Category: poetry

Notes on Form

Old tools in a fallow field.

There is an exuberant history of forms to be found in these fields, compelling a witness to show how surfaces of knowing can be tilled with the tool of some adopted custom or cadence which, once discovered, can be carried solidly as a birthright through corridors of memory still in blueprint.

The challenge is measure, balance––and the joyous enterprise pains with enthusiasm, the center of any nascent art.

***

Inspired by and using borrowed phrases from the introduction to The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms by Mark Strand and Eavan Boland.

Something with Feathers

Smiles from the threshold.

After the body, winking branches point to cloud faces and birdsong heralds their parade. Here is a frame for the living, and in it, more seeds than there are numbers.

Far from immaterial, this breathes syllables of flesh and leaf, spore and wing; limbs and their memory, and without these containers it would be everything all at once like water to a fish, synonymous with life’s self, but we are creatures bent on naming. 

We make nests of words to offer as a frame for warming the babies, so that when the known perimeter breaks­­––by degrees and then completely, they might recognize in our heat, the beginning of something, and stay.

Fieldwork

Harvest visions in springtime.

How ripe we are, they say, winking infinities in the mirror room. These generous pumpkins, the gentle humility of gourds opening doorways. What is in there? No one asks but you waited, and they told you, forever.

Remember the bright spots that the lantern first let in? They made you dizzy with their terrible splendor, left you spinning back flat against the ground, hang on. You did, and now you speak of these strange strangers like a sister, whispering they saved my life. You throw gatherings to honor them, grand galas for their coming out. Careful, you tell your visitors, they can be a bit much.

***

Inspired by the work and biography of artist Yayoi Kusama.

Sea, Woman

Conversation at land’s edge.

After we dream, we will meet by the shore.

Sister, do you see me? Let us be counted among the living. 

Then we will dive. 

When they come to eat our images, they will repeat the old power play. They’ll try again, to douse our bodies in shame.

Hah! As if to punish us with a bucket of cold water! We’ll wave and smile, go back down.

But sure, we can read the signs. It won’t be long before they make their vengeance into law. It is decreed, they will say, as prelude. Then comes the next mandate about official attire.

An old story. I bet these petty tyrants could use a good dive. But they are too afraid, so they clutch their precious trinkets to their chest and pretend to avert their eyes. It matters very much to them, what we wear or do not wear.

So complete is their exile from any land, they relinquish their only birthright: the primordial cave of their mother’s body, the original canal of first passage, the ripe breasts from which they first tasted their own lives, where the membrane between worlds remained transparent, and the mountain of her form was the first ascent to some wider vista onto what might be, an impulse now degraded into mere collection of images to be held in place of first sight.

How are your eyes today, sister? Good, and look! Your skin has healed!

It is clear today, let’s get the boats, go back to that spot, remember? There was more than we could carry in our nets!

I will get the others. We will take the boat. When you see it is good, we’ll go back down.

I see you, woman.

It is good to be seen. 

Let’s get the others.

***

Inspired by the Japanese ama, as photographed by Iwase Yoshiyuki and described (with stunning images) in this article. Many of the ama lived in communities with other women, supporting themselves and their families comfortably by diving for abalone, sea urchin, and seaweeds. Many women dove well into their nineties. The business was lucrative through the 1960s, after which it suffered the effects of climate change and overfishing. Chris Lee describes some of these issues in this Zenbird article.

Liquid Cats

What happens on a page.

When it comes to inking a cat, there’s no telling what will happen. 

The long brushstroke of a tail; paint bleeds a fluid form, feathered fur.

Sometimes, the shape of a body can only be defined by where it isn’t.

***

Inspired by this article about Endre Penovác’s watercolor cats.

Between Whales

Song over distance.

In the event

that one of us

should slip from

the range of

contact, I want

to tell you that I 

did not know if 

my voice was 

made of sound,

or if that was just

an idea, possibly

unsound, until

you answered.

I still don’t have

a word for the 

color of that 

last note, but

now I think this

is more likely

about the limits

of any language

seeded 

in isolation

than it is about

a problem with 

my eyes.

Between Vagrants

Appeal to the strange bird.

It has been a long journey, and you are far from home. People are talking. They call you lost, straggler, waif; accidental. Wonder.

Not to be contained by any ordinary mob, by what sensitive tentacles did you come, reading, as some say, the whole vault of heaven? What do you see, and why are you here?

Sometimes I think I have wandered so far that I forget my native tongue.

Stranger, please.

Speak.

***

Inspired by Marion Renault’s article in today’s New York Times: “These Birds Aren’t Lost. They’re Adapting.”

Thoughts on a Train

Over vanishing worlds.

The cynic will call your nostalgia an ailment, but consider the lost elegance of oaks, the grey slush of salted roads at the end of a snow day; purple ink of handwritten liner notes inside the plastic shell of a favorite mix tape, the pealing chorus of children screaming in chase, hiss of the downtown bus breaking, someone on the blue shag carpet of a den hooting about a bad call over a plate of cheese and crackers, beer, full ashtrays on coffee tables, end tables; world maps covering dents in the kitchen walls, and the way the aunts with their lipstick would be laughing over the salad spinner, at the last attempt of someone’s last date, to do what must have seemed appropriate at the time and a harmony of, I can’t even––over shuffle of silverware and children up and down the stairs like a herd of elephants.  

If you hear that again, you’ll know that there will soon be a pillow at the back of your head and not this sideways neck, and no, it won’t sound anything like this dream when it’s over, but you won’t be sick with it either, just slightly jarred the way a body always is to find itself moving at high speeds over steel rails on land almost familiar, with a sense that it is always slipping out of reach before the witness finds the words, and maybe this is the tension the children were playing with, screaming at chase, whenever the it got too close.

Breaking Silence

A tribute.

When silence is betrayal, when uncertainty mesmerizes, a calling to speak can be a vocation of agony––so rejoice as well, because we are here in firm dissent, a new spirit among us.

No document from human hands can make any of the persecuted less our brothers––sisters, hear their broken cries. They watched us poison water, bulldoze land, and the children run in packs in the street, seeking food for their mothers.

Family, village, land––destroyed. The initiative is ours now, to somehow cease this madness, to be prepared, with every creative protest possible. To challenge the young with alternatives, each by their own convictions.

There is a deeper malady here, and the answer so readily dismissed as weak is love––courageous, relentless against fear.

Let us hope. We still have a choice.

Begin. 

***

Exactly one year before he was assassinated, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his speech “Beyond Vietnam––Time to Break the Silence” at Riverside Church in New York City. Today’s post is a tribute to this moment, assembled from words and phrases in this speech. Found poetry is one of my favorite ways to listen.

Non-Linear

Regarding some equations.

On first introduction to the idea of convergence, it is natural to take an optimistic view. However, in certain cases it is clear with moral certainty that whatever else happens, convergence does not.

Consider subharmonics. Proving their bare existence, we begin with a theorem of our own before beginning any proofs.

Suppose a positive constant, some fixed function bounded by a given. From there, find a local maximum. Suppose the velocity of a given around a stationary point, spinning.

Consider any variable whatsoever, and let it be x. It follows immediately that the notation parallel to that for symbol y is denoted by an alternate symbol.

We are always supposing. 

We suppose always,

assume the truth.

***

Today is the anniversary of the death of celebrated British mathematician, Dame Mary Cartwright (1900-1998), who is considered one of the pioneers of what came to be known as chaos theory. This exercise is a collage of phrases found in this paper she published in 1945.