Musette

March 21 poem: Bedtime story

Day 21 and the process is feeling a bit raw. That is, traveling from psyche to page without a lot of editing. Dispatches, I suppose. This one came from a friend's mention of driving across town at one of those moments when the freeway was empty and he seemed to have it to himself. Thanks, Brett.

 

Bedtime story

Driving home I flip off the lights and weave, sleek needle pulling a long black thread. The radio is on but cutting in and out, static like gravel flying up to ping the glass. This could be what it feels like to fly. We think of nature as silent but it roars and amplifies itself. There’s no one frequency. I keep my eye on what’s in front of me, grateful for the moon. The traffic’s tidal, surging and retreating like our blood, the landscape a diorama posing long-dead threatening beasts. The sense of control that comes with putting them in the same frame. I imagine their story and take it over. I look out and see wolves. We’re to think of the frozen creatures as what time compresses into sediment, stone, oil. I take the long view though you are waiting for me and this trip to other epochs only takes me away from you. I tell you the nesting cups of time each contain the other and I try to explain it, but you are going to bed. When I finally slip in you are dreaming and I hear a scream. I reach my hand to touch your arm but it’s pulled into itself. It still sleeps. We do what we can, I tell myself. We try to find words and will, we pick up what the other’s dropped, tidy things, pack tools we don’t know how to use and take them to the town of fallen houses. We vow to learn to go on, rebuild. Night pours out like a stream of oil that coats everything. I don’t know how we wash it off to breathe and yet we do. Nothing is inert, we learn, everything is in metamorphosis, atoms rearranging in their own minute/infinite space. I find this comforting. I will be the oil one day, or isotopes, or a disposable syringe. I aim the car for the familiar. We are eating dinner. We are drinking tea. I am gazing at you and finding you more beautiful than ever. We’re here now. Listen, you tell me when you wake, it doesn’t matter where we’ve been.

3/21

Image by .reid., sarah, via Flickr.

March 20 poem: Signs

Monsoons arrived with the first day of spring. I expect it'll be glorious out there when the storms finally lift. It's already so lush that "you can almost imagine it's humid" in this desert, David said on the last sunny day. I did just a bit of fevered writing today, and with my focus turned mostly to a work project, I don't know what it produced. Not what's below. That's just a short bit I'd saved for a day like today, when something would be better than nothing at all. Perhaps it's the haiku of prose poems, a thought that flitted through. But t's day 20 of this project and it's still going. A miracle!

 

Signs

We long to think the air changes somehow, becomes charged, and that a person might sense it, the tiny hairs on the belly or nape rising with a buzz of tingling. Or that a faint  arc of ripples might form in the bowl of water kept for capturing subtle vibrations, and a dog or cat seeing this, might become restless. We wish for sleep to deliver glyphs we could puzzle out to mean “a falling plane” or “angiogram” or even the image of campaign signs reading “four more years.” Our endings, though, surprise us when they come. They just come.

3/20

Image by Pierre -M- via flickr. Looks like tarot, no?

March 19 poem: Ritual for ending a new war

Sitting at brunch today, we glanced up at a silent TV screen that announced missile fire on Libya. These are days in need of ritual.

 

Ritual for ending a new war

Take a cutting from the orange tree that empties its scent into winter's final night. Wrap the perfume in leaves and carry it to the warriors who sit on a ship named “destroyer.” Watch them soften as they take it in. Fold the leaves into boats that you christen “creator,” and launch the small, green fleet. Let the leaf boats ferry the sound of waves, sweeten the sailors' sleep with dreams of lovers and children. Let every dreamer wake full of longing. Now, find an image of the dictator on the 50 dinar and fold this dark leaf into a boat. Set the vessel in a bowl filled with oil and when you light it, gather its smoke, carbon for re-blacking the violated sky. Rub out the scratches that missiles clawed in, but shape the last few contrails into glyphs for prayer, or birth. Rest now. Dream the Turareg blue of Earth.

3/19

The image is from our friends at NASA, Earth as seen from Apollo 17.

March 18 poem: Half-life

Thinking about looking, looking away, and the truths attached to both. (Lines of this prose poem-like substance will be a little distorted by the wrap, but I like the thought of the image accompanying the words this way.)

