Category: Wonders

Of this Earth

And walking.

It was another day of humiliations, said the poet. I did not always understand him, but these daily laments I knew well. There are whole days when you can hardly speak, mind running downhill, shining through the glass even as it darkens. Yes, it darkens. Until the next morning when you walk along the fault lines, life in your hands. Lumbering with losses, o child of blood, here you are again, still being born. These notes, if I tried to work them, would make a terrible love poem. No danger of that right now; no time. I am often in the predawn hours considering the horrors outside, how they continue.  This is a note just to say that I am smiling at the way that you continue, still being born. Please continue.

***

Reading the opening of Robert Lowell’s Collected Poems, absorbing a phrase here and there, and then I notice that it is Valentine’s Day and there is a funny gap between these simultaneous realities, which I can’t quite resolve at the moment but find amusing. 

Another Contour

Text as body of bliss.

To hear the text as living, breathing being, not to be measured against the normative strictures of the machine, and know its will to bliss. To find a text on which you can never comment, because you may only speak inside it. As, whispering, you might say into it: mysterious stranger, remove me from my common notions; remember me back into elsweheres that I may be lost in the constant introduction to what may never be written.

***

Notes while reading Roland Barthes’ The Pleasure of the Text (trans. Richard Miller).

On Knowing

Notes from the grandmothers.

Hold in the mind the feathered whisper of something almost touched, but not. Resist the urge to offer up a salve to stop the itch. And let her volume erupt, and stay while she splits her seams, threatening to tear each hemisphere from the other.  Don’t bind. Don’t apply ice to stop the swelling. What do you expect can be born otherwise? These are wonders. It’s when these terrible discomforts leave, and the mind rests sated and full of itself that the subject is really in trouble. 

Waltz

With crouching figure.

Skin trembles with the muscle that sheathes the innermost reaches of the lush garden behind a poem that is tended to nurture and feed the disarmed and disappeared, which never asserts except to underscore an endless stretch of unseen elements, each moved only to dissolve the ends of their reach to attach at the points of dissolution, into some more and ever unknown, whole.

Invocation

Notes from another war.

What I meant to say was not what I said. But this: If death is certain, only timing unknown, will you wait for me where you are living, for I do not know what I am. Here where a child starts a sentence “When I was young . . .” and he is nine. Here where grass is fried in oil until the grass is gone and surgery happens by the light of cell phones.  How fragile, these bodies. In the rubble, you see a hand, reach for it. But where is the rest.

What I meant to say was not what I said, but this. If we met on the shore where I keep vigil, would you know me? Could we sing? Could we continue then, against the fire whose fuel is men and stones, women and children, water and the flesh of my flesh? Would we?

Not It

And the posture of reaching.

Once it was declared that we were playing hide-and-seek, the first thing to do was call “Not It!” but I tended to be late when it came to calling anything. So now I am out here still looking even though it is way past dinnertime and the others have most likely all gone home. Is this it? I persist, but it isn’t. The words are still all wrong. As consolation, I might aspire to the endurance of the dark star, of sloths and tortoises and the legends of creatures rarely seen in the wild, of the dancer’s posture of reaching for something not yet grasped, of the sense of having not yet arrived. At what, no one will say. The point is that whatever this is, it is not yet, as they say, it.

Look, Moon

Witness, washed.

You can’t bring anything back, so we do this other thing. We walk outside alone at different times. Look at the moon, we say in our heads. Then in a message. A photo in the message. See the moon. Its light a soft wash for the nests in upper branches, for the cliff’s edge, the canyon brush, the witness. There is work tomorrow, and this moment won’t be reversed. Look, we say, when the other prayers won’t come.

Crows

The day they carried me off.

Do you have a destination? One was saying, and I was an elegy to be written, then misplaced, then found again by a crow in the early morning light. Let me be part of your nest, crow. Your families tell the best stories, and I watched you pull the mist off the road like a blanket with your collective beaks. I was looking for notes, but the walls kept sliding. It’s true that reason never gets us there all the way. I looked for a better map like I looked for my notes but after the crows found me, I was home. I did nothing. I was carried and everyone was talking. My voice slid to my ears and my will beneath their weight. The musk of their feathers. It was all I ever wanted. I thought of all the times I had looked up to see them, watching as if working something out. What took you guys so long? I heard in my ears, the joke on me laughing.

This Dark Abundance

Life among lichen.

To find the gnarled bend, its dripping hush, the moss-encrusted gathering space for unruly congregations of ferns, witches’ whiskers, and hazel gloves––and be enchanted to protect the wild, wet, crawling danger of this womb with hope only to be near it––and know that if there is anything here to be tamed, it is in you.

***

Inspired by the ongoing movement to protect the temperate rainforests of the UK and Ireland.