Lady death come to get me on her gray horse I can feel how thin it is now between here and that other side I ask my mother are you there will you take me and it's almost like my life is like the blanket covering me now, I can throw it off and go when I am ready it's a short time anyway and a few will miss me I am sorry for that but my ashes will sit on the dining room table which everyone will always mean to take to some farm and never really will it doesn't matter I will already be on that farm and every farm and on all the green hills and in meadows blowing with wildflowers for as long as everything 

curious

My aunt who died told me
Don't try to answer the question.
Wonder about
the answer to the question
but don't let yourself suffer with
the need to have it answered.

I know that she is right.
Not having the answer but
wondering about it
is analogous to
being alive and being
curious about death.

worsh

I think about you all alone in your trailer and the dark curved hills sleeping like a beast all around you. But you don't know about them.  You are inside your trailer watching TV until 9:00 when you go to bed so that you can get up early in the morning and wait tables. You haven't washed your own dishes in three months or so.  You just use paper. And the silverware can just sit there in some sudsy water you ran a while ago.  Maybe you'll wash a fork if you need one. But you say it worsh, not wash. I forget why someone in my family says worsh. But you aren't thinking about that.  You think you are thinking about (which thoughts the television quiets,) your mother who died ten years ago, and your sister who died some years before that while you worked so hard waiting tables.  And you think you are thinking about your own baby niece, whom you only held once, buried with them.
But I don't think it's that, really, that you are thinking about, but something that died inside of you a long time ago.  You might be able to remember when you go outside, turning off the television, to look at the sky.

something else

On time when we were kids we were driving across the dessert and came upon a wagon train, thirty or more pairs of horses and conestogas stretching into the distances.  When we drove up to them, parked, and inquired we learned that we had not in fact gone back in time, but instead were encountering a group of faithful Mormons re-enacting their past.  They took of their stetsons and invited us to join them with evangelical enthusiasm.

And for some reason this memory in particular makes me worry that everything I've ever experienced was in some way a re-enactment of something else.

espiritu de mi alma

The relief is like a wind going out of me and lifting up into the wide deep heaven.

Yesterday the expanse of water in front of me from the train window felt like that, wide and unencumbered, having in it's moods and immensity some similarity to the spirit.

And my soul seems sweet to me, and stands up straight like a flame in no wind, and lays down and rests in clean white sheets.

train poems

Red orchard branches,
red, for winter
A long tired
afternoon light
White barn
glowing pink
in the sunset
----
Inside the cold winter earth
the moist clay roots are
moving imperceptibly;
To me something like
birth and also death.
----
Crossing the desert again
I am surprised I have forgotten
how people live in America:
       Heaters, coolers, cars
       Shopping centers-
       Lowes and Target
This day our daily bread.
----
That long green murmur
that creeps over the land
after the first winter rain
is somehow my own spirit
leaping up there.
      I am astonished by
      this quickening.

I feel so ephemeral as if the slightest disruption will cause me to vanish altogether.  I do not think that I am so very fragile, yet there is something in me that is so unlike this world that it struggles to exist here.  Or perhaps it doesn't struggle to be here at all, and that is the difficultly.  Perhaps it is more a matter of will, that I am unwilling to eat the food here, and so commit myself to the shadowlands.   Perhaps I am not made out of clay like the rest, if I were, I think I would live on the earth more readily, and less in the air.

this epitaph I wrote years ago

Lest some resurrection call me,
And trouble my longed for rest,
Weigh me down to the earth
With a stone upon my breast.

Let the rose roots tangle
And hold me by the hair
And the cool rain will sooth me
As I lay sleeping there.

remember me

Perhaps we are sewn like a thread through life, disappearing to appear again, coming from the back side of everything's fabric. I don't know, but if we are thus stitched along through time, it hardly signifies that we are embroidered here together. I feel more as if you coming and going through this world before me was only meant for a catalyst, a brief womb, igniting me and throwing me away from you into the great expanse, mercifully, kindly, telling me to live, as one might throw a weak thing away from death.

Because otherwise, I might forget that I am coming alive and not folding away.  I might fail to bloom in the spring of the year.  I might instead fold my hands with yours, and make my last bed with you.  I might so easily, clinging to your spirit, forget that we are not one, that I cannot be you.  I cannot go with you through that needle stitch to the back side of things.

You touch me and must go away from me.  Maybe there are some sixty years before me without you, and maybe there will be centuries, eons, since we touched for a moment before rushing away to different harbors.  Do you even now remember me?

numinous

I kept expecting you to step out of the heavy grey dusk
of a city in which I have only seen you once
under a gold crescent dish in which
the ghost moon rested like a silent bubble
which is surely your moon even in a town where you belong
as little as Florence or Sienna, places I expected
to meet the Seraphim of the paintings,
and maybe did, and maybe didn't.

quince

This afternoon we came upon
      a great thicket of flowering quince
bare body of tender pink stretched out
      in thorns and the late light.

I tried to make the children understand the
rare brevity of this winter apparition
but time means little to them and they
took the flowers lightly.

To Jor

We speak so nostalgically of
   the fire, the dishes, the kettle
   the snapdragons we planted by
   our old front door:
I begin to think that
   even sitting here together
   we miss each other.

the deep

Sometimes a door opens up into another person, and standing at the threshold one feels immensity, fear, awe.  After time the door closes and I wonder why, why didn't I go through?  But perhaps in that precipice feeling, that almost, but not quite, that terrifying edge at the brink of infinity, one experiences the sublime.  Perhaps it is felt only on the near side of the door.

unfinished fresno beat poem

"We were all in love with each other then," he said, and I know we were,
something about the hot wind blowing through the night time streets,
and the way we all together watched the slow turning of the nothing town.

