February 2024

To the Well

From the lighthouse.

––And then, an invitation. To reread certain silences in the context of a long tradition of expression among the artists whose work was protection. The practice demanded resistance of revelation, to cloak certain as-yet-unknowns in protective veils to keep them from the probing instruments and hungry hands of the doctors of discourse. Serious students of the art learn to absent themselves in certain company. Once fluent in silence, they can breach the perimeters of the well-trodden and overgrazed pastures in which they would be kept, to run wild through unsayable fields. Here is where the well of patience nurtures an impetuous and vibrant life in abiding resistance.

Flock

In song.

There will be no total here, no summing up. Instead, a polyvocal cacophony of riddles exerts a centrifugal force away from the presumed center––out. Only the permeable find it. After recognition of the way that meaning in abundance winds toward silence interrupted only by the exultant shriek. Only the indirect, circling utterance will do.

Bearings

and findings.

But how? When submerged in a field of study. When the subject of discourse is the limits of knowing amid a sustained ordination of unknowns in a place of ebbing permanence. When the illuminating hope is for another possibility. When the practice of this hope demands that I accept of the unreliability of impressions passing through this passing form, and witness anyway.

Suggestion and Syntax

And the figurative flirt.

Around here, no one asks why you associate with some books. They just look at you, if they look at all, like you are carrying a blowtorch: A quick nod. Ah, that’s interesting. You must be up to something. Carry on! This is ideal for me, because if anyone did ask, I might be compelled to reply with the sort of explanation that allowed someone to think that I was engaged in a bout of serious study, letting them imagine me to be a woman of great ideas. Instead, I am most often ogling the body of the sentence, its curves dancing across a page, watching it turn soft pirouettes, caring little to translate. I like the ones that move in slow glissades, in delicious sashays, suggesting by their winking flirts, that there is much to be understood beyond what they are saying, whose movements keep time with a roaring whisper not unlike the sound of the falls that have been known to draw the passing wanderer inexplicably close to the velocity of their aqueous gravity, seeming to whisper, Come closer, Come here.

Sea, Floor

In the belly of the whale.

Through a certain lens, you think, here is a moment adjacent to, or inside of, some incessant hunger. Which repeats until it breaks. Which breaks only when it kills the host. Above us, as storm of a century (another?) ––and below our feet, until the raft where we were standing is also gone. This was hunger, too. And the sea sounds to be made of a hunger all its own, but this is not what it is. That swallows us. This is not what it is that has fed and ferried. Us between homes where we dream of the floor of it. From where we go looking for the floor, in vessels and with instruments. Sometimes we do not find the floor. Sometimes the vessels do not return. Sometimes they return to tell us that the floor is home to life for which we have no name, that the floor is an opening to something else, a liquid earth that rises through its own cracks, spreading.

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.

Inaudible Stone

What aches to hear.

The affliction of this moment is the speed of its demands––no, not even a moment, a recognizable now, but a storm of futures hailing hard against the roof, and faster. I still breathe, but breath is shattered. That which I might listen through is thick or I have slipped from wherever that other sound was, into some other frequency. Cold now, and afraid. That when you call, I will not hear.

Why Poetry

Unsatisfying answers to an impossible and enduring question.

For the world-renewing potential of an imagined response. Because the imagination is violent in its impulse to press back against the killing from without. To tilt the scales on the side of the near erased. To disobey the given order. To honor some dimension of collective soul only glimpsed. Because a pressure accumulates. Because of this abiding anxiety. Because the capacity for making transcends those of judgement and knowing. Because joy in language, thrill in meetings. At arrivals that morph into futures. In awe over the burden of experience. To push against a form that seems to demand submission and imagine not a win but an encounter with that which sings behind the fight. Because longing is endless, and music, and unknowing so complete except for a small, insistent certainty that there is a sense around this somehow, to be near it even if I have none.

***

Notes while reading Seamus Heaney’s The Redress of Poetry: Oxford Lectures.

Sound of a Sentence

At reunions.

Note the irregular pattern of the veins running to and from the mother tongue in jubilant slide of dream-substrates––to read a world through glass in fog of morning, the edge of bliss so sharp it cuts the taste of iron in the mouth––the bite of dying life to living ends, running to sudden thunder, the wicked warmth of hot irreverence, its backslap pummeling affection.

Is that you? When were we?
Are we the only two here?
Hello, friend. It is so good.
To read you again.

The Skins of Us

Keeping on.

Like the flecked bark of bent birch, so long scarred that scars and skin have blended, old wounds match birthmarks now, and this seems right–– to mirror fate and accident, deliberate and unknown. Once, to see it would break my heart. And did, I think. I can’t remember how. Only that at some point I knew it to be a thing of too many shards to be considered whole by any stretch, no matter how careful the mending. Not that I was so careful with the mending. But here she is anyway––of a piece, in a manner of speaking, nodding along with the head over the tattered skins of arms, as the head remarks: How fitting, for any occasion.