“If there is any irreverence in my own work, I hope it is the irreverence I bear in mistrusting my own sincere self, which then sincerely mistrusts the irreverent me. If there is a bottom to this, I think it is a life’s work”
-Mary Ruefle-
Category: Poetry
My Species
even
a small purple artichoke
boiled
in its own bittered
and darkening
waters
grows tender,
grows tender and sweet
.
patience, I think,
my species
.
keep testing the spiny leaves
.
the spiny heart
– Jane Hirshfield
WRITING YOU
What I should do is phone; the circuitry
is there and we’re both somewhere in the circuitry.
I need to talk. What should I find to say?
You know how it is: it rings; you answer; no click;
no dial tone. Hello? Hello? No word.
Not even goodbye – I couldn’t give you that.
.
Listen to this: to write you requires a scheme,
subtends an apparatus, such that here
be an I, you be he there, space
discerns the entities , depicts them such
as the scheme requires. Are you lost? I am.
I want to be not lost. I write even so.
.
Tell me what to do. I want to show.
Schemelessness. Undress. To speak from that.
I want the secrecy; I want it said.
To speak from wordlessness. There are certain things
that happen and we don’t know: proteins meet
and shape each other. We are the husk of this.
.
Whatever happens happens in some such wise,
under attention. I hate all huskiness.
Let me be where it happens, let me be the hidden cells
and silent if silence is all there is to say.
I want to talk though. I want to talk to you.
I despair of what to say. Goodnight. Goodnight.
– William Bronk
WRITING MEANS CLIMBING THE STEPS OF OUR LACK
– as if the aim of writing were to use what is already written as a launching pad for reading the writing to come..”
– Edmond Jabes –
Spring Forward – Saving Daylight
Taken with a feeling of grandeur: a premonitory greatness arising with convergence. There are uncertainty principles and the bafflings of mathematics as one ranges across scales. Relationships over time and fictional emissions, philosophies, transpositions of experience…and sometimes, somehow, they inextricably and irreducibly link up, reciprocally foster…and generate moments of novelty. Perhaps this is indicated with the term emergence. There is music, too, and emotion.
A sense of sense. Of universal process in which one plays a micro-part, participation. For the time – being and becoming seem joined. There may be love, generation, sometimes even intuition of revelation. Simply processes – ongoing self-organization – of “selves,” and smaller and larger collective, complex, and dynamic systems.
Something like “meaning,” I suggest. Nobody gets what I mean.
Which represents entropy. Things falling apart even as they arise, conjoin…together.
Things I do not mind. Emergence / entropy … it’s all dynamic – which is what I’m thankful for in the now. “Alive” perhaps we’d call it, un-“dead,” – a state I’m thrilled to avoid.
****
Of course there’s a “Her,” and a “Them,” or “they,” – my spouse/partner/girlfriend/significance-of-Other … and the offspring numbering 1-4 – the “matterings that matter” in me… my hand and body, pen and paper, & the complicated processes between that emit some strange result.
Physics tells me “strange attractors” (at that relational scale), I suppose it’s literature’s “muse,” romance’s “one,” the what-fors and what-nots equaling “It,” equaling “unknown,” equaling “that to which things tend.” Optimization, in a sense (if only a fantastical one).
Depending on the color of the glasses. What hole is peered through, by whom, from what angle. Perspective. Outlook. Relation. Some mean free path I’m on. Perhaps now a ‘we.’
“I” feels uncomfortable, unnatural. The idea there might be a group-of-me consoles. If only one (other, more). If only a “you — too?!”
– Emily Dickinson
something like that.
Dancing like cancer survivors…
At least grateful we’re experiencing
That’s a sort of Spring-Forward, is it not?
An attempt viewed in incompletion
Impromptu
Arid time and things, they pass
Erase, not quite, deteriorate
Inexact as well, but depleting
Depleting.
Depleting.
.
Not exactly end, ending
Never a beginning
Ever picked up midstride
Midstream
Only ever in the midst
.
Tiring then,
Worn down,
Depleted, she said,
Exhausted,
.
and yet what from?
From what is he so tired
unto ruin?
What is ruin-ed?
What never was?
Perhaps.
.
Always midstride, then
Nearer to the end
this depletion
Depleting
.
nothing
Begun ever
Certainly nothing
ever completed.
Always midstride,
and nearer to the end,
incompleted, and
depleting
Depleting
.
Unable to keep up with 1/8 of the 9-year-old,
worrying the 10, the 17, the young man
fails the partner
fails the weather
failing his own mind
own dreams
his own body
.
ideas
.
Depleting
.
Always midstream,
frozen in place
nearer to the end
this present
Depleting
.
Would like to write it out
Write it off
Pick up again
Declare a start
But he can’t
or won’t
.
Nearing the end,
Never getting there,
(near completion, never that)
only begun and that just barely
joined midstride
nearer to the end
simply depleting
.
Inexorably
.
Without fail.
The one thing without fail.
The one absolute success.
The one almost-completion:
.
depletion.
Depleting
.
Always midstride
and nearer to the end –
very much like dancing
on bleeding broken legs
Impromptu
Death.
Abundance.
Extravagant generosity of depletion.
Lust with which the world gives way.
And life.
Things.
Prominence.
.
I have entered a world
in which I am
saddened
begladdened
nostalgic
and eaten away
.
It is “Today”
this world –
the realm, the sphere, the moment:
Now.
A time that’s never,
only almost
and a just-was.
.
Each beginning
what equals
another end.
That time.
What was.
What will be.
What I remember
and predict.
.
The first day
once again;
each possibly
the last
.
It is like this –
each time –
it is the present:
that attachment
that letting go.
