Threads

My mind is on a loom—

Slowly stretched by  innumerable fingers.

Moving from minute chaos to a grand design

Whose pattern is beyond my grasp.

Many contributing ideas, plans, people,

Threads sourced from slow-growing proteins

From some animal in the Andes—

Through sea, and slop, and snow

Made its way to be jumbled in my lap

On a porch in Oregon—neatly dyed and repurposed.

Ready to be infused with my ‘individuality.’

I label these threads as my own

But I wasn’t on the mountain

Watching over the herd, smoke piling

Out of my mouth and off the hills.

As morning dew evaporates,

Hosts munch a photosynthetic routine

Marching and growing another day—

Completing processes determined

By millennia of biological wiring.

The alpaca feels purpose.

The shepherd feels purpose.

And where do I find mine?

My threads are energy borrowed

From the sun and evolution and privilege.

This design is simply light reflecting off matter,

Bouncing back on my neat retinas

Infused with meaning by cortices—

A bubbling miasma of chemistry and coincidence.

This is my existence—Biology has designed me

With a illusory sense of purpose

To keep busy on the loom.

Last Breath

I bought this flower
While holding your hand.

And here it sits--strange
How it lives in your absence.

Your fingerprints are everywhere.
The coffee cup your lips touched--

The way the blankets lay just so--
Blueprint for a sleepy body.

Wilting petals whisper
Memories, this dahlia exhales.

Gray Autumn

Autumns cloak crunches underfoot

Like paper cranes folded in

The feverish propulsion of summer.

You tell me to take my shoes off

So they can be rubbed—the knots

Tied in a ceaseless trudge

In shitty clogs on damp wood floors

I walked to you—

Rain dripping off my brow,

Golden crisps blowing in from outside--

And you told me its okay to rest now.

And that even trees get tired.

They’ve shed layers to reveal quiet bones.

And although grayness has taken hold,

You tell me to have faith—

That there’s life in those veins

A capacity for phototropism

Even winter can’t stamp out.

Wait--By Galway Kinnell

Wait, for now.
Distrust everything, if you have to.
But trust the hours. Haven't they
carried you everywhere, up to now?
Personal events will become interesting again.
Hair will become interesting.
Pain will become interesting.
Buds that open out of season will become lovely again.
Second-hand gloves will become lovely again,
their memories are what give them
the need for other hands. And the desolation
of lovers is the same: that enormous emptiness
carved out of such tiny beings as we are
asks to be filled; the need
for the new love is faithfulness to the old.

Wait.
Don't go too early.
You're tired. But everyone's tired.
But no one is tired enough.
Only wait a while and listen.
Music of hair,
Music of pain,
music of looms weaving all our loves again.
Be there to hear it, it will be the only time,
most of all to hear,
the flute of your whole existence,
rehearsed by the sorrows, play itself into total exhaustion.

Grow Slow

As for me, my internal pace is slow. Mine is the intrinsic slowness of the tree that embraces its growth and its blooming. Yes, I have a bit of its admirable patience. I had to train myself in it from the moment I understood the secret slowness that engenders and distills any work of art. But if I know its temporal measure, I know nothing of its immobility. Oh, the joys of travel!

---Ranier Maria Rilke
The Book of Hours II, 34

Charged

How all things are in migration! How they seek refuge in us. How each of them desires to be relieved of externality and to live again in the Beyond which we enclose and deepen within ourselves. We are convents of lived things, dreamed things, impossible things; all that is in awe of this century saves itself within us and there, on its knees, pays its debt to eternity.

Little cemetaries that we are, adorned with the flowers of our futile gestures, containing so many corpses that demand that we testify to their souls. All prickly with crosses, all covered with inscriptions, all spaded up and shaken by countless daily burials, we are charged with the transmutation, the resurrection, the transfiguration of all things. For how can we save what is visible if not by using the language of the absence, of the invisible?

And how to speak this language that remains mute unless we sing it with abandon and without any insistence on being understood.

Ranier Maria Rilke
Letter to Sophy Giauque
November 26, 1925

She Goes Away From Me

 

She goes away from me.
We call it traveling.
We say it makes us grow to be apart.
Something is dull around my heart.
She calls me every night.
Though she left in the light,
in the morning I am formal
I make the day seem normal.

Women want to speak, to trust
with knowledge every loss,
to follow thread from the needle's eye
straight to the lucid sky.
Andrea speaks of sexual intelligence.
One to another we hold evidence.
Sewn in the corners of our samplers
we tell the underside of what appears.
Thus we grow together like grass,
wind singing and tuned, we are a mass.

Karin likens you and me to family,
our leaving like the failing of a village
without a name, and not yet mapped.
Or like a young death; infant wrapped
into the ground. What is this for,
this little life, nothing more
than brief breathing? And yet, it's not from pity
that mothers christen for eternity.
Women brought communion
to every effort in the West.
Men spoke of softening but this was less
than we intended. What we mean by root
is metaphor and real, buried essence, truth.
Somewhere in the circle of each mind
is every detail, bliss, suffering, kind.

