alone

is this aloneness enough?  does it show you?  can it reveal?

standing alone in the kitchen after he has left me, my legs still extended and my hand reminiscent at my hip –

(is this bone a word he once spoke?)

i almost feel what he must feel – my presence – my actuality – my more convincing being

i put my hand to my other hip and feel the phantom sway of bone between, the join, the dip

and horizon of my actual being

- almost

but he has left the room

and definition of alone resonates like a question

as though bones are not enough

even my hips

they do not exist

the crow and the mountains, the crow and the valley

all over the mountains and the valley

the crow flew

without once thinking, 

"where am i?"

from out of time's corruption

"Photography does not create eternity, as art does; it embalms time, rescuing it simply from its proper corruption."

- André Bazin (1918–1958), French film critic.

grey tree

how much time can one day hold?

when does this tree exist?

being delicate

being delicate

and almost seen

in the fold of the world

somewhere good, necessary and wise

not so dapper dan

there is something in the lock of winter that i invite
but there is something i revolt against, as well
(today) with fistfuls of lapels 
i'd like to put winter up against a board
and wrestle it out of its quietude

up

what waits for us?

considering

it's not the quiet of the forest, the trees, the crows breaking free from the thin lines to be solitary and independent for only a brief and deceptive moment.  it's not the slow leg of the moose in the snag struck like a tree to the earth against the enduring rock, or the moose's wrinkled unquestioning face.  it's not the shadows beneath the pine like time or the white defined branches of the stripped bare maple in the lock of winter's brace.  it's none of these things.  and it's not my relationship to them.  (how can you relate to something that is, when you are not?)

it's the uncountability of the parts.
it's the namelessness of the whole.

hands

at all times they're attached to her

but of course, you would say

but why, i ask

it is and i'm not

yes, it is very beautiful where i live

this does not mean that i get to be all greedy over it,
parasitic, suck the ripe blood from its pores

it means that i am irrelevant

and it is very beautiful where i live

holy place

in the holy place

we hold our breath

please, always choose to deviate

it is 1 a.m.  i am on my way upstairs to bed.  i reach under the lampshade and turn out the light, a motion i have engaged in a thousand thousand times before, without thinking.  as i do so, i look out the living room window.  i am struck.  this exists.  i think of every time i have not acted in my life, not stood up, not thought, not felt, not breathed, not taken the picture, not written the poem, not stepped outside my boundaries to be present.  with great respect and recognition, i thought of donna telling me (on another post the other day) of this: 

I was driving home a few nights ago around 11 p.m. The sky was clear and the air was crisp. A part of me longed to find an open field where I could stand in the night and feel my puniness, the speck-of-dust space of my existence. But it was late and I was expected home. But it was late and my trajectory was already set: mom’s house to home, point A to point B, my safe world. My one world.

Approaching an intersection, the wet pavement reflecting the lights of gas stations, street lights and stop lights, I imagined the vast grid of streets that continued far out of my sight and my vehicle, antlike, following its programmed route.

I didn’t find a field. I didn’t even pull over to look at the sky.   To deviate was unthinkable.   almost. But telling it, it becomes a possibility not taken. 

(my bold and underscore.)

i tell myself, erin, you must always, always choose to deviate.  always the field exists.  screw whoever or whatever you think is waiting. 

i take the picture.

more than

even angels are complicated~
.

no words required - just put your hand here

transformation

i bet you didn't know
all it takes for a woman to transform
is a scarf,
a pair of earrings,
a perfume,
a poem,
a voice,
a hand,
a suggestion,
a doorway, 
a promise,
an idea.

although, at times, it appears that the transformation occurs outside the woman,
the dialogue must take place within the woman.

nostalgia

in midnight in paris paul says of nostalgia:   "Nostalgia is denial - denial of the painful present... the name for this denial is golden age thinking - the erroneous notion that a different time period is better than the one ones living in - its a flaw in the romantic imagination of those people who find it difficult to cope with the present."

milan kundera in<i> ignorance</i> writes, “The Greek word for "return" is nostos. Algos means "suffering." So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.”  (thank you, monica, for your earlier discussion on nostalgia:)

and laura tedeschi  introduces a new element regarding nostalgia, "that it is the pain of not knowing what is there now."

i consider these ideas in regards to my own nostalgia and firmly do not believe it is a denial of the painful present.  in fact, it requires me to look the painful present directly in the eye.  nor do i want to return to nostalgic times.  i accept they are necessarily in the past.  what would it be to relive them?  we would forever pass into and then out of them, those times becoming lukewarm and used for their lack of uniqueness.  and for me it is not the pain of not knowing what is there now, but perhaps this might change depending on what piece of nostalgia i consider, but i don't think so.  rather, for me, it is a celebration of the past, what has been, and what has brought us here to this moment, but it is linked with sadness, the loss all time forces upon us necessarily, the unforgiving, unrelenting forward loss of innocence as we move forever in one direction, between moments. 

nostalgia must be, i think, as personal as any idea, seen through the eye of one's life philosophy.

i go~

 where do i go?  where do i ever want to go? 

always into a space with colour, light, mood. 

it is not a place.

within the dream of pine

if you think along the lines of nature, then you think properly.  carl jung

(you can listen to jung speak of life and death here.  thank you, dean)

the shift

under the earth and up through the forest is where the transformation takes place.
how?  one dares.  when?  when one can not bear it otherwise.

and so the world changes,

 but the shift happens first inside.

the new page