*
I looked into the icon's eyes
but they looked to my right -- I could-
n't turn I couldn't take my own
eyes off those eyes but wondered did
he see his father behind me?
so could I if not face to face
still feel the presence of my own
creation in the icon's space?
The self was not the center of
this gold place -- but felt an assuage-
ment rise, a great weight taken off
these shoulders lifting like a bridge.
*
Monday, May 11, 2009
Friday, April 24, 2009
Story: We get healthy
*
I don't know what it is about heights. Perhaps that they aren't there. You are high, you look down and see the ground and recognize that there is nothing between. Nothing really. It's space, yes, but you see through it. It might as well be nothing. You are virtually touching the ground so why not just go there or be there or admit that you already are? Oh no no no, I say. I'm not doing that. I have an enormous will for negativity. I can't do anything but I am very powerful at resisting something happening that I don't want. Change, for instance.
So I hovered up there with the other students who were so much more graceful than I was. Always. It goes without saying. But they weren't perhaps animated by the same sort of fossilizing fear that held me as if protected in its grip, not grip, but something in its own way ethereal, otherworldly. Embedded in me, in any case. The visuals shifted in front of us, square panels with humans in the air, actually us. I don't know quite what, there were skyscrapers or cornfields in the background. A grid anyway. That was comforting. My foot touched the bleachers behind me, or above me, or back there somewhere. I hooked my foot and hung swinging. Get your shoulders down, away from your ears, the teacher said. Engage your core. Focus. Whatever you do, don't look at your feet.
As I looked at my feet or through them, I saw her gliding, Andrea, so beautiful and in control -- she was so poised she could also do the arm movements, as synchronized, so antiquarian. Whereas I huddled freezing on the side, my foot snagged, my eye all over the room. What would it be like to be nothing but an eye? To wander everywhere, to be virtual and free of risk? "Pleasures of reason are subject to a natural growth or development, reflective of the development of the understanding" (Donald Rutherford). My own reason hung deliciously suspended, it swayed and waited. Did that mean I was secretly happy to be so afraid?
The bleachers went down in reverse. That is: instead of each row extending further than the row above, they went the other way. Or I was looking at them upside down, that had to be the reason. So if I just turned my own self upside down.... And then the hunger to fall, to jump, to break through the non-substance separating me from the ground, that hunger would rest from its constant hunting for me and I could finally relax. I rescued my foot and stood motionless on the bleachers below me. . Then the bell rang and the strangers came plunging into the room. Immersed. And the clock moved forward.
I moved through the dungeons that were segregated by sweat, no, by sex. The grim statues of the warriors were staggered everywhere, too crude to go on display "upstairs". One was stuck with one sock on and one sock off, sock on sock off, another combing his hair like a hideous Spartan, another on the scale, frowning forever at the number he saw. Their balls clattered as their phantoms walked into the showers and washed themselves away. Now I climbed the old stairs and yet I found myself another floor down. How could that be? I felt the muscles in my legs. They were tired but it might have been the fatigue of going down instead of up. There didn't seem to be up just down. The room seemed to lie in the bowels of the world but there was a giant window, which seemed to have a ship embossed on it, no it was moving toward us at an angle. Then the building prudently turned and avoided the crash. All the weights clanked down. The Punishment Room turned on its pivot. Ahead of me but inaccessibly aloft, Andrea was practicing her flying. Her arms moved in perfect arcs.
Think of pain as a massage. That was what my trainer had told me. There was said to be a point in the center of a lift where everything, even the lifter, lay perfectly poised. It was a sweet spot and a still place, full of meditation and the fruits of meditation, but it eluded me. All activity in the Room was sealed both ahead and behind (did I mean up and down?) by rows of hermetic screens, behind which the "scenes of torture and violence" ever played themselves into exhaustion, a form of entertainment for some -- or perhaps a lesson. A screenful of bleeding peasant farmers from a faraway land. A turgid remake of Psycho filmed in 3D and BloodVision. The deoculation scene from Let's Go Swimming. If you tried to look away you couldn't because where you looked away to had another screen. Indeed one felt sealed inside them, both in and out of the Klein bottle, oneself a Klein bottle. One sock on, one sock off. Oh how the enormous Punishment Room weight the spirit down and so like the Psalmist I lifted my eyes, trying to find at least the floating woman who could soar outside the pain. But lifting my eyes was now like lifting steel. Were the eyes then part of the physical body? Was there no escape?
But even mouthing the word "escape" assured me that there was one.
As in a dream I floated backward letting the images grow smaller -- but this was no dream because the space had its own technical specs, which no dream of mine could ever have. That is, I was in a place, with an integrity and intensity of its own. It existed outside me. I was merely here. If I wanted so very badly to renew my relationship with Heaven, I couldn't do it in this palce. It had to be broken down so it would stop blocking our sight of God.
I looked up but the rafters were completely dark. Horrible spotlights beamed down to hurt us.
The Nazi Kommandant's wife was in her customary place, near the door to the washroom and exit. She never left the place, she was always here. Some witch stood over her in trainer's costume of saturated black. She lay on her back holding the weight, the excessive impossible weight halfway aloft. She was too weak to bob it back into its rack. It was too much of a thing to rest on her emaciated chest. So it just hovered. And the trainer did nothing to help. I stepped forward to lend assistance and I bumped into glass. We rested on the curves of the bottle. The woman was real but she was also an exhibit. What then to say about oneself? A weakness and depression began trying to enclose me or seal me off really, like a giant piece of cellophane, which I knew I'd never escape if I once let it get onto me and attached. But no. What this place lacked but what I surely had were alternatives.
I needed to pee so badly and the door to the washroom had as it were climbed to the other side of the gym. That old familiar slog to something that receded from you, a losing game. It was a pinprick in the distance, a painful rhythmic throbbing. This was the pain that wished to be subject not object -- wished not just to be felt but to be the one feeling you and then simply take over. I willed myself to ignore it because there was something else that needed to be done first.
Squeezing around the staticky flickering glass of the TV screens I stepped forward to where someone very special lay. He was so delicate that I wasn't even able to see him except when I had fasted, meditated and slowed my own seeking down. To see him you had to be in almost a hallucinatory state, one that left you unprotected from the world. I cannot explain it more coherently than that.
The ship lurched as I moved forward. He too lay on a bench, he too was oppressed by some weight. It didn't matter how much, any amount was too much. He was structurally nothing, a blob, a white larval shape. There was nothing to be called a carapace, a shell, a skeleton, not even bones. You might say I'd not known the meaning of the word naked before. He was so frail that the slightest touch, I suppose, would break him and kill him. He was like a man of soft foam. And with weights hovering above him!
The gassy liquid in my stomach began to knead itself and leap in its hissing swamp. As so often, my heart seemed to be in my penis and my bowels. And the lights on the ceiling were sputtering. Disastrous music played.
I myself was mostly foam.
I reached down or tried to, I tried to pick up that anomalous weight hovering above him. Dear one, let me take that thing away from you. But my fingers were just froth, they could not establish a grip on the bar nor could the bar hold still. Like a vision the things melted in front of me. And at that point the vision came to an end.
12/24-12/30/08
I don't know what it is about heights. Perhaps that they aren't there. You are high, you look down and see the ground and recognize that there is nothing between. Nothing really. It's space, yes, but you see through it. It might as well be nothing. You are virtually touching the ground so why not just go there or be there or admit that you already are? Oh no no no, I say. I'm not doing that. I have an enormous will for negativity. I can't do anything but I am very powerful at resisting something happening that I don't want. Change, for instance.
So I hovered up there with the other students who were so much more graceful than I was. Always. It goes without saying. But they weren't perhaps animated by the same sort of fossilizing fear that held me as if protected in its grip, not grip, but something in its own way ethereal, otherworldly. Embedded in me, in any case. The visuals shifted in front of us, square panels with humans in the air, actually us. I don't know quite what, there were skyscrapers or cornfields in the background. A grid anyway. That was comforting. My foot touched the bleachers behind me, or above me, or back there somewhere. I hooked my foot and hung swinging. Get your shoulders down, away from your ears, the teacher said. Engage your core. Focus. Whatever you do, don't look at your feet.
As I looked at my feet or through them, I saw her gliding, Andrea, so beautiful and in control -- she was so poised she could also do the arm movements, as synchronized, so antiquarian. Whereas I huddled freezing on the side, my foot snagged, my eye all over the room. What would it be like to be nothing but an eye? To wander everywhere, to be virtual and free of risk? "Pleasures of reason are subject to a natural growth or development, reflective of the development of the understanding" (Donald Rutherford). My own reason hung deliciously suspended, it swayed and waited. Did that mean I was secretly happy to be so afraid?
The bleachers went down in reverse. That is: instead of each row extending further than the row above, they went the other way. Or I was looking at them upside down, that had to be the reason. So if I just turned my own self upside down.... And then the hunger to fall, to jump, to break through the non-substance separating me from the ground, that hunger would rest from its constant hunting for me and I could finally relax. I rescued my foot and stood motionless on the bleachers below me. . Then the bell rang and the strangers came plunging into the room. Immersed. And the clock moved forward.
I moved through the dungeons that were segregated by sweat, no, by sex. The grim statues of the warriors were staggered everywhere, too crude to go on display "upstairs". One was stuck with one sock on and one sock off, sock on sock off, another combing his hair like a hideous Spartan, another on the scale, frowning forever at the number he saw. Their balls clattered as their phantoms walked into the showers and washed themselves away. Now I climbed the old stairs and yet I found myself another floor down. How could that be? I felt the muscles in my legs. They were tired but it might have been the fatigue of going down instead of up. There didn't seem to be up just down. The room seemed to lie in the bowels of the world but there was a giant window, which seemed to have a ship embossed on it, no it was moving toward us at an angle. Then the building prudently turned and avoided the crash. All the weights clanked down. The Punishment Room turned on its pivot. Ahead of me but inaccessibly aloft, Andrea was practicing her flying. Her arms moved in perfect arcs.
