The Color of Lightning, a reading

Since Tania Pryputniewicz left the redwoods and vineyards of Sonoma County for the sunny beaches of San Diego, we have been at a loss to record our Perhaps, Maybe collaborative posts together such as Three stars, The End and Beauty to Memory. Here is our first attempt to bridge that distance.

Eureka - A Prose Poem by Edgar Allan Poe

Eros (a collaboration with Tess P)

Perhaps as you enter the penumbral shadow of yearning, thinner than light, fleeter than flame, a vein in the rock - and stand poised to retrace your steps, carrying the fragrance of earth and rose across time – you remember those quiet evenings of visiting your younger self walking alone beneath a dazzling moon on the brink of a new desire, folding and unfolding the possibilities over and over again in your mind while a white boat waits, tied among the reeds where water lilies rise.

Maybe your yearning was pulled from the fabric of the night sky when bright needles of light punctured the black canvas and a brilliant liquid of light fell quickly toward you like a shining bead of mercury from a broken thermometer that your mother had shaken and together on your knees you rolled the darting beads onto paper that she folded like a luminescent, white boat on the water.

Spring (guest blogger Julian M. age 12)

Perhaps as I watch a cloud look at me with deep blue night eyes, I see the world pass by and I wonder if everything comes and goes as it seems.

Maybe the sunshine shines on through perilous storm and rain with heart filled soul and love.

Beginnings (inspired by H. Murakami)

Perhaps there are ways of telling stories that don’t always take off with assuredness, types of stories you can never tell - tracks with trains passing over them that have a mysterious silence all their own.

Maybe the point at which you begin to tell a story is not always the same point at which the story begins, since beginnings are always like this: one minute everything exists – the next minute everything is lost. Yet this may be the beginning you were waiting for, as you watch it swell and grow from nothingness to excess, from dreamy glimpse to solid afterthought, and although you have no idea what is going to happen next, another part of you knows exactly what’s coming as rhythms, words and thinking fall neatly into the arms of a tale so vast, so wide, so alive you immediately run to the window and stick your head out. 

Emptiness as Canvas (with Tania P)

Perhaps the world is a chaos of aches and pains wandering around without knees to inflict; smells that have never known noses; sours apart from their fruits; adjectives bereft of nouns – unattached, adrift, waiting to modify – while within this infinite ceiling of sky with all its stars we huddle within one of eternity’s countless furrows and live like microscopic mites, mostly ignored.

Maybe in the failure of others to notice us, whether omniscient angels we so wish exist or the ordinaries of incarnates, the desire to be seen burgeons the heart past its former borders so its light mingles and ripples along the celestial hem of the Aurora Borealis, no less luminary than the yoni of the candle’s flame in the bedroom defining itself against the diffuse and deepening blues of night.

New Growth

Perhaps while on the outside your daily life appears consistent and secure – a thick, branching angled stem held rigid and upright against the frosty sparkle of a new snow, another life is going on inside you. A longing that shines from the slanting rays of a cold sun invades your tidy routines as desire sprouts up in crevices of memory long since abandoned by your cultivated outlook.

Maybe as each encased, spiraling tuft of what lies dormant is invited to sprout, triggered by an undetectable clock, the twining stems of its foliage gives you a clue; and while cutting back the roots may temporarily weaken the impulse, it may also promote new shoots. 

Compositionally Driven

Perhaps it is because clouds are camels one minute, streaming hair the next, that we gather like sea birds come to rest upon the ocean’s churning waves while making our way to the pebbled shore. Water kept on the move is made to do things; when static is as wasted and provoking as a buried talent.

Maybe this natural flow of creative spontaneity restores buoyancy to our ancient conversation between the sea and the seashore.

Dedicated to the memory of Karl Fisher: Feb. 20, 1960 - Feb. 20, 2013.  

 http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10151344754133884.478960.18305738883&type=3

Perhaps, Maybe, Because (with JHG)

Perhaps pheromones are maybes, physical maybes. Perhaps maybe is a language, a requiem for all the dead languages we have spoken, all the blue notes we have ever proposed with no room for because, because because is a dolt with big feet who is not your friend and will only leave you hanging, sticking to what and how and when. But perhaps, maybe now there's your best friend at the open door of language.

