Perhaps there is no greater pleasure than to live two hours out of twelve in a different world. It is like love at first sight – if the author is just right. An eye blinks, a muscle shifts, and I am glad to be under the spell. The sky brightens behind the glass, room swirling with the fragrance of my lover’s words like a sweet colored smoke.
Maybe here, now, we forget each other and ourselves. We feel the obscurity of an order, a whole, a knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous. We think the world imagined is the ultimate good. It is in that thought that we collect ourselves.
www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/final-soliloquy-interior-paramour
Saturday, May 30, 2015
Sunday, May 10, 2015
Atlas of Goodbyes #3 (a collaboration with Tess P)
Perhaps it is a small gesture that we practice saying goodbye to you in this way – you are everywhere: postcards, baseball hats, sweatshirts, tote bags, water bottles, coffee cups, Christmas cards and so on… (should I mention bumper stickers?). Perhaps you will survive some adaptation. Your beauty and that of the frozen landscape is disappearing, a diminishing resource. Today the news of over-crowded, capsized boats on the Mediterranean Sea. Lost forever, no looking back, a chance taken knowing death was there, willing to barter with life for a just life. How can I speak of both of you? Why?
Maybe as the first soft peach decree of light descends upon what remains of our great decision, its illumination appears small and scattered. We pass by a clearcut forest, and immediately notice the absence of shadow once cast by spreading branches and sprawling, silvery trunks. Sometimes a rush of doves reminds us that the world is a place where mystery does not ask of us to be mistaken for its being. It is as if the tight weave of shiny threads that capture dolphins in the reflective nets of our making tug our attention away from the urgency of the dark stain spreading out from behind the fishing boat, the horizon turning brown.
Maybe as the first soft peach decree of light descends upon what remains of our great decision, its illumination appears small and scattered. We pass by a clearcut forest, and immediately notice the absence of shadow once cast by spreading branches and sprawling, silvery trunks. Sometimes a rush of doves reminds us that the world is a place where mystery does not ask of us to be mistaken for its being. It is as if the tight weave of shiny threads that capture dolphins in the reflective nets of our making tug our attention away from the urgency of the dark stain spreading out from behind the fishing boat, the horizon turning brown.
Sunday, May 3, 2015
Thinking Through the Heart (with Tess P)
The spirit of life, which hath its
dwelling in the secretest chamber of the heart - Dante
Perhaps as a blue lake holds the eye accountable to its borders, what we experience of the world is first routed through the heart. The heart, which possesses the same neurons as the brain, stores memories, of which I could tell you wonders. My sweetest loves speak to me there as delicate traces of the past dislodge and sparkle deep within the dark oozy liquid that radiates to all points well beyond the fingertips of my extended palm.
Maybe somewhere between the tall silo and the shed, you held your hands out to us and we, as if invited and could choose, fell into its vortex of galaxies and swimming stars. Strange murmurs of the voices of our past entwined with songs of children yet born. We heard in a new language, and we knew for that moment that the world would go on because of your beating heart and your blood that you freely gave to us, your blood that is everywhere in the smells of the milking room, sweet, thick, and warm from the sun and putrid as the decayed souls that linger in the hay.
Perhaps as a blue lake holds the eye accountable to its borders, what we experience of the world is first routed through the heart. The heart, which possesses the same neurons as the brain, stores memories, of which I could tell you wonders. My sweetest loves speak to me there as delicate traces of the past dislodge and sparkle deep within the dark oozy liquid that radiates to all points well beyond the fingertips of my extended palm.
Maybe somewhere between the tall silo and the shed, you held your hands out to us and we, as if invited and could choose, fell into its vortex of galaxies and swimming stars. Strange murmurs of the voices of our past entwined with songs of children yet born. We heard in a new language, and we knew for that moment that the world would go on because of your beating heart and your blood that you freely gave to us, your blood that is everywhere in the smells of the milking room, sweet, thick, and warm from the sun and putrid as the decayed souls that linger in the hay.
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