this is what i mean to say

i mean to say something.

what, what do you mean to say?

something.  please, something.  i mean to say something.

it is inside the tender every day moment that the magnitude of life resides

we are made, not by grand sweeps of significance
but rather by small and ordinary gestures

Highlights and Interstices by Jack Gilbert 


We think of lifetimes as mostly the exceptional
and sorrows.  Marriage we remember as the children,
vacations, and emergencies.  The uncommon parts.
But the best is often when nothing is happening.
The way a mother picks up the child almost without
noticing and carries her across Waller Street
while talking with the other women.  What if she
could keep all of that?  Our lives happen between
the memorable.   I have lost two thousand habitual 
breakfasts with Michiko.  What I miss most about
her is that commonplace I can no longer remember.

in the evening along the river

while the petty house of man crumbles
always there remains a place of quiet rejuvenation,
of timeless honesty, of endurance and stark truth

investigation of the self viii: what is it to be you?

what is it to be you?  what is it to be me?


if i am to be honest, and i want to be honest, honesty the shield against the inauthentic life - sometimes i am sad.  there is a great deal to reckon with in this life.  so i tell you that one night while sitting with my hair hanging down over my face and staring down at my thighs, only this window of sight open, and while crying, i realize that only i will ever know what it is like to be me.  what an astounding revelation!  only i have this capacity to know me from this vantage point, from inside my eyes, no camera able to sink back far enough, to be able to encapsulate the filter that is all of my history, that is all of my desire and all of my fear.  considering this incredible revelation, that only i know what it is to be me (and of course, i am only just now learning) even my vantage point pivots and i begin to see myself differently, more clearly.

existence, part vii (we try to inhabit this world)

inside of this sentence is an idea
around its perimeter i push the sand
do you see it?


man is like this, too


what idea do we contain?
who sees us?

to sweet impossible blossom

From Blossoms by Li-Young Lee

From blossoms comes
this brown paper bag of peaches
we brought from the boy
at the bend in the road where we turned toward
signs painted Peaches.
From laden boughs, from hands,
from sweet fellowship in the bins,
comes nectar at the roadside, succulent
peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,
comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.
O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into
the round jubilance of peach.
There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy, to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.

one small window in wabash

as soon as the window of light is opened
it doesn't matter, exactly, where the body is

but instead
where the heart, the mind and the soul go~

so sings the common man

the multitude is cacophonous

however, each solitary

 individual

isolated

unique creature,

is important

existence, part vi (woman)

and so he named her, woman

she was quaking in her nightdress in the side yard,
naming things in whispers like tree and sparrow and breeze.
her nightdress blew against her body and suggested she had a form
but her trembling suggested it was no one thing.
what was she up to by naming the world?
it was a game she played, only she didn't really understand it.
what she wanted (and this was a secret even to herself)
was for someone to tell her she was here.
it was she who wanted a name.