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.

Only in the night sometimes one seems to know the road (guest post by Rainer Marie Rilke)

Perhaps we always retrace by night the stretch we have won laboriously in the foreign sun?

Maybe. The sun is heavy, as with us deep in summer at home. But we took our leave in summer. The women’s dresses shone long out of the green. And we have been riding long. So it must be autumn. At least there, where sorrowful women know of us.

 from The Lay of the Love and Death of Cornet Christopher Rilke translated by M.D. Herter Norton

Atlas of Goodbyes #2 (guest post by Tania Pryputniewicz)

Perhaps I feel your absence more keenly beside you four months before we marry in February chill of river house, startled awake on a fold-out couch under shelves of Greek amphoras and Turkish grave rubbings chalked by your grandmother’s hands.

Or maybe it was just a dream, not sighting with weight of prophecy, those silhouettes of snakes tipping Trident inches above us, red brine frothing like scorched cider, Neptune’s conditional permission to love you. Don’t forget, he added, your lover is of the sea. One day I will bring him home to me. His words fell contextless in the days before black seams of episiotomies, sting of newborn gum-bones on breast. How dare you take him before we begin.

Atlas of Goodbyes #1

Perhaps I feel your absence today in a loosening lull in the rain after a clap of thunder shakes the upper windows of the house that once spoke to me alone when I leaned my elbows along the delicate edge of her windowsills.

Maybe as I recall the pivotal scene of our parting, a performance of memory I’ve become expert on, the permanent sting feels unnatural like a cat that can’t relax or a persistent tingle traveling across my scalp held in momentarily by the music’s easy beat, cold drink in hand, the comfort of small talk.

Waiting

Perhaps like a jewel in the hollow of my hand time’s silence shines in the moonlight of my dreams, well outside the daily hustle and thrum that cloaks the world’s divinity.

Maybe as we run on like hungry goats trampling and trespassing on land that is preserved, waiting is the calm within our agitation and patience the art that allows us to access a new point of tangency where each creative act is a muddled attempt to enter the stream.

Hands (inspired by Sandy Frank)

Perhaps the fingers of one’s hands are the artist’s fluttering pennants of promise – forever striving and restless like the beating wings of an imprisoned bird.

Maybe if hands could speak they would take on the voice of a wise old man. You must try to forget all you have learned, they would say. You must begin to dream. For we don’t yet know the happiness to be found in hands, in the same way we might savor the sight of daisies in a field, or the sound of snow falling at night. Outside my window, dogs bark for no reason. Inside my teacup, what comes warm is good warm.

http://sandyfrankfineart.com/Sculpture/Pages/HandWork.html

Looking Backward (with Tess P)

Perhaps looking backward for the truth and measure of one's life is useless because the shepherd quickens and disappears like the light that breaks the flight of starlings; or truth knocks like the woodpecker on the house; you leave the house to yell, Get off! Go away! and she's flown far beyond the trees. Last night, I tossed in sleep as if my limbs were branches heavy from a slow, tender rain that freezes in winter. In the heavy waking when "why am I not sleeping?" is the question, there, what I took for milk was mud, what I held as dirt was sweet and strange, a truth so twisted and spiraled, one need only climb into the clouds and it's quick to take your hand.

Maybe tonight with a new, warm mossy sleep nestled deep into the curve of my back, I immerse myself into clouded thoughts of the places I feel the tiredest. Eyes closed, I wander straight into the weight of a continuous rain that does not ripple my rising surface but swells into a stretching lake that mimics my reaching arms – sediment filling me to waking as my face, like a satellite moon, reflects the promise of the night’s swampy sowing.

Digital Dark Age

Perhaps the angel of history has his face turned toward the past. He would like to stay there long enough to preserve each artifact, but a new storm blowing in gets caught in his wings with such intensity that he can no longer close them.

Maybe this storm propels him into a future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. Knowing that the once-living wood is what allows the leaves and roots of the tree to reach so high and draw so deep, like Scheherazade, he must adopt a creative strategy for saving the kingdom. 

Evolution (with Tania P)

Perhaps the bicycle, perched in evolution between horse and car, allows a girl the modest means to ride just far enough away from home to leave home, to revel in the panicked flit of geckos into underbrush and the daisies expiring in patterned versions of their former selves, petals curling groundward on the very stalks that pushed them sunwards.

Maybe the bicycle wheels, larger than dinnerplates, spin off wordlessly into the air as they continue to evolve, growing in diameter the further from earth they fly, ultimately encircling distant planets with delicate, orbiting rings – just as we are encircled without beginning or end, without sides or corners, with all points equidistant from the center, by that which grows old gracefully – a bouquet of fiery petals risen from the mud which once sheltered striped lizards peering out from a crack in the wall, right angles framing the curve of their tails.

The Unasked Question, a reading

Hummingbird's Complaint, a reading

In celebration of dear friend and poetic collaborator Tania Pryputniewicz’s new book release November Butterfly, we were reunited this week in Sonoma County where we snuck in a few minutes to record some of our collaborative work at Perhaps, Maybe. Congratulations, Tania!

