Musette

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 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.

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 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.

 

A year's worth of poems

I got my first look at this lovely project last evening, when all the poets (save one) read their calendar pieces. I'm liking the idea of living with one poem for a whole month as it sits on my wall, catching my eye at odd moments. All the poets are from L.A. County, and a sense of the place and its distinctly observed worlds flows through, though the poems are quite diverse. I was pleased to be in such good company, and quite tickled to be "Miss May."

Here's one of the poems I read, not a new one, but one I like:

When we were snow
We dreamed cold streams had crystallized us,
fractals in radiant bloom at the
borders of these temporary bodies,
our vague shapes edged with infinity
and tossed back into lightness, into
exquisite refraction, and we could
see ourselves that way for just an instant
before the slow drift, the gradual
return to yet and almost, to time
as it blows across our path, measuring
our scattered fall, the span your words have
traveled to reach me, to crack our frost
walls and set us gently in our bed
again, warm beneath the dark sky, this storm.

 

Wanting vs. having

The trees in this photo are nothing, really, like the ones in my mind, where it's night and the boughs of lavender are closer to gray, catching the light of odd streetlamps and the occasional passing car. Those night blooms are the ones that finally caught my imagination, and wound up in this poem—which is only so much, really, about jacarandas at all. I pull it out today because it's in a calendar that features poems about L.A., and I'll be reading it at Skylight tomorrow. More information about that project is here.

 

Today, I want what I have

Purple fills the gutters—jacarandas,
blossoms descending against the gray.
Chalked beneath the trees, the outlines of
cars and our own sleeping shapes, scattered
in the night. We lie waiting for beauty
to alight,  sticky, blinking
into skin, the house tinted, sky swaying
with drifts and flight. How often the blossoms
have disappeared as we wandered, lost
beyond these streets, longing for some other
miracle—the migration of monarchs
or the scent of a lost year’s perfume. Is
it your touch or this petal breeze that
pulls me back?  This time, I hold out my hand.

 

(photo by ccharmon via flickr)

Where poems come from—sometimes

 

A lot of time passed. I wrote in notebooks and on computers and sometimes forgot the words almost as quickly as they moved from my mind onto paper or screen. But yesterday, looking for something, I happened on one of the pieces. Here are a few of the fragments. They feel like suddenly remembered dreams to me. And remembered, they may turn into something. Even poems.

One fragment:

On this night there are only white roses, clusters of moths, wings tangled. Lying in bed, the sheets crumpled around us. I listen to you sleeping, your breath smooth tonight, but I’ve heard it stop, felt for your pulse, which is steady even when your chest is still. I nudge you back to breath. The door slams. We’re  both awake now, the candles burning down, how thin the veil between waking and sleeping. It is all, the scientists say, one continuous dream, half remembered.

These characters we’ve chosen. The man in the orange sweater, the lost girl, a man looking up from a hand of cards. I haven’t looked into the closets or under the bed, have not read the medical charts, the e-mails stacking up like layers of skin. We slough them off, slough them up, these flakes of thought, these voices repeating and repeating: I’m here. This is what I’ve seen. it matters because I’ve seen it, sent it to you. As leaves perhaps speak to one another before they fall.

 

Second fragment:

 For too long I have not remembered more than a wisp of a dream, though the night has become familiar, sleep pausing for a moment, then resuming. As if the body needs to reassert itself—solid, resting on a mattress, darkness sifting into the iris as through a funnel. Perhaps the glare of dreaming is too bright and the body squints against it, waking. I long for the bread I remember, the shattering crust and stiff but soft sponge for butter. Before long I’ll ask for the rice balls I believed only she could make, the meatloaf cooked in a skillet, the soup from a can poured into a thermos. It was colder then, the snow hardening enough to support the weight of a girl walking home in the early twilight. Girls were allowed to walk alone then, out to the fields, and up the street until it ended. Alone with the growl of a stomach. Something stops us now, as though the impulse stops at the synapse, dies there without even a note of longing. A bare-chested man sits with his computer, scarcely moving all day. Hungers pushed away. The body ignored so long it begins squalling, making noises as a baby would to get attention.

 

Third fragment:

I pull the cards. A resurrection. A beginning. A long walk in snow, remembering to look up at the lighted window and to knock on the door of the church where shelter, even beauty, await. Fortunetellers are everywhere. I consult 7 or 8 a day. It’s not normal, the future becoming so much a part of the present that it encroaches, an invasive species. We’re chanting now. Now. Now. But the moment cheats us, or we cheat it. The unpredicted future—the next now. The now of the next heartbeat. A knock at the door. The slamming can’t be fixed. The plumber is due next. Now though, it’s quiet. The heat coming on, the birds in focus again, birdsong. In the murky pond, a dozen enormous koi. Food floats on the surface, but sleep pulls them down. This is where I rest. This is the sleep I seek, the cold water layered above me, cold sinking in.

(The photo is by Dystopos, via Flickr)

Writing with Julia, Part 3

Just last week I was wondering if I'd ever write another poem. It's that same false thought that blows through when I haven't written in a while, or when I sit down with Julia (it had been ages since we'd gotten together in the garden--things were starting to bloom) and see her zip into a poem while I am essentially writing things that bear a scary resemblance to shopping lists. This one, she said, had a tiny spark in one of the ghazals I wrote in February, a war poem with the image of a girl's scarf in a tree. I'm happy to marvel at how the mind takes a starting point like that and runs. Here's the poem she wrote, which may or may not be finished:

Windstorm

From the window we watch it whip
the lemon tree. The wind has snared
an ugly bag, glaring white in
our green view, but flying
uniform, under attack.
You are on my hip, happy
for once to be held. You point, say,
Bag. I tell you later we will open
the screen, window, and cut it down.
When the wind blows we are transfixed.
As one we hear it tear at what
contains us, watch the tree strain,
threaten to give way. When the wind
stills you ask for it again. I say,
That's the wind. I don't command it.
You ask for it again.

        --Julia Cole

Even starting is catching up

Poetry month again, only this time it's the official month, which made it hard to skip, though of course I was tempted. So, a poem a day. I started working on something yesterday, but there was a long hike involved, whose quite steep terrain hadn't been advertised, and once I finally sat down again, sleep set in. I'll see if I can catch up, though, and make it an even 30 poems... In the workshop the seed was planted for doing praise poems. I thought of Neruda's odes to common things (this translation of Ode to tomatoes was a huge influence on me early on.) But I'm thinking more about common things like--self-help books and Botts dots. We'll see...