Roof, Rexroth, Blossoms, Bridges, Zen-itude - Views Above Windows

[I took this photo about 12 years ago (2010), my first spring in the studio apt, a new digital camera gifted to me so my arm plunged out the window often to snap mostly wasted images…but a few as usual were keepers or, rather, keepers enough. Click on the image to get a larger view.] 

Kenneth Rexroth is good reading now while I'm on the roof, first roof sit of the too too brief warm-enough/cool-enough season for sitting on the layered tar rolled flat reflecting gray from a clear sky (the roof will be unbearable to sit on by April's end). Fragmental view of bridges Manhattan and an edge of Brooklyn Bridge framed by buildings East and riverward…so, reading Rexroth, an early teacher for me in Blue Ridge tree tops 1970's then, and then with his translations of Chinese poems too which are now with me on the roof NYC 2016, the cover's wrecked, stained, torn, the edges brown and where the scorch came from I have no recall at all but clearly some flame or other got to the spine of it and burned the gray to dark brown and black. But the book still works and my hands are gentle with the pages, the spine weak and cracked, my thumb's a gentle press to hold it all together, tenuous though. The poems strong though. 

I lean over the brick ledge to peer east and down East 10 Street to quaff the view of bright off-white buds of trees just a few arms length below me, I would so gather them to me if I could but my reach is not long enough so the eyes must do, the stubborn ginkgoes refusing to open; they contrast against red brick and buds bright left and right of each twining limb dark, thin, black studs/nipples where leaves want to be but not yet, not yet. The aroma of the blossoming trees is strikingly sexual, male, though the eye sees the graceful flower an entire tree becomes before green has its long free run over the eyes and street--Not yet "green, how I want you green…" Not yet - "not my hands but green across you now" but these Rexroth essays and translations, and some Shinkichi Takahashi zen surrealist incantations for linear assonance and sumi-e mental negative space…Some Rexroth here accounts for such clear trances, the utility of them in an age bereft of substantial visions (though the essay's not about Takahashi but could be): 

"Poetry such as this attempts not just a new syntax of the word. Its revolution is aimed at the syntax of the mind itself. Its structuring of experience is purposive, not dreamlike. We are dealing with a self-induced, or naturally or mysteriously come by, creative state from which two of the most fundamental human activities diverge, the aesthetic and the mystic act. The creative matrix is the same in both, and it is that state of being that is most peculiarly and characteristically human, as the resulting aesthetic and mystic experience is the purist form of human act. There is a great deal of overlapping, today especially, when art is all the religion most people have and when they demand of it experiences that few people of the past demanded of religion....A visionary poem is not a vision. The religious experience is necessitated and ultimate." -- Kenneth Rexroth, World Outside the Window, the Selected Essays of Kenneth Rexroth, pg. 255-256