Tag: relationship

Fathers Day 2012

On By NW FilbertIn Poetry2 Comments

Fathers Day 2012

(for Tristan, Aidan, Ida and Oliver)

 

I would use the word “foundational”

but it’s much much more than that.

“The child is father to the man”

in so very many ways.

 

Fundament comes closer

expanding in us a sense

of ever-expanding edges

of universe and galaxies

within which everything that is,

is

 

But, personally, it’s larger,

and deeper, and wider

and exponentially more important

 

these children that father me

to fatherhood.

Giving me these things they’ve made

of me.

 

I look at them.

I long for them.

I love them.

and I marvel.

 

I come from this! I sing

these four amazing

and tremendous beings

making me their father,

 

shaping me as man,

a human,

a relationship

after all.

 

I’m not much of one for ‘truth’

but will say ‘this I believe.’

 

N Filbert 2012

 

Embraces

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Writing20 Comments

I didn’t get around to performing the Friday Fictioneers prompt-100-word-story this week…having gotten sidetracked by a prompt that has haunted me all week from the writings of Lynne Tillman…finally, something worked out of me related to this… as follows:

EMBRACE

“in an embrace, something may be confirmed, avoided, or resolved”

-Lynne Tillman-

            A kind of “there was.”

Sinking into his arms, strong and coily, warm almost gruff.  The dusty smell of oil and denim.  She felt small, she felt memory.  She closed her eyes as in sleep, and allowed.  So much to confront and to question, perhaps to ignore, but now, just this now, this embrace.

He’d wounded her for years.  Secretly whittling strips from her heart with a scalpel.  Holding her mind under liquids and spells, the sky and its stars, overwhelming her with presence while silently working dissection.  His voice anesthetic, a narrative of dreams.  She was victim.

And part of her knew.  Wanted.  Would rather.  She with her own confused expectations, demands.  Her ownership.  Defiance.  Some part of her vision selected this blur.  Macroscopic.  Details out of focus, the essence of place.  Embrace.

***

She had shouted, threatened.  He had thrown.  She began her crumbled march as he grabbed her.  He corded her in arms, shackled her to his chest.  She, unable to move, to breathe.  A little dizzy.  Anger and fear.  Him holding.  Him safe.  He panicking.  It held.  The embrace.

She struggled, she sobbed.  She squirmed and struck out.  Refused.  He held.  He tightened.  As if in a last expiration, the lungs clinging life.  She stabbed and she stabbed and she stabbed.  He bled.  He held.  A braced embrace.

Eventually collapsing.  Exhaustion disabled the leaving, dismantled the stay.  Floor and furniture took them in and supported.  And held by receiving their burden.  Stasis.  Time, embraced.

***

That morning – the fog – the waves – all the greying of sands.  They’d wandered alone for solitude’s space.  To be lost.  Unbeknown.

A moist, briny chill had embraced him.  Swallowed him up.  Become him.  Immersed, he released.  Saturate, evaporate.  Began.  Unwinding like a mummy’s cloth he disrobed.  His anguish, his anger, his hope.  Dissolving out to sea in trails.  Emptied.  Cleaned with a salty sludge, he weighed.  He grew heavy.  He blended in with the mist.

Enough moisture to formulate drops, her tears joined the air.  Embracing herself through the wind off the water she shook and she stumbled, she clutched.  Unseeing, she fumbled along. Desperate.  Undone.  Like the thick cover of sky, her past and her present, her future combined and ran away down the rock.  She was hollow.  Held only by her arms, her hair keeping her head in its place.  She wept out her body until drained like a sieve.  The charcoal of sands embraced her.  Falling.

***

The hesitancy.  Two scarred bodies full of wounds, slowly exposing.  The want for another.  A crave and a care.  Some tendering need to devour.  They approach gently, allow touch, speaking perimeters.  A leg crosses over.  Eyes keep locking and unlocking with an almost audible click.  Food is had.  Hunger remains.  They move and they walk, learning hands and arms and shoulders.  They gaze.