The old people and the bums alike were our beauties
and we laughed about them as if their daily remarks
were the humor of a lifetime 

until we dropped off one by one, Josiah, overwrought by
the attempt to find the universal music and it's synesthesiac  relationships,
fell of naked into a great graveyard of weed chased by assylum keepers,

and elisheva, unable to bear the strain of small town gossip, and
the presence of the lunatic who lived behind us, walking only on his knees,
in rain waders all year, with a duck taped door, and a camera for police -
moved off to a place where all are alike lunatics, dispassionate, impersonal.

Paul, I know, sits there still after brief stirs to become a plumber, a brewer,
a truck driver across all the wild western states, which are eastern to us,
living at the edge as we do - he returns from all this to drink coffee and smoke,
just as we left him.

We left all for various reasons, we have gone to become hipsters,
angel headed, and unremarkable, working day jobs in bagel shops,
preschools and yarn stores, running women's info shops for all I know,
parts of some great cog, moving everything towards nothing.

Oh, I know we are reading Hegel, Jung, becoming
Zoroastrians, and Swedenborgians, but somehow still

return from Newport

This town smells like dead grass and dry earth,
mediocre devastation of dirty dishes and stale air
and the sweet feeling of surrendering away from all that
to just sit on the steps with torn clothing and ashes 
falling away from your mouth while the roses bloom
and the houses around invisibly slouch into the earth.

Because all this is real, and that posh beach town
just an illusion like Disneyland of a different kind of life
which we don't live, and no one ever does,
but only pretends to.

And Jesus never walked there.
But here he bums twenty-five cents by the gas station,
and sits by the mulberry tree
with the post-punk philosophers
in the dust.

Well once I heard he went there 
with a whip in his hand and cleaned out
the barnacles on the rocks
which catch you for sure before you get too far out
and after that he walked there on the white sea and
felt immensity.

love

is a word like feathers
dropped very lightly
but birthing illegitimate children,
wide eyed creatures who wake
naked in the morning to wonder
why they are so pale, so bare
lacking the faintest hint of goose-down,
mush less the plumage that
would seem to follow a soaring word like love.

Singing

in front of you
involves for me
all of the hesitations of making love which
flood through my near adolescent mind, shifting
with tremors of uncertainty if
you so much as touch my finger.

Singing is like nakedness, perhaps
the unlooked for nakedness of a dream,
where clothing gone, I go to dress, to speak
and step instead into a room of people, naked,
singing.

For me to begin to sing is to embrace someone, slipping
the note too high or low,
and the odd look that cuts
across my long-limbed love as
I bump shoulders or misplace a hand,
notes falling down and pulling back quickly.

And to hear others sing, voices like
a firm handshake or a careless kiss,
I feel rising the jealous loneliness as
others go off together into music.

a distribution of weight

Hovering lightly above the earth
like the spirit over the waters
not calling this or that place mine
but living in all and none:

As regards you too,
I am suspended,
touching you only lightly,
not thinking of your love as mine
but knowing it a subtle pull
exerted on the round earth,
I rest here on you
very lightly.

a thinking poem inspired by Rumi

With my bare head and loose feet I leave the house

and go out flinging into sun motes,
laughing, seeing at once that I have been
trying all day to give you things
from my empty hands.
I put my hands in my pockets.

I gave you the world, stars, and some
pale lacy thing I called a soul,
-in words, I mean -
and all along my hands held just wrinkles
and crumbs from breakfast.

But you!
You are no better.
You are a beggar like me,
always asking the universe for everything.
You who say you have so much to give
are another silly fool
with allot of words
and a terrible need for breakfast.

Oh, I know you are something, alright.
I see you shimmering there on the edges,
but I shall not pick you up
and try to put you in my pockets.
Neither will I try to give you things
I only dream of having.
See? I turn my pockets out.

visitation II

A weird girl came to me in my sleep and laid her hand on my forehead. She sat all silvery on the foot of my bed in the moonlight for a long time, and then she went out again into the night and felt the wind blowing around her neck and ears and she touched the bark of the trees with her fingertips.

visitation I

The Angel of the Lord came to me as a pale gold cat. This cat arched it's back against the brick wall and ran along beside me and entreated with me to love it. I could see the thickness of it's fur and hear it's rumbling purr, but I kept my hands deep in my pockets. My heart was sad and ashen and I had no love inside me to offer even a pale gold cat. So after following beside me for several blocks, the Angel of the Lord departed from me.

without

Separate from all of you
I've fallen out of the world again.
Your sharp word and unseeing look have
cut the cord which holds me to this time and place and
outside of that safe womb I am
a tired soul that
has watched centuries pass by
and kept nothing.

years

I remain in your good grace
Because of the years that lay between us
Years which like a monarch bestow divine irrelevance:

I assume no form in the world you live in,
I exert no force on the objects there,
Relationless I remain without name,
And yet I am there, a thing from without,
Unclothed, unnamed, yet present.

I rest lightly on your hands and feet.

ephemerality

I say things poorly. Words are all sticky or sharp for me. There's hardly any graceful sort where the words take the shape of what I think about. And there are just these days, and I'm afraid I'll never explain quite right.

There was a little place that was blue and green on an otherwise white and tan canvas, and it was like looking through a little tear to a different place. Seeing you is like that, a small space of the otherwise unknown.

