And...

...the world is beautiful again. I saw a woman with a Phoenix tattoo over her heart the other day during the hook pull. It was beautiful because that's all of us, all the time. Nicer metaphor than the ground glass dust devil I sometimes feel my heart to be.
Remember, self, to write about your soul more.

Morningish Greatpoets

On the other hand, maybe I mourn beforehand so I can be the graceful/cold/hardass I am under pressure when I need to be?

After Love

He is watching the music with his eyes closed.
Hearing the piano like a man moving
through the woods thinking by feeling.
The orchestra up in the trees, the heart below,
step by step. The music hurrying sometimes,
but always returning to quiet, like the man
remembering and hoping. It is a thing in us,
mostly unnoticed. There is somehow a pleasure
in the loss. In the yearning. The pain
going this way and that. Never again.
Never bodied again. Again the never.
Slowly. No undergrowth. Almost leaving.
A humming beauty in the silence.
The having been. Having had. And the man
knowing all of him will come to the end.

Jack Gilbert

(no subject)

 When your first response to a request for your time is, 'I don't have free days.  I make time from blood and stones' you know you need to slow down and take some time.  You also may have just been spending a lot of time with someone who's innately dramatic.  In my case both are definitely true.

I was going to write about my soul.  I was going to write, you know, that it exists.  I was going to write that a friend of mine, known henceforth as Walker because he's come up a dozen times and now needs a moniker, actually flinches internally when I use that word.

I was going to write that I could feel it strongly this morning.  I slept the night at CrazyChris', it's been a long long time and he's been mentally absent for maybe four years now anyhow.  Now he's back, and we cried and talked and ranted and talked and cried and backrubbed and held each other, and I felt safe.  I've realised (I've only now realised it, or only this morning when I was lying there watching the green light come up into the room with morning and he was sleeping beside me and the room was the same, his freckles were the same, as they were when we were lovers) that I am safe.  I've realised that whatever happens, with whoever, whatever breaks or darkens or snaps or halts, whether or not it returns to me as a nourishing connection, I will always have friends who love me.  Any one person may not be present, no one may be available in the second I need them, but they will always be there.

During the hook pull I had my obsidian spheres (dark, one with a green eye for thinking and one with an empty pool for feeling) on long lines from hooks in my chest and back.  I put out my hands and spun around (I was wearing my blue girl skirt) and spun and spun and the dizzier I knew I was going to be when I stopped the more I kept spinning because I didn't want to be in that place yet.  The spheres lifted and sailed along, tugging their own dance, and they were connected to my flesh and they were part of me.  When I stopped (because everything ends) I dropped quickly and put my hand on the ground so I didn't fall.  The weight of the spheres was taken by the ground, and the world was fuzz around me.  In that moment I was free-- I did not soar (one soars on wings, or wind) or float (one floats in something) or fly (one flies in relation to other things).  I was me, not only me (which requires a comparison to another thing) or Me (in which I overshadowed the things around me).  I was just there, and there was nothing else, and there was nothing else.

Those two experiences-- one last weekend, one this --have stretched that continuum of connectedness and distance on both ends now.  My world is always getting bigger.  My self-knowledge is always getting bigger.  My sense of self?  it becomes, not bigger, but more steady and certain and sure and dependable.  I no longer require someone else to be my rock at the centre of the universe; I no longer require it of myself. My soul (yes, there it is) has attained enough mass that it is my rock.

I showed CrazyChris the most beautiful spot in the city.  We were walking-- it was so lovely out-- down the Drive, and he was going to soccer, and I asked him if he'd been there. He said (of course) that the most beautiful spot in the city was a pretty tall order, and I reminded him that I always choose my words deliberately.  When we walked up he looked at me with a cocked eyebrow, all skepticism, but when we sat down he understood.

We watched a robin bathing together there.  That space, that one tiny space, is peace distilled.  It is powerful magic.  It is most beautiful.  It feeds the soul and leads one to freedom.

