this world, this feather, this mouth: grinding the lens

it is not to wag a flag that we make art, if art is what it is that we make.  it is to be here. 

Spinoza ground lenses to afford himself the breadth to think and write.  i wake and lay into the side of my spirit in the hopes of grinding this lens of my being.  perhaps i will only ever create lowly things which might afford a moment for the world to show herself as the world.  if this be my poverty, then i am rich.

i wake up.  i find a feather touched with dew.  i wake up further. 

it is at least another hour before i break free from the reverie of feather.

i don't know what it is that i have learned but i know that i've learned something.

i am conflicted about posting here but then i am conflicted in life about a great deal.  my last post was to (perhaps) have been the last, however, i find i have no conflict with the feather and i am driven madly to sing her.

everyday has a way of unlocking the metaphor of being

early morning, january 3, 2013

 

 this too is a photograph of the iris passing

summer readies herself to go

but already the iris is gone.

is there not one thing but anticipation or memory?

between the red apple and the red apple

between the moment of being the red apple
and the way we touch the story of the red apple,
a thin chink, a fragment, a shallow groove,
the telling of the making and undoing exists.
if i had a little metal pecker, a knife's blade,
i would insert it and leverage the world open.

sadly, i do not

but my spirit doesn't know this.

stitching the shore

it is so strange that we seem to live a linear journey when really our history is picked up and passed through our cores time and time again in our making.  if i step back from this i understand that every person lives the similar pattern, as though the stitching, that in the end will render us nothing, along the way makes us all the same in design, with variations in temporary material.  this poem was once specifically important to me and so remains that way to me but each time it passes through me it gains new colour, new dimension, new understanding. 

it feels to me as though the world is made of two main string lines, violence and Eros.  while one makes, the other unmakes, or they together make the unfailing pattern which adds up to both everything and zero.  and while specificity is important in our own stories, who we love, how and when, most important is that we love, that we try to make that particular fabric stronger.

"The Shore" by Sharon Olds

The water was clear, grey-green, when I dove
under, it was shimmering.  I looked up,
and saw a wave, passing over,
a gray bar, hurled flat toward the beach,
parallel to it, like a stone yardstick.
I went down inside, to see it again--
wild, shadowy rolling-pin
hurtling toward shore.  Looking up,
without breath, and seeing it,
I felt I was in a nucleus,
seeing the forms of glisten accruing
around me in a cell.  And in bed, when I,
your aqueous humor blurred a moment - not
with tears--with the blur of birth and death, and from with-
in my soul, I saw in your eye-crypt
and honeycomb meshwork, the pure sea.  And then,
when you, your pupil swelled, grew
and grew like a time-lapse flower in the dark on the
screen--bud, half-blossom, blossom, then the
full bloom, stretching as if it were
coming toward me, the one who dwells at your
core rising, and coming out
to me.  When I cried, each tear made a shining rough
mark on you, like a rip in matter
through to spirit, and, clasped as we were, I
felt each
drop hit
and its tiny waves vibrate out, then
what we had become lay, without moving
or speaking, and then eased out, into its sleep.