*
A beautiful lostness
(near Covent Garden, 10/3/06)
They move from A to B, they move from B
to A -- and then cancel each other out.
Some move too certainly -- they know their way
too well and don't guess what is blocking it.
The blockage is itself an opening.
To see it, feel it, first you must be lost.
It is a queasiness, a presupposed
for knowing where you are, because to know
is pain, this knowledge is a form of pain.
The grid is in the shape of shattered glass,
it slithers in this dance of randomness,
improvisation. In the broken lane
confusion twists like a kaleidoscope
into perfection and comes to a stop.
*
Wednesday, October 11, 2006
Tuesday, October 10, 2006
Useless poems - 8
*
Sonnet of the placement of a place
(London 10-1-06)
To understand the placement of a place
is past impossible -- I dream of it
by walking some monotony of bricks
that suddenly have disappeared. The foot
stands on what isn't there and I wake up.
The terror of support withdrawn conveys
in no logical way the preciousness
of having something under one. But what?
What makes the haunting placement of a place?
You might say time consists of pondering
the deep significance of place -- what is
and isn't, in succession. And the way
it now withdraws is very long and deep
to study. And I go there when I sleep.
*
Sonnet of the placement of a place
(London 10-1-06)
To understand the placement of a place
is past impossible -- I dream of it
by walking some monotony of bricks
that suddenly have disappeared. The foot
stands on what isn't there and I wake up.
The terror of support withdrawn conveys
in no logical way the preciousness
of having something under one. But what?
What makes the haunting placement of a place?
You might say time consists of pondering
the deep significance of place -- what is
and isn't, in succession. And the way
it now withdraws is very long and deep
to study. And I go there when I sleep.
*
Thursday, September 21, 2006
Useless poems - 7
*
"The hunger not to do so"
In the midst of my acting any act
there comes a voice -- like someone in a room
whose echo is offensive, much too loud
to be so inner and perhaps unreal,
a room that is not meditation but
the hunger for it -- hollowing my act,
a voice that clamors for all acts to stop.
It undermines me and will not shut up.
It has this restlessness as if it were
tied down, yet what it wants is not to move
at all -- it wants to lay my will down on
the floor and walk away -- wants this so much
that now it has become the opposite:
it wishes just to sit -- and cannot sit.
*
"The hunger not to do so"
In the midst of my acting any act
there comes a voice -- like someone in a room
whose echo is offensive, much too loud
to be so inner and perhaps unreal,
a room that is not meditation but
the hunger for it -- hollowing my act,
a voice that clamors for all acts to stop.
It undermines me and will not shut up.
It has this restlessness as if it were
tied down, yet what it wants is not to move
at all -- it wants to lay my will down on
the floor and walk away -- wants this so much
that now it has become the opposite:
it wishes just to sit -- and cannot sit.
*
Friday, September 15, 2006
Useless poems - 6
*
God in the body
The body has its way -- a laying down
like tracks -- of how it can bend, how it can't --
of how, by definition, it can be.
The soul is in denial. If you say
the soul is what the body lets it be
the words don't even form -- they can't be said.
Our words are like a wiping of the slate
on which they're written. Not that they are false.
Their core is sheer evasion. But their sound
is physical. It is the way a slab
of meat would cope with the emergency
(emergence?) of a leak. Some substance leaks
into and through the damage. Someone speaks
a tell me tell me. Who is it that speaks?
*
God in the body
The body has its way -- a laying down
like tracks -- of how it can bend, how it can't --
of how, by definition, it can be.
The soul is in denial. If you say
the soul is what the body lets it be
the words don't even form -- they can't be said.
Our words are like a wiping of the slate
on which they're written. Not that they are false.
Their core is sheer evasion. But their sound
is physical. It is the way a slab
of meat would cope with the emergency
(emergence?) of a leak. Some substance leaks
into and through the damage. Someone speaks
a tell me tell me. Who is it that speaks?
*
Monday, September 11, 2006
Useless poems - 5
*
Judgment
I want to take the coat of judgment off
and lay it folded neatly on the ground.
Someday somebody else can put it on,
not me, not me. I want to take it off.
I won't say that it's bad or dangerous,
I won't even say that the time is wrong
for the garment to be worn, and I won't judge
the one who puts it on, if someone does.
I plan to understand much less of it.
I want to think this out a different way.
I want to hear some things I haven't heard.
The right or wrong of what a person does
will be the sound that comes from a locked room.
I heard it but I didn't make the sound.
*
Judgment
I want to take the coat of judgment off
and lay it folded neatly on the ground.
Someday somebody else can put it on,
not me, not me. I want to take it off.
I won't say that it's bad or dangerous,
I won't even say that the time is wrong
for the garment to be worn, and I won't judge
the one who puts it on, if someone does.
I plan to understand much less of it.
I want to think this out a different way.
I want to hear some things I haven't heard.
The right or wrong of what a person does
will be the sound that comes from a locked room.
I heard it but I didn't make the sound.
*
Wednesday, September 06, 2006
Useless poems - 4
*
The door
The door opened as pain, opened with pain,
was pain -- the tearing open of a wound.
