It is my winter legend, as if I had
walked far through a tunnel or trench,
my winter legend as if I had survived
all I have survived but at once
and this hovering blue light touches
all my gentler desires
(and my harsher desires are wrought
of hot wax and fire. Lovingly I will
dig a hole big enough for my body
in the sand of this age.)
I am almost as fearless as if
I had knowledge of nothing.
In Dutch Flat it is freezing
but not snowing.
The coal sleeps one foot below
the frost.
The pines shake and hiss:
I feel I'm yours forever, stranger land.
I negotiate the body warm and
pulsing. I negotiate its past pains
on this present day.
I know how frightened you are of fear,
of bad dreams, how frightening
the consequences of mindless movements-
but continue out of curiosity
or want of heat.
I have such an abundance of both,
stranger land.
The compass of my silent part, of my
Silent Part, is spinning.
Monday, December 29, 2014
Tuesday, December 16, 2014
...
I am Flying Away.
Something has loosened its meticulous hold on my edges
and like a careless garment I am Flying Away.
The place that raised me dissipates me
and ushers me silently pineward saying,
fearfulness, you are fearsome forever the sum
of a silent and mystical equation
strongest when broken, strongest when
breathing, oblivious, taking in sun or streaming
rain, strongest Every Moment, lovely and
natural.
The only part of myself for keeping is the
finger of fire in my chest and not forever.
All else is shirked and shed as minutes.
All else is shook like snow from my jacket.
And I no longer speak a language of Despites.
To think that not long ago I felt that
I was Flying Away.
I am familiar with this relationship between
space and nearness. The lost drowning feeling
of being far from the still surface of a moment,
of glassy gentle waves evading me or my body.
I am familiar with strange newness rendered
casual and known.
I am not familiar with the moment beyond
this moment,
but the moment when the charged
roiling stops-
I am familiar with it
Tuesday, December 9, 2014
I and II
1.
I see the fragile, missing aspect
like a vanished rib.
“These things can be
assuaged,
by long drive
by the estuary or
sequoia.”
The body of the beloved
is disrupted
by a rock cast on water.
It goes all wavy.
And we were not milkfed.
I was fed on plum brandy,
you on engine oil.
That we have gas in our tanks
to reach the coast
is boon enough.
That we grappled
to the last-
I’m so impressed-
so impressed by the unwavering stars,
the prevalence of field,
by all you’ve collected
beneath your fingernails.
I’m so impressed
by our earthly grace
in the face of hard time.
I hardly know how to put it-
I’ll stuff this in a cinnamon box,
and send it on its way.
2.
Sometimes all you know
are your quantitative fears,
stacked like a cairn.
Or you wake from a dream,
wildly loving
the face you found framed
by the snow
of sleep-
Sometimes you cry in the car.
And I dedicate this song to you, like
a bench with a name on it.
Hands decimated could rest now,
rest in the tidal pool of my dream,
almost as if home.
Mostly I don’t think of home,
because it carries on without me
but I lost it
and then noticed it was gone.
Softer times allow for gentler pains,
stung by nettles, stepped on a hive.
But you were caught on barbed wire,
stepped on knives.
We both of us have known the mine shaft
too well.
If a heart is a nautilus,
it makes me want things.
Long drives, drive
in a warm den of silence.
Spit memories into the west wind.Wednesday, December 3, 2014
Let It Fade
Let It Fade
Occasionally struck by the nearness
of everything, the brevity of everything,
the precious greenness of it all,
struck by how I ought to run away with my crepe-soles
smoking,
collapse or not with great autonomy.
I am building a wall of books to
lean on.
I do not say that I will
engage with your body as an instrument
because that I will not do
I will only remember with
eyes closed as I curl like orange peel on this
bare mattress beneath wool, your back
stretching like a country mile your eyes
open and not,
or how taking your boots off I felt
venus,
I felt vaguely rose,
and I evacuate it all now like
a mouthful of vaporized time-
precious ether-
drop something and pick it up,
I cannot joke about it I say and you leave
nightward, I to sleep,
Forgive this trite awakening, it is
trite in fact, but I realize so often now:
I really do not know what I want
of this day or this life
Marzipan
Marzipan
I love to love the life of the mind
as if it could salvage rather than harm-
but know I’m better off saying the rosary
until I fall asleep.
