in a loud forest at a new cut
Kneel, then, upon these roots, listening before the offered body, to the language of this ancient tree, cut now, far from canopy and now a waiting map of exposed flesh, etched with the record of seasons. The wound may sprout a new tree from inside the cracks of her severed body if the roots are intact, if disease does not kill what would.
in letters
my experience is an ongoing
experiment, unwilling to stay
anywhere as stodgy as the inn
of expertise, even overnight
and every time i start in earnest
to say anything true enough
to ring, i give my meager savings
up again
putting all i know at risk to all
i have yet to understand
*
Inspired by Ann Lauterbach
extremity
what is the word for what
happens when a mouth
opens wide with cry so great
it makes no sound?
of clay
You go around putting on the necessary faces at the appropriate times, hiding the other mess in the back spaces of any given place or moment. In conversation you might allude in an offhand manner to the messes waiting in the wings but you know not to break certain taboos. One of these being an admission that you live entirely in the wings, just flying around in the shadows keeping company with the discarded stuff that has always been your kind.
Then you are going about the motions of your seemingly appropriate life and then there is this urgent material flopping over and beyond the edges of every shut closet door, every drawer. One day, during a vigorous cleaning, you decide to collect the stuff. You throw out lots of things, but this stuff is something else, you set it aside. It waits, being regularly looked at, appearing to pose a question about handling.
Yes, you tell it. Yes. I hear you. Maybe it hears you, maybe not. You touch it. It holds the indent of your finger. It holds space, a malleable and formless lump. One moment it is magnificent in its strangeness, luminous in soft light, and another moment it looks like something a dog left on the sidewalk, and you wonder who does this?
One day, you pose a series of related partial questions to the lump. Will you? And pull. Reveal to me? Knead. Something? And you spend time just holding the cool, lumpy mass of it in a hand, warming.
Its formlessness is part of the appeal, and so is its willingness to bend to any form but precisely.
You handle it. Set it down. It now has a spot on the bedside table, beside the lamp, the pile of books, the coffee cup. The cat approaches, sniffs it, turns, sits beside the lump, then moves away.
Will you? You ask the lump. Show me? You mean your whole life but are embarrassed to say this aloud. You are not yet ready to admit to yourself what you are hearing when the lump whispers back.
You are sleeping, dreaming, or otherwise away when it talks. The cat, who listens with more experience and a more advanced sense of time and purpose, gives you a pointed look when you return. You carry on, leaving, prodding, kneading, arranging, and setting it down. Then you sleep.
Here I am, the lump whispers while you dream. Your whole life.
but again
to be a husk
returned to soil
by way of river
over falls
& under bed.
what good
is this? someone
asks & one
answer is another
voice, yes
what good
is this.
ideas for an educational panel of inquiry
Here’s a talk i am going to give
in theory anyway called
teach like an animal
& its genesis is in understanding
that i failed in my intention
of becoming someone who
knew things well enough
to tell them with authority
the more i look the more
convinced i become that
there is a lie at the center
of the whole idea of knowing
and it is congenital with the myth
of the preeminence of self, and
i want my panel to include
shapeshifting nature &
the pride of ancestors refusing
to be erased, whose voices echo
in the shimmering electric currents
coursing though the cells which
make my body of my mother’s
and the mothers before her.
I grew up reading a single
line about an all-knowing God
on loop, and even this God
said only i am that i am
in response to demands for
explanation but knew how to
show up–for the stutterers
and the dispossessed, the wretched
and the women, who consistently
challenged the important somebodies
when asked for announcements, when
asked to show face, who turned to sashay
away revealing only the back parts
in graceful admonishment of the
asking mouth’s presumption
of being filled in a single
gulp of word and then
done.
in flight
Hello, i
am still here
flying through sky
into riverbed, into body in river
in bed into ocean ––either way
disinclined to make points, only pointing,
ever to erosion and becoming and I tend
to erode the best intentions of anyone who tries
to name me as a fixed point & sometimes when
i take this skin shirt out for air i am reminded
to dress in layers after going into places
where so many are so eager to use
their ready points as points
of contact when these
only make me bleed
& then I am back
to being current––
again
to the question of how one is being
Now i riverbed, now ocean &
either way am disinclined to point,
tending to erode those points
aimed to find me taking
this skin shirt out for air.
i learn to dress in layers for those
places where everyone seems
eager to use their ready points
& these only make me bleed so
now i am back to being current
again to answer that question
re: the I that I seem, being @
the end of am. I can only say:
I am currently.
Maybe you know this way
& why we never lack for
company, streaming as we
do through here, hearing
communions all day long.
to learn
Teach me
by your presence and your song.
I am too full right now to take
anymore of answers. I have been
here all day sampling those & now
i am overfull and still malnourished.
I cannot be alone in this. I won’t.
Let us sit here together awhile,
friend, attending
a concert of
shared breaths, our resounding
amens.
what comes in whispers
The problem is always remembering, but some have none of that. They are the sort to wonder out loud where the time went. Those of us who remember well enough to be pierced every time by how thoroughly everything goes when it goes, cannot do this. But some are so convinced of their centrality that they wonder aloud about the interpretations of dreams, as if a congregation of gods had gathered to watch them sleep, leaving little dream notes to their chosen one. The rest of us went around, pulsing with the leaving of it when it had been so close. Interpretation was the enemy to that sort of charge. What it was wouldn’t stand for being caught in a goblet for drinking; at best it could be absorbed like mist into skin, to leave you feeling chapped whenever you walked anywhere drier than a cloud. Meanwhile it galloped before you, a herd of wilds never to be saddled, running the secret that would lose its legs in the telling. Hush child, intimates the dust in that wake––not a direct address, mind you. Only by not understanding may you receive anything worth knowing, even by thirds. It is like that most of the time, except for the moments when it isn’t. Being entirely unprepared for those, these tended to floor me. The way it comes sometimes, that vegetal speech cracking in husks, and me too dumb to leave my fascination. What? I’ll be asking, as it all goes dark again.
