Without Change

Perhaps without change, one could argue, there would be no butterflies. Their lives are so brief, what can it matter? They are like leaves that painlessly drop from trees. Plenty of nets to go around, with scarcely any turf left; as it is, they have hung on many decades longer than expected.

Or maybe the butterfly, as if in flight from itself, zigzags through the air as it senses, everywhere it flies, the ultimate difference.  Yet change remains, and our tender attention to it need not be narrowed by the broader world contained within the innocent, unguarded space of the one great sadness obstructing our view of it.

The Eighth Elegy by Rainer Maria Rilke

Simply Poems (with Tania P)

Perhaps until a spot more fertile for the flower is found, its pale shade stands as a reminder of what must come. Because leaves understand the inevitable, do we need to be told?  Little losses everywhere.  These are simply….simply poems. 

Maybe poems, like tiny losses, hide miles of roots sheathing a core light we long to hold, like the diver catching underwater a blackening orb of falling lava, a geode he fails to fully open, but in trying--and before its heat forces him to drop it to the ocean floor where once hardened it will increase the island's girth--its two halves in his palms circle one another like a pliable hourglass, orange tendrils splitting their casing while refusing to separate.

Your Child (with Tania P)

Perhaps your child meant at first to come through my body. But in the final recalibration and preparation for the roundhouses and last minute swervings a child must learn to endure on earth, came instead through yours, explaining the tenderness I feel watching him cross the room towards us with your eyes, his father’s open-shouldered command. Perhaps he’d chosen you all along, and it is the you I see in his eyes that explains the lotus-petaled serenity, affinity, that blooms in my heart in your company, the infinite’s gift of the thousand forms.

Maybe as your child approaches us with his energetic lift and swing, I am momentarily freed from every undoing, for contained within the depth and breadth of his smile – stolen from a sailor, an artist, a storyteller, a poet – is a delight that transfigures all without his knowing. 

Revision (with Tania P)

Perhaps as a writer the desire to tell the truth haunts you, as it should, yet at the same time all past events over which you previously had no control are at last subject to your decisions, your revisions - as creating patterns or finding form in any life, or mind, or world contains the promise of a worthy goal.

Or maybe, like the birds, destined to the confines of one humble repertoire, we stand little to gain by striving to rearrange the order of insight, the sound of the sounds themselves transportive as is. Just as listening to a foreign language--adagio, andante, poco a poco--elicits a response devoid of reason, like the inner harmonic struck when spotting the color spectrum feathering red to indigo to violet across a sky silvered with recent rain.

Oblique Strategies #2 (with Tess P)

Perhaps you are an engineer, and your life is simply a matter of work. What to increase? What to decrease? Do nothing for as long as possible, then go outside, shut the door and incorporate. Once the search is in progress, something will be found.

Maybe in observation of the clouds’ supply and demand, you search for a ratio that will fix those long broken, and deliver bridges to greener pastures, your true project being a physics of the heart, a law of multiplication in which love drifts and settles everywhere like the rebellious hairs of a cat.