The End, a reading

The End (with Tania P)

Perhaps we put a period at the end of each sentence to curtail the fear of the dark that lies beyond that dark with its unknown duration before light returns. Outside, his warble silver and pocked as the half-moon impaled on branches, the mockingbird. On the other side of the windowpane, the sleeper hesitates.

Or maybe each perceived ending is a pivot that at best gives us pause; each dark mark a turning point. Silvery flashes of fish swerve up their natal river in a rush to the spawning ground as the luminous sleeper unconsciously beckons the pale sunlight of dawn, waving goodbye to festive stars and sweeping the darker slices of night through a gap in the clouds. 

Beauty to Memory, a reading

http://youtu.be/z0rVhVrmUR4

The Search (with Tania P)

Perhaps you could use an old idea. Or accept advice. Go to an extreme before moving back to a comfortable place. Look at the order in which you do things. Do the words need changing? (You can only make one dot at a time).

Or maybe you could use a new lover. Or accept the one you have, like a lighthouse unable to stop orbiting the ocean surface whether the fog descends or not, hoping less for a ship to warn than a force – (the wish) – more like water than light (no pointillist reduction of rays) – to ravage you: seduction by deluge. Who asks us to choose?

A Choice of Wings (with Tania P)

Perhaps chivalry, hive and liver belong in the same vase on a fur-lined mantle. Women come and go, speaking of Michaelangelo. The widow's second choice arrives preceded by a dream of archipelagos and three-winged birds with indigo feet.

Maybe, when in the midst of a day's hundred indecisions, we actually dare to eat a peach; and in looking inward through a new set of lenses glimpse the soul's most chaotic movements as dazzling symmetries nestled securely within each winged yearning's beautiful shape.

Absence of Presence (Liz B. and Tania P.)

Perhaps it is the absence of presence that leads us to question the coin. We know that the possibility of tossing heads is one half – yet each time it comes up tails. We say that something is wrong. We say that the coin is false.

But truly, neither the querent nor the result of the toss spurred by multiple desires for a single answer figure false, but the fortune assumed gained or lost. Forgotten: the compass of the body in a tech-drunk world where bodies sever peripherally from the heart, nonchalant in the lure of the addiction to sending messages to listeners no longer in the room the body occupies, the sex of distance.

The Scarf (a second collaboration with Tania Pryputniewicz)

Perhaps Amelia disliked the scarf, pale yellow under glass in the San Diego Air and Space Museum, where in a cubicle it sits beside her book, begging the question, when did she last wear it – several times wrapped against her freckled cheek, fringe rippling behind her shoulders miles over the ocean, or perhaps, more likely and responsible for its immaculate preservation, found on her closet floor on top of her boots.

Maybe we are drawn to the scarf in order to question the boundary between the unknown and the known that honors the undercurrent of loss – extending our collective faith beyond the sharp edge of experience and into the arena of exquisite artifact while preparing at the same time for the immense richness of our own individual lift-off.

Beauty to Memory (a collaboration with Tania Pryputniewicz)

Perhaps, just before its end, each sentence descends to earth, however humbly, and the light of this instant polishes the odd green glow of the words, preserving their honest work for fear of a future forgetting.

Maybe future forgetting has its roots in the way the earth conceals its core, an inward melting without trace, red burning gold thus keeping the lawn secure for the bare feet of a woman, her eyes trained on the undersides of green leaves, their spines, her attempt to assign their spectacular beauty to memory before dusk clears her slate.

Winter's Wind (Tess P)

Perhaps winter’s wind is a song of longing with nothing to brush against save the cold limbs of the season, a kind of mournful moan and, at night, a lonely howl that begs the sleepers wake.

Or maybe winter’s wind moves through the trees, not like a sheet pulled from the basket of clothes, not like that, but a music closer to human speech between a parent and a child, a whispering that wraps the body in its hold, warm as wool.

A Lonely Night (guest blogger Julian Magdalenski)

Perhaps as darkness falls over the land and the many creatures of the night come out, they do not rush, for they know something that others don't - a dark secret.

