the more i want the less i want the more i want

if i must long (and i must) then this is how i long

 

the one word which must be uttered

 

the heart feels it

the desire like the oven which must bake the bread

 

 

"heron"

From: "Toward the Same Shore", Yves Bonnefoy

Between sky and room
Sometimes our mirror
Takes the small earthly
Sun in its hands,

As though
The paths, the hopes
Of things and names
Joined on the same shore.

We start to dream
That downstream from this river
Of peace, words will not ask
Too much of the world,

That words will not cut
The throat of the lamb
That trustfully
Follows our speech.

 

gradations of interpretation and truth

 

july 12th, 11pm, the cup is full

11 pm, the night open like a calm lake, clean, pellucid, yet darkly opaque.  six blackened silhouettes, boys,  move through our back yard ignoring barriers, while their voices, pure, enter through our front open windows, songs of childhood, rare crystalline perfection, unadulterated for now.  alone in the kitchen but not alone, i watch them out the small back window, know divinity poured into a cup, know awe of body, know unlimited stretch of spirit, their small voices rising up to the gods, not in prayer but knotted in the indulgence of being, know opportunity, know too pain to come. i both die and am born again in the complicated place where both birth and death exist as one, taken form and flight in the uncontainable embodiment of mid-summer laughter.

 

________

 

 

 

mindemoya, summer 2008

 

it hurts to know these moments exist, existed, no longer exist, nor can ever exist in exactly the same way again, but will exist again - newly.  it hurts.  and we are blessed.

the awful and awesome world is

the point, killarney, july 2013

all  potentially exists always

perhaps it is the illusion of time, the extension between happenings which has convinced us otherwise

perhaps it is because we cleave to the ease of luxury that we are astonished by brutality

 

 

 

________

 

reflections of sky in water on rock, killarney, july 2013

 

from:  The Sixth Meditation: Faces of God,  Jack Gilbert

It is convenient for the old men to blame Eve.
To insist we are damned because a country girl
talked to the snake one afternoon long ago.
Children must starve in Somalia for that,
and old women be abandoned in our greatest cities.
It's why we will finally be thrown into the lakes
of molten lead.  Because she was confused
by happiness that first time anyone said
she was beautiful.  Nevertheless, she must be
the issue, so people won't notice that rocks
and galaxies, mathematics and rust are also
created in His image.

________

                                       The forest must
not show the other face: slugs and grubs,
nematodes, and greenhead flies laying eggs
so their white larvae squirm in the filth.
Tent caterpillars, high in the trees, swarm out
from their offensive shrouds to eat the green
luxury bare.  Spiders cast their nets in the dark.
Aphids gorge on lice.  The braconid wasps lay eggs
under the skin of sphinx caterpillars so the larvae
will bore their way out through the host.
The other faces of God are not mediated by our
heart's need.  We are not stone, nor even jungle.
We are animals haunted by love.  Not spirits
buried in flesh, but the flesh itself.
And the spirit we are is not separated from it.

________

There is a god who prepares the locust in the blind
earth for seventeen years, to have it born without
a mouth.

the vegetable

my computer is old, cranky, temperamental, slow.  i try to open old images and the computer's motor whorls, works, goes uphill and down, to the breakdown of time and space, out into numbers and dashes and pulls back images from the ether.  i wait.  one photo.  and then another opens.  there you are, my son younger, my lover not yet my husband.  you are on the shore of a great lake and in the first photograph together in what i know is the tunneled cold.  you heft a log.  oh my, what will happen?  in the next, incrementally, as the luxury of technological photography allows, you move your arms in tandem a fraction backward, swing the pendulum of girth and weight effortlessly now, although i see the evidence in the history of your shoulders and knees.  open, open!  i want the next image to open!  i want to see what you will do, what you have done, what i already know and even then knew.  you will set the log sailing through the air and then splashing into the cold water.  but it comes over me, the desire to see again, to witness the unfolding of the simple event, not in my mind but through my body! and i am filled as though with the longing to eat a fresh vegetable, one i can not identify nor name but a vegetable stubborn, resolute like the cantankerous radish, the jerusalem artichoke, the turnip, something difficult and notable, but how i want to - how i want to - like a revelation of flesh, the translation of the earth's soil - eat it!  as i wait, i salivate.  as i wait, it is all that i am, this hunger for the vegetable, food of the earth, natural progression through earth's time, born into skin!  but not all that i am for if i separate the thing from its shadow i am starving for the hunger too and desirous to hold it all a moment in my mouth, to have taste break inside my being into being and to know it absolute, beforebeforebefore before the unforgivable swallowing.

elements of a short story: the moon, the earth, the teapot and me

something reaches from the other side and begs to be framed
needs, at all costs, to find a body