Category: Perception

Oceanic Roar

Notes for a libretto.

Now let’s try an ocean drama, every character a refracted light, world of enough light to see by, but only sometimes, and not enough to know, where everyone knows only this, our common limit––to be suspended in a what of such magnitude, so prone to sudden shifts, any one of which could mean sudden death, where all live by song and sing by reverberating waves in the space between continents, where the pretense of being an island would never hold, where anyone who tried would be, as the saying goes, laughed out of the water, except that of course there would be no leaving it, only a period of waiting until the waves of that laughter subsided in the dark of a rising tide, in the space before a bass line begins from the balancing currents of these suspended lives.

Force Like Water

Upon arrival.

Sometimes, with the predictable mess already seeming to be written as it laps with greedy lips at the attention of the assembled, hungry for confirmation of certain known pillars of popular opinion, it is easy to miss the appearance of this other thing, which will show itself sometimes to those who are tired of looking, of taking in the spectacle of predictable tropes. Today, for example, it was a creature of spectacular plumage, resting its wings in the rafters in the dark, its feathers so bright they glowed. Looking down between bouts of casual grooming, the creature had about itself such a stark matter-of-factness that my first reaction was to assume that my mind was up to one of its old tricks, dreaming or conjuring this image from fatigue or delusion. Delusions, as anyone knows, are always reluctant to give themselves up.

Milk Witch

Between blooms.

Words on one side, none on another;
between them, secret smiles, a tolerance
for pain and the nights of long dreams
fire chasing what is caught in the high wind
of the binding gut-level blindness
of spent battery. Scent of lion’s teeth,
the soft, yellow heads, weeding their refusal
to be declared the natural collateral
of another hungry idea seeded by the flying man
in dreams of immortality. What grows here
always flies to its fall and what is fallen
will be consumed beyond its given name
turning the defiant shine of resting face
from the hungry tongues, declaring
at last a body beyond words, back
to an original mouth.

Into March

Against the cessation of stops.

To see the shining belly of a gaze, hungry,
we warm to it because it looks like relief
from another madness, a way to peel
the clocks to feel the membrane of each
hour’s sections cool against tongues,
nectaring the Eden we missed, minutes
running off our chins from the body
of Time, our subsistence rations
after nothing of that space or any place
could reach us singing any––more,
though she tried, calling with an offer.

Gymnastic Grammars

Language in liminal space.

If you look hard, it is a process
of falling from a tear in the sky
where the fist of a new star
broke night into some arrival
to tumble down
a spiral staircase
of syllables, dispossessed
and never thinking to own––
not the looking, not the sight
of any of it, not the words,
not the threaded gravities
tugging its light
into them.

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.

Sea, Floor

In the belly of the whale.

Through a certain lens, you think, here is a moment adjacent to, or inside of, some incessant hunger. Which repeats until it breaks. Which breaks only when it kills the host. Above us, as storm of a century (another?)  ––and below our feet, until the raft where we were standing is also gone. This was hunger, too. And the sea sounds to be made of a hunger all its own, but this is not what it is. That swallows us. This is not what it is that has fed and ferried. Us between homes where we dream of the floor of it. From where we go looking for the floor, in vessels and with instruments. Sometimes we do not find the floor. Sometimes the vessels do not return. Sometimes they return to tell us that the floor is home to life for which we have no name, that the floor is an opening to something else, a liquid earth that rises through its own cracks, spreading.