light and dark Archives

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.

hello, troubles

settling into the dark passage

How else does one go about making a soul, anyway, except by taking the aches as they come, one by one? I see you, Heartache. Lamentations, I heard you coming from miles away. Come in, chip away, then; there is plenty of me to go around. I know already that you’re going darken the whole place down. Here’s one way to find those little lights that have been hiding in the cracks, keeping company with the mice who ran off with the last of the cheese.

Among Kings and Queens

Along the fortress walls

The game prize glowed with standard marble and a cartoon cupid peeped out to double the flames. An abundance of jewels decorated the assembly, the idea to catch more light, and more, to rise and rise to meet its source.

It is not difficult to make a fetish of fearing dark, where those uncrowned and slippery forms tend to wind along walls as if to challenge their veracity, as if to challenge certain given truths, the self-evidence of status. Or of your life.

That you see and know. That you remember what was. That what now shall be done is your will. That time is for your hurry, food for your teeth, your tongue, that these pills will do for fixing what ailments may come. That the night you feared might only be good where you wished it so when you went around saying good night and watching the walls.

Cracking Us Up

To shine through us.

In this luminous shade, our tenses melting, we could number the contractions in our skins until we lost count or became distracted. Even the spine’s intention drifts. The once vivid eyes lose precision, and some bright cousin of sorrow shines through. Oh, I am falling apart, you say, not for the first time, and now we can’t stop laughing.

Music for Digging

Thoughts on getting down with it.

Here’s an invitation to stomp through the track-lit hallways of an administration building and sing in a waiting room, wailing exhalations of various shapes.

Consider this a reminder not to chase the light too hard, to balance those ethereal divinities with the ever-present nuisances of daily demons.

Against the weight of daggered baggage, here’s the forgiveness of emptiness. Over the round hoop of the ancient zero like an open mouth, weave a nest for the unborn and make it big enough for the recently departed.

A body will reveal its resilience in rest, holding until only spirit is left, leaving calligraphic marks on the skins it brushed.

Song is a mother. She is working in the dirt and it is everywhere.

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Inspired by, and with borrowed images from Spencer Kornhaber‘s recent Atlantic article, How to Listen to Björk, According to Björk, regarding the artist’s latest album, Fossora. The title comes from the Latin word for digger.

After Dark

The first night of the world.

Something new was happening in the land of light. Suddenly, the world began to grow dark. The birds knew, but people had to learn, this is where you pause what you are doing; this is how you put down mats; this is when you lie down.

Be still, said one who knew.

And do what? Someone asked.

Sleep. But they didn’t know the word, not yet. So, the one who knew said, just wait, and people waited. Eventually, they knew sleep.

Then came a new light, but softer, and the birds sang to meet it. The sleepers opened their eyes and finally, after all this time, they were waking to meet the first day.

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Inspired by “Finding Night,” Virginia Hamilton’s retelling of the story of Quat, the solar god of the Banks Islands, north of the New Hebrides in Melanesia. From In the Beginning: Creation Stories from Around the World.

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.

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