to learn
Teach me
by your presence and your song.
I am too full right now to take
anymore of answers. I have been
here all day sampling those & now
i am overfull and still malnourished.
I cannot be alone in this. I won’t.
Let us sit here together awhile,
friend, attending
a concert of
shared breaths, our resounding
amens.
in atmosphere
if cessation of air then
if balloon i can hold it maybe
if i can carry it over
if you catch (if you see me)
if in what happens after that i may remember (that point)
if what pierced was the inlet of air (and not skin)
if remember
if i ask you will you (try please)
if to prevent this you may (show me)
if i am breaking and fear (to remember how)
if whether an alternative (or what?) ever was
if can be helped
if this breaks everything open in the end
if asking you where does that leave me or us standing
if to this question one answer is back to the floating again
if dizzy just remembering that vertigo and
if terrified to go so far and high so fast
if needing help at altitude will there be any or only the snipers again
if alone losing air at that distance will there be others
if so and we burst at those heights will it matter
if skins gone
if breathing
if not something
if i knew i could explain at lower elevations
if i go i need to tell you i have tried before
if i go i need to tell you i am scared
if i go listen i could not speak before of this fright it had more dimensions but
if language would allow i would have shared with others i saw shaking too but
if this is time for turning to another, calling hold
if i or you should try
if what is here
if when is now
if_____then, how?
if i am running out of pen
this dark glass
turning a page from the volume at my side & long unopened i saw the book of love come after the book of annihilation where to everything there is a season and all seasons point to their eventual end & so now here i am, casting bread over waters to find it later where rose of sharon & lily among thorns & i remember looking how i could not find my love so now i call open, dove when i come to your door this is the strange soul begging for its only work
if it goes like this what now
the week for learning
how it was death
been knocking
on my nerves
was the week for learning
how
now might be
an entry into this
high time
to set some things
down and go
into that long channel
with high archways
of blue-white ice
where a single bird silhouette
flaps waiting, high above
& also you
in that passage
where we can’t take what
with us when we
go
of a long and winding perch
they tire me, these boys
who mean to make me
an old woman so young
meaning I guess to put
an end to possibility
for fear of their constant
little deaths but we manage
to love somehow in a place
of constant beginnings
far from their halls of
perpetual mirrors
& invite them in, and
they mean well but
get sick before arrival
afraid i guess to enter
anywhere where they
are not the all and
its eventual end.
ache
i wanted to offer once upon you
i wanted to give you time
of which you were always saying
i don’t know where it went
now
there is a city on fire, and
there the burn scar, and
there the wild white sun again
eating the distance between
dream and despair and
it is the smell of you i miss
now
when i leave, afraid you
will wander off, walking
into the flames to see their
dancing because it really
is so much more up close
than what any aerial view
can tell you or high budget
film they miss the terrible
now
grace of those licking tongues
you can only see this when
they are right outside the
window-wall, with only
the glass between you
for now i wanted for you
an hour you could not
lose like your keys
your glasses the moment
we were almost inside
now
i lost it, too, waiting
like come here and
after a certain point
getting out is no longer
an option so you watch
the flames through the
glass knowing that if
it were the glass of another
time it would have shattered
by now but not knowing how
long this new stuff will hold
out
afters
when bird i dreamed i walked
upright like woman to fall
beneath tree under branch
after their singing stopped
& upright like her i braced back
into song to call her lost to calling
them
back beneath shade beneath branch
to revive her and rising she only
took up song again, with all words
wronged
upright, back braced, throwing
notes
to land gone from sense or syntax
to cries beyond
meaning, obscured shades beneath
that branch
she lost the lines between her limbs
now they are gone
from sense or syntax, losing herself
to loss beyond
the beyonds, as her grandmother had,
beyond hope,
becoming something else, enough
light to make shade
like the dead, leaving––leaves beneath
each living branch
each branch like a river she knew
when him once
before her body into dirt was enough
to carry the lost
song from beyond that ancient branch
from bird
to whatever gave her syntax sense,
from loss, to carry
from the last she knew, the song
no one sings anymore
to rest in shade, believing you can
still make a soul from dead
leaves if you leave
it all.
in retreat
with weakness ever infinite,
surrender is always possible,
even likely.
better to the tree than the crowd,
better to the force of gravity than
the heights of a fool, professing––
anything.
out there, in the beyond, there
is a tree and she holds up the
sky
you can walk to her, extend a foot
to a branch and let her
hold you
suspended, then breathe and look.
how much better this offering
than another needless
sacrifice? you can
stay awhile. you may need to.
let the crowd and the fools
hold forth with the sole of
your foot facing sky
let your head remain grounded
beneath her shade. Extend
a hand, return.
somewhere, meaning
Start with want.
Begin with impatience, the stuck breath of what to say when everyone is always interrupting, holding forth.
Start with fever.
Begin with syntax as the opposite of cultivated rows of well-behaved lines, to swing the screeching monkey mind between vining ellipses.
Start with eruption of doggerel in perfect union with the fervent bloom of heart’s first blood, and with the last. Of everything. Start with everything at once, all at one time.
Begin as a reader. Begin with a piercing sense of fundamental unworthiness. Then say the word.
Start intending to get a closer look at the many-legged creature sliming under the rock you take to be your soul. Start naming the insects teeming in the soul, and the slime you mistook for a separate matter.
Begin with the end in mind––no, not your ends. The end. Begin with questions, like how many legs? And what is the taste of this monster’s spool?
Start with what may kill you and then get past it. Resist thinking this makes you stronger than those who start with what may kill you and then get nowhere. Notice how everywhere you get; you break open into more pieces. Break. Dance.
Begin building the opposite of a fortress. Start with rubble. With commitment and patience, one day you may evolve into an underwater wreck. Stick with it, and one day you will become the sand of an abandoned beach.
I mean.
Start with revision. Of the material as they have been presented to you, by all who meant you well, or ill. Start by revising the known story.
Begin against logic, against all reasonable arguments for some better thing. In hope and without any.
I mean.
You can begin with an attempt to explain, if you must. But that one, I think, is overrated. So little of this what will submit to explanation, anyway. Plenty of people get off on the idea of fitting saddles onto flying dragons, but some prefer dragons in their wildest states, breathing fire against any demands to explain themselves.
Start with putting a bucket to catch the drops from a leaking roof, or you can start on the roof–– or if you are really motivated, you can remove the roof. There are many ways to stop a leak, but none to stop the leaking of the world from the containers we try to make for it.
Begin with an admission. I am such a small container, and the world is leaking from me.
I mean.
Begin in darkness, deaf, and dumb as bedrock, mute as the whale as she appears to the climber who cannot hear her singing.
an original affirmation
Take it, I said again, and gave
this body to mirror you an origin
in chorus of looping yessss, as
susurrations waving shores
to where they waited, wanting
words to answer but I had only
one. It was yes and child
yes again, and there they
were yes child and here,
meaning all of it.