Think of pain as a massage. That was what my trainer had told me. There was said to be a point in the center of a lift where everything, even the lifter, lay perfectly poised. It was a sweet spot and a still place, full of meditation and the fruits of meditation, but it eluded me. All activity in the Room was sealed both ahead and behind (did I mean up and down?) by rows of hermetic screens, behind which the "scenes of torture and violence" ever played themselves into exhaustion, a form of entertainment for some -- or perhaps a lesson. A screenful of bleeding peasant farmers from a faraway land. A turgid remake of Psycho filmed in 3D and BloodVision. The deoculation scene from Let's Go Swimming. If you tried to look away you couldn't because where you looked away to had another screen. Indeed one felt sealed inside them, both in and out of the Klein bottle, oneself a Klein bottle. One sock on, one sock off. Oh how the enormous Punishment Room weight the spirit down and so like the Psalmist I lifted my eyes, trying to find at least the floating woman who could soar outside the pain. But lifting my eyes was now like lifting steel. Were the eyes then part of the physical body? Was there no escape?
But even mouthing the word "escape" assured me that there was one.
As in a dream I floated backward letting the images grow smaller -- but this was no dream because the space had its own technical specs, which no dream of mine could ever have. That is, I was in a place, with an integrity and intensity of its own. It existed outside me. I was merely here. If I wanted so very badly to renew my relationship with Heaven, I couldn't do it in this palce. It had to be broken down so it would stop blocking our sight of God.
I looked up but the rafters were completely dark. Horrible spotlights beamed down to hurt us.
The Nazi Kommandant's wife was in her customary place, near the door to the washroom and exit. She never left the place, she was always here. Some witch stood over her in trainer's costume of saturated black. She lay on her back holding the weight, the excessive impossible weight halfway aloft. She was too weak to bob it back into its rack. It was too much of a thing to rest on her emaciated chest. So it just hovered. And the trainer did nothing to help. I stepped forward to lend assistance and I bumped into glass. We rested on the curves of the bottle. The woman was real but she was also an exhibit. What then to say about oneself? A weakness and depression began trying to enclose me or seal me off really, like a giant piece of cellophane, which I knew I'd never escape if I once let it get onto me and attached. But no. What this place lacked but what I surely had were alternatives.
I needed to pee so badly and the door to the washroom had as it were climbed to the other side of the gym. That old familiar slog to something that receded from you, a losing game. It was a pinprick in the distance, a painful rhythmic throbbing. This was the pain that wished to be subject not object -- wished not just to be felt but to be the one feeling you and then simply take over. I willed myself to ignore it because there was something else that needed to be done first.
Squeezing around the staticky flickering glass of the TV screens I stepped forward to where someone very special lay. He was so delicate that I wasn't even able to see him except when I had fasted, meditated and slowed my own seeking down. To see him you had to be in almost a hallucinatory state, one that left you unprotected from the world. I cannot explain it more coherently than that.
The ship lurched as I moved forward. He too lay on a bench, he too was oppressed by some weight. It didn't matter how much, any amount was too much. He was structurally nothing, a blob, a white larval shape. There was nothing to be called a carapace, a shell, a skeleton, not even bones. You might say I'd not known the meaning of the word naked before. He was so frail that the slightest touch, I suppose, would break him and kill him. He was like a man of soft foam. And with weights hovering above him!
The gassy liquid in my stomach began to knead itself and leap in its hissing swamp. As so often, my heart seemed to be in my penis and my bowels. And the lights on the ceiling were sputtering. Disastrous music played.
I myself was mostly foam.
I reached down or tried to, I tried to pick up that anomalous weight hovering above him. Dear one, let me take that thing away from you. But my fingers were just froth, they could not establish a grip on the bar nor could the bar hold still. Like a vision the things melted in front of me. And at that point the vision came to an end.
12/24-12/30/08
Thursday, April 09, 2009
Good Friday reflection
*
As Jesus walks or stumbles toward his death, he encounters the women. In Luke they are called "daughters of Jerusalem", nothing more. They lament the crime that is coming to pass and that they cannot stop. They are powerless. In the way the world measures power they have none at all. And Luke doesn't even tell us their names. It is amazing how many women in the Bible don't even have names. The Syro-Phoenician woman. The widow with the mite. The widow with the judge. They have no names yet we know intensely who they are.
Here at this moment in time you almost feel the Gospel writers are saying: Look how low Jesus has now fallen. All the men have fled. There are only women.
Only?
Only women? If the women in the Bible are only women, if they have no worldly power, why do they strike us, strike me, as of an awesome power? What is power anyway?
On Good Friday all power seems to be veiled and put away. It's true that some toy soldiers are moving forward to inflict terrible pain, a murder, but the soldiers and officials don't feel powerful. They are mechanical, as empty as machines. Evil has no freedom of movement, it is just a stereotype.
For us the power of Friday is in the figure moving to his cross. And it is surely in those women. Because they are there. They have shown up, they are present, they witness. They are with Jesus. They don't need titles and sometimes not even names to be fairly the most powerful people on the planet. How could that be? What is the power? It is not a power that can be cashed in or used. If you are Jesus's closest, witness, that's something you can't trade in for something more valuable. Nothing is more valuable than that.
These women are at the center. I want to stand next to them. At least I say that now but had I lived in their time there's a good chance that I would have scorned them as the other men were doing. Let's face it. there's a good chance I would have scorned Jesus too. Within my historical moment I am a coward and a conformist too. Anyway you have to take a contemplative distance to understand the deep worth of something that you take for granted when you just live with it day by day.
Gazing at these amazing women I can't help thinking of my mother. She was like your mother: a totally unique and powerful being who hid like so many women of the 50s and 60s inside a cloak of anonymity. In a way she didn't expect people to notice her. When she did something she certainly didn't expect it to be acknowledged or rewarded. When I was a suicidal teenager she saved my life, I think more than once. Well, isn't that what women just did? She was a life-giver and a life-saver. Hey, no awards were going to be passed out for that. Aren't life-givers pretty common?
But now she's dead and very few people on earth even know her name. And I would give just about anything to be able to stand next to her now.
*
As Jesus walks or stumbles toward his death, he encounters the women. In Luke they are called "daughters of Jerusalem", nothing more. They lament the crime that is coming to pass and that they cannot stop. They are powerless. In the way the world measures power they have none at all. And Luke doesn't even tell us their names. It is amazing how many women in the Bible don't even have names. The Syro-Phoenician woman. The widow with the mite. The widow with the judge. They have no names yet we know intensely who they are.
Here at this moment in time you almost feel the Gospel writers are saying: Look how low Jesus has now fallen. All the men have fled. There are only women.
Only?
Only women? If the women in the Bible are only women, if they have no worldly power, why do they strike us, strike me, as of an awesome power? What is power anyway?
On Good Friday all power seems to be veiled and put away. It's true that some toy soldiers are moving forward to inflict terrible pain, a murder, but the soldiers and officials don't feel powerful. They are mechanical, as empty as machines. Evil has no freedom of movement, it is just a stereotype.
For us the power of Friday is in the figure moving to his cross. And it is surely in those women. Because they are there. They have shown up, they are present, they witness. They are with Jesus. They don't need titles and sometimes not even names to be fairly the most powerful people on the planet. How could that be? What is the power? It is not a power that can be cashed in or used. If you are Jesus's closest, witness, that's something you can't trade in for something more valuable. Nothing is more valuable than that.
These women are at the center. I want to stand next to them. At least I say that now but had I lived in their time there's a good chance that I would have scorned them as the other men were doing. Let's face it. there's a good chance I would have scorned Jesus too. Within my historical moment I am a coward and a conformist too. Anyway you have to take a contemplative distance to understand the deep worth of something that you take for granted when you just live with it day by day.
Gazing at these amazing women I can't help thinking of my mother. She was like your mother: a totally unique and powerful being who hid like so many women of the 50s and 60s inside a cloak of anonymity. In a way she didn't expect people to notice her. When she did something she certainly didn't expect it to be acknowledged or rewarded. When I was a suicidal teenager she saved my life, I think more than once. Well, isn't that what women just did? She was a life-giver and a life-saver. Hey, no awards were going to be passed out for that. Aren't life-givers pretty common?
But now she's dead and very few people on earth even know her name. And I would give just about anything to be able to stand next to her now.
*
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
Story: Sam and me
*
I was so young. I dreamed of falling into the arms of a man. Then what? Feeling safe? There was nothing about a man or his arms that guaranteed safety. I knew what a man was. I even knew from the inside. They were all as dumb and as blind as I was. It made no sense to love them so much. But sense was something on the sidelines. I dreamed of his arms.
Sam was my confessor, spiritual guide. He was somewhat fat -- I loved fat men. He had arms that looked just right to me. I confessed many sorts of things to him but one thing I was careful not to confess to him, the love itself, my love for him, that remained unspoken and even undemonstrated. So the confessions were incomplete from the very start and oddly, paradoxically, became even more so as my love for him grew. That is, the larger it became, the more there was to hide from him. More and more as the time went by. Finally, the thing that filled my life was the one thing I couldn't say.
And, you know, as I loved him more and more, in a way I respected him less and less. Because he had no idea at all about the terrible thing playing me. He was wiser than most people I knew and at the same time very blind. Insofar as it could, my love expanded within his blindness. A piece of art for art's sake, a thing with no application at all.
He took me to his gym. Bad idea! I tried to turn away as he unwrapped the cloth and linen from his toasty body. He was indifferent to his own physical presence, the way straight men used to be, in the early eighties, say, before they came to recognize that they were pretty too, like the women that they long for. We ran along the trail, hearing highway noise that couldn't touch us. The knees sang. I was so happy in that temporary way. He was very fit for his size. Some sort of tank. Sam.
The horrible part of my divorce, he said, is that I not only miss the kids but I still love her, as much as the day we married.
I could not control my drinking and I still can't. I spend all my time running away from it. I can't actually achieve anything because I'm still running.
Kid, you are so lucky not to have an obsession like that. I do have obsessions and they're huge, I said. I was sliding open the door to my own revelation and definitely keeping it closed at the same time. Unfortunately I am great at keeping closed.
Sam, like most of the other clergy that I'd met, and all of the best of them, "supported gay rights", even fervently but he didn't have a clue what it might mean to be gay, how deep it went. He thought it was a "way of life". Without wanting to, straight people really did think it might be something superficial like a "choice". They of course didn't feel the power, the trembling. I mean, they didn't feel where it was centered.
