Clarity

Perhaps as we take our first steps into the brightness, the width of the water increases. How clear everything becomes here within the sound of the moving sea, as only this walking into it can reveal.

Maybe as we continue to wade out with no destination in mind the metallic, lucent green clear-like aquamarine slaps against our skin before bubbling to the shore in a lavender froth. We look into each other’s eyes and find the water there speaking to us via its flash and gleam. Just as we breathe without thinking.

Inauguration Day

Perhaps mind is the shadow of a cloudless sky passing over the choppy water of a wind-tossed sea. You have been thrown overboard. You may not even be aware of it. You have entered a liminal space, silent, bound by certain rituals and full of magic; tumbled into a landscape where only the blackbirds know your thoughts.

Maybe the bricks by which the structure of this threshold have been constructed were raised by sounds: each brick filled with feeling, filled with heart. You can only know this space by leaving that step upon which you are now standing. Suddenly all sounds come to you from everywhere, from all directions, falling on you from every side. You will feel a dizziness. Relax, and let everything enter. You have become more liquid; you have become more evanescent, praising as you go.

Remanence

Perhaps all roads not taken, all lives cast adrift still exist marooned in space and time. Each image of an image of a shadow’s shadow lurking at the edge of our eyes gets projected at every turn and passed on from one day to the next, from person to person, generation to generation – from time to desire and back to a memory that never goes away because it was part yearned for, part remembered, part imagined – a memory that can never go away because it never really was.

Maybe all unlived minutes, all conversations still on hold pulsate after we stop breathing in the way that underground water wells up and works its way to the surface by the pull of a dowser’s rod. But for now how impossible to reach them no matter how close we come: that childhood, bright summer sun shining up from puddles; that great unsolved love. They fade the way this landscape fades – a late forgotten pear hanging over golden meadow weed growing soft and dark.

White magic

Perhaps their eyes are red, tense. When you look into them you feel a sudden shivering: those thieves and hunters that visit you when morning is near. You are asleep but not totally asleep. You are not yet awake – and you may fall back into sleep again. You are just on the surface, just near awakening.   

Maybe as you feel yourself being drawn to them, you see their eyes are alive but their faces are dead, so you turn away, steering clear of their hypnotic beckoning. Instead as you begin to relax you can’t help but catch the outline of your own reflection in the dark window glass of your inner eyelids. And as garden insects stop singing in the evening when the rains begin, and as eyes are useless, after all, unless there is something to be seen, suddenly, simply, you begin to see yourself perfectly.

Overflowing

Perhaps we are able to share because we have reached a point of overflowing. This overflowing eventually becomes a flood. By our own overflowing, the entire universe is filled and sooner or later we touch all stars. At the point that the whole universe is bathed, in us the earth feels good.

Maybe from up above, the lit windows of our modest homes look like a fallen constellation. Night air moves in the spaces between trees as moths make dusty circles around illuminated squares of brightness that glow far away from any why, when or how. So often we do not seem to care one way or the other about the sweet smell of late summer berries, or take the time to follow a wandering drift of unidentified sound. Yet on days in which a strong wind presents a challenge to us, we so easily open our mouths.

Looking Inward

Perhaps eyes are the light of the face. Movement is their nature. Just like a river, they are so alive! They continue to move even when we are dreaming. The whole night they are dreaming along with us, but they can rarely remember what they saw. 

                      

Maybe eyes are the doors to our inner secrets, yet at any time, we can close them. But who has ever really looked at their body from the inside?  Beyond a blank sheet of darkness, a sensation of having totally gone blind – perhaps something greets us naked, toothless and hairless, heart newly opened, face turned upward, nose almost touching the pure anticipation of our open palms.

Mirage

Perhaps if there are no objects, then light cannot be seen. Look at the sky, it is blue, but it is not blue. Only when the wind has scrubbed every cloud from the sky will it be a bright morning; only then will our eyes, straining like fan blades against the ceiling, begin to flicker - their sharp edges poised to slice through the wonder of this new day’s delicate cocoon.