Arriving at last at embrace.  Caressing the soreness of worlds.  They mate at their bruisings.  It becomes more.  Ravenous and fearful, they struggle.  Wrestling and huddling, they carefully voice every play.  The directions.  No pain is no gain.  And they gain.

Become more in the matching – four legs and eight limbs, doubling heartsize and brains, and they fitted.  They enter, they receive.  Exposing and sheltered.  In opening wounds they are bandaged.  They had not believed, they were doubt.  This, a healing embrace.  A beginning.

***

In death they are laid side by each.  Before long the roots will take over, a tendrilled combine.  The skin will grow lax and more fluid, the moss and the mold remedy.  Bones become ashen and dust.  Filtering one for another.  Transposed.  There will be one flesh, this earth, the conglomerate of bodies and beings with rain, moon and sunshine.  Planted there, embraced in all that will hold.

They take to the breeze like powder and spark.  Knuckles and teeth cackling the stones.  A huffed form of cloud, they merge, they seep.  Skein on the water, grain on the leaves, one and the other, the other again.  No one can tell.  Salt sugar sand shaken together and forever sifting.  Their love, their lives, its embrace.

N Filbert 2012

The Unknown and Unnamed recalculates and barrels on…

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Journallings, Philosophy, WritingLeave a comment

“& knowing from

the look of the others

that a panic has come

into your own eye

to know yourself only

as an instance”

-Ron Loewinsohn-

            Am I indeed no/w/here – is this a place to founder?

Are you here too?  Now?  And what might that mean?  (Or is that already to abstract, extract, exit to a changing no/w/here?)

I have my concepts.  I have my doubts.

I am unidentifiable, no/w/here.

If you happen to find me (or dis-cover?) would you please point me out?  Just a gesture will do.

You can use the simplest sign, that concept, just a dash, a briefest line – “/”.

Or a slapdash curly loop to momentarily contain it all in, all of that malleable nothing with thousands of experiences passing through: .

Loop-the-loop-de-loop go the organs and wires, the pores of the flesh, the nerves and the neurons, the veins and cells…

I am bewildered.

I think I am a concept.  (I thought I was a verb).

I get the joke!  “I think” – I am a verb.

So runs the conception.

Selah.

The ?/’I’ Barrels On…(the Unknown and Unnamed recalculates)

 

Empty concept or full flow, he advances (advances?) – he verbs.

Verbalizes.

He acts.  The marking concept, the tiny scratch – ‘/’ – goes on, regardless (of my regarding).

No/w/here.

This is IT.  (was IT and becomes so again) as ‘/’ act.

This unknown, unnamed subject/object absent presence moves like a filter screen being swished through a tub of air always tagged “IT,” (if this were a game).  Is IT?

Beginning from no/w/here and heading there too, and always at once…

it’s downright unsettling!  (literally – there is no settling or pause!)

I find (without actually locating a thing, even a speck or a fragment, not “conceived”) I am always no/w/here, and that no-place is always (ALWAYS) changing, moving, different(ly).

Unknown(-able?)  Unnamed(-able?)  Unlocated(-able?)

            Homo Scribus (homo-anything!) – person-as-verb – erases as it writes, deletes as it constructs, falsifies as it truths, acts in its passivity,

ever equaling the equation at zero!

(no/w/here)

I’ve gotta steer clear of math, of physics…I don’t compute!

New Ekphrastic Works from myself and Holly Suzanne!

On By NW FilbertIn Art, Experimenctes, Graphotos, WritingLeave a comment

New verbal/visual work from our studio at home!

http://ekphrastixarts.com/2012/05/08/a-portait-of-an-us/

Unknown and Unnamed Undoing: the swoon and the swarm (a kind of mathematics to be continued in rain)

On By NW FilbertIn Art, Experimenctes, Journallings, Philosophy, WritingLeave a comment

Unknown and Unnamed experiences: the swoon and the swarm

 

I hadn’t remembered it like this (trying not to remember).  That all of it got into you.  That all of it came out!

Immersion.  Enthrallment.  Ecstasy – words that come, to mind.

