Tag: vessel

the problem of shape

preliminary findings

The year I learned the war was inside me — even if some of its battles were without — I began rummaging through the wreckage, hoping to find more than detritus accumulated from years of warring. Around the mess: sky.

I had wanted to be a bespoke collection of formidable weight, but I was discovering I was one part bargain-basement yard sale, another part fairytale creatures — some feathered, some furred, some horned, some visible, many unseen.

And the last part of me was something else. It wasn’t the war exactly, or the yard sale, or any single one of these creatures. Here was a drifting thing, like a cloud.

How long had I tried to pin her down? Or, when I couldn’t, solicit outside help. There are always people eager for this work — telling the unruly body of a woman (ethereal or enfleshed) how she should behave, ready to point her back toward some imagined vessel of herself.

Mine was always either pouring out or sponging in.

I told myself I would learn to regulate the leaking. To absorb less. To hold my shape. I may have been lying.

In defiance of common sense, I was more interested in the experiment. I kept testing it, again and again, in different ways: how much could I take, how much could I let flow away?

It had to do with boundaries. Mine were the kind cell walls have — osmotic. I wanted to know what that meant. I wanted to live it better than I had.

I knew this would make no sense, so I kept it to myself.

I spoke instead of love. And of endurance.

devotion

study in shade

hear these minor tones, dissonant echoes, nocturnal murmurs
whisper of hellhound behind, tremble sound haunting hollow
taste of revenant ash in throat, beneath each note this velvet
dissonance—

here where sea pushes into land: roaring liquid love, thunder
crashing at the lip of the last wave—and the next.

where Pollock pours black enamel over raw canvas, painting
like a man already buried. Here is love freed from time.

here are the rites of the bull cults, the fetid silence
of hardened blood, evicted angel beating one wing
over trembled flame—

no longer showing but shown through.
no longer singing, but sung into—

by jagged notes, passing through
the charmed demon winding sand
ripping the sails that carried you
and when the sails are gone––

all sea
all sound.

acoustic matter

hearing what ripples through here

like the roar of many waters
what thunders through empty space
courses through me when i am least
myself, having lost it all until
the eye blinks from an empty
vessel, waiting

for what reverberates through
each cell across generations
responding to a constant call
ancestral fires shining in the
eyes of newborn suns

& the last cries swallowed
by rising tides of another time
come to surface in the voices
of the daughters who raise
them the silence before their
echo is long, but their sound
is longer

Not Within

But without

It appears that it has become fashionable to do what some practicioners call “focus on gratitude.” Which is, of course, a universal good. And yet, so often there is something knee-jerk about the reaction, a compulsion that makes the effect smell like Febreze™ sprayed into a filthy room.  Or, at the risk of mixing metaphors, putting a bad paint job on a wreck. Maybe this is because of the well-meaning speaker’s insistence: I have––, I have––, I have–. In the face of any loss or disappointment, this can certainly help. But it is something else entirely to admit to having nothing. And then, from the position of that hopeless wasteland of wrecked person, to meet some other peace.

Still Waters

With cat.

In the early morning, an hour for the dust, your altar, your black eye, long since healed, the ridge of the once-purpled nose still visible in certain lights. That weather is over now, moved elsewhere, but still you come to sit with it.

This morning’s sounds are birds and the laundry room just outside the door, and dogs after a passing truck. The phone rings at an odd hour and familiar panic crashes like a wave. But it is nothing, a pocket dial.

And yet, it means something to gather these nothings to the chest and hold. Either because unless I still do this, I am nothing––or because I am essentially nothing, and it is good to be among my kind. Probably both are true, but I don’t get to know.

So, I sit here with these nothings and now here the solid weight of this cat pouring herself into my lap, to hold and be held. She is someone, this cat. She won’t do this with anyone else. I think she likes that I am good at disappearing, too––into the bed, the chair, the book, the music, birdsong.  And, when interrupted––gone.

She is a great teacher the art of emptying the form, so that the liquid of something else may come in. I have spent enough time with the form itself, testing its limits to see what it will take. A lot, it turns out, but for what? When those limits finally cracked, I felt something else move in. It will not be named so it is nothing, and here we are now, these insubstantial breaths our sum, and the sum of us nothing, too.

Song

Tracing elements

How frequently I am reminded, by calligraphies beyond my reach, that I have come from nothing and will return. Blood has its own cadence, impatient with vastness. It will only sing against the fabric of its containment and we, these imperfect vessels––hold, dancing at the edge of a dark pit. There is gravity to it, pulling. What resists will not name itself in a language I can recognize. Meanwhile, this music.

Incant

The open mouth

If it gets so dark
that singing seems
to stop
like a final answer
to that constant question
would you find me
where I wait
in silent suspension
open mouthed or tight-lipped
and remind me back
to music
one faltering note
at a time
to the beginning of the first
song?
Would I know
what lives
at the bottom
of the first
breath to rhyme
with the heights
of the last?
Would it know
me? Could it
enter, even
then?

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