Maybe a child sees the rising sun as a saw blade, or as a yellow circle with teeth. Lao Tzu believed that that which can be said cannot be true. As a result, he remained silent for most of his life. I will always wonder if he ever visited hidden rooms of forsythia, with their inviting, open doors of yellow star-shaped flowers, or dark mountains gathering dust from the sands of ancient Egypt, swallowed whole by trees in the nearly invisible rain that smells as bitter as aspirin and sounds much like a lid closing over a tomb.   

Suspicious Magic

Perhaps most artists have rarely used more than a little of this suspicious magic. Yet it is the key to any work of art, for if in your mind’s eye you cover it, the composition goes flat. It is certainly most difficult to use, yet for those artists whose primary interest is in announcing a remarkable moment, a time when light stood still, it is a small price to pay for the expression they are searching for.

Maybe while no work of art can be expressed with out a hint of the mystery of it, it is only visible in its beauty in moments of high vitality. Alive and thrashing, in picture form it is almost but not quite completely pinned down. As the outside creeps into the inside, it is difficult to see where it begins and where the work of art ends. It often sneaks up on the viewer unawares, and floats in a space like a magic carpet, unsupported by anything banal.

https://www.abbothall.org.uk/exhibitions/winifred-nicholson-cumberland

Adventures in Fiction

Perhaps a man spends each moment worrying about the next. Living is like running in place, a motionless motion. Panic is a sound behind a wall inside him, as moving is the only way to keep down thoughts of what he sees as what he sees becomes one unpleasant skin growing over another, growing another ignominious version of himself.

Maybe, with such sudden seizures of tormented manhood flooding upon him, he rushes to gather himself up. And although storms of anxiety grip his heart, he fights with the feeling. He once believed in common sense, yet his eyes have a strange glare in them. Big, hot, blue eyes set far apart. He bellows in a foreign, airless language, trying to keep some sense of purpose, but the compass he conjures in his mind has only a single arrow pointing to a direction the rest of us don’t recognize. This results in, well.....you probably already know.

Notes on Abandon

Perhaps as the past has left me and moved on, so too have previous versions of my body left me. My naked body, the days sweet and long. My entrapped body, I look at you and try to start a conversation but it is difficult for you to say anything. My ‘in love’ body, when I hear sweet songs and think of you I want to see you so badly but you don’t call. My relatively certain body, the elements so mixed up.

Maybe even as nature might stand up and say It could not be otherwise you still don’t believe me, body, as I wander through the garden that brings us together as one, fertilize seeds simmered in sunshine and smiles that I will always remember.  The lettuce is good, although everything else is sort of dying. You thought you’d seen the last of me, but here I am, in air that is warm and grey. Am I so alone? Here we go again. And what if I don’t even like the new you, here waiting for me? 

Seasonal Shift

Perhaps leaves are the shifting thrill and shrill of the tree, the talkers, the noise. But when might we notice the first one falling? Who will catch it as it sidles down, not just a rogue leaf but a marker, the signal of the real turn of season which is happening now?

Maybe so it is with us, the photograph that we wish to see does not exist. It would show the point of turn, while containing the low voice that slips below the seeping of the songs on the tinny, too-quiet radio. It would reveal the dishevelment of the day, of edges, surfaces, nuances, habits while paying close attention to the lovely redundancy of this yearly rearrangement of design which spreads and pools like a poured liquid, at once broader and more saturated than it ever was before.

Related Words

Perhaps receiving a pin that signifies your acceptance as a new club member does not discount spilling thousands of gallons of crude oil into the ocean, in the same way that buying a coat that can be worn either side out encompasses all space and beyond. 

Maybe there will come a time when drawing the enemy’s attention away from a sneak attack will reflect changing the placement of two paragraphs to make your composition read more smoothly. And while refusing to get out of bed for a month is a steep price to pay for arguing about who got to the parking place first, forgiving your brother for borrowing your favorite music CD and losing it is energy moving out in all directions from the sun.

Birds at Dusk

Perhaps far beneath the earth lives the mysterious root of all things – not a shapeless clump but a beginning formed according to a pattern; glossy even when lodged under the weight of tumulus stone and soil.

