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

“Human love is...not a matter of merely exchanging differences but of creating a third entity, something new that is combined of each. This new entity is a living, united self beyond anything that can be created by a single individual. This is the ‘AND’ of you and me and human growth.” George T. Lock Land