Frank Russell (1951-2008)

This is a kind of grieving, three days worth
late in the night the Sunday morning after:

Frank is gone, one of many pioneers
in the space time continuum, scholar
of oblivion, Blues lover of the evidences
within and without the fantastic, illusory
world. He rolled his wheels in the night
highway, and god only knows where
he was at the time, in addition to being
thrown out of the car, in his Father’s
old World is all I can say for sure,
living pointlessly to point far out
in all the particles of eternal night,
down in, let’s say for the Blues in it,
in Plato Beach, Florida, no zipcode.

He would laugh on his end of the phone
to see the joke of everything in that,
in how understanding ruins what it touches
and to poor mankind touching is everything,
so we invented language, but were stuck
with some lost perfection or just ahead
a spot where the facts don’t add up
but almost beautifully, as if language
really did precede the world in mirrors
of human seeing, apes their essences.
He’d call me at all hours once in a while
and I’d say, Man, the ideal and oblivion
are not that far apart, like the signs
“Welcome to…” and “Come back when
you can sit a spell,” and not even three
whole moments have passed. So we live
and so we die, too: we both knew it.
Ours is the age of pornography, all kinds.

He gave his life to third eye seeing
but the life he had to give had been
overwhelmed originally by too much,
his Father’s suicide, and a pointlessness
that had somewhere to come to a point.
His good luck and bad two fates thereby
warring in his soul, each disguised as
the other, ending in-what? Escape
or/and ultimate victory realized
in a “fanatic heart,” Yeats’s phrase.for
an Irish dame’s love of her land’s History.
His world burns itself to unending
clarity, as in Heraclitus, but needs,
as usual, an anguished human life for fuel.
It was his to adore the mysteries of unfinished,
deliberately imperfect answers spreading in
micro- and telescope alike, the same even.

The world dizzies us all, I should have
told him; think small. Try not to die
among the fathers. What did they know
that we don’t. It was their performances
that saved them to our hearts, not even
what they knew, or were bound to believe.
His quest to define some doctrine of
divinity in the empty spaces out there
in the blown-out, rambling-by-the-numbers
universe might as easily have been charming
rather than an ongoing cue to quit being.
Hearts stronger than ours knew better than
to “break up their lines to weep,” or cry out
against a person or persons not there.
I should have told him but I didn’t
performances end on their own terms,
not accidentally on a night road near
the sea, in a stupor of facts it took
remote distances to quantify to anything.
It’s not even a cautionary tale, his
rendezvous with the nada we inherit.
God is all the people you could or
could not love, a practical joke on the soul
compounded, stylized to ceremonies,
made lyric, narrative or dramatic,
writable in any and numerous cases.
Out there in boundless spaces among
burning gyres, exploding gases, clusters
of matters and antimatters whirring about
is one’s own face looking back,
and he, my friend, was hopefully not the last
humanist, albeit his unfinishable, formidable
theology-in-the-making had a built-in
bad teleological habit, an end to being.
Faith was his curse, surprise, surprise,
in our “Our Father Witch,” who literally
offed his own son to save us, and says
He is still out there in the dark making
scientized Hamlet monks of any not paying
attention and Ophelia goes into the drink
singing fragments of hymns and old songs.

Buddy, we already miss your huger than
songs bravery against the night of space.
You would have made a good Jesuit,
and god’s presence proved by his being
in all moments grandly and infinitesimally gone.
You were right: Civilization is all laws
and the law is given most to those who
have none. Step into the shadows, Man,
and begin with our best wishes the journey
outward. Send back news if you can.
If Huxley could croak under the spell
of LSD, why should you not be free
to punch your own ticket to outer life.
Inner, I might have suggested you say.
It’s the same. One galaxy to another,
I will always feel you looking over
my shoulder when I read something
too vast or chemical or sub-atomic or
micro-macro-micro to understand.
We’d agree, the universe guards itself
from being finally known better than
our fathers did, not to mention mothers,
mare aeternam, eh bro’, who also
don’t know any more than we do.

Cowboy in the cosmos you are now.
Your lady misses you terribly in the moonlit
palms out there in the savannah.ferns.
The life and deathly violence in meadows
out therein the boonies should have saved
but it didn’t. What do we humans want?
More. And so we have no choice but
throw the boomerangs of our stories away.
Good night, Bro’. Now you know everything.
How little and how much that actually is.
And if truth turns out to be seeing without
language, I know you’ve already understood
that much. We talked about it openly.
We even agree on all the silences the least
thing written is capable of holding back.
Let me write out.from time to time,
something from that world of silences
after all, Friend, on your behalf.
All caritas to you, friend, whether
it exists or not. If we do, it does.

Gordon Osing
Copyright © 2008

Gordon Osing, Zen Poet
Photographs by Josh Mintz

This entry was posted on Friday, February 8th, 2008 at 10:53 pm and is filed under Wild Blue Yonder. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.