We walked through the leafy labyrinth. He kept touching my shoulder, hugging me. Each time it felt as though my skin would simply slither off and I would just become a pool of liquid. The sheer unplaceable feeling of it. Oh you poor paralyzed penis, you don't fit anywhere! It was a gun that pointed more at me than at him. Back in the locker room I didn't know what to do. I went to the john and tried the squeeze the feeling out.. Toothpaste from a tube. In soreness longing only grew. He was so beautiful, so warm, he was more than a man to me. How could that be? What could it mean?
I was in love with his goodness -- his goodness heated me up. I didn't want to soil him, i just wanted him.
An icon with God flashing through? More likely utter idolatry? As I stepped into the shower with him I became Russia, as in a game we used to play in college. Russia? Big sad place. People on their own offering sweet kindness, giving rubles to strangers. But unable to take charge. Unable to organize. Soaked in booze. Riddled with corruption but not really corrupt, just unable to cough it up and spit it out. So decay stayed put like an absolute given. Oh, they were so resigned and their resignation was like steps that criminals climbed -- the steps basically the backs of humans who couldn't remember how to stand up again. Really we longed for a strong man to pick us up. We craved a strong man, a man without doubts. That was Russia, frozen in fear. Not healthy at all. Not likely to get better. And yet there midst all the ball-clashing warriors, the naked strangers, there was Sam, not exactly America but a little bit like America. Warm, brown and completely oblivious of me. It almost seemed that if I touched him he wouldn't make the effort to feel the touch. Oh, this dissolution of my soul, it couldn't be good.
Sam, nights dreaming of you. Mornings recovering from what didn't even happen. Sam.
So. Established distance. Went weeks without seeing you. Sam. Wandered the street at night instead of sleeping. Scrutinized every man I passed. Ah, Sam, scrutinized was the wrong word, an unhappy word. What they were was to me completely veiled. It was the veil I studied and got lost in. The shape of the groin, that I memorized. Idolatry? But none of the words applied correctly.
When I saw someone who looked like you, I would be pretty much devastated, Sam. And many did look like you. Like but not really like enough, not the same, so nothing like.
Grace fell on me even in my bad dreams. I felt affection -- well, ignorance but also affection -- for every man on earth. Any color. Any class. The unbeautiful in fact were what they were claimed not to be. Ravishing. Important. And the women I loved even because they couldn't hurt me.
Trashy roads, dangerous, with these guys like angels walking along. Sam, there was a grace. Not to mention searing pain. A spear from my throat to my butt.
In the bars, Sam. Places you would never go. Hot ones leaning back, peeling the label off their beerbottles. Feeling mentation drain. Too much noise to think through. People liked that. Music like hot syrup from the speakers. Agitation. Vital energies leaking into the darkness. So much motion would have to land somewhere. I had had to fast for a blood test, so why not? just continued the fast. So I was light headed and next to hallucination. The guy that looked most like you was at the top of the stairs, theatrical. In a single beat he just fell forward like a panel of flesh, down the stairs, joints like water. It would be some drug the rest of us never heard of. Solemn Samoan bouncers carried him out of the house, forever. Miguel stood next to me. Never ever do that, he said.
I dreamed that night of a larva, soft and white, a creature so soft that the smallest touch would crumple it and pulp it into juice. Sadness, so vulnerable -- why would anything let itself be so easily attacked? Then the morning tried to pull itself together. Was that dream creature me? Or was that a form of God, daring to enter the world without armor?
I needed my guide to help me ponder things. But it wasn't even safe to go near him, that is, near you. You you. I was left exposed to Jesus without mediation. Sitting on the edge of my bed I shook softly and silently four times but no. It wasn't that I shook but that I was shaken. Not alone, I wasn't at all.
Miguel Miguel. I found him at the coffee house and tugged him by his sleeve, for all the world like a spoiled child, right, not far from the truth, both spoiled and child. Take me home with you Miguel. Please. Let's not wait.
I need to f*******ck you instantly.
What's got into you, crazy boy? he asked. Is it that you've lost access to your clay angel?
To fat old Sam, that pious fake of yours. Then I kissed him to shut him up and he finally got up from his couch. It was low low low. Somehow we got to his apartment and climbed the stairs.
Miguel was someone that to my shame (but sort of a numb shame because, in fact, I barely thought about it) I had ignored and possibly in some strange way even scorned -- because he had always seemed to me a bit sluglike in his effeminacy and we straightish looking guys were always afraid of getting near and suffering contagion -- this is a disgusting thing for me to say much less admit and I wouldn't say it except that if I don't tell the whole truth, why even bother? But now the cards had all restacked in a different order because 1) he'd gone to church with me and knew Father Sam too; 2) being feminine is not such a bad thing, is it?; and 3) well, Miguel had this odd Miguel quality that could not be scorned. Not in my condition for sure.
He opened the door, I jumped onto the bed like a beached fish and then the wonderful part began. Ignoring my infused genitals as though they weren't even there, he slipped off my bloody shoes and solemnly caressed my feet and that was it. When I squirmed on the bed he grabbed them from a different angle that was all.
These have been stepped on and despised too long, he said.
Little wallflowers always sitting in their cardtable chairs, at the rim of the dance floor, my poor little feet, always having to dance but never being asked to dance. They melted under the unexpected attention as the rest of the body drifted into and out of sleep. Could feet be awake by themselves?
I left him at 5 am. We had been intimate but hadn't had sex, which a lot of people considered to be impossible, not to mention a loss of time. The expression "like a virgin", what it really signified was a time when knowing a person had multiple tracks, deepening intimacy that didn't go only one direction. Maybe Freud was upside down and sex was not the substructure of everything else but itself only a superstructure of something richer and leafily truer, whose existence we had stopped noticing or suspecting. You know, Miguel said, you are really a bottom at heart. You are not afraid of black men, you're comfortable with women even when they lead, you treated with respect, at least once you let yourself do it. You're a bottom pretending to be a top. That's part of being a Christian anyway. The bottom. The shame.
You know, he said, it used to hurt me so much to see you walking through that bar, twisted tighter than a pretzel. Trying to be so tough.
In the morning I had to rush away from my chaste friend. In the courtyard beautiful Lili and the others were rushing to their yoga. We kissed like apples bobbing. I had to rush home to get ready for work.
In the shower I thought about Sam. I still loved him but didn't crave him like a bad food anymore. Let that person be. I could feel him in the water but didn't try. Let it go. I will set you free of me and me free of you. My little cross bounced on my clavicle. Sam Sam Sam.
I dressed and went in to work, sort of a long ten hour sleep. Then I climbed out and scrambled home, stopping at Sam's apartment on the way -- thinking I could risk at least that. I assumed we could interact like 2 normal humans, whatever shape that interaction might take. I found him packing boxes in a half-empty echoey room. Man, I'm so glad to see you and get a chance to say goodbye.
I started helping him fill a box, moron that I am. I had to move slowly because the foundation of the floor was not quite steady. The world rocked and changed its angle like a heavy boat or rather a light boat with something very heavy in it. Looking out the window you might see west, you might see south. I had to hold my body still.
I wanted to be free of him but I didn't want him to leave. I was still lost in something like idolatry. What was so damaged in me that this could happen?
I have to go try to patch things up a little bit and at least see the children, take care of them or try, he said. It's been like living with half my organs removed. You're so stable you maybe won't understand -- how unstable and incomplete I feel. There are aspects to marriage that maybe you'll never know, in your situation. And I wonder if you're the lucky one. We all know it's better not to be so bound to the world.
As he talked I managed to look at him and saw -- something unexpected -- the image of someone I would soon not be seeing, I mean, I already saw him a thousand miles away, and me right here, trying not to stagger as the room moved like that idiotic boat. A big chunk of something was missing right next to my heart, on top of my heart. How did it feel? Was the best thing to have it just forcibly pulled out like this?
I was like a dog who'd just been given an exotic worrisome treat -- maybe it was toxic, maybe not -- and who urgently needed to take it into solitude, to taste it and break it down and see what it really was.
*
I was so young. I dreamed of falling into the arms of a man. Then what? Feeling safe? There was nothing about a man or his arms that guaranteed safety. I knew what a man was. I even knew from the inside. They were all as dumb and as blind as I was. It made no sense to love them so much. But sense was something on the sidelines. I dreamed of his arms.
Sam was my confessor, spiritual guide. He was somewhat fat -- I loved fat men. He had arms that looked just right to me. I confessed many sorts of things to him but one thing I was careful not to confess to him, the love itself, my love for him, that remained unspoken and even undemonstrated. So the confessions were incomplete from the very start and oddly, paradoxically, became even more so as my love for him grew. That is, the larger it became, the more there was to hide from him. More and more as the time went by. Finally, the thing that filled my life was the one thing I couldn't say.
And, you know, as I loved him more and more, in a way I respected him less and less. Because he had no idea at all about the terrible thing playing me. He was wiser than most people I knew and at the same time very blind. Insofar as it could, my love expanded within his blindness. A piece of art for art's sake, a thing with no application at all.
He took me to his gym. Bad idea! I tried to turn away as he unwrapped the cloth and linen from his toasty body. He was indifferent to his own physical presence, the way straight men used to be, in the early eighties, say, before they came to recognize that they were pretty too, like the women that they long for. We ran along the trail, hearing highway noise that couldn't touch us. The knees sang. I was so happy in that temporary way. He was very fit for his size. Some sort of tank. Sam.
The horrible part of my divorce, he said, is that I not only miss the kids but I still love her, as much as the day we married.
I could not control my drinking and I still can't. I spend all my time running away from it. I can't actually achieve anything because I'm still running.
Kid, you are so lucky not to have an obsession like that. I do have obsessions and they're huge, I said. I was sliding open the door to my own revelation and definitely keeping it closed at the same time. Unfortunately I am great at keeping closed.
Sam, like most of the other clergy that I'd met, and all of the best of them, "supported gay rights", even fervently but he didn't have a clue what it might mean to be gay, how deep it went. He thought it was a "way of life". Without wanting to, straight people really did think it might be something superficial like a "choice". They of course didn't feel the power, the trembling. I mean, they didn't feel where it was centered.