And maybe if you were to write a sentence with the word sentence in it not once but twice or even three times, you might shape the items that sentence gathered in with a tender touch, tinker with the fit, tether each green garden, moonlit pool, lemon, lover, and starry night before dissolving them (along with all the radiance of an opal sky) in an unbreakable bond between hand and eye that sets the stage for the actor who becomes her role, as we sometimes say, if for no other reason than to savor the sweet taste of the line.

The Color of Lightning (a collaboration with Tania Pryputniewicz)

Perhaps lightning has a color all its own – like the bright flash at the bottom of a pan that prompts the eager prospector to cry out, “Eureka!” He has captured a bit of lightning, if only a speck, signaling that the rugged morning hike to this secluded spot has really been worth it after all.

And maybe, all the darkening trail home, like Poe and his trick of titling a treatise a prose poem, the prospector dedicates his find to the left, right symmetry of boot fall and fading tines of adrenaline along edges of spine, throat and heart, placing mindless sifting and coincident grace above any rational method of explanation for his luck.

http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/poe/eureka.html

From a Mage's Staff (guest bloggers Tess P and Tania Pryputniewicz)

Perhaps you were intentional when you dove into the cold blueness of the pool and submerged yourself dolphin-like, staying beneath for a brief eternity, your blood knocking in the private chambers until you rose out of the water primeval; and laid your body upon the sun stricken cement to leave behind a silhouette of water that you might rise from and look back upon, softly chanting -- so that none can hear you: leave it, leave that sliver of being behind you.

 

Maybe that sliver of being with its shadow longing and love rises later towards what it perceives as the distance the body must cross to find home. Fractionally hesitant yet responsive as the were-light from a mage's staff is to the magician's need for light, the body turns back for each silver sliver, soothed like a child by the promise of grasping again the string tied to the balloon rising to the ceiling. Someone taller and kinder inevitably returns to the room.

A Sound So Private (a collaboration with JHG)

Perhaps if you could find a place where satellites and airplanes could never spot you, and where a drop of water fell every few seconds tapping the surface of a pond, it would be quiet enough for you to hear a sound so private from within you emerging in tiny ripples radiating outward toward blue distances of sea and sky and grassy fields of wandering green tendrils grown from a seed so small a single thought contains them all.

Maybe memory is a lap in a rainy pool, a lapse, an orbit of wobbly jewels, et le bon mot, per chance de lysees, peut-etre, may actually be a dance of elegant lawn turkeys, that elusive bird that's a combination of: hey what's it to you, and here, I dare you, strutting along the edge of the open field. The closer you try to get, the further they remove into the thicket, into the bruise of thorn and hairy ruse. In fact they hate to fly at all, flying downward is preferred, but can, when necessary, by a series of hops from limb to limb, get way up high in the trees, where the fox cannot, and to be out on one can bird-word winter, tuck in.

 

Moving Water

Perhaps rain is an artist that transfigures all as it cuts through stone and loosens the fragrance of flowers. Enveloped in a shapeless air with our towns of fixed streets and houses, we wait for this transitory guest to arrive and dissolve whatever is caught, hardened or entangled as it swirls through the shade of our tenements and fills our inner wells with a fresh source of the elemental.

Or maybe rain is the elegant return of memory, the heart of the earth held open to receive the buoyancy of its dream-filled flowing forth; a liquid that does what words would love – seldom pushing or straining while keeping all unlikeliness to itself.

 

Night of the Knight (guest blogger Julian Magdalenski, age 12)

 

 

Perhaps darkness, creeping around the corner, gobbles everything that it sees. It jumps from building to person to person – to anything that it please. Little does life know that it is not spreading but running from the light. The soul of the sky.

 

Maybe the only thing that night wants is not to go into that light so bright, to fight the light and grow in height. Become a knight of the night.

