poetry Archives

The Staying Power

A conversation on creating.

She explained that none of this will offer any useful defenses against death, health, or inclement weather. That it has nothing to do with a feeling of faith, that the time to stay often happened when faith was shaken. On the task at hand, she said hold. She said, create.

By way of encouragement, she said no, you will not get over it and no, you will not decide that you can go on.

Why, then? one of us asked. She laughed. I invite you and now you need a reason?

Shaking her head, she turned and walked out, leaving the door open.

Inheritance

In the land of time and space.

There are those who are so much time, who live primarily by movements through and in and around space. Then there are those who are full of space, whose movements are through and in and around time. Each group has a special way of ordering and knowing the fluctuations of the other. Each is friend, antagonist, and carrier to the other. In their constantly shifting dynamic, these groups are inseparable.

Watch the tree. She marks time in her rings and by the turn and fall of her leaves. The fruits of her body are eaten and carried, stored, and adopted by those who move into and around and through her. They know themselves by these movements and she knows herself by holding them. Notice the wind, whose very being is movement, singing his force through her branches, stretching her sway to his song.

We, the children of Time and Space, are the natural carriers of both traits, and the flux between them plays out within and between us. Now we are winds, now trees; here like a bird, here like the whale, here like the ocean floor, the bed of the lake, where the embryonic futures of our spaces settle until hatching from the cells that hold them still before the swimming.

Encounter

A meeting with the art.

There is the event, what occurs after, and what will be remembered; what is in the frame and what beyond it, who stands beholding, and what presents itself, as composition. The artist tries presenting Time as concrete. For example, here’s a calendar and it can repeat endlessly without naming the century. Following these questions out, and out, and out, she creates a dizzying array of images, depicting a history. The effect is a sense of overwhelm, a sense of being tiny by comparison, crushed by the scope and depth of it all. Some will retreat immediately. For those that remain, there are other effects to come, and one of these is a certain euphoria of spirit, suddenly released from certain presumptions about its individual weight.

***

Inspired by the work of Hanne Darboven.

The Flamekeeper

With Czeslaw Milosz.

You asked how to survive in a ruined world. Your answer was a series of confrontations: with experience, with history, with the paradoxes of humanness. You would hunt these, not to eat but to offer as food upon your return. If writing is faith, how can you do it amidst the screams of the tortured, the imprisoned, the babies? You meant to answer, keeping witness with your pen in the faint light of your constant faith in a city without a name, writing a song for the end of the world. In times of crisis, you said, everyone becomes a poet.

***

Inspired by the life and work of Czeslaw Milosz.

Fellow Creatures

With Elizabeth Bishop.

When you were the giant toad, your eyes hurt to see so much and still be hungry, and it was strange to feel your colors shudder while carrying those heavy sacs of poison, mostly unused.

As a crab you seemed at home in your tough, tight shell. You preferred approaching objects sideways.

As a snail, you were intimate with the great effort of the tiniest movement. You knew the shining ribbon of your wake, and yet complained I am too big. I can feel it.

Some say you were most at home when you were fully estranged, singing a hymn to the seal you befriended because of a shared belief.

In what? someone asked you, and you were quick to respond, in total immersion.

***

Inspired by Helen Vendler’s scholarship on the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop.

Paint Not the Thing

But the effect it provides.

You can see them in Goya: the cannibal Time eating his children, the hooded sisters pointing to the door, bodies swallowed by the earth. In the end, he was exploring the color black, not as an abstract idea, but in earnest, to know its texture. In its light, he found the spirit to move his brush.

Rothko called them performers, the dark shapes standing by, alternately actors and choral elements in a tragedy. Out of the quarrel, we seek some calling into flight. Lorca would wait for the ghost and when it came, let it harness him by his own words.

Oh death. How she insinuates, with her senseless black strokes, some corkscrew in the guts of our continuance. She’ll have your eyes first. Here is the danger in being willing to follow. You become a walking sepulcher across sacred grounds as the somber eagles look on, poised to carve wild chasms through what moves.

What to say on these occasions? It may be this or that, but preferably both. Let only the delirious and lucid speak here. The written page is no mirror, but a way through the hall of mirrors, to these shapes that linger just beyond.

***

The title alludes to something Stephen Mallarmé once wrote, attempting to explain his “new conception” of poetry. I came across this in reference to the work of Robert Motherwell.

The Catch

Language and looking.

Even the so-called visible is hard to see, like one of those creatures abundant only in captivity, for whom a return to the wild means likely death. All my best attempts at sense-making amount to a series of interruptions and asides. Some say it was different once, but I wouldn’t know.

Having no access to that other once, I run along this seawall by flickering glance and jagged line, between the dream and whatever this is. Now a blurred portrait, then a caped figure from behind, silhouette dissolving in a field, and what can follow any of these but another exception?

There is no paradise until you lose it––or the key, so now I play locksmith with these filaments of letters borrowed from lines of blue swallows against sky and skaters’ blades on frozen ponds. I am looking for a clue to help me mourn this thing before me, writhing in a net. I do not know its name.

Updraft

Passenger notes at dawn.

An atmospheric river pours dreams through the night, drenching our words and pooling at our feet. One takes us in its boat, drops us, picks us up again, evades us in its thrall and escapes upon waking. We spend so much of each ride asking how it will end, and will it? And what if it won’t? Until we end up beginning again.

When the end escapes us, where are we? Climbing through spirals of remembrance, children at a playground, one and another occasionally stuck, fallen, left out, carried away. The arrangement shifts constantly, like mountain weather.

From here, we cut swaths of sky for new wings. Once lifted, we rain intentions into our shadows, raising the tides against the impact of the next one to drop from these clouds.

After the Words Ran Off

The rewilding of language and hearing.

After the long racket, there was a time when the words loosed their ties and harnesses, freed their necks from collars, and jumped the fences one by one in an unrelenting tide, away from us.

Once freed, they made their own music and removed the delicate garments we had been dressing them in. Once feral, they refused our concerted efforts at domestication. They would think and move for themselves and no longer in our tight throats. They were done with our agendas, our probing scrutiny, the various tinctures we administered at prescribed times, and especially the bells.

We spent our frustrations banging against the broken fences and ringing the redundant bells, and then grew silent with a sense of everything to say and no way to do it. In this time, we became aware that the next occasion for speech would announce itself only by the rising hairs at the backs of our necks, and this was the beginning of our listening.

Flower-Headed Children

Swimming through the ruins.

She told us that we wouldn’t be arriving anywhere until we stopped marking time. Okay, we said, but when? Laughing, she grew. The more porous she became, the more easily we could swim through the spaces she filled.

When the land came apart, we carried the rubble in truck beds. We had to pile it somewhere. The pile became an altar.

To what? Becoming, we hoped. Something we couldn’t see. It was made of our lost parts, broken bits, and the way that we could be each other’s angels, showing up at our ruins. We slept sometimes among the rubble. No one noticed.

She loved a good play. Among actors, she told us, they call an entrance the time needed for one character to join the others on stage. But what about you? We wondered, swimming back and forth through the holes she made for us. She laughed again, and we spewed from her pores, back into one another and the wreck.

***

The title comes from an exhibit by Jaishri Abichandani.