We walked through the leafy labyrinth. He kept touching my shoulder, hugging me. Each time it felt as though my skin would simply slither off and I would just become a pool of liquid. The sheer unplaceable feeling of it. Oh you poor paralyzed penis, you don't fit anywhere! It was a gun that pointed more at me than at him. Back in the locker room I didn't know what to do. I went to the john and tried the squeeze the feeling out.. Toothpaste from a tube. In soreness longing only grew. He was so beautiful, so warm, he was more than a man to me. How could that be? What could it mean?
I was in love with his goodness -- his goodness heated me up. I didn't want to soil him, i just wanted him.
An icon with God flashing through? More likely utter idolatry? As I stepped into the shower with him I became Russia, as in a game we used to play in college. Russia? Big sad place. People on their own offering sweet kindness, giving rubles to strangers. But unable to take charge. Unable to organize. Soaked in booze. Riddled with corruption but not really corrupt, just unable to cough it up and spit it out. So decay stayed put like an absolute given. Oh, they were so resigned and their resignation was like steps that criminals climbed -- the steps basically the backs of humans who couldn't remember how to stand up again. Really we longed for a strong man to pick us up. We craved a strong man, a man without doubts. That was Russia, frozen in fear. Not healthy at all. Not likely to get better. And yet there midst all the ball-clashing warriors, the naked strangers, there was Sam, not exactly America but a little bit like America. Warm, brown and completely oblivious of me. It almost seemed that if I touched him he wouldn't make the effort to feel the touch. Oh, this dissolution of my soul, it couldn't be good.
Sam, nights dreaming of you. Mornings recovering from what didn't even happen. Sam.
So. Established distance. Went weeks without seeing you. Sam. Wandered the street at night instead of sleeping. Scrutinized every man I passed. Ah, Sam, scrutinized was the wrong word, an unhappy word. What they were was to me completely veiled. It was the veil I studied and got lost in. The shape of the groin, that I memorized. Idolatry? But none of the words applied correctly.
When I saw someone who looked like you, I would be pretty much devastated, Sam. And many did look like you. Like but not really like enough, not the same, so nothing like.
Grace fell on me even in my bad dreams. I felt affection -- well, ignorance but also affection -- for every man on earth. Any color. Any class. The unbeautiful in fact were what they were claimed not to be. Ravishing. Important. And the women I loved even because they couldn't hurt me.
Trashy roads, dangerous, with these guys like angels walking along. Sam, there was a grace. Not to mention searing pain. A spear from my throat to my butt.
In the bars, Sam. Places you would never go. Hot ones leaning back, peeling the label off their beerbottles. Feeling mentation drain. Too much noise to think through. People liked that. Music like hot syrup from the speakers. Agitation. Vital energies leaking into the darkness. So much motion would have to land somewhere. I had had to fast for a blood test, so why not? just continued the fast. So I was light headed and next to hallucination. The guy that looked most like you was at the top of the stairs, theatrical. In a single beat he just fell forward like a panel of flesh, down the stairs, joints like water. It would be some drug the rest of us never heard of. Solemn Samoan bouncers carried him out of the house, forever. Miguel stood next to me. Never ever do that, he said.
I dreamed that night of a larva, soft and white, a creature so soft that the smallest touch would crumple it and pulp it into juice. Sadness, so vulnerable -- why would anything let itself be so easily attacked? Then the morning tried to pull itself together. Was that dream creature me? Or was that a form of God, daring to enter the world without armor?
I needed my guide to help me ponder things. But it wasn't even safe to go near him, that is, near you. You you. I was left exposed to Jesus without mediation. Sitting on the edge of my bed I shook softly and silently four times but no. It wasn't that I shook but that I was shaken. Not alone, I wasn't at all.
Miguel Miguel. I found him at the coffee house and tugged him by his sleeve, for all the world like a spoiled child, right, not far from the truth, both spoiled and child. Take me home with you Miguel. Please. Let's not wait.
I need to f*******ck you instantly.
What's got into you, crazy boy? he asked. Is it that you've lost access to your clay angel?
To fat old Sam, that pious fake of yours. Then I kissed him to shut him up and he finally got up from his couch. It was low low low. Somehow we got to his apartment and climbed the stairs.
Miguel was someone that to my shame (but sort of a numb shame because, in fact, I barely thought about it) I had ignored and possibly in some strange way even scorned -- because he had always seemed to me a bit sluglike in his effeminacy and we straightish looking guys were always afraid of getting near and suffering contagion -- this is a disgusting thing for me to say much less admit and I wouldn't say it except that if I don't tell the whole truth, why even bother? But now the cards had all restacked in a different order because 1) he'd gone to church with me and knew Father Sam too; 2) being feminine is not such a bad thing, is it?; and 3) well, Miguel had this odd Miguel quality that could not be scorned. Not in my condition for sure.
He opened the door, I jumped onto the bed like a beached fish and then the wonderful part began. Ignoring my infused genitals as though they weren't even there, he slipped off my bloody shoes and solemnly caressed my feet and that was it. When I squirmed on the bed he grabbed them from a different angle that was all.
These have been stepped on and despised too long, he said.
Little wallflowers always sitting in their cardtable chairs, at the rim of the dance floor, my poor little feet, always having to dance but never being asked to dance. They melted under the unexpected attention as the rest of the body drifted into and out of sleep. Could feet be awake by themselves?
I left him at 5 am. We had been intimate but hadn't had sex, which a lot of people considered to be impossible, not to mention a loss of time. The expression "like a virgin", what it really signified was a time when knowing a person had multiple tracks, deepening intimacy that didn't go only one direction. Maybe Freud was upside down and sex was not the substructure of everything else but itself only a superstructure of something richer and leafily truer, whose existence we had stopped noticing or suspecting. You know, Miguel said, you are really a bottom at heart. You are not afraid of black men, you're comfortable with women even when they lead, you treated with respect, at least once you let yourself do it. You're a bottom pretending to be a top. That's part of being a Christian anyway. The bottom. The shame.
You know, he said, it used to hurt me so much to see you walking through that bar, twisted tighter than a pretzel. Trying to be so tough.
In the morning I had to rush away from my chaste friend. In the courtyard beautiful Lili and the others were rushing to their yoga. We kissed like apples bobbing. I had to rush home to get ready for work.
In the shower I thought about Sam. I still loved him but didn't crave him like a bad food anymore. Let that person be. I could feel him in the water but didn't try. Let it go. I will set you free of me and me free of you. My little cross bounced on my clavicle. Sam Sam Sam.
I dressed and went in to work, sort of a long ten hour sleep. Then I climbed out and scrambled home, stopping at Sam's apartment on the way -- thinking I could risk at least that. I assumed we could interact like 2 normal humans, whatever shape that interaction might take. I found him packing boxes in a half-empty echoey room. Man, I'm so glad to see you and get a chance to say goodbye.
I started helping him fill a box, moron that I am. I had to move slowly because the foundation of the floor was not quite steady. The world rocked and changed its angle like a heavy boat or rather a light boat with something very heavy in it. Looking out the window you might see west, you might see south. I had to hold my body still.
I wanted to be free of him but I didn't want him to leave. I was still lost in something like idolatry. What was so damaged in me that this could happen?
I have to go try to patch things up a little bit and at least see the children, take care of them or try, he said. It's been like living with half my organs removed. You're so stable you maybe won't understand -- how unstable and incomplete I feel. There are aspects to marriage that maybe you'll never know, in your situation. And I wonder if you're the lucky one. We all know it's better not to be so bound to the world.
As he talked I managed to look at him and saw -- something unexpected -- the image of someone I would soon not be seeing, I mean, I already saw him a thousand miles away, and me right here, trying not to stagger as the room moved like that idiotic boat. A big chunk of something was missing right next to my heart, on top of my heart. How did it feel? Was the best thing to have it just forcibly pulled out like this?
I was like a dog who'd just been given an exotic worrisome treat -- maybe it was toxic, maybe not -- and who urgently needed to take it into solitude, to taste it and break it down and see what it really was.
*
Sunday, November 09, 2008
Poem: In the kitchen
*
As close to me
as my own breath
were the people I
expected to be with
forever -- she sat, she stood
in the kitchen so familiar
that I didn't even need
to look at her to see her.
In my memory a crumb falls
& the dog is there
brushing my ankles
with a sweet puff of air
& everything taken
beautifully for granted
as an eternal routine
until it ended.
*
As close to me
as my own breath
were the people I
expected to be with
forever -- she sat, she stood
in the kitchen so familiar
that I didn't even need
to look at her to see her.
In my memory a crumb falls
& the dog is there
brushing my ankles
with a sweet puff of air
& everything taken
beautifully for granted
as an eternal routine
until it ended.
*
Thursday, October 30, 2008
Poem: Prayable space
*
He'd been unbalanced
as long as he'd been,
and too often leaned against
himself and fallen.
He was immune
to the scientific
worship of reason
because of the hairline crack
in his own.
Reality
was what you could not contain
or share -- privacy
was its being,
its burden,
its flame, though perilous to hang
from or lean on.
Community was
only where you went to assuage
reality's
intensity and damage.
The fellowship was a mercy
like the physical
law
that broke one's fall
inward
to where
the word
of God pulsed with fear.
"It's only a movie."
Was he insane?
Or was insanity
what made him ask that question?
There was a small
puncture
hole
that widened and tore
all the secular,
a place that if justice
flourished anywhere
was its only access.
This hole formed into a cell
with birdsong spattered
on the wall:
so blue and serene was the word.
It was a house of prayer
where a brokenness churned
the air
and one's eyeballs burned.
I can speak
with you here
but no not speak:
I am nothing but ear.
Through some canal the known
world lay spread
in a prayable condition
where fate was liquid
again,
something to shuck
like a skin
or unfold like
a story
whose meaning
lay
in the future waiting.
The secular
caked in doubt
while something in its interior
spat him out
into a place
beyond destitution
that was
surely big enough for everyone.
He heard piano
music behind a door
that he could open if he wanted to --
it wasn't blocked anymore.
The person
whose place this was remained
unspoken and unknown
as the puncture hole widened.
*
He'd been unbalanced
as long as he'd been,
and too often leaned against
himself and fallen.
He was immune
to the scientific
worship of reason
because of the hairline crack
in his own.
Reality
was what you could not contain
or share -- privacy
was its being,
its burden,
its flame, though perilous to hang
from or lean on.
Community was
only where you went to assuage
reality's
intensity and damage.
The fellowship was a mercy
like the physical
law
that broke one's fall
inward
to where
the word
of God pulsed with fear.