If you haven’t yet read Tania’s book, available here at Saddle Road Press, or at Amazon, it is an exquisite collection of carefully observed accounts of the everyday that blend and weave with excursions into the lives of iconic female archetypes. In each poem, Tania finds a magical, mystical beauty in the commonplace; gratitude and healing in the sometimes sorrowful upwelling of the mystery we call life. Tania is a writer whose senses, heart, generosity and intellect open in every direction. It is a privilege to know her and to continue to collaborate with her.

Everything As It Was

Perhaps as leaves of cherished memory pass into thin black air never to return to the trees that created them, their faint leavings linger on in bright, abundant fields of spring wildflower and inspire small movements in the hush-hush snowy realms of frozen winter grasses.

Maybe all that has past is not a diminishing road but rather an open ocean, and as our dreams reassemble, blinking like ships lost at sea, they each carry a forgotten treasure from shore to shore, from generation to generation – dear and inescapable, greeting us in the cool breeze of the open window each evening.

Trauma

Perhaps trauma has no discrete edges. It bleeds from wounds and words and across boundaries, flying outward from the center before shattering, vase-like, in an extravagant effort to be seen: a container for wishes we attempt to piece together in the dark before a certain amount is suddenly too much.

Maybe when sadness becomes a seizure, stripped of any protective cloak or force, our hearts demand an experienced escort in response. It is here we keep our vigil, alert for some piece of magic. Catch something far away and draw it close.

The Thin Places

Perhaps between dawn and dusk, matter melds from one form to another. Communication can be very subtle, so be ready to receive whatever comes: differences in skin, muscle, bone, bark, leaves, and wood.

Maybe like a flash of lightning that is a past event before it is even seen, you cannot compare this present experience with a past experience, you can only compare it with a memory of the past, which is part of the present experience. The clockmaker’s influence is everywhere.  

PB & J

Perhaps home-made sandwiches are much more than nourishment, they are messages from home, love letters in clear plastic bags that say: You are not alone. Here is something a little special to brighten your day.

But maybe the knives that spread the love cut both ways. As harried moms and devoted dads rush to fill domestic orders, sometimes the fruits of their labors turn them inside out in a crazy-quilt of conflict and difficulty. Yet it’s the sort of thing one easily forgets when, at the end of the day, small clouds that obscure the lustrous moon loosen and glide smoothly and evenly away.

One is No More, One is Not Yet

Perhaps alone here on the trail, the early morning sun is weak. Single strands of spider silk drift across trees. In a narrow passage the way is draped with silken threads and I feel them land gently across my face. Sorrow, outlined in silver light.

Maybe as I move carefully toward the clearing I stop to study you, uprooted tree – a tree reaching for sky, a sudden wind, your roots torn, the thud. I remember your face, and I feel I know you, but that you do not know me: a mere intruder spirited through the dawn from a dark realm of restless seeking. Looking for life, I find it here in your upturned root wad, now a perch for swallows.

Childhood #3

Perhaps a steady, rhythmic ticking first informed me of my whereabouts. I can still hear my father winding the chime whose weights had slipped down as far as they were allowed to drop as wooden hands with fine fingertips pointed to worn numbers on the face of the future circling around us.                

Maybe in the middle of a difficult night the hourly bell dispelled my fears like a smooth, tinctured breeze of unsaid things traveling easily throughout the house. How I miss being able to tell this type of time by sound. Today it’s like seeing red, the lit lines on my digital.

Eternity

Perhaps late in a day swept away by the memory of summer meadows in bloom, a leaf as large as two hands held together gently taps my name against the pink and orange glass of the kitchen window.

Maybe as I breathe in the sweet scent of buttered plum and ripe peach backyard lit by golden slivers of fading sun neatly penciled across the table, living itself becomes a fragile surface to be touched and be touched by: each perception a skin. And though my mind cannot easily carry away all the hours my life has to give, I still act as though I expect it all to come back tomorrow.

The Call (after Remedios Varo)

Perhaps when summoned the true heroine ventures forward on a solitary journey away from the pale of society to a zone unknown – toward dark birds that will attend her from the hollows of nearby trees. Not the world in reverse, but the reverse of the world.

Maybe as light from the star to which she is attached suffuses her body with an otherworldly glow, the painter remembers. She does not paint time, but the moments when time is resting. Only the canvas is real.

in memory of Barbara Nell Hunt (1953-2013) - friend, poet, writer, wise woman, thinker, activist whose sharp wit, sense of humor and kind words probed the possibilities of a woman's creative power.  
http://www.legacy.com/EnhancedObit/EnhancedObit.aspx?PersonID=167077699

Attempting the Impossible 2 (collaboration with Tania P)

Perhaps the cord that tethers ability to success is both loose and elastic. As you bring your hands together, fingers pointing toward heaven, face scrunched in abject concentration, clear visions of inevitability are often no more than eyes behind binoculars, or legs speeding the distance of a stationary bicycle.

Maybe heaven's frame is the body, heart exacting rent from the mind in a velvet purse that secrets a hole and thus never quite fills with coins. Sidling sideways like Chagall's bride drifting through Chagall's blues, the seamstress sleeps in a rocking chair on the front porch, dreaming of empty canvasses.