Incessant welcome,
and its goodbye.
To 2015, then
“Great changes in life are always a help…”
-Fyodor Dostoevsky-
A STEP AT A TIME
Now one eye daylight
and one not
there was a lifetime
before they flew
their true colors
but I must have known
the moment I was born
the pans of the balance
swinging along with me
always two poles
with the seasons rocking
between them
.
and the familiar the unexplored
the city the country
abroad almost at home
and home never quite there
just the way it was before
.
left foot right foot
on the same way
my own way
of finding and losing
and in my own time
coming to one
love one place
day and night
as they came to me
.
but the knowing and the rain
the dream and the morning
the wind the pain
the love the burning
.
it seems you must let them come
so you can let them go
you must let them go
so you let them come
– W. S. Merwin
(Parenthesis) : Swarm – Becomings
(Parenthesis) : Swarm
developing concept, ideas, form
Confession: for me the process involving humans crafting and innovating artifacts is (perhaps, nearly) as pleasurable and fascinating as the delight and enjoyment of the “accomplished” creation / artifact / best-of-my-ability result.
Today I plunged into a work I project for my future – a collection of poetic writings with a provisional cohesion designated by the titular nomenclature (Parenthesis) : Swarm. I am offering the beginnings, inchoate guesswork, anticipatory effort, languaging hoping to find some concretion or sense – in case others too are fascinated by the ways in which we humans find forms, structures, outlets, mediums for the expression of our experience.
Poetry depends on its realization to activate and actualize its purposes. I think that form and structure, metaphor and language rudiments all occur as potencies – possibilities, options, offerings – to both direct and elicit, open and enclose, what we are moved, determined, or curious to communicate.
Here lies (or rises) the inception of one of this year’s projects for me… for better or worse, I hope it provides instigation or inspiration in you concerning the prospects of concocting, explaining, depicting, describing, or mediating some forms of human experiencings of our living, our worlds.
(Parenthesis) : Swarm
assaying beginnings
(The blue was an empty sector of sky) :
before the ascending clamor of birds,
blackbirds, maybe. Or wrens, sparrows, the murther of crows
at which point : (monochrome)
(Soundless activities = black / white) : an argument of colors.
–
(White page. Blank. Emptiness. A void) : A chaos.
Sounds, ideas, emotions bum-rushing, flood-filling, desire-aching to mark up, cross out, cross-hatch, scribble-claim, create/destroy the unwanting, unwanted : (Blank page. White. Unlined. Refusing).
–
(White noise. A chaos. A filler) : (A Parenthesis) : A Swarm.
–
Rising up or rising down? Its violence, this freedom (this emptiness, bereavement) : this horde.
(If parenthesis sounds aside reflective calm) the lettered patterns are closing in, are pressing, encroaching (an erasured calm).
–
There are (Breath-gaps, Awareness) : while we survive.
Endure infinity, perception, experience : ALIVE (reflect. dream. prepare to become).
(Sleep-freedom) : surreality of anxious dreams.
(The “little deaths”) : vigorous and belabored, exhaustively lusted , our desires.
Like fires, like (Ash). (A remains, an inchoate.
A beginning) : an actuality.
–
If triggering happens – within swarm – directions will alter towards (flow)
An isolation (becomes compatible). (We thrive) or are disjointed.
Differentiation (in accord).
(This is how it ends) : in its beginnings.
–
You arrive – a great undoing – traumatic archive. I retreat
(or receive, select the join). Independence (community).
The surge : (the Swell). We swarm – the two, no six, no twelve
(of Us). The (love) : and discord. (Arrangements) interrupted.
(Habitude) : and nuance. (The Parenthesis) : The Swarm.
The Holidays
Within this 3-week, no, 2-month, no, now nearly half-year era
misnomered “the Holy Days” –
I want everything –
.
to come due later,
in January,
in what’s new,
to BE new
and newly different.
.
For now –
to simply endure,
and that – blithely.
For there to be lights and laughter
and a certain sort of gladness.
Not this anxiety, this stress,
this hurry-up and choosing.
.
What is “holy” of these days
must be a kind of wanting.
Beings filled of wish
and momentary joys.
We list them:
I want …….
and I am thankful for …..
.
Hooray! – these days are holy!
I get to say and give and get …
wantonly.
Wantingly.
.
We ache.
.
And it begins again.
Left to Say
What she said was.
And there was so much – too much – movement in the still place.
What she said was
I…
To piece together, pull apart was far too much, was overbearing.
Even I’d be overwhelmed. Why with the even?
What she said was
It is too much.
I…
But I could neither find, nor could I follow, there the thread.
Of what she was saying, is saying, which was…
I cannot.
.
Think of where that leads!
She said
She cannot think of where it goes, where it comes from.
I cannot.
Is what she said.
She says.
I listen like a camera.
I record.
Her stillness moves too much.
Is unbearable, she says, to be unable, to I cannot.
I don’t believe her, though I see it with my ears.
.
She says it is too much, I will not try.
But I am trying.
Which does not change.
Birds are caught in all their movement – silent blur.
She can’t decipher.
What it is.
She will not say. Says I cannot.
I, pressing buttons, click the shutter, press record.
(Depress, record).
She will not can.
I take a picture.
It does not hear.
.
And what she says is
There’s too much for me to wager on a word
Even in flocks
Even in dialogue, or forms of living movement,
Even in swarms.
I blink.
I snap the shutters.
She has said nothing
She will not say
I hold the stillness, how it flutters.
Silence seems.
Seems only.
But what she says is
She cannot.
.
The birds swoop past
And there is nothing
Left to say.
All my Words are Silent 