Category: writing

notes from a reading

in the shade near the back of a crowded room

Why does the performance poet so often sound like the caricature of a self-proclaimed poet? I suppose this is something that happens in the act of proclaiming so much and at such volume in that outfit. This one calls himself by a word that is three adjectives stitched together, each of which might have been lifted from the stickers of a 1980s grade school Trapper Keeper ™. It isn’t @zippydippycool, but you get the idea. I do not like noticing these things with such profound embarrassment. Doing so only reminds me that whatever it is that one is supposed to be very excited about, I am not. And that my heart, which may sometimes retract in shock to a mean and stingy artifact of itsownself, is usually on the verge of brimming way beyond expected confines, so I spend most remembered moments of this one life trying to pass as one whose heart and everything else is not so often leaking. Meeting mostly failure, with many humorous exceptions that never fail to surprise me, as when someone remarks (as someone often does) on my apparent calm. Which may explain the aversion here, as perhaps only the complement to a fondness for the dull-seeming ones with no names who do not wear any outfits but go on in a deliberate way, careful not to show themselves too much and scare everybody off, unseen and unproclaiming, especially when it comes to knowledge of what it is that is going on––here, and here, and also––do you hear that thing in the background, which is nowhere? I feel it coming closer all the time.

ars moriendi

if it goes like this what now

the week for learning
how it was death
been knocking
on my nerves
was the week for learning
how
now might be
an entry into this
high time
to set some things
down and go
into that long channel
with high archways
of blue-white ice
where a single bird silhouette
flaps waiting, high above
& also you
in that passage
where we can’t take what
with us when we
go

Space lets go

they love their lines, don’t they, love?

they love their lines,
don’t they, love?

like, here body,
there mind &
soul on another
level still but
here’s what i
know, even the
space of no matter
has substance &
pretending some
other way is a runaway
cart horseless after
its fool self while
i the once upon a
river here been
wet and heavy
until a green
scar in scorched
earth & once
no longer moving
find cause
to remember
to weep for
what
mass was
once in me
for carrying
only
to find its
waters
gone come
back to me
Time i am
calling you
now
cross them

art and artists

opening notes of a survey

you can see us in Goya where
cannibal Time eats his children
hooded sisters pointing

to the door, bodies swallowed
by earth as if by probing black
in earnest, he would find

courage to move the brush
Rothko called them performers
Lorca waited on a ghost

to let it harness him by words

& when nowhere stood still we
gathered in twos and threes
hoping to hear the heart

of one living beat hard time
into heat where a mind’s
nerve breaks

a call or cry we wanted
to respond & drummed
an ache the tenderness

of those faces spectacular
& then it was late
all eyelids and moons

o death how

you insinuate

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.

authorial voice

and mirror shadows

The writer, aware that the telling of certain stories in the third person might, by another writer, be handled effectively as neat confessionals, sometimes laments. It would be good if she could walk into the world naked, saying “I am that I am!” like some deity.

Having lost belief in selves as focal points some time ago, now she can only watch what happens to her body with uncertain degrees of remove. Having also lost allegiances to what she once might have considered a certain landform of facts like a single continent against a singular ocean, she now thinks that it does her no good to try to figure where any of these went.

Now that any nascent sense of would-be self is gone, memory can also be recognized at some distance, for the fiction it is. Her old ways would never admit such heresy. Once, she tried to say things like “I did,” and “I went” and “this is how it was.”

She is no longer convinced that she has been anyone, anywhere, ever. However, given various expectations of the current milieu, this emerging understanding is going to continue to present certain problems. For now, the writer may decide to ignore these, keeping vigil in this bed in this underground shelter where this pen over this notebook continues to move.

*

First published in Exist Otherwise, January 2023

stilling

waters and what they carry

Sometimes I write notes and then find them later with something near gratitude. For an ability to forget to have the common sense to keep these things close. The finding sometimes happens when I am trying to remember what sort of self I ever was and if it matters whether I can answer.

It would be a stretch to call this feeling glad. I am not so mindful that I regularly feel glad to find my next breath. But here I am, needing one to come. And then this funny note from a strange stranger, and we fumble on in the dark.

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