I did feel like crying when you sang of the sheets on the line and how in the evening you could smell the dry leaves, and how time stood still. I won't hear that song again, probably. I'll know as much as I did then, not more.

Tomorrow maybe, I will go out and stand by the canal. I will remember the things you said and I will think about them. I will look at the light on the water, and the leaves. Then I will walk home.

For Marc

My dream was a woman who flew
by holding a piece of grey silk.
She flew with her being a mist,
seeing through my eyes the recurrent landscape
of pines wrapped in fog extending forever.

They charred her in the air somehow
and she fell like black ash
into the streets of a city where they called her impure
and held her down with their bodies.

Hooks

Slipping out of consciousness I feel the wood of the bow,
The string, the notch of the arrows within my hand.

For Plato the soul has evidently two parts because of the archer
Who both stretches forward and pulls back to send his arrow.

Now I dream the archer and know that
In this fierce pulling back against myself
My soul flies forward.

*****

I have no sense of dignity.
I am the dust to your feet.
Or rather I am the cool water washing your feet in the evening when you return home.
Or if not water, I am the cup that holds the water, poured out, emptied over your feet.

Now I am empty, I am nothing.
I have no sense of dignity.

*****

I've fallen down again
below that fabric on which everything is happening.
Somehow in the middle of it all
I fell out
And tumbled down into this inky stuff below the bottom of the stairs.

I don't think that with your hooks
Your best shiny hooks
Or with your careful nets
You could ever pull me up and make me one of you again.

I am sitting down here
Singing your songs
But something else must happen

*****

I suspect I should give up the sea entirely
Boats, the sails, the rudder, the occasional oar,
All these with everything for catching fish
The line, the hooks, the nets, the pails,
The small sundry things kept in salt worn boxes
- Even the poetics of the sea, the colors,
The taste, the wind, the moods, the desiring waves -
I suspect I should give up everything pertaining to the sea
And go inland.

love's end

I try to change the endings sometimes
defiantly, with might-have-beens.
Aside, though, I whisper to the playwright,
as he holds his pen in hand, and say
what makes an end?
For this is all continuous
excepting death, and even death
is what you say to yourself concerning death,
and your own heart rests or goes dark
with the weight of the conversation
you have with yourself in the graveyard.
So show me your ending
and I will show you the one who
looked down as he stood there
and reasoned for silence in his heart.
I walk in the cemetery now,
and to me it seems that the silences
are pauses
the conductor holds his hands still
and lets the music
fit into the people
before beginning the symphony again.

gloom

It's morning, so it doesn't bother me as much now. But I am certain - as certain as you can be when the question is a ghost or a haunting, or some other spiritual disturbance that doesn't have a place in the ordinary tug-a-war of internal life - I am certain that what was said last night is inadequate.

I tried to parse it out in my notebook. It is not a question which bothers me. There were once words which begged to be answered, once it all rested perilously on the tip of the scales -before falling over to the other side. But the falling was utter, impressive, and certainly conclusive, and no questions remained. I would not say that all was brought to light, but I would said that everything was dragged, with certainty, into the dark.

Nor is it something I want or don't want. Once I was burning with desires - all colors of desires. "To Carthage, that city of unholy loves, I came." For me, the pears were ripe and sweet. I ate them for a long time, and went on wanting them after the summer was out and there was no fruit anywhere, but now- now I cannot bear the dry ashy pulp, now I would certainly throw them away.

At times I judge myself differently, I think perhaps it could be love which remains with me, and troubles me. I know that love remains: love is the shape of gentleness that is still there when the fires have burned out. But I do not think that love is what disturbs me.

Perhaps it's the ache of forgotten scars, that brings this sense of disturbence, perhaps it's a flinch, a dull echo of pain. But it doesn't come like pain, doesn't feel like pain, it's just like a sense of things, a heightened awareness, a gloom. It's like deep thought, that I can't quiet decipher it the terms of the more-forward thought, and I don't know if I read things that are underneath or if I'm like a broken compass, that once told mysterys and now veers crazily each direction.

I have accounted for annihilation.

assemblage

New breaking morning, my feet walk on eggs shells, broken plates and dishes, bits of crystals that fell from the sky with the rain, and below that snow. These all crunch softly, shards cracking, breaking as I walk on the white that covers the world. It is pure, virginal, like just-born, or new-dawned, or never touched or thought of before. And yet it is here. And broken.

The sun goes higher and I, thick black blindfolded, miss the heat of the day, hear only the whir of chariots, flaming horses' feet in the sky, the clang of metal as it strikes off the sun and the sparks fly. I only smell the singed scent of human hair, and feel the cracks in the dessert pulling apart under my bare feet. Everything, I know, rests on the crustacious cicada, rests on the steady floating pitch of the cicada, is deafened and sustained and surrounded and upheld by the proclaiming red-eyed cicada.

Then the paling. The paling, and substance turns to vapour and my relief is like a wind going out of me as my eyes behold the fluidity of the elements. It all lifts away, the plastic limbs of toys, the broken clockworks with unsprung mechanisms, the specimins of animals, claws and beaks inside glass cases all lift away and show like dim bird wings against the dusking sky. A wind moves in the eucalyptus. The eucalyptus streatches, grows a little, then settles down again and waits, waits for the sky to thin and open the space and the stars.

If the truth is a coin

it should be paid out to love
yet she is a lady who keeps
her house well, even in poverty.
Where there is no knowledge
she keeps silence
and lives still.

Red Haired Witch of Oscar Wilde’s The Fisherman and His Soul

(With love to Elisheva for a story on a summer night, a mosquito candle in a jar, and falling asleep on the grass.)