To be inside the room would be to bleed.
You didn't want to pass through what this was
to pass but had no other, easier,
more civilized, more human avenue
to where the knowledge was nor did you know
what it was that you didn't know, just knew
that there was only one way into it.
Pain with the separating feel, the feel
of isolation -- no one else would know
the special grip that it applied to you
nor were you sick enough to want them to:
it was your door, just yours, yours to pass through.
*
The door
The door opened as pain, opened with pain,
was pain -- the tearing open of a wound.
To be inside the room would be to bleed.
You didn't want to pass through what this was
to pass but had no other, easier,
more civilized, more human avenue
to where the knowledge was nor did you know
what it was that you didn't know, just knew
that there was only one way into it.
Pain with the separating feel, the feel
of isolation -- no one else would know
the special grip that it applied to you
nor were you sick enough to want them to:
it was your door, just yours, yours to pass through.
*
Tuesday, September 05, 2006
Useless poems - 3
*
The path
There are places and there are paths.
Places become internal. Paths must not.
Your path can't be explained but must be there.
No place exists without a path to it.
Depression is your path to joy.
Depression is crammed full of intense meaning
that can't be used, that really has no point
of access, and becomes unbearable.
You must walk it, which means to fathom it.
Its whole reason to be is where it ends,
your place of understanding. You must not
medicate or deny the path you walk.
Your pain is not to push down but to know.
Your understanding is the way you go.
*
The path
There are places and there are paths.
Places become internal. Paths must not.
Your path can't be explained but must be there.
No place exists without a path to it.
Depression is your path to joy.
Depression is crammed full of intense meaning
that can't be used, that really has no point
of access, and becomes unbearable.
You must walk it, which means to fathom it.
Its whole reason to be is where it ends,
your place of understanding. You must not
medicate or deny the path you walk.
Your pain is not to push down but to know.
Your understanding is the way you go.
*
Saturday, September 02, 2006
Useless poems - 2
*
An inward world
Why was the trip forward so much like
an excavation? How was it that the path
out of oneself chiseled this inward world?
It was like falling into one's own nerve.
Within the pain one did not feel the pain
but was the pain and became what it meant,
and what it meant was quite impersonal,
a sort of unbounded commodity.
It was an awareness that did not belong
to the one who walked its, let us say, its canyons
and salmon-colored shadows, attributes
of a personage well grounded as a place.
God was not lost. God was at home. God was
the owner of this place. God was the place.
*
An inward world
Why was the trip forward so much like
an excavation? How was it that the path
out of oneself chiseled this inward world?
It was like falling into one's own nerve.
Within the pain one did not feel the pain
but was the pain and became what it meant,
and what it meant was quite impersonal,
a sort of unbounded commodity.
It was an awareness that did not belong
to the one who walked its, let us say, its canyons
and salmon-colored shadows, attributes
of a personage well grounded as a place.
God was not lost. God was at home. God was
the owner of this place. God was the place.
*
Thursday, August 31, 2006
Useless Poems - 1
*
A horror of being
You had a horror of the sort of being
that was like standing in a light, exposed
to comment --where this comment was defining,
was itself an exposure and was you.
You wished to be not watched, simply to be
without that light of someone else outside
not understanding and not caring to.
And still it wasn't solitude you sought.
You must try to say nothing but the truth.
What you sought was the "someone else" who was
in fact inside and therefore understood
the ground and underpinning of your being
so hard to hold up to the light -- unless
the light was his not just your emptiness.
*
A horror of being
You had a horror of the sort of being
that was like standing in a light, exposed
to comment --where this comment was defining,
was itself an exposure and was you.
You wished to be not watched, simply to be
without that light of someone else outside
not understanding and not caring to.
And still it wasn't solitude you sought.
You must try to say nothing but the truth.
What you sought was the "someone else" who was
in fact inside and therefore understood
the ground and underpinning of your being
so hard to hold up to the light -- unless
the light was his not just your emptiness.
*
Sunday, August 06, 2006
Jorge - the Garden of Orthodoxy - Part 1
*
You were Jorge.
You looked just like Una, your sister, but with a twist that was indefinable and changed everything.
What was balanced in her face became unbalanced in yours.
What made you more than an ordinary man was that you were a worm and not a man.
When other people talked of self-aggrandizement or even self-improvement you would take a breath and scan that very self. Not theirs but yours.
It was moist, it was long and thin, it moved through the earth and disgusted the people who had to look at it. A worm nature.
Offensive to men. Beautiful to God. God felt an absence of repugnance for the worm, God even loved the worm.
Once you had been a human like the others. Una and you were children, living in the Garden of Orthodoxy.
Orthodoxy is not a set of beliefs, Orthodoxy is a place, a world, a realized wing. It is a place beneath the wing of God. One does not "behave well" there. One is close to God there and all behavior is intrinsically "well".
The wing itself shelters you from other kinds of living that you do not really even understand, the kinds of life that lead or unfathomably come to be led astray, de-winged, the flavors of existence that are no longer effectively attached to existence, which in effect shouldn't even be one of the possibles. Because the Garden was in fact everything and everywhere. And so in some sense the Garden still contained even the people who had simply walked away -- who had walked out of the garden one day, as if temporarily, casually, but fully intending to come back.
