Category: love

To Move the Stone

Into light.

Like the fine dust of the nearest moon,
its footprints to prove that even stone carries
within its stubborn mass the key to lightness.

Like the magnetic field that holds it upright
spinning days and nights against its body.
These sudden leaps against its weight––
these secrets that will not be summoned
––only met.

As the bird and not the feather, unseen
amid glare and muted by noise––nested
by the patient weavers’ nets of threads
to catch the fallen nothings where they
float––

As masked dancers beneath surveillance
states, limbs stretched against compressed
space to tread the arcing thread taut
between the spikes of barbed gates––

And soaring, inside the empty vessel
of my cupped hands lifting
where I reached them up to you
to catch me back, the waters
of this heavy form.

Reflections in Water

And the telling, slant.

My favorite detail about Perseus other than his winged horse has to do with the delicacy with which he handled that severed Gorgon head, taking care not to scratch or rough the head by grainy sands, how he thought to place it on a bed of leaves, then sea plants, how this act birthed coral. 

I am reminded by Calvino, who in an age for questioning the fate of books, considered a related question of weight, and made a case for lightness. Only the reflected image allows for the presentation of what may be revealed only indirectly.

I am reminded by Moses, pleading let me see your face to God on the mountain, and God like, no but here is my backside and no doubt the frisson of such an encounter with the hind-parts of divinity is the highest achievement of any art.

How else does a winged horse emerge from Gorgon blood? By what other arrangement but such delicacy can the stomp of a single hoof draw water from stone and invite muses to drink? Where they gather to admire the horse, its beautiful wings.

Always wings, always the mountaintop. The nearness to sky, to flight. The weight of being is weight enough. Only the image––or better, song––can pulse across space, soaring.

I hope so. Let us not, before it comes, be crushed the accumulated weight of the dust of ourselves rubbled in the making and unmaking empires, those heaviest of forms.

***

Notes while reading the opening of Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millennium.

Perception Problems

And the chase.

With everyone going around asking what is going on here, I decided to take the question to the oracle, who was just starting to move out of her third or fourth morning nap. She was nonchalant, grooming her back fur while keeping an eye on the birds outside. Call it a crisis of perception, she said. As an advanced being, she is tolerant––but only barely––of some of my neophyte questions. I suppose the point is humility, so have learned to persist.

Look, she says. You all talk about signs of the times, but you have a momentum problem when it comes to reading them. Some of your so-called ancient minds (here she laughed) may be useful to your kind now. Take that guy Euripides, for example. In one of my earlier lives, I would visit him in his cave. It was home to a sizable rodent population, so it was a win-win. Plus, he had a terrific beard. 

Then she went back to grooming, assuming the point to be made. As always, I must implore her to elaborate. A magnanimous oracle, she usually does. She is referring to his idea that the movements of a moment can be traced to the ebb and flow of two essential forces, love and hate. Plus, the fact of what chases both. Love in its infancy is easy prey for fear, and this feeds its primary opposite. Which is never sated.

Anything else? She asked, looking bored. Let me know when you get around to something interesting. 

I couldn’t resist. I had to ask her how she knew. The look that followed seemed especially calculated to remind me of my stunning ignorance.  

You are asking me how I know about chasing? 

At this point, she returned her gaze to the birds. Mine followed. 

Constants

And figuring.

The work involved an intellect of spirit, but our teacher called it only love. Or nothing, as it mattered little what you called it, our teacher reminded, repeating: show your work. It was endless iterations of complex proofs, each for a simple truth. Only love. The thing about it was that its coordinates kept shifting in infinite directions, so as soon as you finished one proof, you could be sure that it no longer held because the prior constant was now something else. Go figure, the teacher told us, and meant it. Feel into weeping, carry the mess, survive the noise until arrival at some inner music. Same with smells and what is unbearable to look at. You couldn’t tell anyone what you were up to because as soon as you said the name, the meaning would vanish. It was no good explaining ourselves, so we learned not to. They called us idiots. But you can learn to nod at this kind of thing, laughing as you get back to work. No, it wasn’t satisfying, we might have corrected, if we had any inclination to answer certain questions. It was something else, that work. Always.

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.

Now and When

The long look.

It is an act of devotion, the artist told us. To what we wondered, and she replied only looking. Which, she clarified, is of a different kind than spectating. To look long and well, as she did, was an exercise in love. She watched the neighborhood, noticed what changed. She kept the ancestors at her desk. They watched her and she looked back. They kept up a running conversation in her workspace. She watched the water, announced: it’s coming. It crept up our shores and she watched the water and watched the birds. They came and went, not unlike the visitors at her desk. She looked long and well. She was working out responses to the questions the children would ask, about how to live here now. With these, she went to the water, the ancestors, the birds. And to the other artists she knew. We need each other, I know that much, she said. We stayed with her as the water made its way.

***

Inspired by a recent  BOMB interview by Wendy S. Walters with writer Emily Raboteau.

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.

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