Musette

March 31 poem: Night vision

Last day, wrapping up 31 days of looking for words (and images), sometime finding them. I'm not quite sure what comes next. Perhaps revisiting the riches of March, perhaps taking a brief rest—or joining in with some Poetry Month activity like this. I'll be dreaming on it tonight. This last bit of writing? More fragments...

 

Night vision

We cannot read the darkness.

     —Maggie Nelson, "Bluets"

 

Say the reason no one answered was a power outage at the house.

Say no one knew the reason.

Say the note slipped into a slot in the box and lodged there.

Say the test results were mistaken.

Say all of it was a mistake.

Say he did lose the number, and regretted it.

Say that was the turning point.

Say you knew the words he’d speak a moment later.

Say the silence said everything.

Say the ones you most hated really were the most like you.

Say the letting go of memory was a way, finally, to unclench.

Say there was enough for everyone, but not all at once.

Say you clenched again to hear it.

Say it was a blessing/curse.

Say you stopped looking for a blessing, or a reason.

Would darkness still seem to be the absence of light?

 

Photo by Hugo Chinaglia, via flickr.

March 30 poem: Shadow (fragment)

The penultimate day and I am reduced to fragmentary wanderings. Still, every fragment has potential, no? The first line is from Carol Snow, who I'm encountering for the first time in the wonderful "Lyric Postmodernisms."

 

Shadow (fragment)

Saw (into) and entered the wide corridor. I’m in the habit of shadows, lean toward the shift of them, their points of attachment. A different sort of anatomy. Surely hands reaching into the shadow body could manipulate it, could draw out the obstruction, make it dissipate with light. This seems like common knowledge, like applying pressure to stanch the blood or licking clean a wound. Though the lack of vivid color and taste makes for confusion. The shadow does not thicken in folds like a length of tulle, nor blue under staining to show what’s been compromised. So one walks the corridors, feeling for unexpected drafts or heat, or what falls into spaces left by doors flung open. The slant, the slam of things. Memory of a boy who says: Pull down your pants. Shadow on the floor replacing what came next.

Photo is by Mrs Logic, via Flickr.

March 29 poem: My hardest battles

I couldn't believe my good fortune. In the current issue of O magazine, which carries a large poetry section for poetry month, I happened on what was certainly not intended to be a poem, but which works better than anything floating in my mind today. One of the questions asked of the poets in the next pages is "Where does poetry come from?" Here's one answer. A toast to found poetry!

 

My hardest battles

        (found poem, from April 2011 O magazine, pg 132)

i.

It doesn’t take me long to shake off a bad mood.

In general, I try not to set my hopes too high so I won’t be disappointed.

 

ii.

I can be comfortable with nearly all kinds of people.

I believe in saying, “Where there’s a will, there’s a way."

 

iii.

I think it’s hard to get ahead without cutting corners here and there.

I expect that I will achieve most of my life goals.

 

iv.

I try to make light of my problems when possible.

I go out of my way to flatter important people.

 

v.

Before an interview, I am usually confident it will go well.

In my opinion, honesty is always the best policy.

 

vi.

When I make a decision on my own, it’s usually a poor one.

I have a tendency to make mountains out of molehills.

 

vii.

If I had to choose between happiness and greatness, I’d choose greatness.

I’m afraid the future of mankind doesn’t look too bright.

 

viii.

When the weatherman predicts a 50 percent chance of rain, I expect rain.

My hardest battles are with myself.

 

Photo by mattymatt, Matt Baume, via Flickr.

 

March 28 poem: Dilution

 

I had thought that meltdown meant "boom!" But it's long, slow poisoning, it seems, and it lasts a long, long time. Today's news seeped in. How could it not?

Dilution

Ninety paces from the sea, reactor tunnels overflow, a four-year dose of poison joining  water every hour. The iodine isotope’s gone in just a week, but plutonium’s half life spans  300 lifetimes. It’s around and toxic for 24,000 years. Ingested, plutonium’s alphas turn healthy tissue rogue, but outside, skin or tissue paper, our origami armor, keep the rays away. The point is not to eat it. The point is to keep the rain, the kelp, the precious catch far from children’s lips—everything that once would’ve birthed their bodies from the sea. Peril lasts at least until dilution, the capaciousness of time and elements to render the deadly merely venial. Or safe right now, as experts say. Ningyo, goddess weeping white pearl tears, fills the seabed’s vents with grief. Containment vessels—slave ships, threats of hell, boxes locked against whatever tempts—always crack, she knows. Black the ruined night.