For Jorge and Una, the Garden of Orthodoxy was a place of sheer poetry, because God was there. They were little children, they took the bliss for granted. The taking for granted was itself the substance of bliss. One moved freely in the shelter of what was not anxious and would never need to be. For the garden thrived in the indifference of time -- not that time was absent or even suspended -- not that time ceased to do whatever it did -- but the concern was a thing that lived miles away, "in the next county", far on the other side of the stiles and hedges and small shimmering animals. There was not the constant bruising reference to time, the looking at one's watch that was said to be the definition of adulthood.
Only protected can one be free.
*
The light was horizontal like the branches of certain trees. How can it be like that? Una asked. Doesn't it come straight down. How are there shadows on these red barks instead of the ground.
I think the light comes oozing out of these dark places, Jorge said. The light comes second, the dark comes first, I think we see things in reverse -- the source is more mysterious than what we see.
The sunlight flows every which way from these dark places. The foundation is darkness -- light is like something placed on top. It's not as real.
Well, should we be scared? I'm not scared at all.
They would look back at the house. Sometimes the back door was open, sometimes Aunt Estelle, practically a widow, was standing on the porch. She wasn't monitoring them, she was simply there. She was always half doing something and half listening to the sound of children's voices. So it seemed.
Her little prayer book in her lap. The children turned and dismissed her from consciousness but not completely. Aunt Estelle. Warm and quiet. Touching the links of the chain on her neck as though it were -- almost a rosary or some such thing.
There was a pond in the back yard, the keeper of the moist stones. Tadpoles and the whiff of frogs. Fish who would surface for food and then suddenly sink into nonexistence, if existence is appearance. Beyond it, more fields and the touch of forest. The land was too still to belong to anyone. In hide and seek, so many hiding places, one had to make the effort to be found. Pine needles on the pathway, don't run barefoot. Smells of honey and tar.
There was the preternatural clarity of an intense single moment. Yes but it went on for years and years.
Look at the way those branches -- those pine branches, those branches of pine -- they almost make a square, the way they are posed in the clearing. And look at that three legged dog!
Una and Jorge wanted to catch the dog and make it a pet but -- oddly and wonderfully enough -- it ran too fast to be caught.
As though its piercing disfigurement needed to be -- here and only here -- caressed and furthered -- within the Garden of Orthodoxy that bound them all.
So the dog ran, free and free forever. And the 2 children knew better than to chase it into the infinity in which it lived.
For they knew -- and this was the Orthodoxy -- not to go too far.
Did they know? In fact, did they? Dusk would be falling, not the dusk, but the state just before dusk, a sort of tableau of clear glareless light, the anticipation of gloom. The outer woods were ahead of them, with the big campus on the other side. We'd better go back, Una said. Dinner will be waiting for us.
At the edge of the wood was where the feeling of rightness began to thin, like scarce oxygen on a mountain height.
Una, protected by an instinct her brother didn't have, would pull at his hand. The aunt would be waiting patiently for them at the back door. It was amazing how dark it suddenly was, how quickly the day's light had been sucked away. But oh how good existence was!
END OF PART ONE
*
You were Jorge.
You looked just like Una, your sister, but with a twist that was indefinable and changed everything.
What was balanced in her face became unbalanced in yours.
What made you more than an ordinary man was that you were a worm and not a man.
When other people talked of self-aggrandizement or even self-improvement you would take a breath and scan that very self. Not theirs but yours.
It was moist, it was long and thin, it moved through the earth and disgusted the people who had to look at it. A worm nature.
Offensive to men. Beautiful to God. God felt an absence of repugnance for the worm, God even loved the worm.
Once you had been a human like the others. Una and you were children, living in the Garden of Orthodoxy.
Orthodoxy is not a set of beliefs, Orthodoxy is a place, a world, a realized wing. It is a place beneath the wing of God. One does not "behave well" there. One is close to God there and all behavior is intrinsically "well".
The wing itself shelters you from other kinds of living that you do not really even understand, the kinds of life that lead or unfathomably come to be led astray, de-winged, the flavors of existence that are no longer effectively attached to existence, which in effect shouldn't even be one of the possibles. Because the Garden was in fact everything and everywhere. And so in some sense the Garden still contained even the people who had simply walked away -- who had walked out of the garden one day, as if temporarily, casually, but fully intending to come back.
For Jorge and Una, the Garden of Orthodoxy was a place of sheer poetry, because God was there. They were little children, they took the bliss for granted. The taking for granted was itself the substance of bliss. One moved freely in the shelter of what was not anxious and would never need to be. For the garden thrived in the indifference of time -- not that time was absent or even suspended -- not that time ceased to do whatever it did -- but the concern was a thing that lived miles away, "in the next county", far on the other side of the stiles and hedges and small shimmering animals. There was not the constant bruising reference to time, the looking at one's watch that was said to be the definition of adulthood.
Only protected can one be free.