 

Half-life

Wind rearranges the decay, the reactor now a familiar collapse of scaffolds, skin blistered off and the nucleus of the thing exposed, the core, the heat of it, the plastic bulbs of atoms in their glowing wire rings. I can’t look away. Perhaps this is what we seek in exhibits of sliced and resined bodies, leaves pressed between glass, slide specimens of us, our insides rendered almost understandable. A fresh misperception of what’s been hidden. (I thought I saw right through you. I embraced the mica flakes of you and then felt the blade.) Surface order obscures the chaos of betrayal until explosion makes it explicit, residual fires that sear the eye with a too-bright flame, the burned-in shape of ash that’s carried upward, ghost city, eternal city shifting valences, wall upon wall cascading, half life to half life, end to end. This is the invisible shudder we feel, the air vibrating with it even as the earth, the past, stills and falls away. What keeps drifting down accumulates, so much silence, ash dissolving in a glittering, empty sea. 

3/18

Image from Shandchem, via Flickr.

 

 

 

March 17 poem: The perfect solitude

Pulled a line from "Lisa Robertson's Magenta Soul Whip" and sprinted off from there. What amuses me is the way the worked line/mind I like to cultivate gravitates in the direction of the Soul Whip, but in these quick dispatches from the moment, there's not so much time for that. The odd jagged leap, which I find so beautiful—more spasm than swoon—requires art. This is more of a snapshot. The LR line is the first phrase before the first comma.

 

The perfect solitude

I disliked solitude and I also craved it, a solitude cultivated on Panamanian bushes where the berries take months to develop the proper red shade and then, pulled into baskets and dried, yield a connoisseur’s solitude, a solitude to be sipped and savored, a full-bodied solitude, a solitude only my own psychic terroir could produce. I hated the cult of it, the snobbery surrounding this method of distilling the self from silence, yet it seemed true to me nonetheless. It was easy for the makers of carafes and cafes, mountain retreats and one-person cabins built by an artisan from shipping palettes and scrap metal, but fashioned into fantasy castles of solitude, it was easy for these seducers to seed my mind with their containers for my aloneness, and for me to crave the company of the things, even in my solitude, which I used to design the perfect solitude, so unlike the one I was occupying, so far from there. I wanted my solitude to have gravity, to be a Garcia Marquez solitude that spanned a hundred years and changed those who encountered its  fading artifacts much later, its scrawls on paper stapled to light poles, its tracks in snow, its mysterious valleys of blue butterflies or forgotten, bloodstained rock. I wanted my solitude to keep me company, to court me with stories, to entertain like the best of party guests. I wanted a belle-of-the ball-solitude, not a Walden or a monk’s cave. I disliked the way I craved it, but I craved it anyway. It occupied me, that was its success and failure. It created a space I could endlessly refill. It distracted me from myself.

Image by golbenge (골뱅이) / Seongbin Im, via Flickr.

March 16 poem: Prussian blue

Today I feel the limits of trying to complete a poem in a day. Sometimes what you get is a draft of something, the shape of an idea. My wanderings took me to U.S. government warnings about radiation dangers in Japan and then to its information about treatments for exposure, one of which is Prussian blue, the dye first produced in the early 1700s. From there, it wasn't much of a leap to Hokusai and a cycle of blue and white, cesium and cyanide. I could say that it's quite coincidental that I'm reading Maggie Nelson's "Bluets," which you can hear a bit of here. But that's a lot of incidental blue. This, though, is a quite different shade. No Wittgenstein for one thing—just Hokusai....

 

Prussian blue

Hokusai drapes the roots of his famous wave in white, blown cliffs laced with fractals over foaming Prussian blue. Perspective renders the distant blue of Fuji even fainter, a peak of snow and tucked below, a slender stroke of this imported ink. It blinks from a tsunami trough, surprising as the shade itself, whose beetle shells and ash were meant to form a deep red Florentine lake. For Hokusai’s wild sea, white solids—iron salts and acids, cyanide (from cyan, “blue”)—become an alchemist’s surprise, a blue remove from lapis and its lambent, powdered stone. Blue churned from white remains a signature of the tint, the way its still depths yet suggest the movement just beneath, ships braced for breaking, points of stars pressed to the dark, poised for rubbing through. This evening snow burns into standing pools penned by lost villages’ debris, streets the shade of blueprints, and placid Hokusai nights. Not far from here control rods melt for lack of flood, some alternate path of atoms about to free another wave’s punishing white. There’s no penning what the wind will take, but Hokusai, we’re eating Prussian blue, piles of it to carry cesium and thallium away. Hokusai, we fill ourselves with the stain of almost-night till our mouths and teeth are blue. Against this wave, our fragile bones glow pale.

Image by lady in the radiator, J Loves Film, via Flickr. It had the right blue.

March 15 poem: Darkness

This day contained a dentist, a glimpse at the world before birth, more news of danger and heroism from Japan—and orange blossoms.

 

Darkness

If the dark speaks, what does it say in a dark time?