I’m slapped adolescent and pink
as lightning knocks with mounting
insistence outside the house
the Irishman says
spit in my mouth
and I do.
(When you are godlessly the slut
of your own anecdote, well then-
a mighty freedom!)
And a mighty freedom may descend
on you.
He huffs his hands, orders me around
as if I were simple, covering my face with
latticed fingers says darling did I hurt you darling
no.
I was hurt so long ago
I still tasted of marzipan then.
I laced up
the shoe of history and
it fit.
Marzipan is in the shops now, for impending
celebrations, lightning knocks, and winter
wipes its feet on the mat. I trade
my caustic tongue for marzipan.
Leaves sway and come to rest
on the morning’s euphoric dogs
out for their morning walks, they are leashed
but tied to nothing,
whereas the mind,
whereas the rosary,
whereas marzipan
whereas lightning and
the house, and yes
the marzipan
Fragile
Fragile
Sometimes sadness permeates my body from outside,
element moving through fragile membrane
or waxed paper gives beneath rain.
(It’s so fragile the thing which is hanging in the air
between us all
it’s so fragile as strung lights flicker and roll
along the limbs of sidewalk trees)
the downpour is sudden, and stunning, it’s so
fragile
creaking between the millstones
of our eyes, our warm and coursing bodies
Friend, you’re with your chickens and I wonder what you are doing at this black moment. Your insides are clean and verdant, the rind of your heart is chartreuse, you stay light- you don’t get your feathers wet, and I don’t know how anyone manages that
when my brain itches and I sob sometimes. (I have not learned to be the infallible crier of our greater state of feeling.)
I sometimes hate it
that my only currency
is my own current.
I sometimes hate it that I do not yet know
everything, cannot yet gesture accordingly,
with grace
Friend your chickens outlived the brief thrash of coastal rain and they are fine. You say they stood there back to back
and that although you knew they’d be alright, something lodged a pit in you
Something lodged a pit in me in past. I do not remember the names of my home town’s streets. I left for colors of more vivid alacrity, and
harsher peals to meet,
a collision more meteoric.
How fragile, the revealing of our weather and humble force-field.
It’s so fragile
Gentle Future
Gentle Future
The oppressive atmosphere, just before
lightning is woken:
the oppressive atmosphere of
an anemic Sunday collapsing on itself
like whoever’s body that was
that body was my body
And are you terrified
that cruelty wins
the match?
Are you terrified
that cruelty
smashes the crucial
physical plane
of intelligence?
That was supposed to be
our redemptive scene.
Sometimes even flushed
lust is not the redemptive
scene, not the denouement
fondly forgiven by critics
who know better;
sometimes the body feels
forty degrees celsius pressed up
against the impossibility
of a gentle future.
The impossibility of a gentle future
beneath us
is running its hands
along our asses
and it keeps saying good girl,
and it keeps getting harder.
And She Is Incandescent Yet But
And She Is Incandescent Yes But
Fearfully, fearfully yours,
universe,
I belong fearfully to
my past self,
and she is incandescent, yes,
but vicious
she throws things around haphazardly,
has little regard for these bones of smoke.
This fragile skin of a collapsing
bloom
don’t think there is no shadow
in the rose garden, no cutlery clanging
in the recording of the night.
She wears this pigeon-gray Zeppelin shirt
and takes it off. She lies on the sticky
chest of indifference,
then rolls to the side.
She wakes early to the sound of rain
and it feels like relief
to the forehead,
then she falls asleep again.
She does not acknowledge the
Quaking Vacuum of Terror,
which is preoccupied but
has not forgotten.
And she is incandescent yes
but vicious.
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