Category: poetry

Elsewhere’s Space

A meditation on making.

There is an elsewhere here. It breathes in the margins of activity and swims among the vessels of the plans we forever work over––arranging the sails of this one and that one, checking our courses and whether the knots will hold. Elsewhere is indifferent to all of this, or else amused.

Elsewhere can’t hold the music she holds if she keeps the door open for every cacophony that presumes to invade. She thrives in forgotten spaces and in dreams that dissipate before we can fasten them to words. Her only allegiance is to the country of lost countries. There are no flags.

Without Elsewhere, there is no one here. How may anyone name this central element of a life after the moment of recognition that it is not yours at all, but something possessed entirely by some other out there, in that nowhereland between continents, beneath these vessels, behind these words and all things seen and named; arranged and rearranged?  

But even this final recognition of futility offers no freedom from the impulse toward making the worlds we keep creating as offerings, tempting her unmaking, her not-naming music, her long-shadowed disappearance of all that seems. 

Holding the Beat

Anchoring breath to breath.

If time is the rhythm of a group, breathing, consider the befores an inhalation. When tomorrow comes, we will exhale; and again, and again. 

How different this is than the model of the pointed arrow, to pierce the next flesh of its landing.

If time is the rhythm, it is now, an anchor point that moves nowhere, holding the beat of our breath. 

A Recollection

Of being held.

When we were keepers of the universe

we would tickle its edges by the tips

of the fingers of our outstretched hands

and we would hold those hands out

as we spun with its edges tipping our

heads daring to be knocked back

until we were flat on our backs

laughing the sky beaming back 

seemed to know us 

and later we. were 

not. so sure.

Wordkeepers

Care and feeding of language.

Here is an open space, breathing. Here a heartbeat. Look at the ears on this one, and this one here is loving the new bed. Let’s take them out.

Once upon a time, a dark castle, a long walk. But then what?

Some of us are fine spinning in suspension of once. Upon a dark walk. In a long castle, in time.

There are some who will leave language crumpled in the bottom of bags, forgotten in pockets, scattered on the floor like shed clothes no one thinks to pick up, and others who prefer to let it accumulate like a fine layer of dust in a locked room. There are those who would squeeze it like citrus fruits, extracting the last drop.

And then, there are the poets, treading lightly among the words with empty hands, making soft sounds as if to soothe them, touching their skins, petting them behind their ears. The words lean in, expose their bellies, their hearts. 

Some ask to be broken, promising. There is more to know in the shattering. Some ask to be held close, restored, squeezed––not to extract what is freely given, but to know the pulsing fullness of all they carry, unsaid.

Between Here and Now

Turning a page.

There were resemblances, but none of us could say what they were, not even when we consulted the book of questions. It didn’t help that the answer key was on fire in a wastebasket.

Oh well, we said. There would be no imitations because there were no tricks to hold. The form was liquid and something in it breathed. Turning each page raised a question: what remains of the one before it?

There was no way to open the book without breaking, and there were none among us that were of a single piece, which was probably why we had so many songs for endings. We went to the desert to wait between the sky and sand with everything and nothing between us.

A Way of Being Free

A lesson in letting go.

Anyone who has ever studied the question with any seriousness, apart from their own self-interest, can tell you: it is attachment that will kill you, and once you let go of those who prey on knowing this, they will stop killing you until it is time to die.

Meanwhile, there is work to do. 

With practice, a body bent on living may eventually learn to avoid what makes them ill. The learning is hard and long, but when it comes it will be real and more lasting than any false promise could ever be, and suddenly you will know that you are finally repulsed by what you have been meaning not to care for.                     

That’s when you know the work of your atonement is done, she said, and you can be done with waiting in the name of humility, and you need not keep waiting for the next humiliation when the lesson takes.

Which is to say, I loved and lost, over and again. Who doesn’t, when a woman, bent on giving it all away? Still, there comes a time when it is clear as the first light of the sun: it is possible, in the end, to be giving and remain untaken, unfettered from the claims of those who would take all you have for their gain, especially when it is your whole life.

It is possible that the path to this understanding is the oldest story ever understood. Nevertheless, we keep needing to learn.

Here at last, live on stage! Ladies and gentlemen, the moment you’ve been waiting for in vain, the opening night of A Way of Being Free! And now, let me die by your satisfied mouths. I remove the breast while the director sleeps, and move on.

Curtain.

***

Inspired by certain projects I once believed in, and the learning that followed. And by Ben Okri.

In Good Company

Beneath surfaces.

For the poet, it came down to a single wish: growth. Can you tell me how? She asked, bare against the elements. There was singing by the burial ground, and she remembered the childhood friends that spoke of immortality––one by one and then were gone. Just before they fell, they imagined themselves suns.

Later, she went to the school of omission. It is possible in a dream to be a guest in the land of the dead. There, she met a blind woman on a low bench, chewing. You are much better company than the ones who think themselves gods, she said, and they wrote for a long time together, there by the light of the axe.

Turning

Instead of a story.

I guess the weight of it all is what keeps us longing for some hour of grace, she said. The subject was an idea that one of us was floating, of a truth big enough to shatter the ends of us whole again. We were tired, but she said we would lose the fight if we knew what was before us. Then a strong wind blew, and we were lost again, only now we knew this better than we had before. 

Now we’re getting somewhere, she rasped, and we looked up again, hoping she would elaborate, but she was doubled over, laughing through her tears.