Martin Burke                                                                                               ( please click on the tab at  left  to hear the audio)



CROSSROADS

Martin Burke

There are no other names for places such as this

Mountains embracing flatlands embracing the sea

Each hold itself apart yet joins the others under the same sky

Ruffled, gray, but not threatening

But of course there is more to it than that

The roads that meet and join here pose a proposition

Kant would understand

Who proposed such moments

When you see mountain and sea

As dynamic or mathematical

His definitions of the sublime

Which you need know nothing about as you experience them

At that crossroads which cancels the questions it raises

Whatever is asked can be answered but need not be

So will we walk in this place with a measuring rod or compass

Or stand at the joining

Absorbed into that landscape

Of mountain, landscape, sea?

What else is the world but what it is? Vivid beyond definition

A shimmering which holds.

SATORI

The house is silent, the world is mine.

Rain attempts no dialogue yet speaks incessantly to the world.

My ownership is fictive but even the not-real sustains me

Not again loneliness but over-simplification.

Only the world at its best approaches the purity of this moment

In a way nothing I do ever will. The house is silent, the world is mine:

My ownership tells me this is the Buddha’s poverty.

THREE LETTERS FROM VINCENT TO THEO

1

The soul like a white salad grub; the instinctive necessity to eat; the instinctive necessity to paint the white grub of my own within

Yet can we, earth grubs surfacing, judge the life within ourselves and that life our condition preconditions?

My answer may be ambiguous but perhaps that is most accurate to the life that I will live; dealing with ourselves as if dealing with others; dealing with others as if with ourselves.

Yet even Voltaire loves the rash conclusion and decries the high life (he has done this harm to many (in Candida) )

This life –and perhaps there is some other, but always this life as if it were this life only

Now I am further south doing what I want to do

Hardly a docile servant to my time’s expectations, but who among colour and colour works toward the worlds’ intensity like a white grub on

The plants of nourishment

2

This life –defined by blues and burnished yellow, I neither can nor want to live some other nor is there any heart’s cry (even spoken in French) I might embrace as mine

Even as a rock renews itself to live another thousand years so I adopt this process to my eye; a necessity, a duty, a solace or a torment as I succeed and fail

I work in this faith as a digger would a mine-shaft

Mole-dark but unerring, aiming for the Atlantis of Japan; moving from the paint’s withinness to the world’s withinness by the flurried swirl of a brush

3

The weight of a franc and the stroke of a brush –how can I bring them to a balance which says the one is worth two or five of the other?

Too often what’s offered is no different than thirty pieces of silver yet I’m in a hurry, a flurry of work for the trees are in blossom, the orchards in tremendous gaiety and I’d include the wind in itself if I could

I am betrayed? It is the world which is betrayed

Even the haystacks are crucified for a commercial salvation