What drifts
The raft’s rough edges where deep clings.
Raft sighing back, yes, oblivions, I see you,
kaleidoscopic leagues, teeming
with hidden lives.
You want ours, too? Is this an invitation
or a warning––or play? The way our youngest
are known to slap with open hands
your surface
just to feel
you resist.
And related cravings
We knew its texture even as it was always escaping us. Like how you can hold the child but not the whole life. Or bear daily witness to the setting sun and be daily reminded how impossible it is to see. The thing so often had to do with finding the question that went with the answer the dream was giving. Naturally, many tried to turn this mystery into a theoretical challenge. Which was something different than entering its all.
in this space before what goes
In this time among these machines that want nothing, that take and absorb the images and sounds and other residues of our lives, their harvest, I want. But am so often dulled among their droning that I may not name it.
What, then? Has that been also reaped? I am counting before it goes, wanting to say. Something but the taint of those scythes is in the words, too.
Let us count before we go, some other way. The machine will not know to measure waiting by the heartbeat, ear pressed to beloved chest, the rasp of final breaths or by the caw-caw-caw across the sky outside this window in the still of midafternoon, above and beyond the droning, beeping whirr of them, indifferent to the stretched stillness, pulled taut until the next caws back.
Set alight
The moment in flux––all danger, possibility. Turbulence of arrival within the dream where each other is the heart of each I, drumming.
Selected moments
The bowed wave, well-timed
arrow of bird piercing sunset
sky swelling wind gusting up
just in time to meet the sigh
of almost prayer: a sign, we
say, and mine.
Outside noise
The sound collector, tracking a distant river of birds, listens in fog, sitting for hours on a wet rock, returning explanations to no one. If someone should arrive to ask, what are you doing? the sound collector will reply, I am tuning my ears.
Trail note
Lacking, wretched, miserable, I set out to search, found nothing, and now there is only this to adore, in astonishment.
Here
If most of what is, is invisible
I will place my hope in the unseen
to be nurtured in that dark.
Regarding the next breath
The artist did a series of spirals. I don’t know what she was thinking before she went down this road but begin somewhere is a familiar feeling. I am often haunted by this one. Anywhere will do, but where is still a pertinent question. You can start at the outside and dive in, in, in––follow the logic to the question of black holes and the possibility of the singularity and related questions about the connecting thread between dimensions, or universes, if you take as a fact the possibility of many in one. Or you could start at the center and spin yourself away, beyond the frame.
***
Inspired by the spirals of Louise Bourgeois.
To dissolve some absolution
Always wants. An attempt to loosen the fibers that seemed to contain the riddle of becoming. From that bonebound island I thought I knew what I was and knowing only wants, dreamed that if I were only more, I might hold those skies, that ocean, and swell to blooming so I could let it all go into the living. I used to imagine you a landscape I might photograph in pieces to print on transparencies, hold the light of you up to your light to translate for you this wonder at your nearness. I remember where we stood above the sea holding hands up into sunset as if to catch whatever heavens might finally rain.
But what do you want, always?
What does Always want?
I am impatient to know.
Please speak slowly.
I lack fluency and miss the nuance of your most important phrases.
The phrase “bonebound island” comes from The Notebooks of Dylan Thomas.
