not a pretty picture. not a good. not a bad. picture. but an argument.

Sunday, March 31, 2013

bound to the lovely fabric



once
and somewhere
and once again
someone stretches
someone rises
someone in incredible skin

somewhere - the sun
somewhere - the moon
somewhere - even rain

who?
me?
you?

always some where
always some time
always some one

Saturday, March 30, 2013

edge


standing with their toes wet at the water's edge,
eager for an answer she asks him,
does this place really exist?

he answers with small words that strike out like matches against the darkness,
does it matter?

Wednesday, March 27, 2013

Saturday, March 23, 2013

man meets crow meets world




"Images are mediations between the world and human beings. Human beings 'ex-ist', i.e. the world is not immediately accessible to them and therefore images are needed to make it comprehensible. However, as soon as this happens, images come between the world and human beings. They are supposed to be maps but they turn into screens: Instead of representing the world, they obscure it until human beings' lives finally become a function of the images they create."

 (from Towards a Philosophy of Photography, Vilem Flusser)





Wednesday, March 20, 2013

apex

the sun lifts to the blessed angle;
the spirit's walls dissolve.



there is nothing to stand upon which says,
this is the best moment of your life.

Monday, March 18, 2013

question

 

we are driving along the splendid green tonsilled corridor of the north:
trembling aspen, poplar, tamarack, rock, muskeg and jack pine,
when my daughter asks a question, do you believe in god,
and i look around the walls of the earth's corridor and wonder
and i look around the walls of the corridor of my mind and wonder
and i look at my body, my bare arms extended and steering
and those resolute white birch, black spruce and the punctuating crow flying over
and i wonder, did my daughter ask a question;
are there questions here; answers;
and what are these trees doing in my mind
and where does the crow go as he passes over
and how do words hang like bats in caves with such light?

Sunday, March 17, 2013

am i the flower, wide awake inside the falling fruit?

i think about the orchid
not to think about the flower
but to think about myself
which means, i think about not existing
but:  existence, being
to touch my lover, my mother, my children
to touch the lover, the mother, the children of a foreign hand
all hands and all bodies
all suns rising and setting









Hurry Toward Beginning by Li-Young Lee

Is it because the hour is late
the dove sounds new,

no longer asking
a path to its father's house,
no longer begging shoes of its mother?

Or is it because I can't tell departure
from arrival, the host from the guest,

the one who waits expectant at the window
from the one who, even now, tramples the dew?

I can't tell what my father said about the sea
we crossed together
from the sea itself,

or the rose's noon from my mother
crying on the stairs, lost
between a country and a country.

Everywhere is home to the rain.
the hours themselves, where do they hide?
The fruit of listening, what's that?

Are the days the offspring of distracted hands?
Does waiting that grows out of waiting
grow lighter? What does my death weigh?
What's earlier, thirst or shade?
Is all light late, the echo to some prior bell?

Is it because I'm tired that I don't know?
Or is it because I'm dying?
When will I be born? Am I the flower,
wide awake inside the falling fruit?
Or a man waiting for a woman
asleep behind a door?
What if a word unlocks
room after room the days
wait inside? Still,

night amasses a foreground
current to my window.
Listen. Whose footsteps are those
hurrying toward beginning?

Friday, March 15, 2013

crow asks:


if we were to say that which we long to say?
if we were to shoot that which we long to shoot?
then what? is our being not the bridge?
is there not something to be said for our failing?

Tuesday, March 12, 2013

the good body

should i be nurse-maid to my body? should i consider every morsel that i put to my mouth? i know you feed the body good things, the body is good. you feed the body pollution, the body becomes polluted. that is not to say the body does not decline. the body's decline is good and natural. i touch the mole at my neck. is this the portal to my future? strawberries, raspberries, and blueberries from the forest floor that may have been touched by the animal body, the avocado sliced like seduction down its side, sweet clover by the fistful from the roadside. i press them all to my body. i have a small violet from over twenty years ago between the page and cellophane of an album, the poem flower from a crannied wall scrawled out beside it in fading pencil. beside that my father unerringly sips a beer on the gentle slope of a lawn never getting drunk. what did he put into his body? all course of good things, my mother's bread, (my mother) the animals he hunted through the forest, the ones he raised in the penned yard. my father put his feet into his boots, the boots the shape of his feet, and travelled the fields that he knew somewhere inside his own chest, as though his chest were made of the wheat he grew, straw man of the earth, not straw man. and where now his body? such a gentle kiss to that violet could send vibrations through it to undo its form. such a gentle kiss to my father sent vibrations through him and so i was born. and then again and he was unborn. what do we feed our bodies? he walking through the bush before the sun. he walking through the bush after the sun. he never returning from the bush. long stalks of wild misbehaved broccoli, ugly and stubborn dirty radish, mangled ears of corn. i press them to my body. hacked head of fish torn off to give to me its body; swath of blackness, head of bear dismembered to give to me its body; punctuated chicken head lopped to give to me its body; tremulous release of cow's thick skull. i press these to my body. holy and rendered by man's hand loaf of bread, holy holy ordinary kitchen counter magic. should i consider every morsel to my mouth? yes, yes, every one. is every morsel good? yes, yes, if we know its name, its place of birth. will my body be good? yes, yes, it is already good. will my body decline? yes, of course, here it goes. i touch the mole at my neck. is this the portal to my future? should i be nurse-maid to my body? no, no. be sweeper of this body, on my knees in glory temporary resident in this body, in gratitude weeper of this body. this body is the shrine, the miraculous accidental but precise multitudinous threshold to all.











Monday, March 11, 2013

insatiable heart

the footprints not erased, the moment not yet gone
already the awful longing begins~


Saturday, March 9, 2013

Wednesday, March 6, 2013

ich bete wieder, du Erlauchter



I am praying again, Awesome One.













With my half-mouth I stammer you.

(from Book of Hours, Rilke)

Monday, March 4, 2013

be this intimate life



the first and the last shuddering cry
of the great seduction
the amaranthine body turned inside out
your organs on your sleeve

the first tragedy would be in not being
all other tragedies, in being

submit
then rise

Saturday, March 2, 2013

the importance of white space and the black muscle

while in a very artless setting at work i am moved to make art.  (please, deflate the word art of any ostentation and replace it with, i am moved with great passion to be in the world.)

i realize the key is, i am moved.

one must feel pressure to be moved from one place to another.  something must push against us or we must push against that something.  at work i am pushed by an artless world toward art.

(this exhibits itself in all aspects of our lives; we are pushed by violence to nonviolence;  we are pushed by solitude toward love; we are pushed by the modern state and profound avarice of man toward nature and a state of cleanliness and balance;  we are pushed by our living toward our death, by our death toward our living, and so on.)

while walking in the country the other day, one white farm field reduced by blowing snow after another, i was absolutely and fully attracted to the fence posts.  at points such as these being takes form.  they intercept the void and initiate the state of being.

silence and void.  white space and form.  it is sexual, what happens here.

why sexual and not sensual?

sensual is nice enough, attractive but passive.  sexual is the black muscle over the spinning place, the place where all things pass into and out of existence.

if we were faced with a world complete, condensed and whole, there would be no opportunity to be moved, there would be no momentum. (imagine only a white field.)  instead, we are granted such opportunity.








and so the whole has been divided and subdivided into places of void and form.  we move between them.  this is our birth,  our life, our living, our death.
 

 

Friday, March 1, 2013