*
The light was horizontal like the branches of certain trees. How can it be like that? Una asked. Doesn't it come straight down. How are there shadows on these red barks instead of the ground.
I think the light comes oozing out of these dark places, Jorge said. The light comes second, the dark comes first, I think we see things in reverse -- the source is more mysterious than what we see.
The sunlight flows every which way from these dark places. The foundation is darkness -- light is like something placed on top. It's not as real.
Well, should we be scared? I'm not scared at all.
They would look back at the house. Sometimes the back door was open, sometimes Aunt Estelle, practically a widow, was standing on the porch. She wasn't monitoring them, she was simply there. She was always half doing something and half listening to the sound of children's voices. So it seemed.
Her little prayer book in her lap. The children turned and dismissed her from consciousness but not completely. Aunt Estelle. Warm and quiet. Touching the links of the chain on her neck as though it were -- almost a rosary or some such thing.
There was a pond in the back yard, the keeper of the moist stones. Tadpoles and the whiff of frogs. Fish who would surface for food and then suddenly sink into nonexistence, if existence is appearance. Beyond it, more fields and the touch of forest. The land was too still to belong to anyone. In hide and seek, so many hiding places, one had to make the effort to be found. Pine needles on the pathway, don't run barefoot. Smells of honey and tar.
There was the preternatural clarity of an intense single moment. Yes but it went on for years and years.
Look at the way those branches -- those pine branches, those branches of pine -- they almost make a square, the way they are posed in the clearing. And look at that three legged dog!
Una and Jorge wanted to catch the dog and make it a pet but -- oddly and wonderfully enough -- it ran too fast to be caught.
As though its piercing disfigurement needed to be -- here and only here -- caressed and furthered -- within the Garden of Orthodoxy that bound them all.
So the dog ran, free and free forever. And the 2 children knew better than to chase it into the infinity in which it lived.
For they knew -- and this was the Orthodoxy -- not to go too far.
Did they know? In fact, did they? Dusk would be falling, not the dusk, but the state just before dusk, a sort of tableau of clear glareless light, the anticipation of gloom. The outer woods were ahead of them, with the big campus on the other side. We'd better go back, Una said. Dinner will be waiting for us.
At the edge of the wood was where the feeling of rightness began to thin, like scarce oxygen on a mountain height.
Una, protected by an instinct her brother didn't have, would pull at his hand. The aunt would be waiting patiently for them at the back door. It was amazing how dark it suddenly was, how quickly the day's light had been sucked away. But oh how good existence was!
END OF PART ONE
*
Wednesday, August 02, 2006
Poem: A Struggle
*
There comes a moment when she pulls away.
You find yourself fighting the very thing
you recognize and know: that she consents
to her own going, but more, as she goes
she both consents and was forced to consent
because death has become not just the choice
but what is choosing, and is what she wants,
not "wants" but can no longer not. This death
of her resistance is the death of her.
And you are also forced this other way,
to hold her here, to keep her "secular"
against her will. You have to. You have to.
You must do what your God has asked you to:
keep her alive, but she just wants to go.
*
There comes a moment when she pulls away.
You find yourself fighting the very thing
you recognize and know: that she consents
to her own going, but more, as she goes
she both consents and was forced to consent
because death has become not just the choice
but what is choosing, and is what she wants,
not "wants" but can no longer not. This death
of her resistance is the death of her.
And you are also forced this other way,
to hold her here, to keep her "secular"
against her will. You have to. You have to.
You must do what your God has asked you to:
keep her alive, but she just wants to go.
*
Friday, June 30, 2006
The worm and his killer
*
Ooo! Pierced.
"I am a worm and not a man."
So there it is.
The little worm slithered along the path that his worminess made. God looked down and loved his worm, that was taken for a given. It wasn't a path or a skeleton, or a safety net, just a given.
Sun, that ambiguous good, beat down.
The orioles chirred and whivered in the palm tree. They did not eat the worm nor did the woodpecker peck it.
There was a moment of not being pecked. Existence, the richest robe, the brightest gemstone, always a match for your birth.
The words of existence were few. You cannot have too much of it and you cannot hate it because even your hatred would be more existence. To exist is inexplicable and wonderful.
The worm slithered in the middle way. Neither fear nor confidence but the middle way. Not happy, not un-, the middle. Purposeful, drifting? Neither. Predator, prey? Neither one. Kind or mean? Not that. Boastful? Humble? Not there yet. Striving, at rest? Musical or dumb?
In the middle of the middle of the middle.
There was a little child with her foot in the air. Coming down, coming down. Gratuitous shape, death in shoes. Now does the cut worm really forgive the plow? Does it really? Does it really? Is that just what the plowman says?
The worm traveled neither in forgiveness nor unforgiveness, no, but the middle way, in between. Not afraid, not unafraid, no, not brave, not cowardly, not hopeful, not exactly. Ready? Open? Hopeful without grounds for hope? Existence too abundant to simply be boxed in this world?
The worm rested in God's hand, which was not a material object and was not subject to sun. A human foot was a thread it wove.
If you love God's work, you love all of it.
I will aim for the heart, the little child thought.
