gone fishing to find it
to explain this absence,
let’s say i’ve been fishing
because what other phrase
will fit? that i have been feeling
the line to test the weight
of the line and what it will carry
when the noise wears my ears
stopped full of it now,
when eye breaks
from will to look
where do senses go?
and sense
when the organs will no
longer play to the unwilling
mind?
animal sounds
I arrive in middle age at a beginning, so now I write and speak. I do these acts to correct some learned habits of believing I must know where I will end before I open my mouth to say anything. Such learned habits, I see now, have conditioned my seeming docility.
Fortunately, I have no ends. Better yet, I see this now. So here is as good a place as any, to begin.
This is a small act of defiance, against the idea that the purpose of saying anything is to make a point and that the point is to mean something. Some perspective is afforded now, from witness. To the urgency of the kings of the world, to end this life. (To be clear, some make the point more subtly than others, but to be a prize is a kind of end, and it is possible to spend a life chasing this state, only to learn to see it for the burial it is.)
This affords some confidence to say that one approach that many take when confronted with the impossible fact of a life, is to bring it to a point. Some end to justify the means and all of that. Very Machiavellian. Such notions are rampant now. Knowing this moves me, too.
Nothing I mean to say is so abstract that it may be extracted, like oil from my flesh. Oil, biologically speaking, is the accumulation of bodies under pressure over time. I am nowhere near the age of oil, as I am still alive. The fact of being so is what I mean to value now.
Also, my connection to the dead. This, I treasure. How would I continue, I wonder, without their excellent company? The dead have always been around me, speaking. These and the not yet born have much to say, and little of their ripe and blooming abundance has anything to do with points. The dead, as you may imagine, often have a sense of humor when it comes to ends, as this affords their carrying on. The not-yet-born are young enough to laugh with full bellies of air, at the absurdity, of aiming for a point in the midst of all of this.
notes from where the tortoise wins
Moon, don’t go. I have been too much in the sun with the golden people smiling fun. Listen, moon. I know what I am and I consent to this distance. If it connects me to you, let me trace the pads of my fingers along its lines. For nearly as long as I can remember, I have been reminded by the golden summer titans that my movement, whatever it was, failed to count as well as Time’s. The jolly clock-faced father-god. Time, they told me, bowing as they shushed my complaint against their rush, was fast and I had to keep up. I did, blaspheming.
Zeno had point about the arrow. If at any moment it was at rest in one position, in a time made of moments, how can it ever move? No, Achilles does not catch the tortoise. To do this he would have to reach where the tortoise began, by which time the tortoise would have moved on.
Fortunately, after this pause, the golden people have all gone to chase the sun, and it’s just us again, with the tortoise, stitching moments with no roundly sure clock face in sight. I’m glad you’re here, moon. I know you won’t be, always. But I won’t go chasing all those not-yets, not while I’m drunk on the wave of your fragmentary diamond lights, winking into seas to kiss the shore, and me.
some return in music
Where once music, now noise. I mean to sing against the roar of it, to find the others to recover a refrain from memory. To call and call in aria, unceasing, I do––but for today, only shelter. Only weep.
on your beginnings
This week’s vibe is one of disequilibrium. The return to school is, to put it mildly, a bit chaotic this year. I have spent the last few days feeling severed from the best parts of my mind. To be clear, there is nothing unusual or traumatic occurring in my life at this moment other than confrontation with the noise of the hour at hand in its current institutional form (as sites absorbing what feels increasingly like the engineered chaos it is, designed to destroy the concept of a public good).
So, for now I will share something that I just noticed was published in Stone Poetry Quarterly, as I try to recover. Titled “To Earth, on Your Beginnings,” this piece, like many from recent years, emerged from ideas that I first explored here. Thank you for being with me in this space. I look forward to returning, soon. I am glad to find this one today. Reading it helps me to remember what I mean to return to. With love.
unselfed reflection
i am unselfed
suspended
a runaway from
those expectations
i had not claimed
which built
around me anyway
walls, doorways
lighting systems
with a named address
now to wonder
what was that place?
