a tribute to the moment, and this place
Yes child, maybe one day,
in another world, the horse arrives,
its rider gallant and able. But now
is not that world
and this is not that time. Now he
spins, having lost both horse and will
to ride–– and besides, has never learned.
You are alone–– yet, look around.
Find the company of everyone before
you who has ever learned the same.
There is no more now
to do than there was before, only
less illusion. Carry on. Chin up.
Giddy-up. You are the horse
and the rider. Go on.
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?
study in shade
hear these minor tones, dissonant echoes, nocturnal murmurs
whisper of hellhound behind, tremble sound haunting hollow
taste of revenant ash in throat, beneath each note this velvet
dissonance—
here where sea pushes into land: roaring liquid love, thunder
crashing at the lip of the last wave—and the next.
where Pollock pours black enamel over raw canvas, painting
like a man already buried. Here is love freed from time.
here are the rites of the bull cults, the fetid silence
of hardened blood, evicted angel beating one wing
over trembled flame—
no longer showing but shown through.
no longer singing, but sung into—
by jagged notes, passing through
the charmed demon winding sand
ripping the sails that carried you
and when the sails are gone––
all sea
all sound.
field note over sacred break
here is a book before ink
one wind-creased page in rust of buckwheat
its grammar not plosive but drift
dropped by the trickster bird at night
an arrival in absence
heralded by rasp of the gnatcatcher
foretold in the bladderpod burst
all are gathered. some will listen
to the tremble of lyric for a fault line
over sacred break, a next wave of warnings
ignored
riddles in time, space, and scale management
If you have a fox, a goose, and a bag of beans, what is the best way to cross a river?
In a year of desert driving, I played this question on loop. I wanted a mind for numbers, but seemed to retain only the set-up sequences of word problems.
With a tendency to wondering and feeling too much at once, and with enough sky to lose myself in, I thought mathematical thinking might ground me.
One recurring problem was this: by a fire, under stars, I would go dizzy looking for the farthest ones until my vision blurred.
By then, I did not remember most equations, only the premises for which they were needed. If two trains x miles apart are traveling in opposite directions at different speeds, how much time until they meet? If Jack has eleven pieces of fruit and five are bananas, how many apples for Jill?
The antidote to dizziness, I was trying to learn, had something to do with overriding my first response, which was to be knocked off my feet by the size of it. The sky, that is. And, when it came to math, it was that fact that someone thought like this, imagined a way to sort a world such that these considerations, one parcel at a time, were all. The brilliance.
If a pie and so many guests, cut pieces. Not everyone will want the pie. To calculate circumference, use the number pi. An irrational number to spin the head, but if you knew how to use it, it could help you figure some finite amount of pie, stones, or tire tread.
In the passenger’s seat, I looked through glass and could not take it in. The riddle at least was a smooth and solid thing I could turn in my pocket like a river stone. The river was part of the set up. Mr. Stone was my teacher.
If you have to get across a river by boat. . . the set up went. How do you do it so the fox does not eat the goose, and the goose does not eat the beans?
What relief. To hold one thing at a time, solidly. I wanted a valve for my mind, some pacing for the flow. One challenge. Then another. A way to stop and then go. At that point, the flooding was out of control. My perception far exceeded my abilities to make any sense.
The answer to the riddle was: start with the goose. Mr. Stone told us why. But I was back in the river by then. Where to now, goose?
Who do you think you are? This was a challenge that frightened me some, because it tended to come at critical moments with a tone of authority, as if the person voicing it knew exactly what time Train A would cross Train B, how many apples on each, and whether or not the geese should be eating the beans. If I could focus on one thing at a time, perhaps I would start to see it coming? And have a few answers ready, just in case?
I thought string beans would create less disturbance in the goose. But my mind tended toward the pintos I would buy in five-pound bags from Wal-Mart, which I would scatter in batches over a plate every time I prepared to soak them, checking for rocks. To find one was good. Here was a solid thing I could remove.
Who do you think you are? When these demands came, I would experience the full force of new awareness of the errors of my ways, in dizzying magnification. I meant to apply this force to finding some solution, but I had none. Which river? Which goose, fox, season? Is anyone else on the boat with me? Am I allowed to touch the goose? Are there eggs to come?
The image of trains hurtling in opposite directions calls to mind rail spine, the nervous condition that did not appear until the advent of railroad travel, caused by the feeling of hurtling through space at speeds disconcerting to a body familiar with horse and foot travel. Not to mention the related and perhaps equally anxiety-producing imposition of standard time.
I had once seen a fox while running on a horse trail in lower New York. Much of the trail ran adjacent to the Hutchinson River Parkway, but certain parts meandered into woods and along lakes such that the roar of cars was more muted, the way crashing surf may be if you are several blocks away.
Perhaps if I had gone beyond 12th grade calculus, I would have developed a more familiar and integrated symbolic language with which to explore the interference effect of a series of infinite variables on a given problem and been more erudite in my explanations about baseline insecurities. But I hadn’t at the time and was still young enough to believe that eventually I might, If I focused harder, see with greater clarity.
The river, between then and now, has continued to flood me. But the goose is still on it, and the fox, and the bag of beans. They rest at the banks, where the goose and the fox appear to wear bemused expressions, waving. I don’t know why it is this way, or where the boat has gone, but here I am, waving back.
***
This riddle, which I encountered decades ago, is one of those earworms that shows up again and again. I love the setup, the characters, the play, and the mystery. If, in a given year, I scratch 1,000 pages across several notebooks, an estimated 9.5 of them will feature this goose. Who knows why? Rarely do I publish these, but sometimes it happens. Prior to today, I think the most recent iteration of these creatures in a published work happened in The Closed Eye Open, Issue 10, Fall 2023, under the title Mathematical Goose.