"It's only a movie."
Was he insane?
Or was insanity
what made him ask that question?
There was a small
puncture
hole
that widened and tore
all the secular,
a place that if justice
flourished anywhere
was its only access.
This hole formed into a cell
with birdsong spattered
on the wall:
so blue and serene was the word.
It was a house of prayer
where a brokenness churned
the air
and one's eyeballs burned.
I can speak
with you here
but no not speak:
I am nothing but ear.
Through some canal the known
world lay spread
in a prayable condition
where fate was liquid
again,
something to shuck
like a skin
or unfold like
a story
whose meaning
lay
in the future waiting.
The secular
caked in doubt
while something in its interior
spat him out
into a place
beyond destitution
that was
surely big enough for everyone.
He heard piano
music behind a door
that he could open if he wanted to --
it wasn't blocked anymore.
The person
whose place this was remained
unspoken and unknown
as the puncture hole widened.
*
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
Poem: When I was sick
*
At 17 I had the flu
and couldn't go to school.
I boarded yet I barely knew
a single living soul.
My mother brought me nourishment.
I felt her come and go
but was too feverish and faint
to thank her. Did she know?
My sickness brought along this fear:
"your weakness is your fate".
But her strength saved me from despair
and she would sit up late.
And now I'm strong and she is dead
but it still seems more fitting
the other way: me sick in bed
her at my bed's edge sitting.
*
At 17 I had the flu
and couldn't go to school.
I boarded yet I barely knew
a single living soul.
My mother brought me nourishment.
I felt her come and go
but was too feverish and faint
to thank her. Did she know?
My sickness brought along this fear:
"your weakness is your fate".
But her strength saved me from despair
and she would sit up late.
And now I'm strong and she is dead
but it still seems more fitting
the other way: me sick in bed
her at my bed's edge sitting.
*
Monday, September 29, 2008
Poem: Wax
*
She was wax
in the sun --
existence had to fix
itself on someone.
Oh do not be
like the girl in the parking
lot leaning sullenly
on her thug's hip, enslaved so young.
Everywhere so many
frauds.
The only real authority
God's.
Can you go
blindly
and follow
someone you don't see,
slip the carapace
of pleasing
off, let the apparatus
of church fall with a clang,
let the inner
be exposed
though still too tender
to go outside?
She was not going anywhere.
Where she needed to be
was here
already.
If I could only
obey my own
feel for my
own intention,
nothing but wax
melting purpose-
fully in the flux
of that other one's purposes.
*
She was wax
in the sun --
existence had to fix
itself on someone.
Oh do not be
like the girl in the parking
lot leaning sullenly
on her thug's hip, enslaved so young.
Everywhere so many
frauds.
The only real authority
God's.
Can you go
blindly
and follow
someone you don't see,
slip the carapace
of pleasing
off, let the apparatus
of church fall with a clang,
let the inner
be exposed
though still too tender
to go outside?
She was not going anywhere.
Where she needed to be
was here
already.
If I could only
obey my own
feel for my
own intention,
nothing but wax
melting purpose-
fully in the flux
of that other one's purposes.
*
Monday, September 15, 2008
Poem: Disarray
*
A sense my disarray
brought me closer to God
on a pathway
almost never trod.
I can't judge I can't
and it's not
that I won't
but I can't do it.
God's own beauty
blew me up like a balloon
Without that air I was nobody
and nothing not even a man
So for me to be obsessed
was just to breathe
God was too close to be embraced
or even simply be with.
In the presence one said
no no give me space
I am buffeted --
but in absence distress
and the old disarray,
which was good
in its own way
because it told me what I wanted.
My craving for immediacy,
considered
okay in a sex criminal or junkie,
in a believer seemed weird,
like a lunge
into worship without
knowledge
to sustain it.
Probably whatever bad thing
anyone could say
about me would cling
as a truth and never flush away,
but my God! this poem
is not about me
but about him.
And he knows my disarray.
*
A sense my disarray
brought me closer to God
on a pathway
almost never trod.
I can't judge I can't
and it's not
that I won't
but I can't do it.
God's own beauty
blew me up like a balloon
Without that air I was nobody
and nothing not even a man
So for me to be obsessed
was just to breathe
God was too close to be embraced
or even simply be with.
In the presence one said
no no give me space
I am buffeted --
but in absence distress
and the old disarray,
which was good
in its own way
because it told me what I wanted.
My craving for immediacy,
considered
okay in a sex criminal or junkie,
in a believer seemed weird,
like a lunge
into worship without
knowledge
to sustain it.
Probably whatever bad thing
anyone could say
about me would cling
as a truth and never flush away,
but my God! this poem
is not about me
but about him.
And he knows my disarray.
*
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
Poem fragment: The X in the heart
*
In that country it was as if
everyone
was forced to be alive
because deaths were none
deaths were not but only
people disappeared
as if they moved away
without a way to forward.
The deceased
there was not one example of
so it was hard not to exist.
Everyone was alive.
But there was a hole
in the flank of one house
& the people
inside were in distress
at the mess and unfixedness,
her bookshelves lined with gods,
her walls deep with celebrities
in defiant attitudes,
but where was she?
She didn't
even say
where she went.
In the hall
dogs howled --
nobody could console
the child.
But look: everyone
who is is alive & nothing
is gone by definition
no one is missing
there
is only
here
the rest is pathology,
useless tears
of spoiled
children kicking tires.
The world it has been sealed
& those removed
we do not approach
or speak of or to -- we avoid
even their touch
& O! this X at the center
of our hearts no one
will look into ever ever.
We do not look no no -- just fall in.
& O! there are no words
to say or unsay,
only these dissonant chords
we will never play.
*
In that country it was as if
everyone
was forced to be alive
because deaths were none
deaths were not but only
people disappeared
as if they moved away
without a way to forward.
The deceased
there was not one example of
so it was hard not to exist.
Everyone was alive.
But there was a hole
in the flank of one house
& the people
inside were in distress
at the mess and unfixedness,
her bookshelves lined with gods,
her walls deep with celebrities
in defiant attitudes,
but where was she?
She didn't
even say
where she went.
In the hall
dogs howled --
nobody could console
the child.
But look: everyone
who is is alive & nothing
is gone by definition
no one is missing
there
is only
here
the rest is pathology,
useless tears
of spoiled
children kicking tires.
The world it has been sealed
& those removed
we do not approach
or speak of or to -- we avoid
even their touch
& O! this X at the center
of our hearts no one
will look into ever ever.
We do not look no no -- just fall in.
& O! there are no words
to say or unsay,
only these dissonant chords
we will never play.
*
Wednesday, August 13, 2008
Poem: Not by merit
*
It's not by merit
that I live.
By grace or by error -- not by right
I have what I have.
My worth
must be applied from outside --
rooted in the earth,
watered and fed
by one whose reflection
is what you see
when
you think you're seeing me --
the same one who shines
in you the same
way -- so we wear each other's reflections,
though we feel queasy inside them.
If we back away
from our being
kin -- if now we
seem bound by loathing,
that hatred
should in fact
be pointed
inward to the naked
self whose love
for you, that too
is of
the radiant one within you.
God's embodiment
is -- I don't know -- it is so humble,
so beautiful, so low -- I don't
know -- it is out of our control.
But how can people be
"hard to be with"
having the same being obscurely
underneath?
Such sickness in the news,
warmongers
so anxious
to break the mirrors
and deny that the God
who peers from an ugly face
might be their own God connected
to their own ugliness.
Suppose ugliness embraced
took on the semblance
of grace, suppose disgust
were self-directed violence,
suppose God not only was
but circulated
actively through the likes of us
unseen and unmerited,
would we change?
Would everything
become as strange
as our breathing?
If I woke would I give
you not my merit
but the real thing I have?
And would you accept it?
*
It's not by merit
that I live.
By grace or by error -- not by right
I have what I have.
My worth
must be applied from outside --
rooted in the earth,
watered and fed
by one whose reflection
is what you see
when
you think you're seeing me --
the same one who shines
in you the same
way -- so we wear each other's reflections,
though we feel queasy inside them.
If we back away
from our being
kin -- if now we
seem bound by loathing,
that hatred
should in fact
be pointed
inward to the naked
self whose love
for you, that too
is of
the radiant one within you.
God's embodiment
is -- I don't know -- it is so humble,
so beautiful, so low -- I don't
know -- it is out of our control.
But how can people be
"hard to be with"
having the same being obscurely
underneath?
Such sickness in the news,
warmongers
so anxious
to break the mirrors
and deny that the God
who peers from an ugly face
might be their own God connected
to their own ugliness.
Suppose ugliness embraced
took on the semblance
of grace, suppose disgust
were self-directed violence,
suppose God not only was
but circulated
actively through the likes of us
unseen and unmerited,
would we change?
Would everything
become as strange
as our breathing?
If I woke would I give
you not my merit
but the real thing I have?
And would you accept it?
*
Friday, August 01, 2008
Poem: Proving God
*
When they challenged me to "prove"
my God I was struck by the oddness:
you prove something you don't have.
What you have you simply witness.
God seemed too basic to prove.
But if this was too clear to me
even to be labelled "if"
why did so many others disagree?
There had to be mediation.
We couldn't both be right.
Truth can only be one -- but the more one
it is, the more it feels remote.
My sense of truth was near
but confused, not that it was
but that I was, I suppose, there was a blur
pressed against my soul's moist glass,
something it was all too easy
to call my own desire
but what use could that be?
I longed not for myself but for another.
The world had only one will
that I could feel and it was not
my own but thrust like a staple through my soul
and was blunt yet I couldn't fathom it,
never quite managed to understand, couldn't
write it down as a to do and do it
because the need was so relentless and insistent
and all of me was fastened to it.
There was pain like a shovel
unearthing the old site
of our first warm bonding -- it still
held -- just barely -- but
could not be used
or redeemed in the day to day
bob and weave that passed
like a history in me.
My life was of little use
even to me but I held on-
to it "for dear life" and it was dear as it was
even to exist for not much reason,
praying
for change not
actually changing
so not doing it only wanting it,
as though what I want-
ed still
wasn't
attainable only thinkable.
But only thinkable? one thought
absorbed all my interest
because stakes so high were bound into it
there could be no other contest.