And I always choose my words deliberately.

I am more free now than I was yesterday morning.  I am also slowly becoming more bound, more enmeshed in the net that holds me up.  I can feel smoke curling up from fresh cauterization and I can feel the lightness of many strands bearing up against my inner gravity.

I wish I could speak more clearly.  I wish I could press the imprint of these times into your mind.  I can't.

I was going to write: This is me without fingernails, typing, intent, leaned over the laptop.  But-- the ring on my device goes off-- Angus has texted me to say he's back across the border and will be home soon.  The real world flies back in.  There was peace at that spot with CrazyChris, there was the incredible joy of realising I didn't have to be anywhere and I could walk back in sunshine so hot that had I been standing only in my black leather boots I would have been sweating -- it's the first time this year -- and there was the dive into language like flying through clean air and sunlight.  Now there's only a girl and clicking keys and a laptop with one song playing over and over again in the background.

It's been quite a weekend.

 Here's back to the real world.

Poems for Grief

Michael, the second one is the one I spoke of quite some time ago.

Trying to Raise the Dead

Look at me. I'm standing on a deck
in the middle of Oregon. There are
friends inside the house. It's not my

house, you don't know them.
They're drinking and singing
and playing guitars.( Read more... )

A direction. An object. My love, it needs
a place to rest. Say anything. I'm listening.
I'm ready to believe. Even lies, I don't care.

Say burning bush. Say stone. They've
stopped singing now and I really should go.
So tell me, quickly. It's April. I'm

on Spring Street. That's my gray car
in the driveway. They're laughing
and dancing. Someone's bound

to show up soon. I'm waving.
Give me a sign if you can see me.
I'm the only one here on my knees.

Dorianne Laux

Married

I came back from the funeral and crawled
around the apartment, crying hard,
searching for my wife's hair.
For two months got them from the drain,
from the vacuum cleaner, under the refrigerator,
and off the clothes in the closet.
But after other Japanese women came,
there was no way to be sure which were
hers, and I stopped. A year later,
repotting Michiko's avocado, I find
a long black hair tangled in the dirt.

Jack Gilbert

Miniature Bridges, Your Mouth

( Read more... )

this should be easy. a two-step to cowboys. you're beautiful
but that's not the point.

x

I know my way back perfectly well. like the back
of my hand, as it were. but look, the labyrinth walls
are high hedge and green. this also could be joy.

xx

I literally don't know your middle name. does that
matter? what systems we arrange for intimacy, small
disclosures like miniature bridges, your mouth. not
what I'd anticipated. softer. to begin with,
I should tell the truth more. I could miss you,
and that's a liability.

xxx

I am not often off-kilter. but you're so silent,( Read more... )

Marty McConnell

My Husband Discovers Poetry

Because my husband would not read my poems,
I wrote one about how I did not love him.
In lines of strict iambic pentameter,
I detailed his coldness, his lack of humor.
It felt good to do this.

Stanza by stanza, I grew bolder and bolder.
Towards the end, struck by inspiration,
I wrote about my old boyfriend,
( Read more... )

You know how this story ends,
how my husband one day loses something,
goes into the basement,
and rummages through the old trunk,
and he uncovers the hidden poem
and sits down to read it.

But do you hear the strange sounds
that floated up the stairs that day,
the sounds of an animal, its paw caught
in one of those traps with teeth of steel?
Do you see the wounded creature
at the bottom of the stairs,
his shoulders hunched over and shaking,
fist in his mouth and choking back sobs?
It was my husband paying tribute to my art.

Diane Lockward

We were driving to your funeral
& our father was not crying
because he has a way
of tying ribbons around grief.
( Read more... )

If there were an antonym for suicide
we could all choose when to be born.
I would have been born after that day
so I could not remember you.
So my fingers would stop pointing
at all the things that aren’t there.

Kevin A. González