That if en-joined, then out-sourced.  Becoming indecipherable – like epistemology.

A moment’s rush, for example.  I encounter – which encountering looks like insertion and abstraction on me.  I move toward, feel it out, then back off and observe.  Active, passive; a swing, a rocking boat.

This is different.  Inundation, a flood.  Unable to say what’s mine, what’s not; who’s me, who’s you.  Unable, frankly, to say, at all.  Only be.

Motion, reception; injunction and release.

Think sky-diving: that decision to jump, trusting something, someone will hold together as form in all that air.  Like diving the deep blue sea, compression surround, that some element will remain intact without ground or solidity.

It works that way.  Give and take, see and saw, this uncanny to and fro of body, perceptions, breath.  Eyes contact then fog to some self between.  Fleshes – distinct and specific – now con-fused.  Who’s sweat?  Who’s secretions?  It’s sticky, yes, like that – a gluey bond.

Then the wave, the distended moment – incalculable clockwork – where all borders and boundaries seem lost, some extended and mutual sigh or moan within which the voice is other and the same without identity.

The swoon of it.  The swarm.

Dizzying rush of blood as warmth or wind; eyes roll back, also in, but not to my darkness.  As if limbless or prosthetically invented, my body grows – grows yours or ours or contracts to another covering, but inside-out.

As if leap or let go were no longer options, but instinct.

As if hot and cold – undifferentiated – some something that must define pleasure –

as in emptiness, fullness

the yin, the yang

a cellular entanglement

The swoon, the swarm

emerge

But what?  Or whom?

And what occurs in the median?

Who were that?                                                                                                       What was those?

The swoon, the swirl, the swarm.

            No one effecting.  Effected.  What does that indicate?

Nothing, essential to event – if nothing, than an absence utterly imbued.

A radiance, evocation,

like a sleeping brain on dreams…

with-you, the unknown gets no/w/here.

Whatever the constants, coefficients and variables, given the operator as convergence, the equation = whole,

where the w stands for we,

without which none – (“hole”).

Affecting substance…no one gains currency…necessity (no 1, but at least 2)… and then – ?

No one, unknown, unnamed, no/w/here as 0+O

where O stands for other

in this case, you

O requiring as much as I

inferring – ?

you can’t have 1 without anOther

but where anOther occurs must be at least 1 (other)

even if unknown, unnamed

in order to be lost and found in the joining

the immersion and enthrallment

the ecstasy

Intimacy

On By NW FilbertIn Art, Experimenctes, Journallings, Photography, WritingLeave a comment
photo by ParkeHarrison

Intimacy

“People really understand very little of one another”

-Anne Carson-

            You might say we studied one another through a thick fog.  Or learned one another in the dark, guessing, reaching, feeling our way.

For many years.

We were determined.

Recording nuances, memorizing beats, mimicking rises and falls.  Taking fingerprints with our bodies, collecting snapshots for official documents.  We created and invented artifacts together in order not to know – who was who and which was which.  We merged as often as we could, and more than often asked.

We still remember general shapes and movements – tones, colors, outlines.  Each a sort of negative of the other – surfaces accepting imprints, continuous translations.

You could say we were scholars and specialists.  At times we counted hairs, many times while splitting them.  From observation it is hard to tell bodies tangled in fighting from those wrestling in love.  Unfettered laughter from convulsive wails.  We learned to do so by watching them changing one to another and back again.  Momentary gradients.  We were able to dance on thin lines.

In earnest we catalogued vocabularies by rote, genetics, neuroses, causes and effects, our marriage a lab of research and experiment.  Encycopedic and replete.

Through interference of weather and evolution’s inexplicable leaps we adapted apparati for morphing data, constructing theses.  Compared and bickered notes and conclusions, matters and intention.  Interpretations varied.

More astrology than –onomy, more alchemy than chemistry, we carried forth our quest.  Meteorology, geology, archaeology we sought of one another, growing compendiums of analyses and flow, catalysts and katharses.

Our distance became cosmically microscopic, mythological and rite.  You might say we were studying one another in a great fog.  We kept on receiving each other in the dark.