There was only one contest
and all else
lost its ambition to exist
if this one were false.
Goodness leaked
from our world at a rate
so unbraked
that even the measure had gone flat.
Most of my heroes were dead now
and my own soul seemed to hover
at this perilously low
caressing pressure.
I prayed for sheer prayer
craving an external
power
to erect my own will
and the sun shafted me
on a beam of hot fluff stronger
than the most sinewy
human architecture.
There I lay on a spear that was thrown
by but not decoupled
from intention.
And if it pushed it also pulled.
*
When they challenged me to "prove"
my God I was struck by the oddness:
you prove something you don't have.
What you have you simply witness.
God seemed too basic to prove.
But if this was too clear to me
even to be labelled "if"
why did so many others disagree?
There had to be mediation.
We couldn't both be right.
Truth can only be one -- but the more one
it is, the more it feels remote.
My sense of truth was near
but confused, not that it was
but that I was, I suppose, there was a blur
pressed against my soul's moist glass,
something it was all too easy
to call my own desire
but what use could that be?
I longed not for myself but for another.
The world had only one will
that I could feel and it was not
my own but thrust like a staple through my soul
and was blunt yet I couldn't fathom it,
never quite managed to understand, couldn't
write it down as a to do and do it
because the need was so relentless and insistent
and all of me was fastened to it.
There was pain like a shovel
unearthing the old site
of our first warm bonding -- it still
held -- just barely -- but
could not be used
or redeemed in the day to day
bob and weave that passed
like a history in me.
My life was of little use
even to me but I held on-
to it "for dear life" and it was dear as it was
even to exist for not much reason,
praying
for change not
actually changing
so not doing it only wanting it,
as though what I want-
ed still
wasn't
attainable only thinkable.
But only thinkable? one thought
absorbed all my interest
because stakes so high were bound into it
there could be no other contest.
There was only one contest
and all else
lost its ambition to exist
if this one were false.
Goodness leaked
from our world at a rate
so unbraked
that even the measure had gone flat.
Most of my heroes were dead now
and my own soul seemed to hover
at this perilously low
caressing pressure.
I prayed for sheer prayer
craving an external
power
to erect my own will
and the sun shafted me
on a beam of hot fluff stronger
than the most sinewy
human architecture.
There I lay on a spear that was thrown
by but not decoupled
from intention.
And if it pushed it also pulled.
*
Wednesday, July 16, 2008
Poem: Law
*
it's just telepathy
embodied when
strangers obey
a law -- in their aggregation
the cars at 4 stops
move as one -- unless an outlaw
makes the design collapse
by moving when the law says no.
A good law is a quasi-nuclear
force drawing us
into harmonious measure
at best frictionless.
Hence the deeper meaning
in Auden's suave
phrasing --
"law is like love".
It's a thing that constrains
and annoys
its victims -- you don't have independence
if your acts synchronize.
But complaining is a token --
a symbol of time
at peace: we complain
like children bickering in a happy home
and there will never be a paradise
without bickering if
you conceive paradise as a place
where humans live.
What do I want
from the law?
Ideally I wouldn't
know or want to know
the law is there.
I would have the luxury
of our living without judging each other.
I would be free
"from" it "within" it.
It would never need to be
called upon but
in not being used would set us free
to float between gears
in grace... but this is hard
to imagine seeing how injustice powers
the forward plunge of our world,
and how compulsively
even good people cheat
each other as if by
nature, as if they can't help it.
Then I would have law
not be a human creation
at all but spread above and below
the human,
well beyond
anything a poet
can understand
or write about.
It would encompass
the dead and gone
not just those few of us
who hold life's microphone.
Law would be love
when those most broken
of all have
their tiny portion
of I want to say existence
but it must be
some form of transcendence
we can align with, not see,
an alignment so incomplete
that we
die by law, yet pray for it
to come in its way: that is, completely.
*
it's just telepathy
embodied when
strangers obey
a law -- in their aggregation
the cars at 4 stops
move as one -- unless an outlaw
makes the design collapse
by moving when the law says no.
A good law is a quasi-nuclear
force drawing us
into harmonious measure
at best frictionless.
Hence the deeper meaning
in Auden's suave
phrasing --
"law is like love".
It's a thing that constrains
and annoys
its victims -- you don't have independence
if your acts synchronize.
But complaining is a token --
a symbol of time
at peace: we complain
like children bickering in a happy home
and there will never be a paradise
without bickering if
you conceive paradise as a place
where humans live.
What do I want
from the law?
Ideally I wouldn't
know or want to know
the law is there.
I would have the luxury
of our living without judging each other.
I would be free
"from" it "within" it.
It would never need to be
called upon but
in not being used would set us free
to float between gears
in grace... but this is hard
to imagine seeing how injustice powers
the forward plunge of our world,
and how compulsively
even good people cheat
each other as if by
nature, as if they can't help it.
Then I would have law
not be a human creation
at all but spread above and below
the human,
well beyond
anything a poet
can understand
or write about.
It would encompass
the dead and gone
not just those few of us
who hold life's microphone.
Law would be love
when those most broken
of all have
their tiny portion
of I want to say existence
but it must be
some form of transcendence
we can align with, not see,
an alignment so incomplete
that we
die by law, yet pray for it
to come in its way: that is, completely.
*
Thursday, July 03, 2008
Poem: The voice
*
Where did he hear
God's voice or did
he hear it indeed, did he ever
hear a voice not his but so closely related
to his own
most intimately
hidden -- his own unable-to-be-spoken
hopes of what his own life might be
that the voice lay in his tongue
and not on his ear -- was not imposed
by circumstances commanding
but simply said what needed to be said?
It was no second you inside you
telling you what
to do
and what not,
no no, not so split.
The voice was full of a consent --
his own -- but it
was really consent, it was not constraint.
He would hear the voice then lose it
but the swing of the loss
kept him chasing the part not lost:
its rightness -- looseness --
the seam of confidence
embedded in the darkness
as if mere chance
had slipped and become conscious.
Was it possible? You could really know
what to do and lean
within this feel of assurance that held you
close and guided you in?
Suppose silence were like little wells
where God stored messaging
in virtual particles
through which our day to day swung?
How could one hear this?
Surely the body
acting would catch this voice --
or mask it more likely.
The trick would be not to cover it
with chatter but to listen
to the X squeezing the heart
for a terrible beat then gone.
The trick would be to stay open
for the can't-measure
length of endurance even
to begin to hear.
So... the poet's ear was open like
a bird's
hungry beak.
And God fed it with mysterious words.
*
Where did he hear
God's voice or did
he hear it indeed, did he ever
hear a voice not his but so closely related
to his own
most intimately
hidden -- his own unable-to-be-spoken
hopes of what his own life might be
that the voice lay in his tongue
and not on his ear -- was not imposed
by circumstances commanding
but simply said what needed to be said?
It was no second you inside you
telling you what
to do
and what not,
no no, not so split.
The voice was full of a consent --
his own -- but it
was really consent, it was not constraint.
He would hear the voice then lose it
but the swing of the loss
kept him chasing the part not lost:
its rightness -- looseness --
the seam of confidence
embedded in the darkness
as if mere chance
had slipped and become conscious.
Was it possible? You could really know
what to do and lean
within this feel of assurance that held you
close and guided you in?
Suppose silence were like little wells
where God stored messaging
in virtual particles
through which our day to day swung?
How could one hear this?
Surely the body
acting would catch this voice --
or mask it more likely.
The trick would be not to cover it
with chatter but to listen
to the X squeezing the heart
for a terrible beat then gone.
The trick would be to stay open
for the can't-measure
length of endurance even
to begin to hear.
So... the poet's ear was open like
a bird's
hungry beak.
And God fed it with mysterious words.
*
Wednesday, June 04, 2008
Poem: Soft strips of chance
*
In school he'd liked epigrams
and the way they could heave the most
unruly experiences into sums
that however simplified were not reduced.
A problem -- his own
work had never hooked the heart
of a distant person
caught up in shared hurt.
No poem was ever meant
to stand closed, intact
and pointlessly eloquent
but his did in fact.
But no. There was a cloud
of consciousness, like a chamois
cloth filled with wettest graphite, that stood
above the poem pulsing freely:
the ex-
ternal force of readership
that would flex
itself loose from an author's grip.
Around any willed object the abyss
of chance bit into that will -- but beyond
that abyss, in an almost mirrored place
a new consciousness took its stand.
So if he wrote well
(an "if" never proven)
that wellness might not be sterile,
if the reading were yet to happen,
and the randomness in
which writing lay
were a sort of moat beyond which recognition
slowly moved its eye.
In chance if there is chance there is no "unlikely"
or "impossible" -- there is no reasonable bet
you can just place over the sway
of its indifference to your plans for it.
And if this thing is wielded
by intention, why pretend you conceive
so awesome a Godhead
that just permits you to believe?
What surrounds us feels like destruction
but what surrounds
destruction feels more like creation
in its black and stylish bends,
this movement of time like a shiver that recurs
in a patterned way and seems as willed
in its careless spinning as a dancer's
pirouette through reality's perilous fluid,
a locus
of order, or of a world's slow
coming to order -- both perilous and conscious --
that seems suitable also
to be the stream down which poetry might flow
in fear of being devoured
but also -- or as though also
in a longing simply to be read.
For if he had traveled too far from
epigrams to return to their closure
still the Lord -- of epic and epigram --
stood nearer than ever -- in his fear.
*
In school he'd liked epigrams
and the way they could heave the most
unruly experiences into sums
that however simplified were not reduced.
A problem -- his own
work had never hooked the heart
of a distant person
caught up in shared hurt.
No poem was ever meant
to stand closed, intact
and pointlessly eloquent
but his did in fact.
But no. There was a cloud
of consciousness, like a chamois
cloth filled with wettest graphite, that stood
above the poem pulsing freely:
the ex-
ternal force of readership
that would flex
itself loose from an author's grip.
Around any willed object the abyss
of chance bit into that will -- but beyond
that abyss, in an almost mirrored place
a new consciousness took its stand.
So if he wrote well
(an "if" never proven)
that wellness might not be sterile,
if the reading were yet to happen,
and the randomness in
which writing lay
were a sort of moat beyond which recognition
slowly moved its eye.