But she couldn't see the heart. It eluded her and twisted.
*
If hope was a sickness, the worm had no wish to get well.
*
Now if the child had simply walked away, she would be a person who had no story, which is like damnation, not having a story. But she stayed and looked down. The nisus had fled and the creature was in pieces. It was "dead" -- what is "dead"?
It is irreversible, right?
So she cried to see the irreversible mess beneath her foot. The yolk would not go back into its shell. It clung to her and defined her.
Tears of accountability.
Bottomless pain -- and everyone had it in some way. A person's story.
"I am a worm and not a man."
END OF PART ONE
*
In time the girl grew over the hole where she once killed a worm. It existed and hurt inside her. Her husband would laugh at her delicacies and phobias. Every corner of our house has a spider, honey. Why not get rid of just a few of them?
You would open a book in this house and a spider would leap out, a little fist of congealed ink.
Let it be.
Wherever the woman went, cats and dogs and children would materialize around her. It is odd how safe and strong a basically timid person could feel.
There was some Buddhist sage who lived in a hut filled with cobras. He didn't bother them and they didn't bother him. He was only careful where he sank his foot.
She attended a rather pokey church near the university. Her husband refused to go. Organ music from a time long ago -- that was what characterized the church. She was comfortable in her great discomfort there.
The sermons merely restated things long known from the gospels. The same ideas were shuffled around and re-voiced. She felt that this was appropriate.
The hymns used phrases that no real person ever ever ever could have said. They were not exactly God's words but certainly not the words of a human. She found some melodious sonnet rolling on her tongue.
One day a young woman wandered into the church and sat down. She was not appropriately dressed, not suitable, she looked like a flower child or really a grass child, as though she'd just gotten up from the grass. The worshippers unconsciously did that horrible thing that worshippers did: they moved away as if she were unclean. They stared at the stranger, forgetting even Leviticus. Elise -- shy as all get-out and far from either a mover or a shaker -- stood up and sat next to the stranger, took her hand. it was as soft and boneless as a worm. The girl was as fragile as a worm.
They went to lunch and shared stories but later in the day the elder woman couldn't remember a word of it -- just that the girl was Una. She was "one" then. But one of exactly what?
That evening, leafing through the paper, Elise found the girl's picture among the stories of brief wonders and accidental deaths. She didn't say anything to anyone. Scott kept his own counsel as always.
She set up a cot in the back room. Her husband raised his eyebrows -- just a millimeter or two -- and said nothing. Since that was characteristic, one didn't really know what it meant.
The old hymns rolled like wagon wheels through the old woman's head. Oh, not so old really. Perhaps neither one was altogether old.
*
Does that girl live here or not? Scott asked.
I feel there's a ghost in this house.
*
Before Elise went to bed she tried to run through some form of evening prayer. As always, she was too tired to focus. It often became a deep and debilitating nap.
Sometimes the psalms were there in the core of dream and sometimes they were absent.
As she fell asleep the book in her hands softened and morphed, it began to move slowly. It was so soft that the slightest squeeze would crush it. It had an ever-newborn feel.
She knew who she was holding. "Oh Lord, my heart is not lifted up, my eyes are not raised too high." The most beautiful one submitted oneself, himself, to utter danger, even the danger of being despised. Our God had no shell, no armor.
Elise woke up shaking and in deepest devotion -- deep in the most pierced place there was. What do I do now? Where do I move from here?
What else was there to do but what you always did? The heavy woman pulled herself somehow out of the chair's suction grip. She put on what passed for a nightie then she brushed her teeth. She navigated herself to the underground region of her husband's snore. She lowered herself to bed and lay herself down.
*
Ooo! Pierced.
"I am a worm and not a man."
So there it is.
The little worm slithered along the path that his worminess made. God looked down and loved his worm, that was taken for a given. It wasn't a path or a skeleton, or a safety net, just a given.
Sun, that ambiguous good, beat down.
The orioles chirred and whivered in the palm tree. They did not eat the worm nor did the woodpecker peck it.
There was a moment of not being pecked. Existence, the richest robe, the brightest gemstone, always a match for your birth.
The words of existence were few. You cannot have too much of it and you cannot hate it because even your hatred would be more existence. To exist is inexplicable and wonderful.
The worm slithered in the middle way. Neither fear nor confidence but the middle way. Not happy, not un-, the middle. Purposeful, drifting? Neither. Predator, prey? Neither one. Kind or mean? Not that. Boastful? Humble? Not there yet. Striving, at rest? Musical or dumb?
In the middle of the middle of the middle.
There was a little child with her foot in the air. Coming down, coming down. Gratuitous shape, death in shoes. Now does the cut worm really forgive the plow? Does it really? Does it really? Is that just what the plowman says?
The worm traveled neither in forgiveness nor unforgiveness, no, but the middle way, in between. Not afraid, not unafraid, no, not brave, not cowardly, not hopeful, not exactly. Ready? Open? Hopeful without grounds for hope? Existence too abundant to simply be boxed in this world?
The worm rested in God's hand, which was not a material object and was not subject to sun. A human foot was a thread it wove.
