Category: earthling

Another Invitation

To a dear poet.

To inscribe passion, make of it a history, burning with love and regret, holding posture ever toward the mortal crowd at the gates, immersed in time’s noise, still listening, long after Eden, for the miracle, knowing any journey can be a stand-in for all journeys, ever, the constant flight to another life: the dying, recalling; the oblivion, searching.

But what is this moving at the bottom of loss? It won’t be sold another scandal when it’s time to gather signs. I will lose myself and go again.

One day, when the barbed-wire walls are down, I hope you will come and see me in this bird-painted room. We will sit here together, watching the light move with the cat.

Solitary Shining

Starry notes.

Consider the ancient star’s strange courage and this large man, reading. Watch this spirit storm the walls, the transparent body trying to translate its former substance.

Most poets are too late and too soon, with too much of the world to rush forward, pulling back, having nothing but this cry for the occasion, a flash of voice calling keep you to what goes and come to what will not.

***

Opening lines nod to this verse from William Carlos Williams: “It’s a strange courage/ you give me ancient star:/ Shine alone in the sunrise/ toward which you lend no part!” (“El Hombre,” 1917).

The Commuters

What moved us.

And so, we went on, seeking shelter, seeking rest. We were mostly moved by wants––fears too, naturally. We guided our rafts between dangers and needs until the distinctions between shores began to blur. 

But sometimes in a quiet hour, there would come a recognition. The want had no end, did it? It was as vast as the sky we beheld at night, and just as impossible to see. It was here and it was forever out of reach. There was nothing to do but move toward it, singing the testimonies of our weaving hearts.

Later, another recognition: nothing survives, does it? No single creature. And yet, we sensed this constant drum at the center of each gathering. Only this luminous moment––yes, even of our death––has any life. We gathered to witness and were moved to move again.

Lines of Inquiry

Ancestries in spacetime.

The children of Time and Space had questions. These were about certain unknowns and uncertain knowns.

For example. Does this blind spot have to do with the invisible time in known spaces, or with the unseen spaces in measured time? 

Well, one of us sighed. I guess you never really know your parents.

Space seemed to be always smoothing her voluminous skirts, welcoming us into her lap or brushing us off, laughing. When she stormed, she raged and we hid, but our shelters were only deeper folds of her. 

Time was off somewhere. Running, she said. We wondered if he would come back, and she laughed a quake to cut the earth outside the window. When the dust settled, we would hide there, too.

Survey of Poetry

With cephalopod.

I mean to tell you about the artist whose paintings, according to some, have a brittle, airy alloverness. How insistent they were, melancholy like the memories of a landscape.

I am thinking about the way that every human eye has a blind spot. How the blind spot, instead of appearing as a black dot in the vision field, is conveniently filled by a process of extrapolation, based on visual information at the border regions.

Taking a break from the paintings, I notice someone at the fountain, playing guitar. I would like to tell you about the poetic arc of the neck, leaning over the instrument, the taut curve of intention.

But I am distracted by thoughts of cephalopods. I have recently read about Otto, the six-month-old octopus at the Sea-Star Aquarium in Coburg, Germany, who was caught juggling hermit crabs. Otto was known to rearrange the contents of his tank to, as the aquarium director put it, “make it suit his own taste better.” Otto made international news for short circuiting the aquarium’s electrical system several nights in a row. It turns out he had learned to turn out the light above his tank by squirting water at it. It seems he did not care for the light. 

Octopus have eyes like ours, but no blind spot.  

Each arm has a mind of its own, unobstructed by central control. And now I cannot stop thinking about this looming intelligence of the sea, how when we’re not reminding ourselves to fear its presence, we are replacing it with a cartoon caricature. 

I want to talk about the art of this cephalopod, the poetry of its symphony of intelligent parts in motion. But between this blind spot and the limits of my language, I cannot take it in.

***

Otto’s story is available here (to Telegraph subscribers). I found it in James Bridle’s Ways of Being––Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence.

Aquarian Drip

These dazzling portraits.

When the artist came to visit, we were moved by the shining colors in attendance.

We had questions. One was, how would you describe the world you are building?

There are all these characters, see? Part divine and part human, all in a state of transformation. During each metamorphosis, a being glows these wild colors. It’s magical.

Are these self-portraits?

A lot of them are, partly. Also, part fiction, part archetype.

Can you talk about your materials?

They are loaded. They appear to be surface-level decorations. And yet, the objects themselves emerge from grief. So many people were dying. I was thinking of memorials, how decorative they are. And then I had all these sequins, and was like, I know what to do with those! 

Because people are so much, you know? All these glittering layers, and then when they are gone, you have all this extra sometimes, this overflowing sense of all you see, all you wanted to say, all that they were beyond the simple obit. 

It wasn’t long after I started down this path that I was like, I am going to need a lot more sequins. 

***

Inspired by the work of Devan Shimoyama. The title of this post comes from one of Shimoyama’s paintings.

Swimming Lessons

And other notes.

Let’s rehearse, she told us. Lick this joy first, wherever you can find it. Even there, she said, at the bitter root. Especially there. Because this part will kill you, but this part will restore the dead. These are the same plant, child, do you hear me?

Survival demands distance from what kills you, and yet here is your life. To remind you how you will never get close enough. Only keep returning, back and back to that which makes you want to run.

Here is the cave of the dragon. Here is the belly of the whale. Here are the bowels of the ship, the depths of the sea, the strangest creatures you have known. You recognize them, don’t you? 

Here is flight: suspended, perfect peace. Now the absence of the air you need. Now the desperate kick, up and out of its saving embrace.

Up to the surface. You can still see. Linger. Notice what shines as its holds you. Now back again, down. Down.

A reading of “Swimming Lessons”

Signs of Life

What trembles.

Consider all this a precursor, the artist was saying, to work in another medium. I wanted to begin with some questions, she told us. I was talking to a friend, she said, as I am now––and the friend, these friends, had certain questions. These questions encouraged me, she told us. To keep looking, you know. With these hands. 

I was trying to make something, to see it. There is a way to thread a map of layered memories so that knots are formed at the points of collision. There is a way to see the knots as what hold the web together. 

Of course, they won’t hold still, so it is not clear yet, but I can see how the tendrils of these maps might thread together, suspended in ropy intricacy as though in branches above us. How we might assemble beneath the canopy, looking up. 

It would be so much that we would have no choice but to return to a preverbal state with sounds and textures and smells and a sense of being in one place expanding out and then back between carryings, and no one can ever describe what happens in this state, when the tremble of memory is soul.

Nightswimmers

Liminal play.

When we were children of the sun and our play was a running banter with shadow and shine, I remember how you laughed to catch his spray in your teeth and our skins would carry it back inside when we were called in twilight hours. 

Our shapeshifting forms morphed and when we were children of the moon, we knew our skins to slip like the bellies of jumping fish, winking light just to feel it swallowed by an original sea with night waves lapping whispers to return.

Before Seeking

What hides.

What makes the running child in an everlasting dream suddenly slow at the base of a breath, to crouch here, beneath a rib? It is a passing shadow. It is not unlike hunger or pain, but it is neither, exactly. 

To the child, it is not unlike the uncanny feeling of seeing someone familiar wearing the changed face of a stranger, and this is cause for stark concern, like nightfall at midday. 

So, the child waits here, crouching behind a rib, until it passes. The child waits for a long time. Naturally, they continue to think, this will pass. Naturally, they whisper comforting phrases while waiting. Like one day. Like when it is safe. Like ever after.