Blog - Page 22 of 145

shard light

fever break

First disorder, then efforts to fold what storms in––shaping once and then and after, each verse arriving at every oncoming attempt to live.

perennial questions

in muddy waters

Everybody always asks me these questions, the writer was saying. Hah, like I know! For me, it’s all about the desperate questions, you know? Like, what’s the matter?

But then, he said, everything is like that, my whole life––you gotta stay close to hell, and also to joy. And somehow manage not to melt. Maybe that’s what it is for me, why I also stay so close to water. People are always asking me about the water, he said. I guess it’s the eternal quality about it, and that savage beauty, where everything is eating each other.

We were eating beer and catfish at a party in his honor. Someone asked him how he kept things fresh. He laughed and said, people don’t know how interesting they are! Then he invoked Beckett, who said nothing was funnier than unhappiness.

At this point, we were interrupted by a mutual friend, younger. How’s the work now? The friend was asking and the writer made a face. It’s going, he said, but who knows where?

let

into voice

Incant a tongue inflamed at drought’s long deaths, to spit a song to spark the sky to weeping.

alarm

through to break

Time for a saving disorder, to disrupt and rescue the dreamer.

age of achievement

what progress reaps

I remember those eruptions of song that used to ring outside at noon. Now is another time and I don’t know what it is. Now they offer the children to the machine, weighing their gains for jewels to adorn their crowns and they leave them there––the children, now silent.

sift

an organizing principle

Where did I go?
One of us calls.

I am out here
counting
the wrecks again,
to carry home.

Bags full of havoc,
to sort.

One at a time,
to see
what can be
saved by
meeting here.

The wreckage,
the gaze,
the still-living
hand.

quake

comings and goings

The nerve of these meetings: skin into world, where whoever you are steps into and from, in her shaking assembly of beings made of moving parts. Life teems at the edges between us: land into sea, forest into meadow, the sill of a doorway. Then, now. Here are both, arriving.