Photo by Ha-Wee, Howie Le, via Flickr.

March 27 poem: The thing itself

Quite tired now. Just four more days of this. Happy for the daily attention to words though, however incomplete they may be. There's much to return to.

 

The thing itself

What is it like to talk silently to oneself; what goes on there?   —Wittgenstein

Mind’s wind. Intermittent light below fast-moving clouds. A house picked out of a landscape, its details so bright and precise it almost seems to float. Arbitrary selection of the next feature, a phrase, a memory: Jesus in a Plexi-fronted box, the way we protect our saints. Then the next perception, luminosity of the Plexiglass itself, its attempt to break through without words. The tree as tree, taken in complete, breathed into shapes  before language. A learning to see. This silent speech as erasure of distance, the cleared space the tree, the thing, the other, fills completely. This direct apprehension of the whole (or: love) which I relax into without words, without description. Led here by the hours of knowing without naming, or attempting to. We stop, sit a little longer near the roses.

Photo by Brenda Anderson, via Flickr.

March 26 poem: Man with no hands

I was interested in this image, by edgeplot, via Flickr, because sometimes when I look I see the figure of a man in the gray brush. As for the words, they're a record of today.

 

Man with no hands

“That was God talking.” The first thing the voice says. Not a preacher’s voice. Troubled, but with what? It tries to talk smack with one of the regulars on the street, who walks past fast with a stride that says, “Don’t get any of that on me.” Peripheral vision won’t curve back far enough to put a clear face with the syllables clinging to the wall behind, but the hair on the back of the neck, the whole back of the body, rises for sensing, follows the movement. Voice narrates the bus that pulls up, more about God, God’s pain. Driver gives him a look—how much trouble is this going to be?—and lets him by. There’s no money on offer, no coins dropping. Just stripped wrists placed on farebox, paired knobs so narrow without the bloom of palms and fingers below. The abruptness of the stumps. We all let him pass without looking back to see where he lands. Soundings from the voice: the seats above the engine far behind. Mumbling a while, then picking up, roaring. “So much fuckin’ pain.” More and more words, in another character's voice. Yelling all the way to the valley. Anguish and everything else. A laugh. No one looks. What’s he gonna do, pick up a gun? Until an old woman rolls her cart back there. Her hearing’s bad, but not her eyes. Not the mother in her. “It’s all right honey,” she says first to her daughter, then quietly to laughing, suffering God. “Sweetheart, it’s all right.”

3/26

March 25 poem: Speed of difficulty

Last night's dance stays with me and is somewhere in this writing. As is Jenny Boully's writing—a line from "The Body" opens the poem. It's a sketch.

 

Speed of difficulty

Light and prayer also have finite speeds. Measurable, falling in narrow spectra along the ground as they snap. The speed of groping toward. The speed of erasure. I have graphed my problem with God with a pencil rubbed on sand, which allows for endless rearranging. The problem is that we have rigid expectations of the infinite but let the ordinary go. We wonder about souls flickering, say, but wind holds no interest. Light moves like an organizing impulse through a body it shapes like a curve. An interruption in space, a pause. More interesting: What has fallen in the dark. More interesting yet: A handful of salt scattering as the water inside evaporates. Or the residue that clings to fingers. Magic tricks. I watch the pigeons fly down when they sense our crumbs. The joke is that we’ll swallow anything. Pulverized gems, transfigured flesh, even a bad burger. I prefer what’s difficult, which often looks the simplest. A brush stroke, for example, or a quick, clean swipe of a knife. Original synthesis, explained as the speed of pulling apart, or mating. I could watch the limbs join and release all night without ever reaching in to touch, though it goes on and on without the right combination of hands for  capture. Thoughts tumbling without belief. The speed of waiting.

3/25

The amazing photo is from NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center and titled Earth's Limb (NASA, International Space Station Science, 5/06/09). The information that accompanies the photo on Flickr explains: Earth's horizon against the blackness of space is featured in this image, photographed by an Expedition 19 crewmember on the International Space Station. p.s. The Earth's "limb" is refers to the area where the curve of the Earth meets the blackness of space.

 

March 24 poem: Fable

Saw Nederlands Dans Theater tonight and fell in love with a piece called "The Second Person" and the choreography of Crystal Pite. Amused to see that it was trashed by the newspaper's reviewer who found lots to love about the piece that left me cold. Art's funny that way, moving us as it will move us. We walked in the rain back to our car, parked alone on a bridge near the cathedral. That was perhaps the only poem of the evening. I did a bit of writing, but this is something I worked on earlier. It's an offering to the night, words before sleeping that perhaps will seed a dream.