In chance if there is chance there is no "unlikely"
or "impossible" -- there is no reasonable bet
you can just place over the sway
of its indifference to your plans for it.
And if this thing is wielded
by intention, why pretend you conceive
so awesome a Godhead
that just permits you to believe?
What surrounds us feels like destruction
but what surrounds
destruction feels more like creation
in its black and stylish bends,
this movement of time like a shiver that recurs
in a patterned way and seems as willed
in its careless spinning as a dancer's
pirouette through reality's perilous fluid,
a locus
of order, or of a world's slow
coming to order -- both perilous and conscious --
that seems suitable also
to be the stream down which poetry might flow
in fear of being devoured
but also -- or as though also
in a longing simply to be read.
For if he had traveled too far from
epigrams to return to their closure
still the Lord -- of epic and epigram --
stood nearer than ever -- in his fear.
*
Wednesday, May 14, 2008
Poem: Poor relation
*
You you you -- that person
bobbing in the mirror's
current, up then inexorably drawn
down, your own self moister than the water's.
Well they said to me: you own
nothing not even you
and even this particular introspection
will be taken away and rather soon too.
I said then I will give to God
the intention through me intended,
which I wish I'd not distorted
but know that I did.
I will give what's not mine
but that the giving
of my own intention
to give at least is not nothing
if it resonates with what more deeply
exists than I ever could
and if it makes me
a poor relation but still related.
What I have no choice but to give
to God I will give anyway
I will give what I don't have
I will give my nothingness away
I will give that I'm glad
about it. No. What I give
can't even be stated.
It's a nothing there's a lot of.
I am nothing nothing nothing.
In my own what seems this weary demise
I feel myself somehow also expanding
as God fills the room. Or his breath does.
*
You you you -- that person
bobbing in the mirror's
current, up then inexorably drawn
down, your own self moister than the water's.
Well they said to me: you own
nothing not even you
and even this particular introspection
will be taken away and rather soon too.
I said then I will give to God
the intention through me intended,
which I wish I'd not distorted
but know that I did.
I will give what's not mine
but that the giving
of my own intention
to give at least is not nothing
if it resonates with what more deeply
exists than I ever could
and if it makes me
a poor relation but still related.
What I have no choice but to give
to God I will give anyway
I will give what I don't have
I will give my nothingness away
I will give that I'm glad
about it. No. What I give
can't even be stated.
It's a nothing there's a lot of.
I am nothing nothing nothing.
In my own what seems this weary demise
I feel myself somehow also expanding
as God fills the room. Or his breath does.
*
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
Poem: "Punctured"
*
In church a human sound
came from
behind
him -- but there was no one behind him.
At the dance concert
the curtain never rose
but the entire stage was punctured
by a colored gas.
He held onto his chair
edge
out of fear
that he would fall onto the stage.
The dance circled
even behind his heart.
It swelled
and was rhythmically punctured --
like a something between
our death and us --
the dance lay not out front but in
the body breathed and was.
And I must be a part of this
forever he thought.
The soft gas caressed his face
and caught
his will up in its substance.
We make a community or a complete
world not just an audience.
When it ended he couldn't back out,
but followed
the dancer who looked most like
him down a still stage-feeling road
into a dream-cafe picturesque and frantic
with the need for art,
the abiding need
to speak it touch it enter it
be part of it and in that way abide,
despite Fashion that malevolent
god of fear strutting the aisle
trying to make us feel insignificant
drab and small.
Immune the dancer pulsed as if
awkwardly
with an almost corny declarative
right-now vibrancy.
I want to be
you, the spectator
said -- I mean completely
to be your
image witness lover
participant
closer than the mirror
image is to the person in it.
There is a gold tattoo
of grace carved across our multiverse,
with little characters in Hebrew
that cover our suicide scars.
If I could only get
closer to you
than that tattoo or than the inner side of that
tattoo.
Around them the cafe
throbbed with the displacement
of those who moved away
and those who stood their ground
coming back night after night --
menus slapped on
tables -- diners who when they sat
down could barely get up again --
liaisons that somehow ended
before dessert -- there were
marriages that lived and died
quickly or tried for forever.
Life was like an ode
to transience
embedded
in dance.
Lover and lover
stood on each side
of the mirror
distinct and united
inside the bright vitality
of other pass-
ersby
etched in glass.
Sometimes bodies contain such
a strangeness that when 2
of them touch
that touch dissolves and passes through --
an interaction occurs
but is so abstract
that the loneliness mirrors
itself and remains intact.
Goodbye goodbye
to our intense
reciprocity --
what we felt inside our dance.
Outside our protected
space a still unnamed disease
stood
waiting for us
to pause and it said honey
whether
quickly
or not -- wherever you are
I will find you and eat
you and afterwards take
Africa the whole of it
into my mouth as a snack.
People paused when they heard that voice
and they grew self-
conscious
held their breath and marched into the wall of
shadow at the back
of "company B"
that nostalgic and deathlike
ballet.
The survivor? He'd wake or half wake
at midnight to the sight
of soldiers marching into black
and not coming out --
then he'd suddenly wake --
to the same sight --
boys in black
night after night.
In the pit of reason's stomach lay
an abyss of contradiction
that reasoners groped to deny
without reason.
He slept through it, woke in it,
lived it -- a blackness laid
on top and under, a bottomless night
with him stretched across the lid.
In church not a mention of this.
But if he sat far back
then behind his ear the place
in its darkness seemed to speak.
Now he had become one of those adults
who do
nothing on impulse
nor do they know this nor wish to know --
but no that was not
exact not
precise not quite
it.
Fixity of place
was what he had to have,
every day the same office,
the same drab protective
home,
and in the morning the same road
wrapping him
in repetition like a shroud
for one year then twenty
and not even
gone away
because they were never there enough to be gone.
His dreams were of routine
the days and nights in denatured rows
along a boulevard of destitution,
endless personless days
and all of that just how
one lived, the repetition
meant to help you
both arrive at and be your own annihilation.
It didn't hurt.
It had the feel of
a late night news report
whose numbness was redemptive
for if time was a thing -- then a chunk
of what
exactly? each piece unique-
ly carved, bottomless and intricate,
born as if boneless, to be babied
and cooed till its unknown substance
overnight solidified
and took its place in the dance.
He found himself one night
outside then inside the old hall
of a genteel palace that
stood waiting for the wrecking ball to fall.
It was wounded like sacred space
and the troupe he'd seen long before
mysteriously was
also there.
He saw a troupe of kids expressing
what they had not
even felt yet -- things they would be feeling
in the future but not yet.
The curtain didn't rise but vanish.
The dancers pulled the room
into their gaseous swoosh.
It swept in front of and behind him.
His heart was a churn
with no place to churn against.
The dancers had not been born
when what they danced was danced,
as though what survived
death was not what stood
still but only what moved
and thus paradoxically died
and so only transient
things could become
permanently resident
in the perishing sensorium.
Something "between our death and us"
lay
in this gas
too exposed even to see precisely.
But I will take your presence
in any form that I can
whether in permanence or in transience
who knows? but in either case "in".
*
In church a human sound
came from
behind
him -- but there was no one behind him.
At the dance concert
the curtain never rose
but the entire stage was punctured
by a colored gas.
He held onto his chair
edge
out of fear
that he would fall onto the stage.
The dance circled
even behind his heart.
It swelled
and was rhythmically punctured --
like a something between
our death and us --
the dance lay not out front but in
the body breathed and was.
And I must be a part of this
forever he thought.
The soft gas caressed his face
and caught
his will up in its substance.
We make a community or a complete
world not just an audience.
When it ended he couldn't back out,
but followed
the dancer who looked most like
him down a still stage-feeling road
into a dream-cafe picturesque and frantic
with the need for art,
the abiding need
to speak it touch it enter it
be part of it and in that way abide,
despite Fashion that malevolent
god of fear strutting the aisle
trying to make us feel insignificant
drab and small.
Immune the dancer pulsed as if
awkwardly
with an almost corny declarative
right-now vibrancy.
I want to be
you, the spectator
said -- I mean completely
to be your
image witness lover
participant
closer than the mirror
image is to the person in it.
There is a gold tattoo
of grace carved across our multiverse,
with little characters in Hebrew
that cover our suicide scars.
If I could only get
closer to you
than that tattoo or than the inner side of that
tattoo.
Around them the cafe
throbbed with the displacement
of those who moved away
and those who stood their ground
coming back night after night --
menus slapped on
tables -- diners who when they sat
down could barely get up again --
liaisons that somehow ended
before dessert -- there were
marriages that lived and died
quickly or tried for forever.
Life was like an ode
to transience
embedded
in dance.
Lover and lover
stood on each side
of the mirror
distinct and united
inside the bright vitality
of other pass-
ersby
etched in glass.
Sometimes bodies contain such
a strangeness that when 2
of them touch
that touch dissolves and passes through --
an interaction occurs
but is so abstract
that the loneliness mirrors
itself and remains intact.
Goodbye goodbye
to our intense
reciprocity --
what we felt inside our dance.
Outside our protected
space a still unnamed disease
stood
waiting for us
to pause and it said honey
whether
quickly
or not -- wherever you are
I will find you and eat
you and afterwards take
Africa the whole of it
into my mouth as a snack.
People paused when they heard that voice
and they grew self-
conscious
held their breath and marched into the wall of
shadow at the back
of "company B"
that nostalgic and deathlike
ballet.
The survivor? He'd wake or half wake
at midnight to the sight
of soldiers marching into black
and not coming out --
then he'd suddenly wake --
to the same sight --
boys in black
night after night.
In the pit of reason's stomach lay
an abyss of contradiction
that reasoners groped to deny
without reason.
He slept through it, woke in it,
lived it -- a blackness laid
on top and under, a bottomless night
with him stretched across the lid.
In church not a mention of this.
But if he sat far back
then behind his ear the place
in its darkness seemed to speak.
Now he had become one of those adults
who do
nothing on impulse
nor do they know this nor wish to know --
but no that was not
exact not
precise not quite
it.
Fixity of place
was what he had to have,
every day the same office,
the same drab protective
home,
and in the morning the same road
wrapping him
in repetition like a shroud
for one year then twenty
and not even
gone away
because they were never there enough to be gone.
His dreams were of routine
the days and nights in denatured rows
along a boulevard of destitution,
endless personless days
and all of that just how
one lived, the repetition
meant to help you
both arrive at and be your own annihilation.