                             —Peter Gizzi

We walk through the park as the moon waxes somewhere unseen. Untouched grass shines behind police tape and the citrus grove that has flourished, penned in concrete, fills the air with orange nectar. It’s sweeter, softer-smelling than the fruit, this perfume that drifts with white stars that fall and arrange themselves in constellations on the path. We bend down branches to breathe in the sweetness. Everything glows softly in the sodium pink light that beams from lampposts at the edge, but there is darkness if we turn toward each other and close our eyes to kiss. Across the world waves have washed away whole villages we meant to see, and at the sea’s now-calm edge endless depths lie just out of reach of fires that could destroy us. We hold each other, we and our darkness, we and the fifty men the fire is certainly consuming. In the time before we were born, a thought was enough to leave a mark for life and tonight the darkness carries us toward them, says “breathe in the scent of orange blossoms” says “each of us is the other’s prayer.”

3/15

Photo by miheco via Flickr.

 

March 14: Words fail me

Though I have been writing, as I filter the news from Japan, both reports of the tsunami/quake whose effects keep on sweeping and of the failing nuclear plants, I find that I only want to contemplate the image of vastness, something much larger than this small planet. This image from NASA's  amazing Hubble is of a galaxy known NGC 4449. Details can be found here. 

March 13 poem: 21 possibilities for one day of your life

 

A poet friend, Sharon, reminded me of Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, whose work I began to look at in college, back when Mei-Mei had a chapbook, I think, and was yet to publish a full collection. I loved, and still love the mind at work in her poems, and have a fresh appreciation for her use of the long line. The first line of this piece is from one of her poems in "Empathy." And from that departure point, it takes a completely different path. She might raise an eyebrow to see that line spark a list. This is not the perfect format for this sort of long-lined poem, by the way. The line breaks will perhaps be odd. Imagine the lines unfurling to their full lengths....

 

21 possibilities for one day of your life

You could try to make some fog into a piece of white cloth. 

You could turn the smell of rain into rain by cupping it in your dry palms.

You could gather salt and crumbs from the floor for a cake to feed a hunger that feels small now, but will gnaw at you as you sweep and sweep.

You could stir, churning the pretend spoon in the pretend bowl, then lick until you taste.

You could try to stir without fear or hope or pacing.

You could listen for the catch in your breathing as it slides from the pillow to the earth seven stories below, a ghost in that substrate of televisions and perfume bottles, arguments pooling in the punctured night.

You could wait for someone to breathe you in.

You could try reading Olsen in unison to synchronize your inhalations, or chant in synchronous units of breath.

You could try to make some fog into a white sheet whose accidental markings look like poetry.

You could demonstrate subduction with your hands, taking care to avoid the appearance of wringing.

You could shake and shake the ice and liquid in the cup and try to understand the movement.

You could try to warm what’s frozen inside you, thaw your own impermanent bones.

You could try to mend the cracks in the earth with bandages of fog and breath.

You could lie down on the injured earth and sing.

You could set the rods of your eyes on end and wait for the appearance of lightning.

You could say you are afraid.

You could disrupt the path of fear by capturing it in mirrors, then breaking them and throwing the jagged pieces behind you.

You could try to repeat the movements of finches, shape your tongue around their songs.

You could make your sheet of fog-white cloth into a sail and become both wind and landfall.

You could lie with your lover in the evening, both of you silent, savoring the escape of remaining.

You could erase the fog, the mirrors, the cloth, and dream yourself awake.

3/13/11

The image above, which seemed to have a mood that somehow matched the words, is a photo of a woodcut, found via Flickr, by an artist named Brad J. Reynolds, whose lovely work can be found here.

March 12 poem: Irreducible

I was thinking about the elements, then what's elemental. The image above, from a scanning electron microscope (read the more technical description here) at a Department of Energy lab, somehow had the feeling I was playing with.

 

Irreducible

Even apart I can feel the imprint, your fingers resting along my ribs in the cradling curve that slips you into me like a magician’s trick, joined rings of us, Venn diagram and spiraling stairs of us—infinite center we empty and fill, axis that anchors our slow revolutions. This is the dance, the nestling into, the smooth sliding together and apart, this habit we have of reaching for the other, finding ourselves there. At the height of pleasure your hands lift from the sheets, hovering next to your hips, eyes closed, lips curved in a private, ancient smile. I see this before my own eyes slip shut and I rise to meet you, our twinned darkness now lit with stars, these atoms of us swarming, elementary, irreducible.

 

Image from the Department of Energy's EMSL, the Environmental Molecular Science Laboratory via Flickr (where there is no description of just what we're looking at).