April 2023

Study of Forms

Incandescent immersion.

Unless some energy comes to haunt, there is no movement in these words. But where does it come from? Things remembered, things observed, the contents of a collector’s shelf, or some displacement. A long drive will find it sometimes, the quick flash of wild creature crossing the road. Other times, it’s a matter of grim execution. Always the question of how much to push in the effort to grow a nascent being without killing it with overwork. We all move between the given language and the first, this waiting muscle bared and tense, all attention.

On Walking

For Frank O’Hara.

Some thought you traded transcendence for the unadorned insight of the street, but for you the moment was evanescent, always a strike away and you watched for it, another said, like a bird of prey, like watching for lost friends and death itself.

Even your delight was uneasy, and your affections could glint like the knife’s edge you traced on your lunch hour walks, to swim your everywhere nowhere self in the drama of its lack where in a crowd of windows even what is––

a step away

was only ever

possibly so.

***

Inspired by this morning’s time with the work of Frank O’Hara.

Voice of the Age

A study in fragments.

The voice of the age is a fragment, still jealous of fireflies, starlight; still confused about the first dead goldfish on a stage stripped of shadows, where shadow itself is barred, where the bars themselves leave no shadow, erased by floodlights on every side.

There are more words for the heart and what’s in it, for the world and what’s in it––and more still, maybe, for what isn’t anymore, but they keep getting disappeared in the moments for their imagined entrances in the rest of the sentences we keep starting by these ghost-limbed reflexes to word what we meant to declare, or ask, or exclaim with a full-throated yell.

Subjects lose their organizing action, and the actions continue, amputated from memory centers, and wherever the suspended would-be actors are, it must be somewhere and not the opposite of somewhere. As in, nowhere. As in, everywhere. As in, here.

Speaking of which, is another fragment. Who is here? Who breathes? Or what.

***

The opening phrase (“The voice of the age is a fragment“) comes from Brenda Hillman’s ‘[to the voice of the age]’.

Soils

Of intentions and nourishment.

Born carried away, of a desire that will neither die nor introduce itself by name to a stranger, it becomes obvious that I am that, too. So taken––from every place and the self, too––I cannot arrive.

At the end of everything, when the flow continues, so does this singular insistence. Bleed.

Hand opens soil to hide these delicate hopes, even at the end and especially then. Flower? Maybe. Of course, they will be trampled, as lives are. And yet. They will live, too. There is no certainty in this, but there it goes, happening.

Wayfarers

Moving to stop.

A long way from their destination, the travelers continued for a very long time. After the last of their maps was lost in the wind, they kept on. They had enough provisions, but nothing of visible progress. Eventually, one among them said, “we’re not getting anywhere.” No one objected.

That night, there was a great celebration. Food and drink were passed around. They joked and argued, cried and laughed, danced and loved. Eventually, everyone slept until it was time to move again. The group continued, arriving nowhere, and spirits were vastly improved.

Alice, eat.

Overheard, between chases.

There you go again, Alice, with your rabbit. What now?

Let me guess. It’s the old question about time, and

why you can’t see it, exactly, even as it leaves traces

everywhere while this visible abundance of space makes

a mystery of itself by including the atmosphere

with no evidence to label: this. It cuts you.

You should eat something. Here. Apple slice?

This, at least, is visible. Maybe also at most.

See the lilac, its leaning posture even in rest.

Now the oak, raining leaves.

Will love save any of it? I can’t tell you, Alice.

I am not laughing at you. Okay, a little. Here,

have another slice. I know you want to know

if it’s enough, but what are you counting:

acres? Dollars?

Look, only a machine will move in reverse.

Your question is moot, muted by necessity

of movement between stations and the

fact that you are still hoping for a chance

to erupt from this constellation of endings

into a singular, magnificent bloom.

Another Invitation

To a dear poet.

To inscribe passion, make of it a history, burning with love and regret, holding posture ever toward the mortal crowd at the gates, immersed in time’s noise, still listening, long after Eden, for the miracle, knowing any journey can be a stand-in for all journeys, ever, the constant flight to another life: the dying, recalling; the oblivion, searching.

But what is this moving at the bottom of loss? It won’t be sold another scandal when it’s time to gather signs. I will lose myself and go again.

One day, when the barbed-wire walls are down, I hope you will come and see me in this bird-painted room. We will sit here together, watching the light move with the cat.

Light Sickness

Unprotected by shadow.

Madness is vision unregulated,

constant sight without ceasing.

Revelation without the refreshment

of blindness can only debilitate.

The continuity is unbearable.

To love and lose, again and again.

And yet, we madly want

this madness.

***

Inspired by Maurice Blanchot, The Madness of the Day (trans. Lydia Davis).

Grammar of Mystery

How much in shadow.

To resist the floodlight’s patrolling glare, its demands and agendas, its attendant megaphone, in favor of a posture of listening, a touch whispered enough to elicit shivers of recognition. This earned denial of easy access. The elegant strength, to hold a posture possessed of substance so rich that it will be perennially misunderstood in this landscape, resisting the impulse to break the pose of perfect opacity––to correct, as the saying goes, by shedding some light.

How else could you photograph sound?

Here is the wise light of the dark surface, opening,

in praise of the unknown, unnamed

here is a deft grammar of mystery.

How much to be,

how much to be imagined

in these shadows.

Look, do not look,

but see.

***

Inspired by the work of Roy DeCarava.

Tell it Slant

What I keep meaning to remember.

Give me only indirect truths, the kind only hinted at; the back parts of God, sashaying away, a hunger no feast can satisfy.

This vessel will hold only the sediments of these, and just barely, porous as it is––and still it’s prone to hairline fractures on impact. They are the kind that won’t kill you, for which the prescription is always “Give it time,” but you will always feel.

Feel what? Only this teasing reminder back to the joke about being the sort of person others call solid, as if there were anything else more ripe for breaking, as if faith, on most days, is anything more than the dogged continuance of this half-blind driver who is forever losing their keys.

***

Reading Christian Wiman this morning, who underscores an observation made by the brilliant Jewish theologian Abraham Joshua Herschel, remarking how “faith is primarily faithfulness to a time when we had faith . . . a tenuous, tenacious discipline of memory and hope.”