It didn't hurt.
It had the feel of
a late night news report
whose numbness was redemptive
for if time was a thing -- then a chunk
of what
exactly? each piece unique-
ly carved, bottomless and intricate,
born as if boneless, to be babied
and cooed till its unknown substance
overnight solidified
and took its place in the dance.
He found himself one night
outside then inside the old hall
of a genteel palace that
stood waiting for the wrecking ball to fall.
It was wounded like sacred space
and the troupe he'd seen long before
mysteriously was
also there.
He saw a troupe of kids expressing
what they had not
even felt yet -- things they would be feeling
in the future but not yet.
The curtain didn't rise but vanish.
The dancers pulled the room
into their gaseous swoosh.
It swept in front of and behind him.
His heart was a churn
with no place to churn against.
The dancers had not been born
when what they danced was danced,
as though what survived
death was not what stood
still but only what moved
and thus paradoxically died
and so only transient
things could become
permanently resident
in the perishing sensorium.
Something "between our death and us"
lay
in this gas
too exposed even to see precisely.
But I will take your presence
in any form that I can
whether in permanence or in transience
who knows? but in either case "in".
*
Thursday, March 20, 2008
Poem: "Glove"
*
It was as though the prime
of one's life were a glove
that one put on for a time
and took off
without anything
about the hand inside
changing
except that it was now outside
that is, it was still a hand
and did what a hand did
nothing had happened
to it yet it had been abandoned
or driven between gears if time were gears
or if time was just a mechanism
for maneuvring between months and years
like a dead machine that moved but was always the same,
then something was as wrong
as the glove pulled in reverse
whose fingers would now be fitting
a different universe,
with the life spilled
out of a container
first young then old
really neither.
The body was not a vehicle
or furnishing or mode, not a disguise
device or brace, nor some metaphysical
obstacle either -- there was no well known thing it was --
not sliced matter -- not in fact separate
from one's own awkward
attempts to fit it
within this or a different word.
So if he lived it was not because I
remembered him (because
even my poor memory
was less than what I once knew him as),
but could I say intrinsically?
There was a dancer's picture on my wall.
He filled his body ecstatically
but was flat as a stepped on snail.
He lived not
because I remembered him, no, the other way,
it was the life that was at the root
of what memory occurred today.
Life flexes
fingers in the glove
and seems more than it is
possible for anything to be made of.
It was not just life but his
life, not representative
just the single thing it was
and in that smallness alive
at least not otherwise,
because what
twisted in my gut was
him: the hook of him shifting in the gut.
Life covered the darkness with hair
and gave off the rude spring-green
ever-helpless odor
not of skin but of what has come to wear skin.
And one's own realization -- while it passed through
the place that aged and never aged,
would it too be able to
remain in the passing where it was wedged?
It was as though the prime
of one's life were a glove
that one put on for a time
and took off
without anything
about the hand inside
changing
except that it was now outside
that is, it was still a hand
and did what a hand did
nothing had happened
to it yet it had been abandoned
or driven between gears if time were gears
or if time was just a mechanism
for maneuvring between months and years
like a dead machine that moved but was always the same,
then something was as wrong
as the glove pulled in reverse
whose fingers would now be fitting
a different universe,
with the life spilled
out of a container
first young then old
really neither.
The body was not a vehicle
or furnishing or mode, not a disguise
device or brace, nor some metaphysical
obstacle either -- there was no well known thing it was --
not sliced matter -- not in fact separate
from one's own awkward
attempts to fit it
within this or a different word.
So if he lived it was not because I
remembered him (because
even my poor memory
was less than what I once knew him as),
but could I say intrinsically?
There was a dancer's picture on my wall.
He filled his body ecstatically
but was flat as a stepped on snail.
He lived not
because I remembered him, no, the other way,
it was the life that was at the root
of what memory occurred today.
Life flexes
fingers in the glove
and seems more than it is
possible for anything to be made of.
It was not just life but his
life, not representative
just the single thing it was
and in that smallness alive
at least not otherwise,
because what
twisted in my gut was
him: the hook of him shifting in the gut.
Life covered the darkness with hair
and gave off the rude spring-green
ever-helpless odor
not of skin but of what has come to wear skin.
And one's own realization -- while it passed through
the place that aged and never aged,
would it too be able to
remain in the passing where it was wedged?
Thursday, March 06, 2008
Poem: Watery substance
*
He grew old without noticing --
was mental absence
a part of ageing?
Or did his caution make the difference?
Think. Think. Cast memory
back upon the sweet ones
gone suddenly or quietly but early,
because there is true absence.
The veteran's hands shake
too much to work --
he wheels his chair or leans back
on the worst bench in the park.
His buddies are dead.
Would that have been better?
He once saw a teenager explode
on a battlefield, a teenager,
and he thought
to himself wait
his life isn't done yet:
this kid's not even complete.
But complete? Where
was that now? Then the veteran
stopped thinking -- needed liquor
to wet his brain.
The poem's narrator
never went
to war nor
could he know what going meant.
He was naîve about a cost
not his to pay
at least
not overtly.
Time could be a purge of all one's
crudities and false hopes
but in the end experience
only emptied people out -- perhaps.
All roads led down into
wisdom he was sure -- life travelled down
into itself, but also into knowledge of itself as its term grew
long enough to curve back into recognition.
One's own slow death was worth having
because only from having first lost
this sense of being young
could the full sense of youth have been noticed.
"In school our teachers told us
to shape our future consciously
make the future conscious
or else it would turn to shape us its own way...
With us or without
us it would still occur
and our choice was to climb on top of it
or be dragged under.
I heard but didn't heed
their warning, not exactly, because
I couldn't decide
first of all who I in any fixed sense was
and then, much less, secondly who I wanted to
be -- no. No. I never never
knew who, but only how,
I knew only how to go after
the thing by continual questioning,
and I knew that I never wanted
to take such an awesome thing
as existence for granted."
It was of a mucousy consistency
the ground that kept humans
from plunging recklessly
into transcendence.
There was an athlete who had dipped one little bud
into Coke-white bone-
like dust and fell inside for good
and never played ball again
and shot himself -- by the sea.
One can still feel the water
sleepily
rocking his soft cadaver.
The salt water sinks and pulls itself back out
like the tears a survivor's lips will suck
up and sideways into the throat
where they will thicken and get stuck.
The parents who grieved are dead now too,
they themselves like children, faces
filled with transient woe
only in that everything now was,
transient I mean --
like the face a child would make
when its ice cream cone
fell onto the dirty brick.
"I have been one to survive
without deserving to,
I haven't earned life, I simply live.
Others did more. But that one thing, no.
Unmerited, precious,
it must be probed,
saved, understood, if only because
I must know, were they honored or robbed?
I was never Orfeo
not to look at the one I rescued,
no. Impossible not to
see then caress that sweet head,
wondering at life not death,
since life barely remains
to me as well, and we both
skirt nonexistence and both retain existence,
mysterious substance, of which
there cannot be
too much
too long too far or -- my love -- too many."
*
He grew old without noticing --
was mental absence
a part of ageing?
Or did his caution make the difference?
Think. Think. Cast memory
back upon the sweet ones
gone suddenly or quietly but early,
because there is true absence.
The veteran's hands shake
too much to work --
he wheels his chair or leans back
on the worst bench in the park.
His buddies are dead.
Would that have been better?
He once saw a teenager explode
on a battlefield, a teenager,
and he thought
to himself wait
his life isn't done yet:
this kid's not even complete.
But complete? Where
was that now? Then the veteran
stopped thinking -- needed liquor
to wet his brain.
The poem's narrator
never went
to war nor
could he know what going meant.
He was naîve about a cost
not his to pay
at least
not overtly.
Time could be a purge of all one's
crudities and false hopes
but in the end experience
only emptied people out -- perhaps.
All roads led down into
wisdom he was sure -- life travelled down
into itself, but also into knowledge of itself as its term grew
long enough to curve back into recognition.
One's own slow death was worth having
because only from having first lost
this sense of being young
could the full sense of youth have been noticed.
"In school our teachers told us
to shape our future consciously
make the future conscious
or else it would turn to shape us its own way...
With us or without
us it would still occur
and our choice was to climb on top of it
or be dragged under.
I heard but didn't heed
their warning, not exactly, because
I couldn't decide
first of all who I in any fixed sense was
and then, much less, secondly who I wanted to
be -- no. No. I never never
knew who, but only how,
I knew only how to go after
the thing by continual questioning,
and I knew that I never wanted
to take such an awesome thing
as existence for granted."
It was of a mucousy consistency
the ground that kept humans
from plunging recklessly
into transcendence.
There was an athlete who had dipped one little bud
into Coke-white bone-
like dust and fell inside for good
and never played ball again
and shot himself -- by the sea.
One can still feel the water
sleepily
rocking his soft cadaver.
The salt water sinks and pulls itself back out
like the tears a survivor's lips will suck
up and sideways into the throat
where they will thicken and get stuck.
The parents who grieved are dead now too,
they themselves like children, faces
filled with transient woe
only in that everything now was,
transient I mean --
like the face a child would make
when its ice cream cone
fell onto the dirty brick.
"I have been one to survive
without deserving to,
I haven't earned life, I simply live.
Others did more. But that one thing, no.
Unmerited, precious,
it must be probed,
saved, understood, if only because
I must know, were they honored or robbed?
I was never Orfeo
not to look at the one I rescued,
no. Impossible not to
see then caress that sweet head,
wondering at life not death,
since life barely remains
to me as well, and we both
skirt nonexistence and both retain existence,
mysterious substance, of which
there cannot be
too much
too long too far or -- my love -- too many."
*
Tuesday, January 08, 2008
Poem: "There is a space"
*
There is a space
around your heart, a once rigid
space where judgment was
uncomfortably wedged,
now just air,
filled with a breath
that previously you were
scared to breathe with,
now as it were
the lodging of prayer
too full to censure
itself or any other
creature.
Mere prayer.
*
There is a space
around your heart, a once rigid
space where judgment was
uncomfortably wedged,
now just air,
filled with a breath
that previously you were
scared to breathe with,
now as it were
the lodging of prayer
too full to censure
itself or any other
creature.
Mere prayer.
*
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