I, witch wound with copper hair
and snake eye sea green comb
I, witch wombed in brackish caves
where round ankles world wrapped
I lack one thing to my axle feet:

He, loving the spindrift mergirl
asks mirk witchery of me
He, heaved to his lovelorn mergirl
would shed all his soul by me
He, seeing only the mergirl
looks only for her from me.

Strands to the net that you caught her in,
Strands to the witching net you seek,
Strands, dark strands, I spread out for thee.

under the earth

After my husbands death I continued to live in our house. I grew up in it, and we lived there still after our marriage and I saw no need to move away from the place that had been my home for so long. There would have been little comfort for me in going with company to the seaside, though my friends asked and told me that I was still young and a marriage of two years shouldn’t be my whole life. In a way I agreed with them, knowing I had a weight to lay down, and yet something drew me to stay in this place. Perhaps it was an intuition to wait in the place where you lost something. Somehow I felt that the weight of grief and love was not mine alone but was also shared by this place in which he lived. Sometimes I felt myself imploring with the blue square of sky that was always mine and with the pigeons on the line to carry away my love because they could love better and my love was a weary love for something gone. As my feet sank down in the dew in the early morning and as my hands moved the dirt in the garden I spoke with the ground and pleaded that it take away my grief.

His death was an accident in Europe and so I didn’t see his burial. I think this is why I felt a particular need towards the earth, because whatever it is that goes out of the hearts of those who loved as they stand at the grave, whatever it is that they put away as they put the body in the ground, had not gone out of me and was the heaviness that made me live alone like an old woman at twenty four. Perhaps this is why I stayed on my own property thinking that the land which knew me might be generous in giving what I asked of it.

I spent my days almost entirely in the garden, I felt a comfort in turning over the earth and growing the food I live on. I grew mostly vegetables, flowers confuse me. They grow and die and give no reason, except a loud blare of color. The ones I grew, I grew only because they were his.

When he died a few things were sent to me, a rosary he sometimes carried with him, and a bundle of letters – mine – written in my own hand. I felt a bitter loneliness in this. They did not send his wedding ring, his watch or glasses. They didn’t send any part of his clothes or the contents of his suitcase, not even any of the books he had been reading, or his notebooks. I would have read those and felt close to him and the days before he died. They only sent my own words back to me, mostly letters I wrote to him while he was in Europe, and a few from the early days of our love-writing. I couldn’t throw them out. They bothered me: I loved them, but they hurt me. They spoke to me more of me than of him, they spoke to me of myself completely wrapped up in him, of myself when I moved between myself and him and noticed no difference. I left them on the table where I first unwrapped them and I felt their presence in the room as I came through it. The announced to me so loudly the thoughts I tried so hard not to think, that I can now only find him through myself, that all I have left of him are the things I wrote of him inside my head. I almost hated them, but I couldn’t remove them, and I spent more time in the garden.

As the reality of his death settled into me, my thoughts traveled over and over our years together, each moment looking different to me as I lived through it again in my head. Then there came a different period of thought, when I didn’t think as much about him, and my thoughts found themselves abruptly in different places, in my childhood, in books I had read, in memories of school friends, in days and places which I had never thought of again after they passed.

An incident in the garden one day took me to a memory of my very early years, which I had all but forgotten about. I was looking in a squash plant for yellow buds, and as I stepped back I felt something flutter against my ankle. Turning, I saw that my foot had crushed a large butterfly. I looked closer and was caught by how startlingly delicate it was, perhaps more so because it’s body was broken and indistinguishable, and a wing was partly impressed into the soil.

I was suddenly in a memory of being five, in a white dress on the porch in the morning. A night moth was moving in spasms against the house, and I tried to help it fly away, but instead it flew again and again into the wall, then went still. I held it in my hands, and understood. I went inside and found a glycerin soap box, filled it with bits of silk from my mothers scraps, and laid the moth inside with one piece of orange silk pulled over it. I shut the lid, then dug a hole under the four-o’-clocks and covered the box again. I put a pebble to mark the place. I felt so strange about it, I felt stiff, and very aware of my arms and legs inside my dress.

The memory of this childhood day affected me, and I went into the house to look for a box or paper or fabric of some kind. My eyes fell on the letters. Yes. I took the top one and wrapped the butterfly in the tissue of the letter then put it in the envelope again and sealed it. My hands trembled. I realized then that I intensely wanted to put the letter in the ground, to bury it, to have it away from me. There were still four-o’-clocks by the wall.

That was the beginning. Afterwards there were moths, more butterflys, june bugs and beetles, a few small birds and a mouse. I buried any small soulless creature and asked them to take my dead with them. On the last letter the moth’s wings fluttered. I waited till it was still, closed it in the paper, and let it sleep under my garden.

loved on sunday

for what

Many of the dead in the deep of the ocean died of a particular love and a particular heartbreak. Perhaps you’ve felt it blow into you as you’ve stood on the shore. Your eyes full of the sea, and suddenly the solid earth washes out from under your heart. An irrational desire comes into you, insanely you want it: the vastness, the immensity, pulling you out, out and over, stretching you beyond human space, human motion. Catching at your pulling heart you ask yourself, you want it for what? No answer. But this sea longing has called out many, and the sea lore knows that the ocean is a woman, a mistress, a lover, and some have placed the guilt on sea nymphs, and mermaids and sirens, but truly it’s the ocean herself, pulling them, pulling you. You want it for what? This is love. Your heart swells higher and higher within you till cresting it brakes, dripping, all over your feet.

