in possibility
what might a whole
faith
sound?
with her heartmind
with her souled body
in denial of dictates
by keepers of orders
to wrench by flawed reason
mind from herself
being from womb
also her
how would her chorus
shiver grace back
to her flesh
light back to word
mystery returned
to these folds
within her
this dark glass
turning a page from the volume at my side & long unopened i saw the book of love come after the book of annihilation where to everything there is a season and all seasons point to their eventual end & so now here i am, casting bread over waters to find it later where rose of sharon & lily among thorns & i remember looking how i could not find my love so now i call open, dove when i come to your door this is the strange soul begging for its only work
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.
Crossings
There they go again,
winged wanderers,
orbiting souls
threading bodies
from dust to whisper
into each a given name.
A prayer for return.
Soul, what do you say?
Soul, let’s meet again.
Drinks? To see the shine
of you, looking back,
your words dripping
over me. I will not
repeat what you said
or did when we shared
breath in that space
where the doors were
secure until they––
Soul, I meant to save
you when I told them
Take it,
of my body,
of my time.
Come back.
I have run out of
spare parts to give
away.
What trembles.
Consider all this a precursor, the artist was saying, to work in another medium. I wanted to begin with some questions, she told us. I was talking to a friend, she said, as I am now––and the friend, these friends, had certain questions. These questions encouraged me, she told us. To keep looking, you know. With these hands.
I was trying to make something, to see it. There is a way to thread a map of layered memories so that knots are formed at the points of collision. There is a way to see the knots as what hold the web together.
Of course, they won’t hold still, so it is not clear yet, but I can see how the tendrils of these maps might thread together, suspended in ropy intricacy as though in branches above us. How we might assemble beneath the canopy, looking up.
It would be so much that we would have no choice but to return to a preverbal state with sounds and textures and smells and a sense of being in one place expanding out and then back between carryings, and no one can ever describe what happens in this state, when the tremble of memory is soul.
The reach of an image.
How do you find a painting?
There is a process. Look. Cut. Collect. Look. Repeat.
Does it always work?
Nothing does.
Whose dream is this world, and how did we get here?
How do you handle accumulation with care?
How does an image become a backbone,
and how much will it hold?
Consider some rites of passage.
What are the rites of the soul?
When the oracle shares a meal with the nurturer,
what do they discuss?
And who cleans after it’s done?
An architect and a protector meet at a well.
Who is the first to offer?
How do you paint with the materials of a given day?
If the soul is a translucent heart, beating, what is
the reach of its vessels?
***
Inspired by the mixed media art of Amber Robles-Gordon
Shining the breaks.
Starlight, starbright/ flash in these eyes/ gifts of the ghosts passing through.
Between us/ holding space/ holding the room.
Light/ spinning/ light we can’t help/ ourselves.
There is one/ answer when/ it comes/ to the matter of the next/ dance
and it is/ yes/ every time.
Smiles from the threshold.
After the body, winking branches point to cloud faces and birdsong heralds their parade. Here is a frame for the living, and in it, more seeds than there are numbers.
Far from immaterial, this breathes syllables of flesh and leaf, spore and wing; limbs and their memory, and without these containers it would be everything all at once like water to a fish, synonymous with life’s self, but we are creatures bent on naming.
We make nests of words to offer as a frame for warming the babies, so that when the known perimeter breaks––by degrees and then completely, they might recognize in our heat, the beginning of something, and stay.
For every living.
What knows, perceives, wills, animates––a body, while not of body. Moving a mind, but not quite a mind or of one. Plato considered a soul of the universe, and others saw it in the celestial bodies. Some confuse it with perceptible motion. Where is it before–– and after, this form and these forms? Before understanding, and after? Indivisible, and yet able to multiply, into greater unity, ever greater being, explaining nothing, with no guarantees.