Maybe even the sweetest times must have a dark flow across space and time - so as the owl coos and the fox scurries, everything is night.

Word Cloud

On Being Ill (a collaboration with Virginia Woolf)

Perhaps the great wars the body wages against us unravel the noble doings of the mind, leaving us slave to the solitude of the bedroom, hardened by our discomfort, imprisoned within the inevitable catastrophe of shiver and headache – our sleepless needs and fears tethered to the echo of every midnight groan.

Or maybe in illness we are finally freed to float as sticks down a sparkling stream, scatter with a gathering of dead leaves across the lawn – or like a self-possessed rose – gently tilt our head to the breeze and deliberately fall, petal by petal, in a swirl of dignity and indifference, all scent and flavor, framed in a festival of golden shafts, blue shadows, and creamy, voluptuous clouds.

all this, all that

Perhaps all this talk of despair emits the irresistible fragrance of regretting a life looked back on, a framed photograph kept in a room you enter daily – yet like a road closure during the morning commute, it’s only worth remarking on once.

Maybe all that remains to be finished provides you the only hope you need to continue on, for when you pay attention to that miraculous desolation called the everyday you will no doubt detect a sliver of blessed light from the closest star falling cleanly across the arms of the elderly couple in the supermarket hotly debating which brand of canned soup to buy.

Shadow and Light

Perhaps as translucent trees gather the last of a lingering light, a discontinuity floods my eyes, and I wonder, what is it moving down my face? Single, glassy beads of sweat or tear drops?

Maybe feeling sad feels sad yet this little concern of mine, a mere shadow tracing the smooth, black lower framed edge of the kitchen drawer – skips across the counter and escapes the open door, coming to rest on a sweltering leaf sprinkled with hints of green, faithful servant sent to illuminate this resting place for dragonflies.

Sparrow and Robin (as told to Francis of Assisi)

Perhaps a sparrow says, "I am but a bread crumb in his beard, a snippet of his speech, yet enough to nourish the world until its end."

Maybe a robin replies, "I am a spot of wine on his shirt, the cheerful bloom of a tulip in his hand, a burst of laughter at the return of spring."

A Happy Balance

Perhaps we learn best from words in this book made of air, receiving its freshness a little at a time, our thoughts scattering the sand of its phrases through our fingers in a flood of ink and wind.

Or maybe, like the wandering dog that finds a happy balance between the warm spring sun and the longest hair on its tail, wisdom comes from simple attention to the simple, humble attention to humble things, and living attention to all that lives.

Ambivalence vs. Certainty (a collaboration with Emerson)

Perhaps ambivalence, accepting the jangle of contrary tendencies while preferring not to judge, is a bird which alights nowhere but hops perpetually from bough to bough - a power which abides in no man and in no woman, but for a moment speaks from this one, and for another moment from that one.

Maybe human life is a golden impossibility, as there never was any one right course of action anyhow, and certainty will almost certainly end up in the sad state of a splitting headache, much as the wise woman, through the excess of her exceptional wisdom, is made a fool when she crosses the line we all must walk.

Camouflage

Perhaps everything in this life happens as a breathing, an incarnate give-and-take that filters the world through contact with the palpable substance of things that we yearn to study the inside of and take our nourishment from.

And maybe this tendency toward arranging words to describe the participatory sensuality of this gifted state arises from a clever self-defense, found in the deep-seated desire to confess something very ordinary and obvious to ourselves.

Wonder

Perhaps saying yes to what's legible in any light cloaks the worth of great white shapes that boom and shout and throw gigantic handfuls of salty froth our way at the luminous center of our shifting reflection's black bull's eye.

Maybe everything around us has a question inside, and the answer may have something exceptional to tell us about marking time – as if walking outside to watch rain falling on a driftwood fencepost were a sight to be seen only once in a lifetime.

The First Experience (guest blogger Tess Pfeifer)

Perhaps the first experience shocks the being's brain and novelty is a momentary pleasure compelling us to revisit the first event like a fatalistic love we bore in our bone.

Or maybe first experience is a window to our capacity to love and renews that very spirit which, to anyone who is told, gives pleasure.