Category: faith

Breaks

And the long look.

Discarded things were her materials and she gathered them to herself over years.  She spent time looking before she began anything that looked like art, but looking was her primary work. Whatever art she made, and she made a lot, came from this devotion. She wondered over these broken-down objects, the ways they had served, the hands that had handled them across time. It takes a special kind of eye to see their beauty. Hers came from the choice she made, to love them. Because of this, she never thought of fixing or repair. She only wanted to handle them endlessly, to celebrate what they had become, to carry them into their next becoming.

Husks

Acts of care and grieving.

I have no time to wonder about the purpose of anything, all of which seems beside the point where doing is demanded and I have working hands. No, I never have writer’s block. I love too hard. No time for questions about the rank of the thing, any more than I would ask, are these clean dishes good? This laundry? The fact of dinner or driving to and from? What is necessary for living must happen or else there is death. And when the little deaths of a day accumulate, I carry the husks in a little pouch. If I ever do start asking why, I can take them out, study the way the little exoskeletons catch the light. If I lean back long enough to notice, I will fall asleep within minutes, until the next alarm. Siri, does this count, this constant caretaking? Siri, is this poetry? Siri, I am so tired. I wish something would stick in the gears again and make it stop. But no, that would mean some calamity. Siri, why is it only calamity that can do this and what are we becoming?  Where is that pouch, those tiny husks of living forms? I need to see them now, to notice how they still catch the light. These will be dust soon, but there will be more.

Language of Inquiry

With Lynn Hejinian.

You disbelieved both borders and endings, knew a word to be something bottomless that drew you in. In one dream, you would write a single long sentence in a day, uninterrupted on a thread of rolled paper, chasing thought down the pier with your thinking hand, its bride. By your constant attention on the grace of shadows, you kept your world lit. Those who knew your light were restored by its nourishment. They found something in its playful dance that made it possible to return, even in the days of death, to the living.

***

Inspired and with collected lines from Remembering Lyn Hejinian (1941–2024) in The Paris Review, which came out in the wake of the poet’s death in late February.

The Mountain and the Door

With Jean Valentine.

No, I don’t want to do it this week, any of it. So this morning I linger here, taking in the well-kept secret of you, hiding in plain sight. You worked with what you could not understand. Your work was translation. You threw most of it away, keeping only what continued to kick after the scratching out. You moved a lot. Said later, it was probably preparation. For what others called your tough strangeness. Of Dickinson, you remarked: Happy are those who can choose their refusals and survive. Considering Plath, you wondered over the thin line between the subversively unconventional and despairing state. How close you were to the edge. You feared its pull, that you might leap, but your friend, a nun, understood what you were, reminding you back. Write every day, she told you. That is your prayer, your health, your everything. 

***

I have been spending time with Jean Valentine’s Door in the Mountain (New and Collected Poems, 1965-2003), and this morning I read Amy Newman’s 2008 profile of the poet in Ploughshares. Today’s post is assembled with phrases from Newman’s article, which includes quotes by Valentine.

Between Stations

Call and response.

Editing a manuscript but the voice will not hold until I see it. Who must be the unborn who decided to save a life by delaying the opening. In the meantime, the weight of eyelids shutters the shores of lost continents and the priest repeats: You must. Be ground like wheat until. And I cannot leave this body even as its pilgrimage in other lights seems just beginning, and there is a voice caught in the throat and she is in a running dance after the sauntering river until she stops. Again, that sense of waiting for the lens to adjust. But into what? Then the thick sound of hawk lifting behind my head––off now, that circling cry.

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.

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.