poetry Archives

Meeting in the Mist

The art of looking.

Each body has its signature, each a mystery. I know only awe for these, and nothing else of faith. Expect no unveilings here, no grand revelations. Only the presence of someone with nothing of importance to say, breathing between bouts of getting lost. Are you looking for something? Me too. I am trying to remember what.

In answer to your question. About art. No, I don’t think it’s necessary, but it is a means of survival. I hear there are other ways. Maybe if I spent less time in the folds of this fog and more among the purveyors of proven practices and ten-step solutions, I would be able to tell you what these are.

Instead, here I am, without even an explanation for this body’s central sacrament, which is listening to a cloud. All I can offer is this ritual: wait, wander, listen, repeat––and this open hand.

***

Notes while reading the opening to Carl Phillips’ My Trade is Mystery. What a beautiful gift.

To Carry You

With LJ Roberts.

Your grandmother showed you to knit. She learned from the mothers who fled the wars. You stopped and kept living until you got to where words were no longer enough. You found fabric again and made poetry.

You knit your beloveds into your world, an ever-expanding family. You knit the foreground with the background and layered the threads of one body among those of the next. Then the sky, the earth, a hand, a bench. You showed us all webbed together.

It’s one way, you said, to transcend human forms––or rather, our limitations in seeing what they might be. Here is a box of light, you say. And here is a space for the others.

I want to carry, you tell them––you with me.

***

Inspired by the work of of LJ Roberts.

Inside Out

Placing ourselves in space.

These solemn geographies our limits, and yet. We persist in aiming to be where we are not. If the first myth was of some beyond outside, the next was that it was assembled of infinities––in defiance of the limits that confront us at each breath.

What creatures are we, to be embedded with impulses to defy our own natures and nature itself? The first way we did this was to presume to give her a proper name, capital-N, and place her outside.

After that, we would not recognize what breathed against the window, fogging the glass through which we meant to keep an eye on her wild beyonds, out there.

Little Dream Bird

Questions of memory.

Now, where is the little dream we had before the fire? Thoughts like this always precede those of flight. There was a little bird among us before the fire, jumping from shoulders to heads and one arm to the next, like we were branches. Which of course we were, although we never noticed the tree. Do branches, usually? There are none to ask.

Anyway, you would think the tiny bird would have been the first to vanish, but it wasn’t. I can see it now as it was near the end, bright body against the dark. As if waiting, with a question. We left and the bird did not follow and then came a long road. It is the same as this one. I think I hear it, sometimes.

Elsewhere’s Space

A meditation on making.

There is an elsewhere here. It breathes in the margins of activity and swims among the vessels of the plans we forever work over––arranging the sails of this one and that one, checking our courses and whether the knots will hold. Elsewhere is indifferent to all of this, or else amused.

Elsewhere can’t hold the music she holds if she keeps the door open for every cacophony that presumes to invade. She thrives in forgotten spaces and in dreams that dissipate before we can fasten them to words. Her only allegiance is to the country of lost countries. There are no flags.

Without Elsewhere, there is no one here. How may anyone name this central element of a life after the moment of recognition that it is not yours at all, but something possessed entirely by some other out there, in that nowhereland between continents, beneath these vessels, behind these words and all things seen and named; arranged and rearranged?

But even this final recognition of futility offers no freedom from the impulse toward making the worlds we keep creating as offerings, tempting her unmaking, her not-naming music, her long-shadowed disappearance of all that seems.

Come Out

An invitation.

Let’s bring music to the reading and dance.

Let’s bring something other than what is expected.

They expect words. Let’s give them something more

and catch some holy ghosts.

We can wear our painted masks and speak

in tongues. Pass it on, we will pass

ourselves below the lasers before

we begin. Sample that.

Holding the Beat

Anchoring breath to breath.

If time is the rhythm of a group, breathing, consider the befores an inhalation. When tomorrow comes, we will exhale; and again, and again.

How different this is than the model of the pointed arrow, to pierce the next flesh of its landing.

If time is the rhythm, it is now, an anchor point that moves nowhere, holding the beat of our breath.

How the Hearing

Inside the dream.

Imagine a dream where the bed is pushed aside. The dreamer overflowing from it. Then the ladder. The steps we make. And remake. Who comes. And goes in what light. Who carries. And leaves what stones. Who finally. Whispers I am who. Understands the voice how. It is not outside but inside the dream.

A Recollection

Of being held.

When we were keepers of the universe

we would tickle its edges by the tips

of the fingers of our outstretched hands

and we would hold those hands out

as we spun with its edges tipping our

heads daring to be knocked back

until we were flat on our backs

laughing the sky beaming back

seemed to know us

and later we. were

not. so sure.

Wordkeepers

Care and feeding of language.

Here is an open space, breathing. Here a heartbeat. Look at the ears on this one, and this one here is loving the new bed. Let’s take them out.

Once upon a time, a dark castle, a long walk. But then what?

Some of us are fine spinning in suspension of once. Upon a dark walk. In a long castle, in time.

There are some who will leave language crumpled in the bottom of bags, forgotten in pockets, scattered on the floor like shed clothes no one thinks to pick up, and others who prefer to let it accumulate like a fine layer of dust in a locked room. There are those who would squeeze it like citrus fruits, extracting the last drop.

And then, there are the poets, treading lightly among the words with empty hands, making soft sounds as if to soothe them, touching their skins, petting them behind their ears. The words lean in, expose their bellies, their hearts.

Some ask to be broken, promising. There is more to know in the shattering. Some ask to be held close, restored, squeezed––not to extract what is freely given, but to know the pulsing fullness of all they carry, unsaid.