The Last Question (with Tania P)

Perhaps while we can’t yet turn smoke and ash back into a tree, we can train impossibly shattered things to mend themselves: a crushed hope, a fractured trust – an anguish suspended in a dream.

Or maybe stepping foot on the train, we are meant to notice the girl to our right, her red hat, her brown eyes eclipsing the pall of methodical predictions of heat death—oh imminent end—in favor of her shoulder against yours, the driverless hours in which to ask her which of the poems in the book in her lap she loves best.

The Last Question by Issac Asimov

Sonnet: Against Entropy by John M. Ford

Hair (with Tess P)

Perhaps having lived more that half a life, when I lose my hair I should stand on the steps out back by the dogwood and sassafras, letting the silver strands slip through my fingers to be taken by a breeze; hair that once was glossed like a newly combed chestnut mare, now hair that I hate I even hate to lose but let the birds make nests of it, the hatchlings dry and kept by a few strands.

Maybe the neatly woven cup that cradles a clutch of small white eggs sprinkled with brown so near to where I stand, well apart from the urban pulse, lends me improbable comfort, a reason to pause, as I scan the landscape of tree and sky searching for a flash of wing, a cinnamon colored breast striped with rose, waiting for the evening's quiet to be gently filled with an elegant assembly of silvery notes.

Simply Poems, a reading (with breeze)

Metaphors (with Tania P)

Perhaps when my daughter orders me to stop using metaphors (You're not off the hook. Don't ride me. Give up the goat) she secretly likes it. I can't stop anyway, these birds of paradise tight green canoes holding decks of tufted cards in their rims fanning melon to cobalt to absurd summer popsicle pink. Or this set of chestnut black hinged halves of fallen palm trunk against the fence; wooden fins for a mahogany boy just now reaching for her hand before I can intercede.

And maybe while sitting deep and idle as a cat I feel at my fingertips a little eternity, smell in my breath clouds of steam rising from a warm cup - hear voices and listen so intently that my body, nothing more than a chiffon shawl tossed over the back of a chair, rises up to inhabit a face that emerges from the fragrant flesh of a sweet apple that has fallen into a pasture mirroring a still twilight sky brimming with a tightening circle of stars that solicit my seeing if only for the fact that the beauty of the evening is as wild as the roses are. 

All This is That (with Tess P)

Perhaps you are a taxi driver and in your hurry to find one final fare you ignore your instinct to slow down and instead accelerate. In your rush you accidentally hit a shadowy figure who, looking in the wrong direction, steps in your way. The man is carrying a mirror and at the moment you hit him you see reflected back to you a clear image of your mother’s face on the day she saw your father alive for the very last time.

Maybe long ago, somewhere in her past, the sleeping mother hadn't noticed the few strands that had strayed from her careful part, nor had she felt the blue, kaleidoscope of Xerces that had escaped her slumber to gently pull the lock to one side before returning to the dream, as easily as one enters a mirror, as simple as the moon accepting light from the sun. 

Lost and Found

Perhaps it is good to stand beneath a thing that means to take words away. You may be shocked to find out that there are such things. That’s because the closer you get to them, the further away they really are. 

Maybe once you get close enough to escape within a melancholy charm, you begin to feel comfortable, and hang there free against its sides. But then, just as your breath catches up, you suddenly feel uprooted. It is as if it was there, just a moment ago, but now it is gone. 

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