so this is how you swim inward,
so this is how you flow outward,
so this is how you pray
Mary Oliver, Five A.M. Pinewoods
Rain, snow,
damper pedal.
softening…
slowing…
so that sound
may
rise –
Arise quiet sound –
its feel –
tonight, now,
then
a melancholy birth,
nostalgia and utopia
again, combined.
.
Sustain.
Dear – (names of loves, Colorado cloud formations)…
to follow scent and slope toward where words are to be tasted. Summer. Diction. Pronunciations of a walk, a caress, of noticing and discovery
.
Aspen, pine, columbine.
Grasses, marsh, and pebbles.
Sand and water.
Bodies in the world. Of.
Earthy heavens.
.
To lose reason and perception in being.
A sense of that. Sky. Fluid. Water flowing and founding, above and below.
I can still imagine desire,
after all.
.
Clouds never ceased converging and changing,
even when they weren’t.
Berry referred to this as “the space between the leaves”
“I,” for instance, mind or body both.
Clouding forms.
.
Smoke and drink still, even in absence of.
.
A carriage of conversation accompanying – in the form of silence, – inscriptions, all that is nonhuman, waiting for or presenting any of its forms.
Written language or music recordings, for instance: grasses and bushes, streamsongs and trees along with birds and stealthy deer.
All bodies of the world, in and with it, too.
Imagination.
Desire.
Making presence like a meal. A party. A walk, a hike, a bath, asleep.
If I named you to bring you near – what would you be? Who?
(shuffling the cards of names)
(faces all worn off)
A tiny pine responds, fake empire.
Eyes are everywhere, like leaves, like air molecules.
The spaces between.
.
I go out.
Asleep.
Nights are maps, are dreams.
Translations.
Cloud formations. Always.
“Russian blue.” Vodka. Confusion-in-fusion. Withness.
-to cease the spirit
Nothing beyond.
The mosquito, intravenous. To “draw” blood.
Spirits. (extraction versus infusion)
Extrusion. No medicine.
Aspen quiver, laboring breath. Alone. All becoming one.
What? Who?
(so much any named “you” as an “I”)
Caught in the trees, slipped in the stream. Thirsty.
Asleep again. Watching clouds.
Dear –
– you. fire. rain. bodies with and in and of the world. Here, not-here.
Results this letter. Address. Silently.
Solitude as a freedom to be alone, to become (how slowly?) all-one.
Alone there’s nothing there. Cloud fragments.
Sky rains its portions. With, in, of. Neither for nor against.
Perhaps awake now.
Air in, air out.
Changed
Is all I’ve learned to suffer.
Undergo.
Cloud formations
Storms. There is a darkness, a swelling uprising (not grand!) in me translating the transformation of Alone/All-one, a kind of grit and pollution I add.
Turbulence.
Bones. Rock. Stones
Desire
Imagination
Sky
the fluids
they conjoin.
Dear –
it began.
(it was left for the voices) – with/in/of.
Dear Marguerite, Helene, Clarice…
Hello, I am (not) alone. With/in/of the world. Neither for nor against.
Yet imagination and desire
cloud formations, I was expressing in
such great heights
Again, that uncanny occurs. Someone stumbles upon some old composition or effort. Someone comments insightfully, provocatively, and I come into a new relation to what I had let into the world a decade ago. Thank you. Today, reviewing, I was struck by this piece from some other me some time past, and it felt resonant again, much later, as continuing me…
From my longer work, 2012, I, For Instants, (https://manoftheword.com/experimenctes/i-for-instants/), the brief section “I the Question”https://manoftheword.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/i-the-question.pdf
Again, thank you readers for bringing new readings…
so language is an architecture for open?
–
they make their way to the mountain.
wait.
up there you make your way too,
waiting
.
i’m a man of too many words
but silent ones, written noise
i’m no good with others,
i always say too much
Between
(sky and birds), between
(enclosed and contained),
between the not existing and the sleepless
there are no obstacles.
Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, Xenia
it’s hard to make sense
outside of the world
or in a larger world
things don’t register
in expected ways
.
the pace is all different
and nothing is counting
time, space, and motion
do their thing as one
the human happenings
.
don’t make sense
or seem separate, divorced,
a frantic scale
the earth holds quietly
.
even words dissolve
and transform
like breezes
and bird-calls,
not meaning the same
.
passing, passing, held
passing, passage, hold
i imagine at Heidegger’s hut
he was murmuring
these things, being
.
hard to make sense of it
with reason or belief
a stance
but easy sense
outside
.
Where do you listen?
What are you listening
with and for?
How do you listen?
Silently, with wing-beats
aflutter
water moves
.
i move
out of my head
into the rest
of me, my skin
an open passage
my organs trudging
patiently, waiting
blood moves
.
accordion chest
filling my limbs
hands holding
feet touching
grounded
.
lay back
all in
an other
with / in / of
this world,
here.
[or, grass in pavement; beyond black holes?; “boundaries are made to pound against” (Hejinian); after Celan, after Knausgaard) “you have to dream new ways of thinking”]
.
We praise the dead (remember?)
and the Mother holds them,
in catacombs,
the earth…
…beyond the black hole,
again and again and again…
.
The world is radiant!
Feel that?!
Continuous fomentations out
of undifferentiable chaos –
muddy unsolvables
.
Look! Look again!
Quit speaking.
It is here. (mysteriously)
Redolence…
.
…beyond the black holes,
again and again, not yet…
Where are you, real-ly,
becoming and formative,
nearly gone. To where?
.
Look! Look again!
Call it listening,
attention. The smallest detail
comes infinite.
You are there, also!
But where? you ask –
and can’t be found…
.
…just there, now,
which is – where? –
No longer. Linger.
It occurs, what might
be else.
.
Cheers to the wonder,
unknown! – what
is. Like being
before there’s a there.
It happens…
.
…beyond the strange darkness –
horizon-event, that complains,
and becomes as it passes
in strife, in the Mother,
the dying, remembering
birth-like
Was a kindly algorithmic suggestion toward a remembering, almost a gift, perhaps… once I wrote this…
…yet another example of negotiating tools and context. The previous post it seemed natural, as if I reached into the surround in order to work …
“The Dream’s Navel”: an adaptation
Lydian
The summer
almost always,
so hard to endure –
warmth, light –
no solace
no protection –
only so much
undoing
is possible
in light…
heat
.
The autumn:
a young child
aging,
deteriorating,
dear demise,
desiccation,
something almost true
to fact
.
The spring –
its delusion,
deluge,
as if there were
a coming-to-be,
or fascist utopia –
with –
all the bells
and whistles
.
Our winter:
discontented,
and good –
solidity
of presence,
sweet ache
of living,
being,
held,
in place
.
I love.
Obviously shame and guilt AFFIRM us… as organisms that CARE
(at the least about ‘how we are perceived or incorporated’)
or, it tires me out to be around ‘people’ but ‘people’ are what we get
or, “Hello, Adam” (Thalia Field, Personhood)
or, “I” am constructed by/in/with a context
or, what do “I” (does I’s) know?
or… and so on…
What does “care” stand for? Or represent? “Mean”?
~ a fine form of self-determination-destruction
indenting “i”-dentities
Behold: “I” cares. “I” is ashamed and guilty. “I” loss, lose, be-wilder. (Can you?)
– Care as apparatus and negotiation. A “feeling-for” securing a sense. Places and times.
“Concern”?
How does this fit? Be-long? Where when how what.
And so on.
NOW.HERE. (always – for humans, etc…?=ETCETERA – or beyond outpast = ellipses).
Sing again. Breath. Sound.
“Care” as negotiation.
– somewhere somethings laughing
Fascinating people and interesting things.
For Orthodox Christian Men Discerning A Vocation
Capturing Moments in Life Infrequently Since 1995
Fine Artist
output
An Independent Non-Discriminatory Platform With No Religious, Political, Financial, or Social Affiliations
Gospel Word Gardening in the Age of Decay
Polysemic Stupor 