If you love God's work, you love all of it.
I will aim for the heart, the little child thought.
But she couldn't see the heart. It eluded her and twisted.
*
If hope was a sickness, the worm had no wish to get well.
*
Now if the child had simply walked away, she would be a person who had no story, which is like damnation, not having a story. But she stayed and looked down. The nisus had fled and the creature was in pieces. It was "dead" -- what is "dead"?
It is irreversible, right?
So she cried to see the irreversible mess beneath her foot. The yolk would not go back into its shell. It clung to her and defined her.
Tears of accountability.
Bottomless pain -- and everyone had it in some way. A person's story.
"I am a worm and not a man."
END OF PART ONE
*
In time the girl grew over the hole where she once killed a worm. It existed and hurt inside her. Her husband would laugh at her delicacies and phobias. Every corner of our house has a spider, honey. Why not get rid of just a few of them?
You would open a book in this house and a spider would leap out, a little fist of congealed ink.
Let it be.
Wherever the woman went, cats and dogs and children would materialize around her. It is odd how safe and strong a basically timid person could feel.
There was some Buddhist sage who lived in a hut filled with cobras. He didn't bother them and they didn't bother him. He was only careful where he sank his foot.
She attended a rather pokey church near the university. Her husband refused to go. Organ music from a time long ago -- that was what characterized the church. She was comfortable in her great discomfort there.
The sermons merely restated things long known from the gospels. The same ideas were shuffled around and re-voiced. She felt that this was appropriate.
The hymns used phrases that no real person ever ever ever could have said. They were not exactly God's words but certainly not the words of a human. She found some melodious sonnet rolling on her tongue.
One day a young woman wandered into the church and sat down. She was not appropriately dressed, not suitable, she looked like a flower child or really a grass child, as though she'd just gotten up from the grass. The worshippers unconsciously did that horrible thing that worshippers did: they moved away as if she were unclean. They stared at the stranger, forgetting even Leviticus. Elise -- shy as all get-out and far from either a mover or a shaker -- stood up and sat next to the stranger, took her hand. it was as soft and boneless as a worm. The girl was as fragile as a worm.
They went to lunch and shared stories but later in the day the elder woman couldn't remember a word of it -- just that the girl was Una. She was "one" then. But one of exactly what?
That evening, leafing through the paper, Elise found the girl's picture among the stories of brief wonders and accidental deaths. She didn't say anything to anyone. Scott kept his own counsel as always.
She set up a cot in the back room. Her husband raised his eyebrows -- just a millimeter or two -- and said nothing. Since that was characteristic, one didn't really know what it meant.
The old hymns rolled like wagon wheels through the old woman's head. Oh, not so old really. Perhaps neither one was altogether old.
*
Does that girl live here or not? Scott asked.
I feel there's a ghost in this house.
*
Before Elise went to bed she tried to run through some form of evening prayer. As always, she was too tired to focus. It often became a deep and debilitating nap.
Sometimes the psalms were there in the core of dream and sometimes they were absent.
As she fell asleep the book in her hands softened and morphed, it began to move slowly. It was so soft that the slightest squeeze would crush it. It had an ever-newborn feel.
She knew who she was holding. "Oh Lord, my heart is not lifted up, my eyes are not raised too high." The most beautiful one submitted oneself, himself, to utter danger, even the danger of being despised. Our God had no shell, no armor.
Elise woke up shaking and in deepest devotion -- deep in the most pierced place there was. What do I do now? Where do I move from here?
What else was there to do but what you always did? The heavy woman pulled herself somehow out of the chair's suction grip. She put on what passed for a nightie then she brushed her teeth. She navigated herself to the underground region of her husband's snore. She lowered herself to bed and lay herself down.
*
Thursday, June 29, 2006
The worm's soliloquy
*
Here is what I know about myself.
I am a worm and not a man.
If I do something worthy of a man, it is not me, it must have been you who have done it.
"I fell silent and did not open my mouth,*
for surely it was you that did it."
Although I have never committed a murder, my hands have this strangling thing intrinsically threaded through them. They shake with it, a worm's ghostly vertebrae. I will not deny. I will not deny. I will stop denying.
I am not -- no no -- in no way sexually attracted to children and so what terrible thing inside me impels me to insist on even saying that? Why is it necessary?
I am not different from others in feeling impelled, whenever I see something soft and vulnerable, to crush it, and this even though I myself am soft and vulnerable and essentially without defenses.
What stops me from being myself? You do, Lord.
You are restraint. You are the stopping of my native self-hoaxing. When I don't feel you elsewhere I feel you there. And this is my true vertebrae, not the other one. Insofar as you hold me back, strip me and lay me low, I love you.
Restraint is in itself a good, but I am a creature of the American 60s, the time of the worm, and so my zipper is always down, my belly and my dick exposed, everything always open and all over the place until I too am disgusted. I do not know how of myself to find measure and be measure and live within measure, to be just so. Not everywhere and everything all over the place, not standing nowhere talking on my cellphone or watching the abyss of a dancing monitor, no no no, but to be measure and to be just so. No more no less no other.