 

Fable

In the fable we try to write of the sea, the broad bay empties one afternoon, villagers flocking to the treasure-strewn sand. The gathering crowd heads for the edge, fills shirts and pails and shallow palms. They marvel at the oddness of this shore that once was sea. The sun sets and rises, sets and rises, and soon even fishermen lose the rhythm of water that once swept in and out, a rocking that seemed ingrained but was disposable as a habit, abandoned in a week, a day, or 40. They forget what they’ve forgotten. Someone warns of the illusion but we remain, even when the line of white appears so far away, and then the sound of distant, churning waves. The day is bright, the mood the opposite of fear until what’s closing in comes down. All of us begin run, though some turn back for milk or stay for one more shell, those last grabbing roof or branches as the water takes them, surges past.  We become: the one who fled, the one who stayed, the one who warned, the one we lost, the ones who write the fable that pretends there was folly or blame in this, that pretends there was anything but the inevitable movement of earth and time and mind. We become the ones who almost remember.

Photo by super devoika, Rusalia Bazamit, via flickr.

March 23 poem: Salt to salt

Today's report on the troubled Fukushima reactors shows the complications of last-ditch solutions. Now the saltwater being poured on the fuel rods is leaving behind salt, tons of it....

 

Salt

A string suspended in seawater, weighted by a nail. The metal’s not important, though its shine seems to make visible the critical elements. Time. The startling sedimentation of gray or white crystals. Soul pulled from a body in which it had dissolved, precipitate still infused with the taste of the closed inner sea. A dead white snow on the fields after the flood.  It can’t be rinsed away, this paradoxical beauty, poison and purifier, soil barren, or raked and licked. At the reactor farm after the inundation, spent, suspended fuel rods grow crystalline as seawater sizzles off. Fifty tons of salt fills the interiors, liquid long since lost, rupturing the rods’ zirconium cladding, protective skin that holds in hot iodine gas. The exhale reaches Tokyo (don’t drink water from the tap ) and in Beijing there’s a run on Morton’s, or the umbrella’d girl’s equivalent. Iodine talisman to displace the fear. We listen for explosions, sounds indicating the movement of particles, Izanagi’s spear stirring the salt water once again, extracting shadow islands, rinsing off traces of the Kingdom of the Lost. For now, the invisible remains invisible, but for the dulling sheen of dried brine on the skin, a communion exchanged by touch and breath, shared like rice, like dread.

3/23

Image by Okinawa soba, via Flickr.

March 22 poem: What the rock wants

Wittgenstein's "Philosophical Investigations" arrived today in the mail. It was a fairly constant refrain in my recent reading, so I wanted to take a look myself and have the luxury of pages instead of screens. I scanned for interesting lines and found one, "Look at a stone and imagine it having sensations." The rest came from that. It's long. Next month, perhaps, the editing will begin on all these pieces. For now, I'm piling up stones.

 

What the rock wants

1. Look at a stone and imagine it having sensations. This you do as you feel its weight in your palm and test it for a certain flatness. To balance stone on stone you might imagine the rock aligning its crystalline structures like a spine, but that only serves to turn the rock into you, or you to stone and neither of those makes it easier to make the rock stack higher. Better, you think, to imagine a planet-size boulder cracking, fracturing, breaking its way to smaller approximations of itself. Chips off the block. Not amoebic in its division but a demonstration of some mechanical shattering and smoothing that results, over time, in a sort of cloning. A splitting off, a rubbing away of excess that creates, finally, the approximate unity of the things. A beach of smooth stones, some small enough for skipping over the yielding flatness of water, an act that gives the stone the sensation it seeks—trajectory, movement. The opposite of itself, not falling or standing but flight. Lightness. A gradual smoothing by air. What the rock wants.

 

2. We try this ourselves the night a truck dumps a pile of jackhammered driveway in the dark back yard. The idea is to turn this cairn into a patio. Poor man’s flagstone. Not, perhaps, what the rock wants. We’re kids too small to chuck the chunks but try it anyway, tipping them from the top, de facto wind or water, wrecking crew to catalyze a breakdown of the jagged mass to powdered concrete and sand, or liquid igneous that eons turn to a cool, flat slab. Or so we make believe. We imagine the mountain leveling itself to bedrock, returning to some kind of stasis, a suburb, barbecue, longed-for cement truck. We imagine the unlikely sensation of flight. We imagine pulling away.

3/22/11

Image by Chris Devers, via Flickr.