Category: poetry

New Ancient Cathedral

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.

The New World

Naming ceremonies.

When we went without counting, light shows played across our eyelid curtains, and language curled around us like cats, love-biting our hands, ears, toes–––inclined neither to obey or defy us. We would lick its back in turn. It would sleep on our bare chests. The water taught us flight. If the clock watched us then, we never met its gaze.

It was so, so, so.

[Much? Or little? Who thought to measure? Not us.]

We grew spaces from the back alleys of our breaths, filled them with song. Laughing, we spilled it everywhere, the new world baptized, each feeling a benediction.

Means

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.

To Hold in Space

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.” 

From the Harp

A prayer to the wind.

I am, in the end––and each beginning––no more or less than a hollow vessel strung with sympathetic strings. If awareness is a matter of tuning, subject to interference, all that happens is a matter of sound, sounding. Each new life, each cataclysm is what vibrates through a given string, to wind through the echoic box and out again. Now I am symphony, now grass, now a spool of thread; now current, now whale, now cresting foam over wave. No part may translate itself.

Withdrawing even from myself, I am none of these parts, but all of them, and the handler breathing somewhere in the rupture between what is and what appears. In this state like dormancy, pregnant with possibility, I have never been an adequate expression, beyond this whispered invocation into wind, water, and this lover’s touch–– 

––calling, sound me, that I may remember. Heal my unbelief.

***

Adapted from An Object-Oriented Defense of Poetry in which philosopher Timothy Morton expands upon Percy Bysshe Shelley’s idea that all humans are like aeolian harps. 

Beyond Translation

At the eye of the storm.

To the one proclaiming, without irony, I want to listen, after so long in the role of violent storm, how does a hearer begin the act of translation?

With pronounced suspicion, scanning the horizon. Can a storm hear itself? Perhaps this offered ear is only the eye. The I, ever central, rider of the galloping present, trampling presence, only reminds the embryo at the center further into the liquid dark of the labyrinth with no thread. There is a life that never stops bursting into unheard shouts of life, into lives.

Passage

What crosses the page.

How is it that we move from first love to loss so completely, and what makes the new state as real as the first? The world has a way of calling out the will to speak, to wrap some form around the formless, to create horizons at the edges of a given space, from which to trace the arrivals and departures of the sun. Or suns. I do not know which. The poem is passage, not discourse, the endurance as much as the cocoon.

The Use of Mirrors

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.

Raft

Reach and anchor.

The lunatic, the lover, and the poet each knew: to float on a raft made of words chosen out of desire, it was necessary to decreate the old world first. The flood repeats itself, and the dove.

So, the weaving and unweaving of the shroud by Penelope’s hand. She is buying time for the impossible return of an impossible life, long lost at sea.

Longing and despair are long partners, dancing together. Only the living are so bound.

***

Adapted from Helen Vendler’s essay on Wallace Stevens, which borrows a phrase of Stevens’ for its title, “Words Chosen Out of Desire.”

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