She goes away from me
but someone in her does not leave.
And I am pulled out there.
This is called pain, called missing, loss.
But keeping this, one can go anywhere.
All I've lost is what I have not grieved.

---Susan Griffin--from Unremembered Country

Lit

Now I see—it was just a spark.

I wonder if it ever felt different to you,

Or was I just another crumpled newspaper

Fed to the flames?

I thought we stoked it together, with secrets.

But now I see the beguiling—wit and whisky.

I can’t help but question my own light.

Was it always my choice?

It is difficult to see

The choice in a scheme. Were all conartists

Licking charred wounds—there’s no foresight

When we hardly see ourselves.

Yet I am no longer willing

To get involved with men who are content

With painting me a question mark in ash.

Now I see—matches are plentiful and easily lit.

Atmosphere--Susan Griffin

Learning to
draw tenderness, the
sky is full of
snow for her,
and she knows the
road curves around
her and the chill
of the air has no
fear, and she
sees her sorrow
gleaming in the
hardening river, she is
learning to take
tenderness from the
atmosphere.

---Unremembered Country pg 9

i am the permeable membrane.

i am the permeable membrane.  
how to not lose oneself in a lover
 is a tricky boundary to be sure. 
 i am consumed….by the idea 
of his existence. he is the first thing 
i think of in any free moment. 
 i plan my schedule around the quantity 
of time i can spend with him. i have fallen…
for something inside him. some uncanny energy. 
 for what? why do we take these leaps
when we know the landing is unattainable. 
my oh my do i have a knack for men 
whose lives seem mutually exclusive to my own. 
and so we share this 'time capsule' of passion, 
in limbo….between metaphysical destinations. 
will i ever meet a man whom with i can just 'be'? 
perhaps i wouldn't be satisfied with the coincidence...
the smoothness. so i tease my poor heart 
with another wandering spirit. 
and yes…its been worth it.

That Kind of Woman--Warsan Shire

how far have you walked for men who’ve never held your feet in their laps?
how often have you bartered with bone, only to sell yourself short?
why do you find the unavailable so alluring?
where did it begin? what went wrong? and who made you feel so worthless?
if they wanted you, wouldn’t they have chosen you?
all this time, you were begging for love silently, thinking they couldn’t hear you, but they smelt it on you, you must have known that they could taste the desperate on your skin?
and what about the others that would do anything for you, why did you make them love you until you could not stand it?
how are you both of these women, both flighty and needful?
where did you learn this, to want what does not want you?
where did you learn this, to leave those that want to stay?

After the Tempest

 

My wildflowers wilt in the sun.

Their pallid faces mimic contours

Of landscape— tallis fields

And wounds from raindrops.

My petals shed like in autumn

When leaves walk the plank.

I was beguiled by the full moon,

In all its splendor and harvest.

Your love was like waiting for a meteor

Shower in a hail storm—brilliant

As picasso’s textured strokes.

Sweet rainwater cascaded down lips

Cracked and peeling from overexposure.

The tempest heaved chests, pulsed veins,

Sprained ankles, scruffed knees,

Twisted wrists, hallowed bellies,

Fed flowers hope 
For one phototropic dance.

Yet dawn is a catalyst— drying salty tears,

Exposing the true face of our mountains.

Be Ahead of All Parting---Rilke

 
Be ahead of all parting, as if it had already happened,
like winter, which even now is passing.
For beneath the winter is a winter so endless
that to survive it at all is a triumph of the heart.

Be forever dead in Eurydice, and climb back singing.
Climb praising as you return to connection.
Here among the disappearing, in the realm of the transient,
be a ringing glass that shatters as it rings.

Be. And know as well the need to not be: 
let that ground of all that changes
bring you to completion now.

To all that has run its course, and to the vast unsayable
numbers of beings abounding in Nature,
add yourself gladly, and cancel the cost.

Ranier Maria Rilke
Sonnets to Orpheus II, 13

The Layers--by Stanley Kunitz

 

I have walked through many lives,

some of them my own,

and I am not who I was,

though some principle of being

abides, from which I struggle

not to stray.

When I look behind,

as I am compelled to look

before I can gather strength

to proceed on my journey,

I see the milestones dwindling

toward the horizon

and the slow fires trailing

from the abandoned camp-sites,

over which scavenger angels

wheel on heavy wings.

Oh, I have made myself a tribe

out of my true affections,

and my tribe is scattered!

How shall the heart be reconciled

to its feast of losses?

In a rising wind

the manic dust of my friends,

those who fell along the way,

bitterly stings my face.

Yet I turn, I turn,

exulting somewhat,

with my will intact to go

wherever I need to go,

and every stone on the road

precious to me.

In my darkest night,

when the moon was covered

and I roamed through wreckage,

a nimbus-clouded voice

directed me:

"Live in the layers,

not on the litter."