poets blue

the ink blue of Blake
the air blue of Plath
the gold-pierced-blue of Hopkins

for her who doesn't hear me

bracing yearning wind, and my voice pleading
unfolded pomegranate
running red

refusing fingers closing,turning,
black knees to black shirt

wind, frozen, solitary, palm on your blond head

materials of today

Red flowers found fallen under a La Mirada tree on the way to the bus stop on Beach and Rosecrans, thin wire found earlier used for stringing, stares and sometimes smiles from the people on the bus, bus stop concrete for the flowers left over, sea salt pennies that went in the ocean with me two days before, people, the park, the wire of flowers.

in blue, blue of mary's color

found light alt.

various

found light

not what I meant to write today

First I ask, is it really a person that I love,
Or only an idea of a person I have in my head?
I really can’t say, and I can’t say
Whether it was you that I touched
when I touched your hand
or if I’m thinking of you when I think
I miss you every day.
I can’t say any of these things, separated
as we all are from the reality in an infinite regress
knowing that we cannot know what we seem to know.
Really though, these are thoughts I think to mark the time.
There is only one thing I can’t say
and only that because you turn yourself away
making the words words I never spoke or felt by your
own firm belief in their meaninglessness.
This is all my grief which chokes in my chest every day;
I cannot say I love you.

poetry lately

You can never fall in love again.
You could die, perhaps
die twice or several times,
then grow a new soul
and perhaps you could love again.
I'm sorry to tell you this, but it's the simple truth.
All else is shadow.

*****

Aria's voice harsh on the telephone in the morning,
I try to settle into it the way one settles into physical discomfort
And suddenly I remember being nine or ten
My Grandma at her desk in her underwear
The tone of her voice, her meaningless words
Cutting sharply against the rustlings
Of birds and eucalyptus and peach-coloured morning.

*****

I think of her two gray parents,
alignment of apathy and selfishness,
with surprise I remember that she has them.
Must she fight for herself like a colt in a bit?
Fight against a sense of self that
reaches into a time before consciousness?
I cannot remember what it is like to have parents,
only something that rose and set at the beginning of everything,
I, who, at twenty-two, joke about renaming myself,
and of all my blood-relatives feel most tied
to one who lives alone above San Francisco,
renouncing all of us.

*****

Meg's voice goes on and on
Soft midwestern voice
with notes of the guitar
Soon I will not hear and never
understood very well while I did and yet
it goes on and on
"I was searching for...
... see how we rhyme."

*****

I poured the last of the beach out of my shoes in the morning glare.
"Is the quality of white greater if it lasts a day rather than an hour?"
I think not, and so
While I loved the moonlight on the waves and on
my white ankles crossed on the sand below my dark coat
I don't look for these moments again.

across the room

You. You, with your shoulders far broader than your hips like the anatomy of a man, with your voice of more cigarettes than you could have smoked in your twenty-some years: I see through you. You assert yourself only to men, a confidence betraying a scar, while you hide breasts under the ample neutrality of your sweatshirt. You show your neck, though, under your shock-short hair, you show your face to the world and for that I admire you. I know your hardness, your defiance, your immovability is the strength from many battles.

in a notebook of last year

I wrote,
"This is a fling that I am having with the universe."
It made me laugh and think of Hafiz.

It was ensnaring for all the wrong reasons
It took me in, it pulled me into itself
I assented and bowed my head
But now I am penitent, sorry,
For tying myself to it, though it made no sense.

The fish was caught on the bright sharp hook
But the line runs down to the tangled bottom
Breathing fins just waste there in the water

Let us talk of nothing,
you and me,
Let us talk of nothing together.
Let us talk and talk of nothing
And we shall be together
Talking and talking together of nothing

No.
I am alone,
and I prefer to be alone
with just the sky and the water.
The shore boy,
The boy that goes always along the shore
Speaks to me
And wants to show me the caves and the rocks
that the sea runs into.
He wants me to go with him – but can I?
Because I must be always with the sky and the water.
I must be with them - the sky and the water

I'm the leaf that's been blowing on the winter branch for so long, why haven't I gone yet?

poem from last night

I choose not to write over expressing things poorly. All my best thoughts I keep to myself because I can’t say express them with as much as they are worth. Someday I will have words and it will be like finally having wings and flying out over the sea. In the meantime, I let people read things like this.

The ripples widening outward, concavely,
long after the stone’s ‘plink’ left silence
They bother me, those ripples,
still bending, still disturbing the surface of the water.
All the while I feel it deepening –
the silence and my disbelief in what went before.

i've been breaking prisms so the colours can be free

So I was going through all things I wrote and never posted. This one made me laugh.
I think it's utterly absurd that suicide should be illegal. And really, it's not illegal. Unsuccessful suicide is illegal. They can only do something punitive to you if you don't die. But that annoys me too. Why should it concern other people what you do to yourself? Harm that you cause other people should be illegal, like stopping up traffic by jumping into the street, or getting blood on other people's carpets. I suppose the mental disturbance caused to other people by their knowledge of what you do to yourself could go in this category, and I suppose everything is legal as long as it's secret. But some things that other people try to stop you from involve no disturbance of other people in anyway - for example, when you go to the hospital, something they should be grateful for because you pay way more than the cost of the few stitches. But somehow the system is so confused that instead of just being like, "well thanks very much," they then decide to imprison you for bringing them their paychecks. It's screwed up.

I should write social commentaries more often. Next time I’ll address some of my other causes, such as therapeutic bee-keeping, and how people should take shorter showers.

