Category: poetry

Orchestral Notes

From the pit.

What hungry mouth still stirs here at the breast of its bloody becoming, to scratch light from the surface of a longing night? Another winged man at a precipice, weight of the albatross discarded from the neck in favor of stolen flight.

What passes through the bent arch of towering bridge between shores, each with a resident watchkeeper long decided too mad for words––who has given them up entirely, according to reports, the haptic philosopher keeping time by the hand and light in a window that the pilgrim near collapse may shine forward from denial, through settled fog and into the arms of a dance poised for its cue.

Since You Asked

The poet, meaning to learn.

Well, if you really want to know, the poet sighed, then laughed, adding, join the club. Find ways to introduce these forms whose names are unsayable. No, you may not know them; only feel, then translate. Invent instead some healing. Do not. Repeat. This will not be understood. What do you mean, these shadows? They are your companions. No, you may not lock them in a room of symbol and lose the metaphorical key. You need to take this out eventually, what is still dripping. Into sun.

Why Poetry

Unsatisfying answers to an impossible and enduring question.

For the world-renewing potential of an imagined response. Because the imagination is violent in its impulse to press back against the killing from without. To tilt the scales on the side of the near erased. To disobey the given order. To honor some dimension of collective soul only glimpsed. Because a pressure accumulates. Because of this abiding anxiety. Because the capacity for making transcends those of judgement and knowing. Because joy in language, thrill in meetings. At arrivals that morph into futures. In awe over the burden of experience. To push against a form that seems to demand submission and imagine not a win but an encounter with that which sings behind the fight. Because longing is endless, and music, and unknowing so complete except for a small, insistent certainty that there is a sense around this somehow, to be near it even if I have none.

***

Notes while reading Seamus Heaney’s The Redress of Poetry: Oxford Lectures.

The Music of the Line

Poet in flight.

Always overdoing it, you rebel at limit, a mutiny barely contained by swing of body, sway of voice, as oceanic symphonies thunder from your deepest ear, to press your thumb against the troubled fold of this opening history that it might yet be smoothed transcendent. Ever the acrobat, you bear the body’s flight into the undulating net of current events in ancient time and hold it there, in the intimate round of your long lens.

Scrutiny

Without escape.

The sorrow quotient settles in a deeper register
of knowing, a bog of drunken insight and cat eyes.
It was said of the first poet I loved and recognized
that he lacked the rooted normality of a major voice
and this makes a new kind of sense to me now.
What rough vocation demands such strident use
of sick days to repair the broken levees of a fool
soul bent on protecting the unlooked-for
where sky and ground roar a running river
to spell variations in chorus on the page?
This silence for want of better words
only lives by careful collections of foragers
on shores who number shells on shelves
and bird feathers by weathered tendrils
of larger limbs. The thin page.
The shaking hand.

Seafarers

At the cliff from which this land begins to slide.

Harpooned by grief, time comes to cut the line
of this dogged continuance and admit the map
language won’t translate. Birds enter water
after fish and we stop to absorb the impact
of what they are doing out there, almost
all of it unknown. We would circle and bow
if we could reach them. Now, we think, is time
to map another language for where has never
been a destination, taking boats that take on
water to pull us into her countenance, that we
will know that we have only ever been a
people of unmarked territories, our names
unwritten where they still against the gums
of uncut teeth.

Carriers

Of flesh and earth.

Here comes another to be named,
where naming will not capture
her back. This is some other place now,
where the mountaintop froze above
its consecrated ground, above
these walls, their trumpets,
our removal.

Alice wakes, weeping snowmelt.
How easily we reason, but
this sight may come too late.
Blind mice run from the knife.
and here is our mirror-girl again,
after the rabbit. Heralds, run.
The gaze is silver. Its illuminating fire
now spent.

We figure one another out of living,
from a dream not remembered.
Take off your shoes, daughter.
Drip tears into ash. Time leaks
a sermon from the eyes
of its messengers where words
are impossible, back into the open
mouth.

To Watch

In constant vigilance.

What quickens
toward some destined end
in keening cry. O bird.

Weep for this house,
in spiraled anguish.
I feel you poised.

A sense of something
making an exit. Shore foam
and the ebb of us, waving

Kelp -swaying praise
dance toward surfaces above
which seabirds circle, ready

To dive. Then Black Hawk
shadow, lined against
the light. What comes.

What Flies

And the numbers now.

Will this what then not let itself be counted,
what when it was not permitted any stop?
I walked on limbs while sorting them:
this, and then this, and so on, what
passes for mind an organizing principle.
Unless this flesh is made of minutes
would you save it? I meant to answer.

Current, fly through me.
You must be time.

Is this the hour, then?
Am I?

What Might Otherwise Fly

Except for the weight of this form.

When you found me, I had been waiting, writing, for some time. Writing, I had been waiting behind that wall where the things that pulse at my neck are not what I tell because they are not the sort of thing that, as the saying goes, are up for discussion. One learns, as so many have, not to draw attention to what pulses, beats, flushes in speech or laughter, passion, or tears. My face gives me away. My troubling body gives me away, pouring me through the crack in this voice. I meant to be a formed thing, smoothed and polished for an admiring public, as instructed. The purpose of my upbringing, as far as I could tell, was for this, but in this I have utterly failed. I am instead a porous constellation of trembling orifices, dripping with overflow, and all of it is always too much, and as long as I have been, I cannot remember being otherwise. Perhaps there was a time when it was not too much, when I was a child not yet girl, not yet future woman, not yet in training. But it seems that the knowledge of girl came hand in hand with the knowledge of self and I cannot retrieve my prehistory so long as I am one, even if I would like to lay down the heavy weight of being anyone in particular. The atmospheric particle, absorbing, can collect moisture while continuing to float in the company of other atmospheric particles, until it is time to be rain.