Though I lack the art

to decipher it,

no doubt the next chapter

in my book of transformations

is already written.

I am not done with my changes.

Parting-- Ranier Maria Rilke

 

I have felt what it is to part.
I know it still: a dark, invincible
cruel something, which reveals again
the depth of our bond, and tears it in two.

How unguarded I was as I faced it.
I felt you pulling me and letting me go,
while staying behind, merging with all women,
becoming nothing more than this:

a waving hand, no longer intended for me alone;
a waving that continues and grows indistinct.
Perhaps a blossoming plum tree
from which a bird has just taken flight.
 

Excuses for Why We Failed at Love-- Warsan Shire

More Warsan Shire. My sis shared this poet with me and I'm' absolutely pulled from my bones to her words. This video is melancholic and speaks to depths of male/female intricacies through simple figurative language I find powerful and moving--as if we can always find shadows of our love in the quotidian interactions of the day.  Enjoy.

for women who are 'difficult' to love-- Warsan Shire

you are a horse running alone
and he tries to tame you
compares you to an impossible highway
to a burning house
says you are blinding him
that he could never leave you
forget you
want anything but you
you dizzy him, you are unbearable
every woman before or after you
is doused in your name
you fill his mouth
his teeth ache with memory of taste
his body just a long shadow seeking yours
but you are always too intense
frightening in the way you want him
unashamed and sacrificial
he tells you that no man can live up to the one who
lives in your head
and you tried to change didn't you?
closed your mouth more
tried to be softer
prettier
less volatile, less awake
but even when sleeping you could feel
him travelling away from you in his dreams
so what did you want to do love
split his head open?
you can't make homes out of human beings
someone should have already told you that
and if he wants to leave
then let him leave
you are terrifying
and strange and beautiful
something not everyone knows how to love.

Shrinking Women-- Lily Myers

 A fellow female friend who struggles with the classic melange of body-image-food-guilt-shitshow shared this slam poem with me; I think it is raw and empowering.

Happiness-- by Susan Griffin

Happiness. I am not used

to this. (There is always

something wrong.)

Look at it

the bright early tree.

(I am trying to find out

how you fell.)

The leaves have already turned.

(I want you to see

this, how they

glow outside the glass.)

Morning light strikes

differently. For so

many years I hardly 

had time to know such

moments. They struck me

with such intensity

I would have said

battered me open.

I never understood

they were mine.

I was panicked.

Unhappiness caught up with me 

all the time.

Did you know

the speed of light never alters

even when you go faster

it will be

still that much faster

than you?

(I am thinking that in you fall

something momentous occurred.)

What I see as beautiful

I want you to see too.

Next door, the workmen are hammering.

Very soon we'll go to lunch.

For some reason this moves me to tears.

How life is.

(One does not have to explain

what occurs. One only need say

it has meaning.)

Years ago, when I was young

I traveled to Italy, took in

the great sights. I was in awe, yet

I did not understand

seeing Masaccio's frescoes

fading like shadows into the walls,

this would be the only time

nor that

I would never forget. 

Those muted shades are 

still with me, as possession

and longing, and the view too

of the square before that church

the air, newly spring,

that day, all of it. 

Life, I have finally begun to realize,

is real.

(All this time you recover

from falling

will sink indelibly into mind.)

The leaves

may fall before you are able 

to see them. Science

has recently learned

the line

of existence is soft

and stretches out like a field

wind and light shaping the grass

energy

of sight giving consciousness

force. In the meantime

we live out our lives.

(This morning we talked for so long

everything became lucid.

How can I say what I see?)

At each turning

perfection eludes me.

One moment is not like another.

Last spring

the house next door caught fire.

There was the smell of gas.

We thought

both houses would go.

I vanished up the hill,

went to the house of a friend

where we listened for the flames

and to that aria from Italian

opera, was it the one of love,

or jealousy, or grief?

My house was untouched.

Now the one next door is painted,

fixed. In place of

perfection, the empty hands

I turned out to the world 

are filled.

With what? A letter

half written, the notes

I make on this page,

this new feeling about my shoulders

of age, that sad child's story

you told me this morning,

the workmen's tools sounding 

and stopping. What? As time

moves through me, does it also

move through you?

I keep remembering what you said,

ways you have of seeing (and that

light must have curved with

you fall.) This

is the paradox of vision:

Sharp perception softens

our existence in the world.

inhaleexhale

i inhale

dark 

thoughts

for compost. 

the bin is full

of hallow memories,

mocking energy 

spent--

the belief

that intention 

could manifest 

reality. 

i feel so small 

in this library 

of possibilities, 

within which i once 

found solace.

the longing

stained, 

like brain petroglyphs. 

i weep

for rivers

that will never taste

the sweet-salt 

of the sea. 

pain

is the last

few sips of tea 

at twilight--

pine-needles shimmering.