This is a pretty bit of nothing:
I sit on the dark stone floor of my room with only a dim shaft of afternoon light slanting in through the air. Idly I light some old sparklers one at a time and watch them go, then lay them down to burn out their red glow on the slate. The sparks sting my hands and catch at the bits of color in my clothes - striped socks, a rainbow pouch from my hippie uncle, and the ends of an narrow orange tie hanging from my head, found cast away from a few decades ago…

Here’s a wistful few paragraphs. I think I wrote them on Christmas:
It's a strange game that people play, the effort to appear genuine. I think some of the most admired self expression is really this, an organic quality only made possible by the most meticulous care…

Really, I'm not willing to bear people’s false conceptions of me. That’s why I separate myself. Today, I sat on the piano bench behind the couch and admired the man with dreadlocks who has been around the world. But I didn't talk to him. Also, I moved softly, quietly, throughout the rooms looking at people, their things, their movements, catching at the sound of a laugh, and the exact crinkling of the eyes that goes with it. And shadowing all this was the awareness of my own movements as I watched everyone. It’s a silent assertion of my own existence. I place my feet like this, and I wrap my fingers around my coffee cup so.

I heard someone say this morning "I don't want to know his demons." Maybe it's just a common human effort, to keep the self-demons out of sight. I don't know. I won't know ever, will I?

What if life is meant to be primarily experienced as a mystery, with understanding as the exception? The great things - the ecstasy and the misery - don't seem to give any preference to understanding. It's like the fog around this Christmas - everything in a blur. Or perhaps it is just a raw honesty. They are themselves simply, and without explanation.

And that's how I find things lately - without explanation. I don't mind though - I think that life is its own justification.

one year and I remember

The demon most to be feared is obsession with yourself. Not only does it erode the grasp you have of reality, slowly isolating you from all the beauty and joy you could find in the world, it twists it's knife with a strange kind of irony and cuts you away even from yourself warping all the glass in which you look for your own face. Your self-love makes you hideous to your self, your self-hatred makes you hate everything beside yourself. It empties out love and sweeps away friendship and leaves you alone, senselessly moored in the middle of the ocean.

It was a white star, perfectly white, and smelling like the morning itself. I laid it by her on the pillow while she slept. The sun came in and filled her face and the petals. Later in her sleep she crushed it, and so she never knew.

"Mercy's eyes are blue
and when she places them in front of you
nothing really holds a candle to
the solemn warmth you feel"

Two new records for Christmas, and I wonder, what if our lives were like albums, a track of songs a set of lyrics and the rest of us blows away with the decade? It's like that, isn't it, to the people around us? What they see is the polaroid of the moment, and sometimes life lets the shot be a careful one but more often it's blurry and they've nearly stopped caring by the time the picture sets anyway.

I was thinking today how it would be if the direction of one's life were always running perpendicular to other people so that all you ever get of people was that one brief moment that your path intersects.

Tons of rain have been running off my slanted roof for days, and I've a pile of work to do in the renewed effort to make something of my life.

Today I curled into the smallest knot I could make of myself, and wished desperately that God and the angles would comfort me if I kept my eyes closed tight enough. If I could have dreamed a true dream than perhaps I would come real myself.

But I didn't dream of angles and gold light, or even of vast blue skies.

I hate how I'm such a bad writer. I'm a failure in every way. The only time I ever feel slightly consoled about myself is when I compare myself to mental retards.

I need a car. And money. So I can get out of this place and do what I want. Some times I think I want to see more of the world. But then a simple change of my location causes me such misery that I wish I didn't exist.

I think really, existence is just something that I tolerate when I've been properly satiated.
T.S. Elliot talks about how consciousness is the full scope of time and that human beings have only a slice of it because they cannot bear very much reality.

My feet are freezing. I want out of this place.

But when I think about Elliot's full consciousness, I think that maybe death is dying into that, and I know I couldn't bear it.

of her universal house

Always there is Hannah and Paige filling their pots with flowers, putting on skirts and shoes and singing ridiculously to the Messiah that I can hear loudly even in my room. There are the other girls too, and the circles of their busy school lives go by the marvelous calculation of syllabi. There is also Meg and she comes into my mind like she was last night, standing elevated on the stool in the kitchen, her hair waving neglected about her shoulders, her fingers intently separating an orange. For me their is the strange boy, with his long bony fingers and the trees that he thinks keep him warm at night and his searching face seeing me in his strange way, and there's the wall of his dark eyes, like a room with all the lights dim. There is the field by the trees too, and the night-birds with their haunting cry fading up into the sky. Looking for their shapes against the stars echoes other places in my mind. Far away their is Lake Michigan - perhaps beating inhumanly against the rocks in the cold, perhaps sleeping calmly while the sun sets in gold and lavender. It holds the city in it's arms, and the city grasps at the stars too, reaching up, and blaring back an answering light. The wind is the mediator between the sky and the lake and the streets and maybe the students on their bicycles know it. I think also of the hills I go to when I'm home, and of their silhouettes at night rising hauntingly against the same expanse of stars, and I think of being lost in them in the day, and being far above everything human, and the deer and the birds' nests on the sides of the hills, and nothing but miles of walking and searching to ever return me to people again. Their's a city I think of on this coast too, and a great bridge that takes me to my Uncle's place, among the eucalyptus landscape, and the vineyards turning gold and red for the fall. Then there are the forests, cold and moist and shadowy, and drifting with smoke from our fire, and their's back home to the barn again, for long talks and cigarettes and the warmth of piles of blankets. Oh, also, there's the places in my dreams. There's a friend who's only ever in my dreams, and when I think of her in waking, I wonder if she's real anymore. Last night, strangely, there were my sisters and I selling food in a booth, and there was a swing in it, and the moonlight came in and touched us strangely. And there was the feeling of dried roses. Somehow there was my art professor too, and I kept saying to him, "What should I be doing?," and he never answered much until he was going out when he said "If you would, read through the Greenburg essay. I want to decide if I should assign it to the class." Oh, there are beaches with rocks and little crabs, and there are colors of the water, and there is the spring rain on the long grass under the trees, and on the just-born bulb flowers, and there are places I've never been, with hills, and rocks to climb under a great spreading still sky, with only the birds wheeling, and the broken walls of centuries ago. There are the places of the sky and the clouds and the stars that maybe I'll never be, and after that, there are only the places that you die to.