You know all this, God. Why can't i just submit to you? But in fact I know the answer.
I am a worm and not a man.
*
Here is what I know about myself.
I am a worm and not a man.
If I do something worthy of a man, it is not me, it must have been you who have done it.
"I fell silent and did not open my mouth,*
for surely it was you that did it."
Although I have never committed a murder, my hands have this strangling thing intrinsically threaded through them. They shake with it, a worm's ghostly vertebrae. I will not deny. I will not deny. I will stop denying.
I am not -- no no -- in no way sexually attracted to children and so what terrible thing inside me impels me to insist on even saying that? Why is it necessary?
I am not different from others in feeling impelled, whenever I see something soft and vulnerable, to crush it, and this even though I myself am soft and vulnerable and essentially without defenses.
What stops me from being myself? You do, Lord.
You are restraint. You are the stopping of my native self-hoaxing. When I don't feel you elsewhere I feel you there. And this is my true vertebrae, not the other one. Insofar as you hold me back, strip me and lay me low, I love you.
Restraint is in itself a good, but I am a creature of the American 60s, the time of the worm, and so my zipper is always down, my belly and my dick exposed, everything always open and all over the place until I too am disgusted. I do not know how of myself to find measure and be measure and live within measure, to be just so. Not everywhere and everything all over the place, not standing nowhere talking on my cellphone or watching the abyss of a dancing monitor, no no no, but to be measure and to be just so. No more no less no other.
You know all this, God. Why can't i just submit to you? But in fact I know the answer.
I am a worm and not a man.
*
Wednesday, June 21, 2006
The worm on the cement
*
He called himself a worm but the worms called him an untouchable.
*
So what did the worm do then? He pretended to be okay. He simulated the sort of life that someone who was okay would have. He pulled himself bodily out of the darkness, the mud, the massed bed that bore our color and light. Blinking like a blindman he surfaced into the light and stretched. The world was good and he himself was perfectly normal. Right with God. Average in the sin department, neither a case of bragging nor of shame. Ha ha people said. A worm and not a man. Made an S on the cement and then a question mark. He shivered, finally revealing the truth about himself. He knew that God would have mercy on who he was, not who he pretended to be.
Feet came down solidly on the sidewalk and just missed him or else they didn't.
*
He called himself a worm but the worms called him an untouchable.
*
So what did the worm do then? He pretended to be okay. He simulated the sort of life that someone who was okay would have. He pulled himself bodily out of the darkness, the mud, the massed bed that bore our color and light. Blinking like a blindman he surfaced into the light and stretched. The world was good and he himself was perfectly normal. Right with God. Average in the sin department, neither a case of bragging nor of shame. Ha ha people said. A worm and not a man. Made an S on the cement and then a question mark. He shivered, finally revealing the truth about himself. He knew that God would have mercy on who he was, not who he pretended to be.
Feet came down solidly on the sidewalk and just missed him or else they didn't.
*
And not a worm either?
*
You - you strange boy - you call yourself "a worm and not a man" -- and yet the worms themselves want no part of you. They would prefer you call yourself something else not a worm. For they too have their worm standards of purity -- and you know you are not pure.
*
You - you strange boy - you call yourself "a worm and not a man" -- and yet the worms themselves want no part of you. They would prefer you call yourself something else not a worm. For they too have their worm standards of purity -- and you know you are not pure.
*
Friday, June 16, 2006
The life of a worm
*
Here theology.
I knew a worm. Let me describe a worm.
Drank. Drank too much.
The mouth of the bottle moved its lips a hypnotic serpent.
The two would kiss. Terrible taste. Pseudo love. Nirvana for Dummies.
The worm hated this relationship. In some sense even succumbing he would not succumb.
Would say: I know God means better for me.
Now the moral folk would look at him and shake their heads.
To preserve their holiness would move away and try to shut him out from -- what?
God's grace?
But what did the rich know, in effect, about God's grace? Even Protestants now thought they'd achieved their own prosperity by their own hands. Forgetting Luther they were digging themselves up by their own root.
Meanwhile the worm drank because.
Exclusion. Bad memories. Habit.
A depression that Christians claimed to be sin. Wilderness blues.
Too deep even to explore. But God was there.
Even in depression God was there.
The worm never lost his grip on God and with his worminess even had more to grip with. A grip on God's goodness. God's presence in places mere humans wouldn't go.
The worm would often say: I want to stop kissing the bottle and kiss God instead. And this is possible!
And this was even what the drinking meant.
The drinking was a fervent wish not to drink.
Imitation and perfection seemed to be out of the question. The worm could only love God and pray.
So now the question: what were God's own feelings about this worm?
*
Here theology.
I knew a worm. Let me describe a worm.
Drank. Drank too much.
The mouth of the bottle moved its lips a hypnotic serpent.
The two would kiss. Terrible taste. Pseudo love. Nirvana for Dummies.
The worm hated this relationship. In some sense even succumbing he would not succumb.
Would say: I know God means better for me.
Now the moral folk would look at him and shake their heads.
To preserve their holiness would move away and try to shut him out from -- what?
God's grace?
