poetry Archives

Turn

The sound of planets in orbit.

Every poetic center has its gravitational pull, multiplying repercussions between these miniatures and their attendant skies. Here we go again, pivoting around the lamp sun at the center of an ariel table, and she keeps us moving by the music of her pen. Without this, we would be permanent invalids, plunging ever away from some distant possession, our placid faces dumb with belfry daydreams pretending to be lessons in solitude. In this concert hall, these skies, we hear the saplings grow green and the crawling trellises; the bitter rain on the long road until the high wind yelping names of the dead finally expires into the silence, the axis on which she turns us with the next opening notes. Wait.

***

Inspired by and with borrowed images from the section on miniature in Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space.

Glitch

Gremlins in the web.

Suddenly, it happens: a tear in the fabric between the real and the virtual, blurring the distinction again. From the messenger, an unbidden memorandum of old photos, remember this?––and you don’t, and who took these, and the answer, you already know, is any one of the someones in your circle, keeping constant vigil on the eerily mundane, to send it back to you in surprise morsels like this, to knock your balance slightly in time like a friendly hip-bump on a moving train.

Another call, appearing local, heralds an automated voice. A mixed sense of betrayal and vague remorse after hanging up. Surely there are better directions for these sentiments.

Open the screen at your lap, looking. How many windows open simultaneously in this chamber and what gale comes to rattle the lamps? The curtains are gone since the last storm, a pretense anyway. The office party returns to the bedroom. See the frozen faces, pixel blossoms and broken voices, seeming to speak. One emits partial words, something like a sentence, beginning with We and ending with Here before the screen goes dark.

***

Inspired by (and with borrowed images from) the opening pages of Nathan Allen Jones’ Glitch Poetics, Open Humanities Press (2022).

Risk of Becoming

With Antonin Artaud.

All he wanted was a change in the human condition. They can laugh at me, he said to the mirror. When it came to the question of what a human might be, he didn’t claim to know. Over time, he grew distant from those who did, and these were many.

All he could say, when it came to describing his predicament was, it’s possible. He sought reconciliation––between matter and mind, body and soul, fact and idea. But people loved their borders, and he kept being detained at the boundaries of his body.

Then he turned on words, preferring only sound detached from the old symbolisms, and he let these run through him, imagining that their resonance, after all, might affect some inside-out change.

Really? Someone asked.

It’s possible, he seemed to respond, and he did not say a word.

***

In honor of the birthday of French artist, poet, dramatist, and writer Antonin Artaud, I spent some time this morning in Naomi Greene’s 1967 article in Yale French Studies, “Antonin Artaud: Metaphysical Revolutionary.”

Coffin of Light

Notes on shadows in time.

A white screen waits at the drive-in, illuminated promises unknown. Give me the absent past, someone whispers, and a stream of yesterdays flow in. A scene, the bodies in it, may be utterly artificial. Once photographed, they become real. To the tall silhouette waiting in the hallway, absent the rush: sing in praise of shadow in the empire of light.

***

Inspired by the photography of Hiroshi Sugimoto and also his Coffin of Light.

Let There Be

Notes at twilight.

New world, lens flare: the beginning of light is the beginning of time, and who controls it moves the vision of the moment––and its form. What difference is there, at any genesis, between making space and shining into it?

Seeking, some found light until the dark begat seeking again. A hard time for thinkers, some say, though others object. Reason’s luminescence, which progressed by co-opting fire and then the lives of those deemed fit for its fuel, can only know its debt in waning radiance.

In this twilit hour, something comes. Lurching through a forest of shadows, flickering through an expanding dark, it speaks in long silences now. Given the limits of this human form, and the limits of a word designed for pointing to a nonexistent boundary between itself and other life, only when I begin to know the fullness of my nonexistence as human can I begin to say, I am.

***

Inspired by Digital Light, ed. Sean Cubitt, Daniel Palmer and Nathaniel Tkacz.

Freeze Frame

Thoughts on a runaway train.

Now might be time for some realignment, someone says, regarding some speculation as to whether the moment at hand is coextensive with the time since the last ice age, or something of another order entirely, and didn’t Kant observe something awhile back about the gravity of the gravitational calculations that led to the radical separation between the human observer and the Nature he observes, and here we are, full circle or full ellipse, inside the fullness that someone might stop and measure, in a time when the fate of man and nature are again joined––since the moment the steam engine made the muscle of man or his mule no longer a natural limit for what he might do, where he might do it, and with what relentlessness, or since the moment that the soil was first irradiated by the bomb, since the explosion of acceleration of speed, people, pathologies, pollutants, possible beginnings and ends and alternative trajectories of being, but where in this blur of runaway objects emitting time does a body jump off to look, and what are the odds of landing in earth soft enough to break the fall?

***

Inspired by an observation by philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, that “We are being exposed . . . to a catastrophe of meaning . . . Let us remain exposed and let us think about what is happening to us. Let us think that it is we who are arriving, or are leaving.” In After Fukushima: The Equivalence of Catastrophes, trans. Charlotte Mandel (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015).

Windows

The fractured sky.

Glaziers mark to frame the squinting eye, here is what a sky becomes when you wake to the way the moon was always there beside the sun and inside a kaleidoscope of parallel heavens: now blue, now crimson, now slate, now yellow, each breaking into the next, and yet––instead of falling, it holds.

***

Inspired by the stained-glass sky collages of photographer Alex Hyner, as described here.

A Whole Art

On artistic integrity.

Many poets aren’t poets, Merton says, for the same reason so many religious are not saints: they never get to becoming the version they are meant to be, as created by the circumstances of their own lives.

It always seems more attractive, somehow, to be some other artist––the point being, one you can point to, already formed, as opposed to––what is this, but so much blurred confusion and dissonant noise?

The work of the artist comes from staying with the mess even as the dust settles, even as more debris accumulates, to rescue a faint but still-living music from the wreck.

***

Inspired by this morning’s reading, Thomas Merton’s short essay “Integrity” in New Seeds of Contemplation.

Loud Silence

Sunset lake at midnight.

Like breathing, close; like something rustling in the leaves in the dark outside the window; the first notes of the world. I hear it, we say of this something, but reality is conditional, and faith, already fraught, has a way of returning any listener to the old refrain about the world and it’s too-muchness––so much, with us. A sensitive medium feels the artist’s hand, dissolving the last line into light, the gong that swelled the heart now a faint echo over the sunset lake at midnight.

Window Mirrors

These growing beyonds.

An old problem: how to phrase

the far-away steeples.

How to abandon a conversation

made of one part memory

and the other projection?

Which time is it now, the world

of memory or the procession

of days marching to the iron-fisted clock?

What grows beyond the window over there,

and who has a mirror?

Let’s shine it by the opening buds, a signal

to ourselves and our aboves:

Look, here.

***

The opening line references Marcel Proust’s recollection of the twin steeples of Martinville.