The Guest, a reading (with hawk)

Goodbye, the light

The sunshine of poetry casts shadows 
                             - Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Perhaps it is quiet in the pine woods. All the trees are misted with the day’s last light. A small, dark bug turns on the lip of a green leaf where tiny white flowers are growing out of a damp log.

Maybe as you stop at a rock by the water to watch the sun set, the evening breeze carries an aromatic elixir of pine needle, waterfall, and mossy trunk. The horizon holds open the landscape to an enveloping cloud of darkness, the precise shape and contour of the granite boulder that you are sitting on. 

Vanishing Point (with Tess P)

Perhaps you are a bird pulling out your tail feathers, passing each day making light, opening spaces; cleaning closets, painting the air, the walls the color of the center of the sun –white, white –as if you could chase suffering from your planet; and there, at the vanishing point, you see them, holier than anything these elephants in the summer haze.

Maybe in reverse perspective, your line of vision diverges against the horizon. Such a wide vista provides the elephants the necessary space to recede from your sight. Only then, as white fades to black, are you able to stand far enough outside yourself to notice a pair of singing birds with moons in their feathers perched at the edge of a leafy branch or, as seen under a microscope, nesting deep within the bright room of your heart.

Translation, a reading (with sunbeams)

Chalk (with Tess P)

Perhaps as you were falling asleep, the image arose in your mind of white path meeting white path. Upon the paths was a webworth of deer tracks that ran to the shores of the land gleaming gold with the day’s last light.

Maybe like a fish you suddenly shatter the water, leaping toward the dazzling golden light. Then return, meeting your shadow, sealing the wetness of your world as if a black table cloth were thrown across the lake; and as you drift in the dark, you can still see flecks of light and small creatures with wings that dart at the water's edge.

Translation (with Tania P)

Perhaps translation can be likened to traversing the Grand Canyon by mule-back instead of on foot, gauging how far the gut of the hooved can permissibly swing over trail's edge and back while keeping its rider.

And maybe translation is a way to think in a way we never dreamed we could think as we travel to a place not easily reached in a climate which forces solitude even on its atmosphere. Upon reaching our destination we find ourselves engulfed in a landscape rich and various because its messages can be received; personal prayers that invite us to travel further across a ravine through the city that surrounds us and down to a tiny town in the palm of our hand that our children call home.

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.

The Guest (with Tania P)

Perhaps the body in sleep unburdens its flock of questions, like so many winged sirens, into the sky of dream. As varied as the spectrum of birds from sparrow to phoenix and the unsplit spheres of velvet wrapped geodes, the potentials respond: suitors, thieves, inquisitors, friends. Choose a kettle. Fill it with water. Over the communion of tea, pray for the words to settle your debt.

Or maybe the body in sleep is a wind that knows everything we've never realized, yet any explanation is a confusion of words, for no matter how hard we try to recall what was floating to the surface while the dream was a tight knot inside of us – sentences lose their shape upon our awakening.

Forever New (with Tania Pryputniewicz)

Perhaps nothing is worth as much as what may replace it, when any given thing is only the first in a series of increasingly better things.  Tonight’s sunset changes as I watch – fiery oranges fade to soft pinks and purples; finally to black, with the first glittering hints of starlight shining through.

Or maybe what comes before haunts the now: great grandma’s in the nursing home tracing her great grandson’s palm with her good hand. You’ll have a long life, someday a wife. He’s nine, laughs, pulls his arm away. At visit’s end, she grips her chair to rise on legs she’s forgotten can no longer bear her weight, says she’d like to learn French, asks for sweet peas for her bedside vase. 

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