But what did the rich know, in effect, about God's grace? Even Protestants now thought they'd achieved their own prosperity by their own hands. Forgetting Luther they were digging themselves up by their own root.
Meanwhile the worm drank because.
Exclusion. Bad memories. Habit.
A depression that Christians claimed to be sin. Wilderness blues.
Too deep even to explore. But God was there.
Even in depression God was there.
The worm never lost his grip on God and with his worminess even had more to grip with. A grip on God's goodness. God's presence in places mere humans wouldn't go.
The worm would often say: I want to stop kissing the bottle and kiss God instead. And this is possible!
And this was even what the drinking meant.
The drinking was a fervent wish not to drink.
Imitation and perfection seemed to be out of the question. The worm could only love God and pray.
So now the question: what were God's own feelings about this worm?
*
Poem: Christianity for worms
*
So pitiably were we
unfit to meet God's terms
that we needed a Christianity
just for worms.
We had no kinship
with the saints
whose job was to sweep
us out of their tents.
We already
knew we were
unworthy
to approach the altar
so huddled
in outer
cold
unsure where
our own God was -- not was
in terms of doctrine
but for real and for us
in our desolation.
For the low and stepped on
would there be
inclusion, redemption
finally? -- or were we
tubes of hopelessness
condemned to bake
sad S's
on the sidewalk?
*
So pitiably were we
unfit to meet God's terms
that we needed a Christianity
just for worms.
We had no kinship
with the saints
whose job was to sweep
us out of their tents.
We already
knew we were
unworthy
to approach the altar
so huddled
in outer
cold
unsure where
our own God was -- not was
in terms of doctrine
but for real and for us
in our desolation.
For the low and stepped on
would there be
inclusion, redemption
finally? -- or were we
tubes of hopelessness
condemned to bake
sad S's
on the sidewalk?
*
Poem: The worm in robes
*
The worm looked at the photographs. It saw
itself before it had become a worm.
Elbowy humans in their long black robes.
The sun fell like a stone. One couldn't move.
The light was like a quarry where one's limbs
lay with no possibility of shade,
no hint of shade, there never would be shade.
Light was a giant slab. It couldn't blink
or flicker or not be. Not move. Not think.
Not be a place to grow. The graduates
could only back away from where they stood
embedded in this standing -- yet our God
was there -- orthogonal to our reward,
God was the shade we would soon be dragged toward.
*
The worm looked at the photographs. It saw
itself before it had become a worm.
Elbowy humans in their long black robes.
The sun fell like a stone. One couldn't move.
The light was like a quarry where one's limbs
lay with no possibility of shade,
no hint of shade, there never would be shade.
Light was a giant slab. It couldn't blink
or flicker or not be. Not move. Not think.
Not be a place to grow. The graduates
could only back away from where they stood
embedded in this standing -- yet our God
was there -- orthogonal to our reward,
God was the shade we would soon be dragged toward.
*
Saturday, June 10, 2006
Poem: The worm and the bathtub
*
The worm sits on a bowl -- in pain, content,
both things at once. There is a theatre
confronting it -- a bathtub, white, recessed,
expectant, with a hollow to fill up.
The California shadows want to be
performers -- want to act a mystery
and not just be mysterious, as now.
A red towel hangs, a victim as it were,
and not just what a victim would have worn.
Cloth is kin to the creature dripping blood
into the bowl, the worm. A play begins,
a mystery. The tub is bare and white!
There is a stubborn doorway through its bright
recess -- both open wide and now shut tight.
*
The worm sits on a bowl -- in pain, content,
both things at once. There is a theatre
confronting it -- a bathtub, white, recessed,
expectant, with a hollow to fill up.
The California shadows want to be
performers -- want to act a mystery
and not just be mysterious, as now.
A red towel hangs, a victim as it were,
and not just what a victim would have worn.
Cloth is kin to the creature dripping blood
into the bowl, the worm. A play begins,
a mystery. The tub is bare and white!
There is a stubborn doorway through its bright
recess -- both open wide and now shut tight.
*
Saturday, June 03, 2006
Poem: Christianity for worms
*
The icon looked and maybe did not like
the thing "it" saw -- there was no mirror here,
there was a harrowing disconnectedness
which was no doubt the thing the icon saw.
He saw a worm, no human, just a worm
pressing its body to the filmy break
on the protected space from which one's God
looked out and not just looked, not merely looked
but reached to pull all those within his reach
those golden, beautiful, reachable ones
who "imitated Christ" -- but who were they?
And why was everyone looking away?
He pulled -- even a worm could feel the pull.
It was suffused with blood and wonderful.
*
The icon looked and maybe did not like
the thing "it" saw -- there was no mirror here,
there was a harrowing disconnectedness
which was no doubt the thing the icon saw.
He saw a worm, no human, just a worm
pressing its body to the filmy break
on the protected space from which one's God
looked out and not just looked, not merely looked
but reached to pull all those within his reach
those golden, beautiful, reachable ones
who "imitated Christ" -- but who were they?
And why was everyone looking away?
He pulled -- even a worm could feel the pull.
It was suffused with blood and wonderful.
*
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)