Let’s go see the animals!
This is of language, the sound and sight of it, the signature and sign. The undoing of signs. The shattering of symbols, the gong of their echo. Notice this tongue as medium, as manipulated, manipulating music, a polyvalent creature in motion, now still. Oops, there it goes again. Got it. Sort of. To borrow an expression. This is a form of attention. Here, touch it.
From coffee to eternity.
Take the long view, starting from any horizon where it gathers like rain. Then try a movement in time, leaving reason behind. Go from moment to moment to moment, but no bridges between them. Cellar doors will do, no stairs. This allows for the sudden drop from one to the next.
We move these tiny flames on sticks, and then wait. One sign is the flash of sunrise around the window. Another is a breath of letters flooding the veins, flowering tongues, chiming the ear.
These are useful reminders. Let go, syntax, let’s go. There are more ways to arrange a voice beyond the tired grooves of your worn paths. You can cut the ankles again on low thorns, catch webs in the mouth, know your face by the cheek kissing the cat tail, and forget the mirrors.
In solvent.
Across this wide, crenulated landscape, these internal contradictions pulse our continuance.
Each fold a valley of storms, each groove a supernova. Light into mirror and back again––as it was once, body without organs, and will be.
Watch how we shine in an absence of light. Would you dissect the sea for its parts? You may try, but none of us, separate from the rest, will retain an original form.
Underwater, our flying forms draped in starlight, we are watched equally by mothers and monsters, and lose our faces to know our substance.
***
Inspired by the work of Warren Neidich as well as Katherine Bradford.
Harmonizing vertebrae.
This is not a poster, you said. Not something to be grasped while riding on top of a bus. This would admit no witness without proximity.
Your body a landscape of fossil-ripe skin. Your body an ancient object of bone, stone, shell and wood, the promontory above storied seas, the cave of hillside forests.
Your body inviting touch, that the fingers may know the harmony of its swells and hollows, the full aria of its full-throated longings, even at rest.
***
Inspired by the sculpture of Henry Moore.
Into the beyonds.
To set off, advancing, arms folded over stems: tulip, iris, gladioli, desert rose–– down a path of forking tongues, the question ever which branch, now? ––and be content to dance around an emptiness and never satisfied, to be always on the way and getting nowhere, arms scratched with low branches, thorns; ankles bitten with flying questions, the bloodsuckers biting a frenzy, each new itch auguring branches to come, and know this is happening now, the meaning, it is happening all over you, and never try to catch its supple forms in feeble nets, knowing each tool too insignificant to hold any single marvel, capable only of taking a wandering body––just as scratched and bitten––from its true glory, the act of moving out and out, beyond itself.
To build what may be entered.
Enter this poem. Recognize its ladder. You know it from your grandmothers’ dreams. Here is a plush carpet of sound to somersault you into the dizzy end of the last hallway, hatching to bird.
Here is a poem to be pinched, swung from, picked like a lock, a cast-iron rhyme in the chest from which freshwater fish swim, unschooled, from the unheard, in a furred fury of feathered wings, erupting in collective bloom.
Here come the blue doves, announcing. When the new one is born, there will be change. There will be. Change. Their will.
Time is a baby in the belly of the whale, its new song of a frequency above us. And so, below. Climb into it. Here is a row of commas, hooks for the pulleys to lift us down, held fast to periods anchoring the lines of struck sentences whose ghosts fill the page, a waiting congregation. To be redeemed. Their histories.
Until.
***
Inspired by the architectural poems of Ry Nikonova.
Of seeing.
The moon world waking, you stretch sheer fabric over frame and paint a transparent scene, so that a witness seeing lighthouse, bird, and figure looking back, might also see the structure holding them in place. What does it mean to do this? You ask, of every painting, finding histories of art in every new work, the language being learned even as you look.
***
Inspired by Glasgow-based artist Merlin James. Italicized phrases come from this interview.
This early awe.
I remember a wooded womb with a smooth sitting rock in the center, the dappled light of its dirt floor, where I watched pill bugs. May I not squander those astonishments that would come so often, visitors in shadow and shine––the laughing leaves, the squirrel’s knowing look. The kiss of ladybug against spring sweat in the hiding pause after here I come, with a seeker in full force, not yet arriving.
***
Inspired by Jorie Graham’s Cagnes-Sur-Mer 1950: “May I not squander the astonishments.”
As a shield.
Long studies in endurance make it possible to hold a placid gaze, to make these eyes a mirror, returning only light. Vanity is so often the lead horse, its reliable prance quick to assert the next happy ending: Victory, victory! I watch the riders pass, their contented flag billowing bright.
Behind these mirrored shields, the smoke of a homeland rises over blackened hills, the devastation nearly total. Except for this singing silence, the trace of oiled fingers around the surviving glass bowl. How did they miss this? Protect it. The mirrors are here so that the pillagers may not see what is left for the taking, highlighted against the scorched earth. Hold and wait until they are out of sight.
A bold appeal.
Pardon this extravagant request, but a listener grows tired of hearing only what makes noise. I want now to hear what moves constantly unheard. Also, I am tired of speaking in the usual way. I want a word to shatter language, that I may hold the taste of its center against my eardrum.
