Category: faith

unspeakable

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.

out on a limb

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.

ideas for beginning

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.

one beginning

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.

hello, troubles

settling into the dark passage

How else does one go about making a soul, anyway, except by taking the aches as they come, one by one? I see you, Heartache. Lamentations, I heard you coming from miles away. Come in, chip away, then; there is plenty of me to go around. I know already that you’re going darken the whole place down. Here’s one way to find those little lights that have been hiding in the cracks, keeping company with the mice who ran off with the last of the cheese.

point being

in the after

The point, if there is one, is to emerge. Or else, to acknowledge the emergence of something. It is possible these acts are synonymous, or that one lives inside the other. Does it matter which holds which? Likely not. Whichever it is, it won’t be fitting into that familiar template of the hero myth––having tried this one, and found it lacking, possibly deadly.

regard

and the measure of art

Anything made in this space can neither reflect or embody the life it leans into, but may at best assemble images as instruments with voices of the dead, their players. Unknown concerts happen all the time, keeping time with each tree falling unheard in the distant forest. Now in the shaded alleyway, now at the bus stop, in the basement, the interior of an economy car in a strip mall parking lot. Is it that we cannot help ourselves, making what would call them out? It seems more likely that we would be paved easily enough by asphalt, by overwork, hunger, stress––and forget. I suspect it is the dead who can’t help themselves, reaching back to touch what lives the way we might have touched old photographs in another time, when there seemed more of it. To recollect by offering back the longing notes of these images, their edges sharpened to cut whatever they touch, to make it stranger, as a reminder: you do not know what this is. You do not know what you are.

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