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.

Moon Blessing (guest blogger John O'Donohue)

Perhaps when you meet the one in whom your heart can really be at home, distance does not make you falter. Longing sweeps you upward. Arriving in magic, you are the moth and you are gone.

Maybe a circle of white wind plucks wild hyacinths for your hair, and no one hears you blossoming fresh with love’s scent. Only a young moon flowing like a silver well over sky mountains meets your gaze. 

Oblique Strategies (with Tess P)

Perhaps you shouldn’t be frightened to display a disciplined self-indulgence as you make an old idea valuable by placing it in an exquisite frame. Is it finished? What mistakes did you make last time? You are an engineer of bricks, discarded axioms, simple subtraction, and slow preparation. Breathe more deeply as you carry on.

Or maybe you are hesitant to complete the evidence, admitting that each piece is a rough simulacrum of a music you once heard when the buds of the white birches wore red as if paintbrush tips dipped in a river that bled, held above you in that certainty of blue that recalls the inside of someone's lips close to the gum; if you were to examine the tissue, you might consider unfinished things that require a cupping of one's hand, a modest but slightly lavish signature.

In Childhood (with Tess P)

Perhaps in childhood when nights you waited at the foot of your bed, watching the moths draw their circumference around the streetlight as the stars fell, you listened to the quiet pumping of crickets and cicadas and wondered at the dense darkness of the forest below; and you caught a whiff of disappointment and it came from God; you had thought his great arm had reached across the road that shines like a snake at night, bringing a small offering of light, some jewel from a crown, but when God opened his palm in the solitude of your room, you beheld nothing. It was then that you turned to the wall and out of its paper, the roses, the carriages; the long, billowing skirts like down-turned umbrellas; it was all life that took your breath away, night after night out of paper, and the horses again and again their curved legs and hooves were all pieces of that magnificent moving alphabet.

 

Maybe every childhood is braided with quiescence: moments when a grey-blue haze enfolds the hum of the house, muffles the dog’s bark. Lakes sleep without a ripple. Suddenly a harsh flutter of ragged black wings erupts as an awkward shape emerges from the delicacy of the silent lake. Your question is the gaze you turn toward it. Its answer has no need to push or prove itself.

Transmigration (with Tania P)

Perhaps life passes from one body to another to rise again and look out with refreshed eyes. So pods and fruit appear, only to be plucked by a child’s greedy hunger, or, shaken by a breeze, to reseed the earth for another season – populating farms, towns and cities where words once thrived with meadows of silent grasses and golden poppies.

 Maybe the poppies, so credibly orange and famished red, signal the child, urging her eat the fruit within reach, not necessarily the ripest, signposts of the planet’s collusion to fade memories of stars, wars, lovers and lakes traversed prior to this birth, city, this mother, the slats of past in place, gated, peripherally viewed like the black legs of Thoroughbreds sidling before the bell. 

Atlantis, a reading

Atlantis (with Tania P)

Perhaps the female body, at point of conception, rimmed with oracular palace green like a trio of Wyland dolphins, spirals to the ocean floor for one night in Atlantis. The father, if he wakes in time, finds his way by the rivulets of her beads of air.

Maybe at the moment of birth, the daughter emerges from the churning sea as if awakened from a trance, draped with green flowers of Poseidonia. Her venturing out from the unsearchable spot relaxes brittle sponges until they are soft and supple, filling them with the beauty of the outcome.

Three Stars (with Tania P)

Perhaps this longing, like the nude spring wind slipping through the window screen, shifting the redwood boughs to allow three stars their intermittent due, belongs to me, the maker, and the one I love, perfect in deformity of distraction and infinite reach. Stay, stars, in direct line of view. Stay, body, bridged in this remembrance, this forgetting.

Maybe, when peering into the depths of my own shadow, every beginning and ending disappears in the heavy silk tapestry of dream, where all overlapping is seen in an instant, like watching a circle close.  Tonight as I rest in the geometric curve of perfumed air crowning the starlight above my head, I hear your voice removing darkness like food for the birds – stitching a golden thread of flowering plum along an unfurling road.

A Lost Art ( a collaboration with Tess)

Perhaps when you are silently reading, your hair takes on the appearance of somebody sleeping. You move among the pages, turning over between two dreams. The mountains rise behind as you inhabit the stillness of the bay, and immerse yourself in the gentle sunlight gliding along the water’s surface. The story is worth your attention, yet nothing will come of it, no one will be saved.

Or maybe your stillness invites the anonymous sleeper who curls into the placid blue surface of your dream, to be that silent witness beside you in waves like the rippling heat rising as you turn to see the plunge and shadow of a pelican’s wing, just as it passes beneath the sun. And you are of two minds, one that will stay after the dream recedes to watch the water, the other that will travel through the mountain passes with men one can only dream of, their thick braids hidden under the wooly coats they wear, and their large empty hands like wooden begging bowls. In the distance, a soft clanging of bells.

A Fine Disinterest, a reading

A Fine Disinterest (with Tania P)

Perhaps as we age, we cultivate a fine disinterest in the attraction of objects until they no longer catch at us like brambles or hang on us like burrs – voices, bells, birdsong; health of body and peace of mind; the wild thumping of my heart at the brush of your fingertips – all flakes that dissolve into a fine grey mist at the slightest touch.

Maybe the body, thus transfixed, discarding the desire to name, to quantify, to recall – recalls its former bliss of first vibrations when one heartbeat set the pace for the one still forming its chambers, darkly delicate and writhing in quantifiable syllables of time meted by the breath of the host.

Beautiful Unity, a reading

Perhaps just after the rose is cut and set into a crystal vase it brings summer into any room – yet one by one as petals drop they disperse the beautiful unity that the rose once was. Fragrant, fragile wings that leave their cherished bloom – each a poem that unfolds with a wisdom waiting to be pressed between the pages of any book.

Maybe the finder, years later, a mother herself, re-reads the passages housing the near translucent petals, willing answers to questions she failed to fathom asking back then, standing rooted and vibrant in the rear view mirror of her mother’s passing, which passes back to her in the skin of this morning’s dream, outlines disintegrating but pulsed by a memory of burl trunked but steady love.

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