Ascent
hypnotic bends that lead to melody and percussive tinning--sticks and jinn--ambient spells that run at the level of mere mind, the key of see, little windows of the kind you find in airplanes or hornets' eyes, pigment-cup ocelli, shining all the way down to the beating heart of everything, a-thumping below the senses, unheard, felt faintly, a memory, visit and invitation, rose window--cathedral strains of light stringed and strung--sung. i remember . . . rumors and weird pronouncements (do i keep the e or not?) a meditation on spelling, siblilant sobriety, sober society of sound, circling--ascending. oh, slant of soul, assent now.
Wednesday, January 02, 2013
Saturday, January 21, 2012
Winter Wonderland.
it's nearly time for you to be waking. i have not yet been to sleep. outside my window everything is mantled in snow, which makes the world a quieter place. it's the middle of the night, the part that bends toward inevitable morning. i climb out of bed, boil water, make myself a bowl of pasta. i think of you sleeping far away, and i want to send my love to you.
Friday, November 04, 2011
Those sweet talking nights . . .
7th Floor, Berkeley, Asbury Park, November 4
I return from the hotel lobby
with hot coffee. The
oceanfront window is open
and I send love to the sea that is
constantly salt-scrubbing everything it touches.
It washes itself as it washes the earth and its
creatures. The bed is rumpled, and my lover is
off to begin her day. Her body haunts the white
sheets of memory and touch. Everyone needs to
be touched. In a just world every bed would be
rumpled and every morning, this one morning,
hot coffee, goodness everywhere.
Wednesday, November 02, 2011
Time it was and what a time it was . . .
Day of The Dead, 2011
Maybe the reason we call it fall,
is owing to the fact that in the
autumn trees dissemble,
the sun, the birds, withdraw,
make their homes in more
distant quadrants. Everything
falls away.
I have always been afraid to think that
life has more to do with “visitation” than it
does with “residence.”
So in this day, this autumn day, I collect all my
bruised goodbyes, and in that colored round
I forage.
I find much leaving,
a space where fall seems all,
that, and grace, and gratitude.
Wednesday, May 25, 2011
You, and [then . . .] I
At Rest, At Last
You invite me to re-enter my body after a near-
life-long absence. You: visceral spirit whose arms
are strong, whose bones clink together when you
speak of God, you whose flesh glows red whenever
you recall the great and ancient Ones residing
everywhere in everything,
tiny particle-gods
making up the air and the dirt
whose life the sprung crocuses, purple and yellow, fling out
toward the sun in exchange for the fire it returns,
blazingly, into the vast and expanding walls of
its otherwise dark and hollow frame. And I,
aflame with the firey particles of God,
you and I, aglow, remain,
as if made entire in a kiln.
So I—my dear muse—and my body (stranger for so long)
elicit the enfleshed songs of love, songs rejoining and
mixing with the spheres, rejoicing in our bodies, your
thighs, your own tender and vast universe between
the nested places you call me to, home, free to rock in
ecstatic forms of prayer that culminate in relishes of
silence, like a scream, a scream, sounds like your name,
dripping from my lips, earthbound, discovering air to all
celestial fire, breathing, chanting our eternal fleshy song
—we, taking and receiving, uncharred, burning.
You invite me to re-enter my body after a near-
life-long absence. You: visceral spirit whose arms
are strong, whose bones clink together when you
speak of God, you whose flesh glows red whenever
you recall the great and ancient Ones residing
everywhere in everything,
tiny particle-gods
making up the air and the dirt
whose life the sprung crocuses, purple and yellow, fling out
toward the sun in exchange for the fire it returns,
blazingly, into the vast and expanding walls of
its otherwise dark and hollow frame. And I,
aflame with the firey particles of God,
you and I, aglow, remain,
as if made entire in a kiln.
So I—my dear muse—and my body (stranger for so long)
elicit the enfleshed songs of love, songs rejoining and
mixing with the spheres, rejoicing in our bodies, your
thighs, your own tender and vast universe between
the nested places you call me to, home, free to rock in
ecstatic forms of prayer that culminate in relishes of
silence, like a scream, a scream, sounds like your name,
dripping from my lips, earthbound, discovering air to all
celestial fire, breathing, chanting our eternal fleshy song
—we, taking and receiving, uncharred, burning.
Sunday, March 20, 2011
Calling me back home
Lazarus, Me
You’re calling back into being, me,
after so many little deaths, huge caverns of little graves;
you’re forcing goodbyes that have festered in their incompletenesses
for far, far too long;
calling me forward you say, “receive my love,”
you, calling me to your embrace, calling me out of the night thick with lonelinesses;
and I am reminded
to return the lightness that you bring,
the heart you bear to me,
thank you.
slipping between bright sheets, me;
sliding in from the other side, you;
us returning now, wondering where we’ve been before,
wondering if there ever was a when or there, invisible and disappearing years in which we were not always
present and together.
You’re calling back into being, me,
after so many little deaths, huge caverns of little graves;
you’re forcing goodbyes that have festered in their incompletenesses
for far, far too long;
calling me forward you say, “receive my love,”
you, calling me to your embrace, calling me out of the night thick with lonelinesses;
and I am reminded
to return the lightness that you bring,
the heart you bear to me,
thank you.
slipping between bright sheets, me;
sliding in from the other side, you;
us returning now, wondering where we’ve been before,
wondering if there ever was a when or there, invisible and disappearing years in which we were not always
present and together.
Thursday, February 24, 2011
There's so much you have to go through . . .
