Stirrup of the Sun & Moon. Frank LaRue Owen

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      Poems by Frank LaRue Owen

       Homebound Publications

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      1

      Other Titles by the Author

       The School of Soft-Attention

       The Temple of Warm Harmony

      2

      Introduction

      Almost none of us are taught this originally, but it was a central lodgepole of my late teacher’s spiritual and creative cosmology:

      We Two-Leggeds are not limited to a physical body.

      We have capacities of perception beyond the usual five senses.

      Landscapes—inner, outer—can hold wisdom,

      healing-energy, memory, and teachings.

      A practice of attunement to the spirit of place

      is one viable path for the activity of a poet.

      As evidenced by microscopes and telescopes, just as reality is not one-dimensional—limited only to what can be perceived by the naked human eye—so it is with the complex spiritual nature of human beings and the wider world in which we find ourselves. A human journey can also include attributes that extend from multidimensional experiences such as dynamic intuition, vast ecological empathy, the ability of empaths (and anyone with practice) to pick up “invisible” information from people and environments, and the universal, cross-cultural phenomenon of dreaming—namely, “energetically uncoiling” long enough from our bodies-at-rest at night that we are able to travel to other levels of consciousness, which we might call “rungs” or “realms”.

      Some of us have made a lifetime study of these states of consciousness. When combined with creative expression, a relationship to place and memory through the subtle energy body—what my late teacher and I began to call the “Poet’s Dreaming Body”—becomes a way of cataloging impressions of those places as well as dream, time, heart-mind, and various inner-shiftings.

      Stirrup of the Sun & Moon is a collection of poems rooted in a practice of turning multidimensional ways of perceiving toward the seasons, landscape, ancestry, memory of place, apprenticeship, and the churning gyre of the soul. The central image of the book is of the human soul-as-spirit-horse. In effect, with our birth, we “saddle up” and ride through infinite territories. Just as with an actual horse with a saddle, the “stirrups” provide balance to the rider. The “stirrups” in this case are hewn from Daoist, Zen, animistic, and Jungian understandings of balance-as-ongoing-process of the psyche and spirit: light/dark, luminosity/shadow, solar/lunar, masculine/feminine, consciousness/subconsciousness. Seen in this way, life is experienced as an ebb and flow of seasons, “winds”, tides, and energies. The “stirrups” is how we maintain our seat. Something else entirely, it would seem, has the reins.

       A Few Multidimensional Features

       Found in Stirrup of the Sun & Moon

      As you saddle up and make your way through this collection, you, dear reader, will notice a few features that both orient and augment the poems in this work. First and foremost of these is that every poem (with the exception of one) in Stirrup of the Sun & Moon contains a liner note that includes the name of a song, an album, and the name of the composer(s) of that song.

      This feature is modeled after an ancient practice among some of the poets of the Tang (618-907) and Song (960-1279) Dynasties in China. Poets who adhered to this practice in these early eras would sometimes sidestep naming their poems altogether and would simply list their verses under the name of a song, with the understanding that if the poem were to be recited (and often poems were sung), it would be accompanied by that specific tune e.g. To the Tune of “Crows Cry At Night”, To the Tune of “The Fisherman’s Song”.

      One example of this is the Daoist and Ch’an influenced poet Su Dongpo (1036-1101), who wrote a poem once in which he used poetry as a way of processing an important dream. The poem is listed as: To the Tune of “Song of the River Town,” a Record of a Dream on the Night of the First Month, Twentieth Day, in the Eighth Year of the Xining Period. (source: The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry: From Ancient to Contemporary, The Full 3,000-Year Tradition, edited by Tony Barnstone and Chou Ping)

      Music has been an ever-present and immovable feature of my process as a poet. When I first heard the music of Steve Roach’s Dreamtime Return in the late 1980s, it was a life-changing moment. Steve’s music, along with Robert Rich, Forrest Fang, Byron Metcalf, Chronotope Project, Roy Mattson, and many others, have remained with me and have added a profound depth to the poetic process, both writing and reading.

      Naturally, you can read the poems in this work as a stand-alone experience, but if you should desire to unlock a more multidimensional experience of each poem, simply search for the song title and musician’s name in YouTube and the ‘spiritscape’ of the poem will unfurl. Many of the artists can also be found by searching for them on bandcamp.com

      Another feature of some of the poems in Stirrup of the Sun & Moon involves the place-centric nature of some of the verses. Although not present in all cases, some of the poems in this collection are rooted to specific places, usually in Mississippi or New Mexico. In the case of place-centric poems like this, I have included the place coordinates in longitude and latitude, along with the associated name.

      This, too, is inspired by early Daoist and Ch’an poets who would sometimes designate the location of their poems, or call out an important event at a locale, either with a simple listing of a mountain, city, or temple, or with more elaborate descriptions e.g. Stonehouse’s “On Leaving South Mountain Sutra Library” (Red Pine translation), or, one of my favorites, Bai Juyi’s “All The Mountain Guests Started Up Incense-Burner Peak Together, Helping Each Other Along, Until Rain Forced Us Back, And We Came Home A Drenched Confusion Of Wild Laughter” (David Hinton translation).

      In the case of Stirrup of the Sun & Moon, when place coordinates and place names are listed as a feature with a poem, this represents a significant marker on the “inner map” of this particular wayfarer.

      –Frank LaRue Owen / near the Chisha Foka Trail,

      Natchez Trace, Michiziibi (Mississippi)

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