an organizing principle
Where did I go?
One of us calls.
I am out here
counting
the wrecks again,
to carry home.
Bags full of havoc,
to sort.
One at a time,
to see
what can be
saved by
meeting here.
The wreckage,
the gaze,
the still-living
hand.
comings and goings
The nerve of these meetings: skin into world, where whoever you are steps into and from, in her shaking assembly of beings made of moving parts. Life teems at the edges between us: land into sea, forest into meadow, the sill of a doorway. Then, now. Here are both, arriving.
Antique dreamscape
I want to imagine
the quiet pause
among dreaming
bodies unworried
by fear, just before
the dizzy speed of
radioactive play
began uncoiling
itself.
Before leaving
Part of preparing to go anywhere else always involves collecting to yourself those things that you think you may need. It doesn’t matter whether the mind doing the collecting is the conscious one––the type to make a list––or signing from an underground, unseen but essential.Â
Between the living
Until rest
Until I can answer
Until I can do better
Until quiet
Until time
and presence erupts
against our absence.
After space
First was displacement across a hollowing, echoing earth. Then came the longing of the rest of us, still here. The ache to know a place. Meanwhile, we remain tethered to one or another edge but mostly floating, trying to listen to the remaining birds. Who seem sometimes to suggest a song to somewhere.
in a utopia
follow fortune.
hate the fallen.
leave the huddled masses
on the road in the wake
of drums announcing
perpetual triumph.
know that looking
is considered trespass
against the preachers
of positivity
for there is no
stopping here.
only progress
up and always
as hot air
and wave
What is the opposite of the way we floated in that space, where it held us in that singing silence, drifting to and from? I don’t want to say it. Only that when we approached near enough, we gave names to one another. It was a way to hold and pass between us, all that reflection and depth. Later came a noise to shatter that silence, and we stopped passing names. I may forget my own, soon. Or the one that held me floating, more than mine. I make this feeble note, unsure if I can sound it anymore. It is the scrap of a decimated raft. I hold it, something between here and that endless down.
When suggesting.
What I mean
is that I mean to remember
where meaning is murdered.
What I mean
is for what
lives and where
it may.
Before recorded time
You don’t have a name for what you are in until you’re leaving it. Sometimes, to move, you have to try to give it words even when the blasts keep interrupting, even when the words you have fail to satisfy the genre of official record.