or a pinprick in the dark canvas...

My soul is like a very small boat at sea which each wandering wind and stray current catches up and throws away. The small boy shivering at the helm has all his love set on the stars, yet to keep his course to them is beyond his power. The boat is always at the whim of each new wave that grasps it while the great spheres above burn on silently.

if the lakes took the place of the sea

Amid all the mangled words a desire comes into me for silence. Perhaps there is more truth in not speaking.

of sea and sand and sea again after

See how the sea washes over the sand? There is too much water for the sand and the beach is hidden when the sea meets the rocks. Did you ever think of coming along and living life with me?

Beneath the protruding bluff I grasp the stone and lightly climb on the rocks that reach out in to the sea. I walk out father and watch the colours in the water surging around me. See that green shot with brown, and that pale, pale blue that just thinks of being green in places? Your eyes are like that last. I didn't even know that that colour could be found in the ocean, but with each crash of waves it stares up at me again.

When the water drains out from the rocks, it makes small streams for a moment, with tiny waterfalls and currents. And when the rocks are bared of water it leaves a bed of shells. I step down to examine them and the water crashes in around my knees. I look at the place where my legs dissappear in the surf and think contentedly of water and wind and the way my skirt and hair are lifted away from my body. Do you know that some people live like this? Just watching the hermit craps fight and catching fingers in the anenemes. There are people, I think, who ask for nothing more than all the world spread out around them, and finding they have that, are content. Do you ever think of living life with me?

"Lay on thy whips, oh love"

The idea is to get to the still center, the quite place. Sometimes I step above my life and I see how all of these things meet in the silent axis, and I'm filled with a terrible longing to get out of this, and into that. I want to know the whole, and not merely the parts. I want to give up pursuing little things and get to what is most fully real. But when I think of how to do this, I know that all of my love and desires, and all of my weak prayers are in search of this, and seem to get me nowhere but whirling faster around the circle. The silent place is just beyond, and I can't get to it. I have an idea though, that in the end, the quite place overtakes you. Somehow, someday, by grace or a gift, or some free merriment of the universe, I think we will find that we have arrived at the peace of the center.

From a far away place where it rains

I missed you tonight. I was laying on the grass in the cold wet air, listening to an orchestra play live over the speakers. The air was so damp you could see it, the trees were dusky and thrashing in the wind, and the clouds were running by like they had to get round the earth. I just lay there my soul caught up somewhere in the music, and my body limp on the ground, my head aching and my skin very cold and clammy. I wanted to ask you if you felt as I did about the phrases of the music, intense and full of pensive thoughtful meaning, but still all driving on, as if every thought had it’s highest purpose in suggesting the next. It made me think of the soul, a winged thing, beautiful, but always struggling on to something else. I know you worship music, but I’ve never heard you say too much about it, and I wondered if you had been there, if you would have had something to say to my thoughts. I wished you could lay next to me and warm me, I thought about the feel of your hair on my face.

It was silly, strange dreaming though. When I find beautiful things, it fills me with a kind of longing. Wishing to experience something with someone is only to wish to intensify the longing. Then there would be two beautiful things, and myself trapped outside both of them.

Maybe you are a little like this evening to me. A symphony my soul heard while my body lay aching from the threatening storm. Maybe that’s why I missed you so much.

to know

I see the sketch I made and I am reminded of the contours of his muscles and the points of his bones. I remember his eyes, closed in utter silence. I can recall his face more distinctly than that of any friend; it was unchangingly frozen for me while I drew it, and I learned every detail as I bent over his body. I remember the places where skin faded away into leathery muscle, and the places where muscle shredded and left bone. It was skin on one side of the jaw and raw bone on the other, the muscles on half the chest, and the bared clavicle opposite.

As I go over these things in my mind and note this strange familiarity, I realize that I know things about that body that I know of nothing else. I think of what was given for it to be stretched out for us in that way, and I recognize the cost of self-revelation.

words of this morning

The tangle of immortal souls and then
the door swings closed and it's just things here,
just the boys and the jarring laughter.

You use the same words; love and beauty,
but I remember what those words mean.

Disjunct

What if you had a dream that stopped being a dream and became real and then after awhile, when you had gotten used to this you suddenly woke up to discover that nothing more was left of it than if it really had been an unconscious thought in the night. And then you had to go on constantly correcting yourself. You would be forever trying to dim the memory of sensations felt with real fingers, to the less vivid ones of dream fingers. You would try to go back to the life you were living before the dream. You would try to tell yourself that all of the emotions, the love, the hatred, were just dream emotions, and weren’t really you. But the clarity, the intensity of it wouldn’t let you - you can’t rewrite your experiences, any more than you can un-experience something. And so the only thing you would be left with in the end would be to live out the contradiction, possessing the memory of solid, vivid experiences of real life, and the knowledge that they were nothing more than dreamed.