The Performance (guest blogger Tess P)

Perhaps the performance was encouraged by the onlookers as they rose slightly in their chairs and showed their white and tender knuckles as they braced the arms of their theater seats; and the orchestra was drowned out by gasps as the aerialist seemed to be alone up there, without any support, only one of her legs crossing a red band of silk as she spun wildly about us.

Maybe we grew faint and transfixed as the woman dangled her life in front of us as if we were watching a house on fire and wondering if all of the sleepers were found, wondering if all of the closets were opened, if under the beds the floors were scanned by an eye for such detail because our very lives may depend upon it.

A Call for Maybe(s)

In the spirit of collaboration I invite you, readers of my blog, to contribute a maybe to the following post Tenderness Calls. Post it as a comment, or send it directly to my email lizbrennan@yahoo.com.

The more maybes the merrier, I always say. You may also feel inspired to add your own maybe to any previous post. In any case, I'd love to hear from you.

Tenderness Calls

Perhaps anywhere that tenderness gathers itself amidst the cut and thrust of life, held safe for a time within the curving vault and delicate cone of sea shell and bone, it calls us away from regions of life grown strange with despair. What infinitely precious thing do we seek along the shore?
Liz Brennan

Maybe the fog of the blue coast far off in memory is part of longing, and the ear is compelled to seek the sea in an orchestra of its own device within a shell, which keeps time at bay, like a wrinkle in the linen that lets in a liminal impression left by the child just lately having rested his head on a pillow. 
Tess P

Or maybe the blue fog lifting persistently out of the blue tips of the trees on the third set of hills above the ocean's cove cloaks, delights, the woman grown strange with longing--a longing that rakes the length of her body from child's heart to her heels lifting out of footprints already flooding behind her with saltwater and foam to the cadence of hide or reveal, hide or reveal.

Tania Pryputniewicz

Between Earth and Water (with Tess P)

Perhaps the landscape, heavy with yellow pears and wild roses, hangs down into the lake, mirrored in the still water where object and reflection are joined – halves of one real, unreal whole.

Maybe the floating world is on the path of yellow marigolds that lead into the house where the sugar skulls are on the table as sweet reminders of those who have loved you and who you will be when you are undone; and your love will be there on the lake when someone bends toward the water, in the flicker of the candle, among the flowers blown across the earth.

Ley Lines (with Tania P)

Perhaps ley lines, mapped in hindsight, presage the order of prayer, akin to intent prior to action or the path of ions aligning before lightning strikes. Nightly, how far above her dreaming body, after days of hours of calligraphy charting the path of the god of her time, pages of rows and rows of letters, steeped in infinitesimal kinship with each passage, did the abbess drift?

Maybe a thin film of dust has settled on what the abbess has shed and left: ruby earrings, embroidered skirt, a giltwood looking-glass that once held her face. Staring mutinously at the intricate pattern woven into the worn carpet, how often did she silently question her own abilities – a quest that served to flatten her face into a series of dramatic angles; exaggerate her heavy, lidded eyes and long aquiline nose into a seamlessly jagged silhouette that today we enjoy looking at – compelled as we are to reassemble her distant reality out of its shards.

Some Human Actions (with Tania P)

Perhaps some human actions trigger the animal brain, wiring the recipient to view most of a life’s peopled interactions as omens and intimations of potential danger, causing one to sift perpetually threat from love in a prolonged surging towards waking from reptilian slumber.

Maybe as you stand in the gleam of an autumn tree and watch the strangeness of the gentle world gone wrong tightening in prowling circles, a wind so worn from weathering quiets the tension in your limbs, cools the hot, thick flow of trepidation threatening to overcome your peace of mind, takes you by the hand and dries the tears that are the blue paint on the tip of your brush touching the white paper of the day and spreading out into a flower-shaped cloud, soon to rain snowflakes over the earth in a wintery hush.

Happiness (guest bloggers Kalli James and Sabina Fritz, age 12)

Perhaps happiness is a kitten, soft and sweet with big blue eyes, a wet black nose, and when you walk by it attacks your toes.

Maybe happiness is a burning in the dark. It draws us towards it, bright and alive like a friend in the cold, or a cricket chirping in the night. It sounds as through it is calling to the world.