Category: Wonder

Milk Witch

Between blooms.

Words on one side, none on another;
between them, secret smiles, a tolerance
for pain and the nights of long dreams
fire chasing what is caught in the high wind
of the binding gut-level blindness
of spent battery. Scent of lion’s teeth,
the soft, yellow heads, weeding their refusal
to be declared the natural collateral
of another hungry idea seeded by the flying man
in dreams of immortality. What grows here
always flies to its fall and what is fallen
will be consumed beyond its given name
turning the defiant shine of resting face
from the hungry tongues, declaring
at last a body beyond words, back
to an original mouth.

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.

Of this Earth

And walking.

It was another day of humiliations, said the poet. I did not always understand him, but these daily laments I knew well. There are whole days when you can hardly speak, mind running downhill, shining through the glass even as it darkens. Yes, it darkens. Until the next morning when you walk along the fault lines, life in your hands. Lumbering with losses, o child of blood, here you are again, still being born. These notes, if I tried to work them, would make a terrible love poem. No danger of that right now; no time. I am often in the predawn hours considering the horrors outside, how they continue.  This is a note just to say that I am smiling at the way that you continue, still being born. Please continue.

***

Reading the opening of Robert Lowell’s Collected Poems, absorbing a phrase here and there, and then I notice that it is Valentine’s Day and there is a funny gap between these simultaneous realities, which I can’t quite resolve at the moment but find amusing. 

Viscosity of Memory

And the problem of meaning to make it.

If I were really up to something, you would think I would have an answer to the question of where any of this starts, but no. It’s just this ledge again, and gravity, and my desperate grip. Meaning not to forget to remember, I stretch the web of impressions, meaning to stick somewhere. But whatever I am made of mostly slides, and sliding, what tends to stick to me is never quite the stated destination, but everything beneath its arcing aim. What tends to stick rarely unsticks and I do not forget it. And yet, I still mean to reach what I hope to remember.

Another Contour

Text as body of bliss.

To hear the text as living, breathing being, not to be measured against the normative strictures of the machine, and know its will to bliss. To find a text on which you can never comment, because you may only speak inside it. As, whispering, you might say into it: mysterious stranger, remove me from my common notions; remember me back into elsweheres that I may be lost in the constant introduction to what may never be written.

***

Notes while reading Roland Barthes’ The Pleasure of the Text (trans. Richard Miller).

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.

On Knowing

Notes from the grandmothers.

Hold in the mind the feathered whisper of something almost touched, but not. Resist the urge to offer up a salve to stop the itch. And let her volume erupt, and stay while she splits her seams, threatening to tear each hemisphere from the other.  Don’t bind. Don’t apply ice to stop the swelling. What do you expect can be born otherwise? These are wonders. It’s when these terrible discomforts leave, and the mind rests sated and full of itself that the subject is really in trouble. 

Waltz

With crouching figure.

Skin trembles with the muscle that sheathes the innermost reaches of the lush garden behind a poem that is tended to nurture and feed the disarmed and disappeared, which never asserts except to underscore an endless stretch of unseen elements, each moved only to dissolve the ends of their reach to attach at the points of dissolution, into some more and ever unknown, whole.

Invocation

Notes from another war.

What I meant to say was not what I said. But this: If death is certain, only timing unknown, will you wait for me where you are living, for I do not know what I am. Here where a child starts a sentence “When I was young . . .” and he is nine. Here where grass is fried in oil until the grass is gone and surgery happens by the light of cell phones.  How fragile, these bodies. In the rubble, you see a hand, reach for it. But where is the rest.

What I meant to say was not what I said, but this. If we met on the shore where I keep vigil, would you know me? Could we sing? Could we continue then, against the fire whose fuel is men and stones, women and children, water and the flesh of my flesh? Would we?