Category: poetry

current

ache

i wanted to offer once upon you
i wanted to give you time
of which you were always saying
i don’t know where it went
now
there is a city on fire, and
there the burn scar, and
there the wild white sun again
eating the distance between
dream and despair and
it is the smell of you i miss
now
when i leave, afraid you
will wander off, walking
into the flames to see their
dancing because it really
is so much more up close
than what any aerial view
can tell you or high budget
film they miss the terrible
now
grace of those licking tongues
you can only see this when
they are right outside the
window-wall, with only
the glass between you
for now i wanted for you
an hour you could not
lose like your keys
your glasses the moment
we were almost inside
now
i lost it, too, waiting
like come here and
after a certain point
getting out is no longer
an option so you watch
the flames through the
glass knowing that if
it were the glass of another
time it would have shattered
by now but not knowing how
long this new stuff will hold
out

unspeakable

afters

when bird i dreamed i walked
upright like woman to fall
beneath tree under branch
after their singing stopped

& upright like her i braced back
into song to call her lost to calling
them
back beneath shade beneath branch
to revive her and rising she only

took up song again, with all words
wronged

upright, back braced, throwing
notes

to land gone from sense or syntax
to cries beyond

meaning, obscured shades beneath
that branch

she lost the lines between her limbs
now they are gone

from sense or syntax, losing herself
to loss beyond

the beyonds, as her grandmother had,
beyond hope,

becoming something else, enough
light to make shade

like the dead, leaving––leaves beneath
each living branch

each branch like a river she knew
when him once

before her body into dirt was enough
to carry the lost

song from beyond that ancient branch
from bird

to whatever gave her syntax sense,
from loss, to carry

from the last she knew, the song
no one sings anymore

to rest in shade, believing you can
still make a soul from dead
leaves if you leave
it all.

ideas for beginning

somewhere, meaning

Start with want.

Begin with impatience, the stuck breath of what to say when everyone is always interrupting, holding forth.

Start with fever.

Begin with syntax as the opposite of cultivated rows of well-behaved lines, to swing the screeching monkey mind between vining ellipses.

Start with eruption of doggerel in perfect union with the fervent bloom of heart’s first blood, and with the last. Of everything. Start with everything at once, all at one time.

Begin as a reader. Begin with a piercing sense of fundamental unworthiness. Then say the word.

Start intending to get a closer look at the many-legged creature sliming under the rock you take to be your soul. Start naming the insects teeming in the soul, and the slime you mistook for a separate matter.

Begin with the end in mind––no, not your ends. The end. Begin with questions, like how many legs? And what is the taste of this monster’s spool?

Start with what may kill you and then get past it. Resist thinking this makes you stronger than those who start with what may kill you and then get nowhere. Notice how everywhere you get; you break open into more pieces. Break. Dance.

Begin building the opposite of a fortress. Start with rubble. With commitment and patience, one day you may evolve into an underwater wreck. Stick with it, and one day you will become the sand of an abandoned beach.

I mean.

Start with revision. Of the material as they have been presented to you, by all who meant you well, or ill. Start by revising the known story.

Begin against logic, against all reasonable arguments for some better thing. In hope and without any.

I mean.

You can begin with an attempt to explain, if you must. But that one, I think, is overrated. So little of this what will submit to explanation, anyway. Plenty of people get off on the idea of fitting saddles onto flying dragons, but some prefer dragons in their wildest states, breathing fire against any demands to explain themselves.

Start with putting a bucket to catch the drops from a leaking roof, or you can start on the roof–– or if you are really motivated, you can remove the roof. There are many ways to stop a leak, but none to stop the leaking of the world from the containers we try to make for it.

Begin with an admission. I am such a small container, and the world is leaking from me.

I mean.

Begin in darkness, deaf, and dumb as bedrock, mute as the whale as she appears to the climber who cannot hear her singing.

benediction

from a time beside ours

Child. How old do you think I am?
Don’t answer. What can you know
of time, having tasted–-what, a drop?

What fills your mouth has enough
volume to fill the space of the cave
around your tongue. Hold it there
and pay attention.

Don’t talk to me about time’s layers
when an atom has flown like pollen
into your nose to stick like a note
at the back of your throat,
substance enough––

to make you sneeze it from yourself
like one or another abstract theory
about its essential substance
as though your words can do you
any good in your current state.

Taste, child. Try holding
what comes. Swallow.
Know nothing. Try again.

This is what we do.
They spit on our foreheads.
It does not mean to us
what the spitting kind want
it to mean, and so we carry on.

que c’est

Qu’est-ce que c’est ?

It is like wanting to be able to dance
in a place where my feet are steeped
in tar pits, and I am the soon-to-be exhibit,
wailing with my tusks turned to sky.

Je veux me réveiller et je veux croire
qu’il est peut-être possible de rester là,
pendant un petit moment avant d’être
choqué en retour d’accepter la violence
quotidienne.

I want to dream believing it is still possible
to stay there for a moment before
being shocked back into routine
acceptance of the routine violence
of a given day.

I sit here, bleeding, wanting to insist
let us not for now pretend to be saving
each other when simple company
is enough. If it isn’t, then what do I do
with this knowing? That you will never
hear.

The idea of rescue for anyone here is far
past the depths, and here is my confession.

I do not know what those depths are called.
I do not know this space. I cannot name this time.
And yet, time keeps insisting. On seeming to know
me. What a thing, imaginer.

But I suspect.
That something about being makes this happen.
Peut-être.
That I spend what life I have in service of what
I will never be able to offer in kind.

Où es-tu ? Je ne peux pas en voir.

Enough,
éventuellement.

When hope gives out, I only want
to dream.

celestial bodies

uncertain orbit

Given enough practice, a body
will adapt to almost anything.

What follows adaptation are
impressions filtered through
tether by which body learns
to disconnect.

Notice the intensity & velocity
of spin, point being to propel
other bodies into orbit around
that central heat.

The quiet was brief
&
when done, she thought:

Here come lamentations,
returning.