am loved. I love you because I need you.' Mature love says: 'I am loved because I love. I need you because I love you.' Love implies care, responsibility, respect and knowledge.” Erich Fromm
“Love is a response to values. It is with a person's sense of life that you fall in love...that fundamental stand or way of facing existence, which is the essence of personality. You fall in love with the embodiment of the values that formed a person's character, which are reflected in their widest goals or smallest gestures. It is your own sense of life that acts as the selector and responds to what it recognizes as your own basic values in the person of another. When love is the conscious integration of reason and emotion, of mind and values, it is the greatest reward of life." Ayn Rand
“For one human being to love another, that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation. Love is a high inducement to the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become a world for himself for another’s sake, it is a great exacting claim upon him, something that chooses him out and calls him to vast things.” Rainer Maria Rilke
Very moving! No other words except, "this matters. you matter."