Dear Father
I fell asleep while reading Keats. I woke not long ago, thinking of my mother and then my father, and while still in half-dream and talking, repeating the line several times, I addressed him in this half-dream world of half-selves, “I am so sorry not to have been writing you all these many years and months, my own dear father." Next I began to write. "But I was so angry when you left—helplessly abandoned—a hopeless fledgling not able to bear himself up with his own wings. What you did was not fair—life has been no fairer—all these many years, as I say. And still, a part of me understands and forgives you. I talk about you with people as if my memories are fond and as if I loved you. It is as if that fledgling bird-boy is both alive and dead—a thousand fantastic lifetimes in an unrecoverable past, an unfinished work beyond any hope of finishing. And so the chasms that open up inside of me are vast and unnavigable—disparities of selves that have been introduced to one another only because they all exist within the same scarred and broken body—else they’d be strangers living in different continents, different parts of the world entirely. They share frivolity and sadness, and the bird-boy within—the one with whom it all began—thinks he may have missed out on much you might have offered. There is no way for him to know now, of course. Part of him was relieved that you were not to return, and another part of him—well, it was not another part of him after all. By the time I found you, an older boy with arms like a strong man, with the shoulders of an athlete, with the scrabbled stomach of a laborer, had risen up alongside the boy inside, and it was he who was not very pleased—awkward, burdened and put upon to have found you once again. These two, the bird-boy and the boyish man of great physical strength, (but hollow, without a knowable inner-life)—one robbed, the other born malformed, never knew how to say anything to you at all. It was the same for the older man who came to me a little later, the poorly married and then divorced fat man who sat on the side of the bed when you, at the age of sixty-two, were in the hospital dying. Sometimes I think the tumor in your brain kept you from all those parts of me. And now, here I am one or two lifetimes further along—and just so, another self or two more—only nine years younger than when you died, talking with you now, unsure that there is in fact anything at all to say. It is difficult to constantly reach inside, for years, and come up empty all the time. It is like never being fully alive, and ill-equipped at best for most everything there is to do in a day or over a lifetime. But here I am because a dear friend who understands these things has suggested to me that she’s been talking with you when she prays, has suggested to me that I might once again take up the faith of our fathers—funny phrase—for I have taken up that exact faith, the faithless, undependable, and overly-critical man who meant so much and gave so little. (I don’t know if that’s fair, but let’s hash it out.) I had a “great expectation” too, once, that you would have long ago helped me learn to fly. But today I walk, limp really, mostly alone right now, mostly alone for all these years, except for this new friend I mentioned. I do not want to tell you her name. She has, like God, many different names, but they are not like the names of our fathers. They exude instead a strong and womanly strain—I simply call her 'healer'—at least that’s what I’ll leave you with for now. Besides, I believe she’s already told you her name inside the temple of her God, before the tabernacle where she has prayed for your release, and mine. Or maybe I will call her 'loving woman,' even as I come to you and write to you now, these many years later, my own 'dear father.'"
I fell asleep while reading Keats. I woke not long ago, thinking of my mother and then my father, and while still in half-dream and talking, repeating the line several times, I addressed him in this half-dream world of half-selves, “I am so sorry not to have been writing you all these many years and months, my own dear father." Next I began to write. "But I was so angry when you left—helplessly abandoned—a hopeless fledgling not able to bear himself up with his own wings. What you did was not fair—life has been no fairer—all these many years, as I say. And still, a part of me understands and forgives you. I talk about you with people as if my memories are fond and as if I loved you. It is as if that fledgling bird-boy is both alive and dead—a thousand fantastic lifetimes in an unrecoverable past, an unfinished work beyond any hope of finishing. And so the chasms that open up inside of me are vast and unnavigable—disparities of selves that have been introduced to one another only because they all exist within the same scarred and broken body—else they’d be strangers living in different continents, different parts of the world entirely. They share frivolity and sadness, and the bird-boy within—the one with whom it all began—thinks he may have missed out on much you might have offered. There is no way for him to know now, of course. Part of him was relieved that you were not to return, and another part of him—well, it was not another part of him after all. By the time I found you, an older boy with arms like a strong man, with the shoulders of an athlete, with the scrabbled stomach of a laborer, had risen up alongside the boy inside, and it was he who was not very pleased—awkward, burdened and put upon to have found you once again. These two, the bird-boy and the boyish man of great physical strength, (but hollow, without a knowable inner-life)—one robbed, the other born malformed, never knew how to say anything to you at all. It was the same for the older man who came to me a little later, the poorly married and then divorced fat man who sat on the side of the bed when you, at the age of sixty-two, were in the hospital dying. Sometimes I think the tumor in your brain kept you from all those parts of me. And now, here I am one or two lifetimes further along—and just so, another self or two more—only nine years younger than when you died, talking with you now, unsure that there is in fact anything at all to say. It is difficult to constantly reach inside, for years, and come up empty all the time. It is like never being fully alive, and ill-equipped at best for most everything there is to do in a day or over a lifetime. But here I am because a dear friend who understands these things has suggested to me that she’s been talking with you when she prays, has suggested to me that I might once again take up the faith of our fathers—funny phrase—for I have taken up that exact faith, the faithless, undependable, and overly-critical man who meant so much and gave so little. (I don’t know if that’s fair, but let’s hash it out.) I had a “great expectation” too, once, that you would have long ago helped me learn to fly. But today I walk, limp really, mostly alone right now, mostly alone for all these years, except for this new friend I mentioned. I do not want to tell you her name. She has, like God, many different names, but they are not like the names of our fathers. They exude instead a strong and womanly strain—I simply call her 'healer'—at least that’s what I’ll leave you with for now. Besides, I believe she’s already told you her name inside the temple of her God, before the tabernacle where she has prayed for your release, and mine. Or maybe I will call her 'loving woman,' even as I come to you and write to you now, these many years later, my own 'dear father.'"
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