making room for the spirit of cesar vallejo, new year's eve

 

 

 

crow and the word crow

i called after it as though i were the bird;

crow, crow, crow, i cawed.

how it flew beyond the bounds of its word.

moving toward

 in order to make a knot you must turn something in upon itself. we are the small catches in body and time. god is the infinite which bends toward itself and intricately blossoms us.

before we are tied into existence god lays his kiss, a sweet little moth of gore, at the center of each knot, a delicate wound to tie around.

in our living we are drawn along the line toward that which will heal us. we flutter toward light and love. we do not understand that we will only fully be healed when we are undone and absorbed once again into the infinite.
 

all around that which we see is that which we don't see

there is something about being in the back of the car and travelling

 not knowing anything - but trusting.
 

colour

we drive along beside the field trying to capture the colour

but as soon as we stop the colour dissolves, or rather it becomes its singular parts, paltry sticks of grey and orange.

but as we were moving it was a distant blaze; it was a quiet inferno in the eye that threw out the eye and descended into the heart; it recognized something in the vein.

but standing here amongst the sticks i am lost; i have not arrived.


and so where does colour live?

move, young girl. run! faster! and don't look back. there is a wolf chasing you into existence;  it gives you everything you'll ever love.

the forest sings its own

this is precisely how far we can see

well, maybe not precisely

portrait of yearning

 

 

from: clear night by charles wright

 

i want to be bruised by god.

i want to be strung up in a strong light and singled out.

i want to be stretched, like music wrung from a dropped seed.

i want to be entered and picked clean.

do you understand, this has nothing to do with the body?  do you understand, this is because of the body?  do you understand, it is between me and that which i move toward?  do you understand, this is our condition? 

do you understand, these are not questions.

the complicated relationships of mothers and daughters

river and light

are you looking for the perfect moment?  are you looking for the perfect anything?  perfect is perfect and everything is perfect and nothing.  what does perfect mean?  you torment yourself with perfect.  you have a yoke between you and your language and yet the word is innocent.  the yoke is your own violent making, the conjunction between mind and being, a bastardized yearning that hooks all words impossibly back toward themselves, but words are empty spaces meant only to be held as gentle hands.

unhook the yoke.  look for nothing.  there - now - breathe.

gifts

here, mom, he says, after scampering over cold rocks in an icy wind.  he knows there is something important here, something that almost makes no sense yet does.  our hands ache because of the cold.  i mean, we really ache, we struggle and yet the flowers are enduring and delicate.  i put them to my mouth, my nose.  do they smell, he asks.  oh, i forgot to smell them.  i was only touching their softness.  no, i say, breathing in deeply now with intention, i don't think so.  wait - perhaps?  the wind whips us and the flowers.  the world is too raw and abrupt this day to release the flower's sweet scent but that doesn't mean it's not there.

later he stuffs a feather into my sleeve and runs off over the rocks toward autumn's rough water.  please, tell me he will always always know the value of flowers in an icy cove and feathers stuffed into the sleeve.

whosoever thought of such a foolish notion as ending

there is no such thing.  do not weep for the struggling seedling; don't worry for the tree; rejoice in the fall of leaves.  today this year's first snowflakes fall, by far not the first, nor the last.  free yourself and know eternity.

existence, part x

blow on the glass. rub. 

 

breath - both cleansing and obscuring.

there is something here, i insist.

lean closer. 

mark the congruences.  notice the inconsistencies. 

be astounded by the possibilities - life tied up in such trembling sacs. 

life.  man. whole stories spanning decades and impossible complexities.

breathe again. 
the glass opaque.  the image almost gone.

 

begin again.

blow on the glass.  rub.

breath - both cleansing and obscuring.

there is something here, i insist.

lean closer.



 

scale

(the girl laughs at me for all kinds of reasons.  my voice is wrong, my inflection, my words, what is behind my words, my ideas, what is behind my ideas - what came before ideas?  even my knees are wrong, my body, my shape, my size.  my smell.  my smell is wrong.  i am about to speak.  i am about to think.  i am about to be wrong.  what?  what is she afraid of?)

dawn's coming

at the end of each day
a dirty fistful

each morning
a clean hand

another performance

my dear sweet daughter, both perform and do not perform.  
do you understand?  be yourself.

on the way to the performance

 

october tree

 

from:  Rememberance

 

And you wait, keep waiting for that one thing
which would infinitely enrich your life:
the powerful, uniquely uncommon,
the awakening of dormant stones,
depths that would reveal you to yourself.

 

~ Rainer Maria Rilke ~

 

(The Book of Images, trans. by Albert Ernest Flemming)

geraldine elshire lived in this house, as i live now

upstairs

geraldine elshire was quiet around the hub of what she was as woman

upstairs i barely breathe

the sacredness of body and family a church beneath me