Maybe any close examination of spot, stripe, notch, fleck, vein, color and scale brings us closer to what chases birds at dusk, flying against the wind in the high blue air; lingering fragments of fact disguised by often forgotten words that breathe life into the ever-changing face of things, the wildness–in-itself of all hills.

Everything Pours Forth

Perhaps when I wake I hear deer eating strawberries just outside the screen. Trees, soaked with the thick air of night, are heavy and hushed. As the light comes in sideways from the east over damp summer buds, I step into a room where I expect to find someone. How is it that we sometimes wake feeling nobody has ever loved us?

Maybe as I take my first step into words each day, I instantly fall into a hole with the sounds I make. Every longing that I have ever failed to see returns to me as a squinting of the eyes as I talk. In the end, everything pours forth – photographs, their history. Books, their ideas. Walls, their sounds. Fans, their flow of air. Beams of sunlight so thin I cannot see them. Some mistake in my heart, a dream of what is missing, that pushes me deep into reflection. As I grow closer to understanding, the more amazed I am at being here at all. 

Maybe a Dance

Perhaps as I walk among so many gentle plants and animals that populate this meandering country road, the sun is sinking low as the slow circling scents of twilight settle above me, below me, on all sides. The lights from home glow warmly in the distance. They define the destination. In the end, I arrive.

Maybe a dance in contrast, goes nowhere. While it may begin as the perpetual play of dewdrops along a slippery branch of plum before shifting to a confusion of flying birds, it ends on a remembering of so much passing away, of wings folding up. It is as if all the books on the wall were feathers in a giant feather bed as I move my hand across the page and the images rearrange themselves.

Naturalists' Trance

Perhaps contained within birdsong are clues to events surrounding us. Here is water. Here are berries, the cold morning-stilled flies. Here is a passing airplane, the sound of frogs, a gust of wind. All are reflected in the chorus of the birds we hear, released from the perimeter of the approaching day with the crispness of sunshine.

Maybe with backs to the rising sun we raise our hands, spreading fingers wide. Much as words are anchored to the shapes of our shadows, colorful tints of inner singing rise high along the bright wing of this early hour, dissolving broad streaks of purple into yellow and pink; the blue of each thin, sweet note emerging from the grass further refining the brilliance of our love for the sky.
 

http://www.meghanhowland.com/2011 

When Up is Down (guest post by E. Dōgen)

Perhaps when up looks up, up is down.

Maybe when down looks down, down is up.

Cloud Within a Cloud

Perhaps there will be a soft, murmuring voice in the sound of the just-after. Nothing you can put your finger on, or name, or run to tell your friends about. A cloud will appear at the axis of heaven and earth, a hovering veil carrying the possibility of rain and the promise of life. Portal, or dark auspice? Though the answer is not revealed, it is not hidden, much as the bird’s path is the forest when dewdrops wet the early morning moon.

Maybe as we enter the cloud the reason we don’t see, hear or know of it is that it is not anything remarkable. Yet it forms the circle of our way and is never cut off. It follows the stream within, passing through us as the tea and rice of our daily activity. We set out to follow it. Is this old age, or not?

The Bench Faces the Lake

Perhaps far out on the lake three small sailboats glide, tight white triangles of light no warm wind can loosen. Today the lake shimmers with the glossy blue backs of hungry swallows skimming the surface of the water. 

Maybe a line of geese walk single file across the picnic grounds. Reaching the edge of the lake they slide over rocks and slip in without a sound to join ducks and swans gathering by the dock. One handsome drake with colorful plumage makes way for a white goose with a rough bump on her beak. One brown female mallard is smaller than all the others.

Last of the Last (collaboration with Anna Kamieńska)

Perhaps as I look through my file of recently written poems, I read the last line of the last poem as if it were meant to be the last. How will it sound then? Will it reveal to me the meaning of all?

Maybe as we rush to the final point, the active gift of gathering impressions eventually disappears into nothing until only ashes of words remain. Poems pass through us like air, for this you don’t need more than a few words the cool breeze tells me. Arguments, disappointments, losses, suffering – this isn’t punishment, it’s almost a favor. Otherwise the poem would disappear and life fly away, requiring a more difficult clarity, a more imperfect order.