what beyond there
And then in the hush, a shift
stops the pen, suddenly exhausted
by the weight of what preceded it.
There are not enough words
to make a wall between now
and what is lost. No sense
running for another stone
to prop up against the last
already threatening to give.
The only steps that matter now
are into a nonspace with no
road to lead you anywhere
and yet the only here
there is when you leave
that other one.
efforts in pieces
the shock of being
upends the bowl of
me again to shard
and I have only a
net of words to
collect me back
to seeming whole
Time in Space
We need to talk
about time
& to talk with Time
eventually
instead of scheming
how to use it
to make the most
to have a good one
to have the best
to name its price
as with any commodity
any resource
as opposed to Source
to spend instead
recklessly &
listening for language
& other creatures
is to be folded inside
embraced by layered
fabrics of Time & their
attendant creatures
in
immersive intimacies
of waters, skies
where each breath
comes to carry the
next, yet uncaught.
but again
to be a husk
returned to soil
by way of river
over falls
& under bed.
what good
is this? someone
asks & one
answer is another
voice, yes
what good
is this.
ideas for an educational panel of inquiry
Here’s a talk i am going to give
in theory anyway called
teach like an animal
& its genesis is in understanding
that i failed in my intention
of becoming someone who
knew things well enough
to tell them with authority
the more i look the more
convinced i become that
there is a lie at the center
of the whole idea of knowing
and it is congenital with the myth
of the preeminence of self, and
i want my panel to include
shapeshifting nature &
the pride of ancestors refusing
to be erased, whose voices echo
in the shimmering electric currents
coursing though the cells which
make my body of my mother’s
and the mothers before her.
I grew up reading a single
line about an all-knowing God
on loop, and even this God
said only i am that i am
in response to demands for
explanation but knew how to
show up–for the stutterers
and the dispossessed, the wretched
and the women, who consistently
challenged the important somebodies
when asked for announcements, when
asked to show face, who turned to sashay
away revealing only the back parts
in graceful admonishment of the
asking mouth’s presumption
of being filled in a single
gulp of word and then
done.
hearing what ripples through here
like the roar of many waters
what thunders through empty space
courses through me when i am least
myself, having lost it all until
the eye blinks from an empty
vessel, waiting
for what reverberates through
each cell across generations
responding to a constant call
ancestral fires shining in the
eyes of newborn suns
& the last cries swallowed
by rising tides of another time
come to surface in the voices
of the daughters who raise
them the silence before their
echo is long, but their sound
is longer
before dawn
so often these are opposite to fixing
a way of saying, i will meet you
in the land of grief that we may
put hands in that soil together
& look around
& tend to what grows & also dies
especially the underground
invisibles
while others announce
their comings & goings
with great fanfare between
stints of weeping into the
pools of their own reflections
where meanwhile
we know life here & death
& stay with the work
to make it good.
to the question of how one is being
Now i riverbed, now ocean &
either way am disinclined to point,
tending to erode those points
aimed to find me taking
this skin shirt out for air.
i learn to dress in layers for those
places where everyone seems
eager to use their ready points
& these only make me bleed so
now i am back to being current
again to answer that question
re: the I that I seem, being @
the end of am. I can only say:
I am currently.
Maybe you know this way
& why we never lack for
company, streaming as we
do through here, hearing
communions all day long.
notes from the pair-share
you can be nobody
or you can be a giant elephant
in the conference room
or a shadow, listening,
taking a moment to wonder
really
what are we doing here?
in this space
Since nothing of me holds
in place but my feet on a
flying planet, spinning
i have wondered
where so many could
dismiss with such conviction
so much of this this––us, to call it all
background noise.
My friends glow embryonic spheres
in whispered susurrations and we migrate
along mycelial lines never to arrive
and we are moving all the time.
If my beginning is an empty
space like the origin of every other
and yet each genesis shatters every
omega back into its alpha state
such that my form won’t hold, make me
an opening for sound––
less voice than collective in chorus
not spear but carrier bag
not speech but gathering
display of longing to show
revealing nothing finally
but unceasing attempts
to name where the word
waits for tongue to lift
the earth again
dirt into soil
for breathing.