Of the heres and theres of friends

Hardly a poem - I'd call it a draft if I thought I could improve it - but there are ideas in it I like. Not about real people, either, though a few characteristics are affectionately borrowed.


Today, my friend with the red hair, and I
Sat in the meadow and made wreaths of the daisies
I had an old Polaroid
And I made a copy of her
Very small, but standing there contentedly in the sun
Head tilted down a little
Eyes laughing up at the camera

Sometimes she tells me her dreams,
Her night dreams,
Strange, beautiful fancies from her unconscious mind
A preoccupation with water,
And an empathy so strong
That disembodied,
She passes into everything
Or she tells me sometimes,
How colors and numbers flow together
In close association in her thoughts,
And then we laugh,
And our conversation passes on to other things
The things we love,
And the things we mean to live for,
The ideas we have about the world
Which unfold themselves in our heads.

In my thoughts, today,
I remembered myself as a little child
I remembered myself tying up a bunch of flowers
To give to a friend, uncertainly
When I thought about this
I understood something about my friend with the red hair;
I’ve always wanted to be friends with someone like her
And never have till now.
I wish I could love her like that
Like a friend I’ve always wanted to know
But strangely I find
That there is no place in my heart
Like that for her

*

Yesterday, in the morning,
I saw your face in a crowd.
You were with friends like yourself
And you seemed happy with them
You saw me, and the corner of your mouth moved
But beyond that, no recognition,
You forgot me as soon as your eyes moved on.

In the evening, yesterday,
Like most evenings,
My feet took me out looking for you,
Knowing the while, I wouldn’t find you.
I went like I so often do,
To our old place by the cemetery,
Where we’d hide out the nights together.
Last night drew my wandering
To our nest in the trees,
Where now dry leaves blow.
I lit a candle from my coat pocket,
And green-white moths fluttered around.
Watching I wondered
If you would smile to see them.
I thought about you then
And how you surprised me;
How you were strange and different
But beautiful and like nothing at all
That I could have ever thought of knowing.
I almost laid down there
Like we did when we were together
To see the stars through the trees
But I turned away home.
It is cold there by the cemetery,
Without your body to warm me.

*

On another day, perhaps,
I will be barefooted
With my friend with the red hair
And our bikes will lay fallen over in the grass.
Maybe we will sit,
And talk wistfully of things
My thoughts straying, the while, to you.
Or perhaps by some gift of freedom
My feet will have forgotten their search
And there will be nothing else for me
But to run with my friend and be free

In all my wasted time I've been reading weird indie newspapers that I've picked up in the city. I just finished reading one which concludes with "Please write or send pictures or tiny art:" I don't quite know what it means, but perhaps this person writes for these papers in hope of recieving entertaining mail.

A Cold Rest

I was thinking of what it would be like to be burried in a Cathedral, and I thought about resting there forever with the sun beaming in above you through the church-dust. And then I thought of this part of Lilith, but it is hardly such a Church or such a rest as I imagined.

"The air as of an ice-house met me crossing the threshold. The door fell-to behind us. The sexton said something to his wife that made her turn toward us.[…] But the light of the candle reached such a little way, that at first I could see nothing of the place. Presently, however, it fell on something that glimmered, a little raised from the floor. Was it a bed? Could live thing sleep in such a mortal cold? Then surely it was no wonder it should not wake of itself! Beyond that appeared a fainter shine; and then I thought I descried uncertain gleams on every side. A few paces brought us to the first; it was a human form under a sheet, straight and still--whether of man or woman I could not tell, for the light seemed to avoid the face as we passed. I soon perceived that we were walking along an aisle of couches, on almost every one of which, with its head to the passage, lay something asleep or dead, covered with a sheet white as snow. My soul grew silent with dread. Through aisle after aisle we went, among couches innumerable. I could see only a few of them at once, but they were on all sides, vanishing, as it seemed, in the infinite.--Was it here lay my choice of a bed? Must I go to sleep among the unwaking, with no one to rouse me? Was this the sexton's library? were these his books? Truly it was no half-way house, this chamber of the dead! "One of the cellars I am placed to watch!" remarked Mr. Raven--in a low voice, as if fearing to disturb his silent guests. "Much wine is set here to ripen!--But it is dark for a stranger!" he added. "The moon is rising; she will soon be here," said his wife, and her clear voice, low and sweet, sounded of ancient sorrow long bidden adieu. Even as she spoke the moon looked in at an opening in the wall, and a thousand gleams of white responded to her shine. But not yet could I descry beginning or end of the couches. They stretched away and away, as if for all the disparted world to sleep upon. For along the far receding narrow ways, every couch stood by itself, and on each slept a lonely sleeper. I thought at first their sleep was death, but I soon saw it was something deeper still--a something I did not know. The moon rose higher, and shone through other openings, but I could never see enough of the place at once to know its shape or character; now it would resemble a long cathedral nave, now a huge barn made into a dwelling of tombs. She looked colder than any moon in the frostiest night of the world, and where she shone direct upon them, cast a bluish, icy gleam on the white sheets and the pallid countenances--but it might be the faces that made the moon so cold! Of such as I could see, all were alike in the brotherhood of death, all unlike in the character and history recorded upon them."

"I heard as one in a dream. I was very cold, but already the cold caused me no suffering. I felt them put on me the white garment of the dead. Then I forgot everything. The night about me was pale with sleeping faces, but I was asleep also, nor knew that I slept."