shapes of buried sounds

| ginger k. hintz

“When it’s your turn to live through a war, you’ll see, you don’t have time to feel anything.” —Colette Marin Catherine

Zenon Zubyrtowicz

It’s all random chaotic vigilance these days.
Day number: “unknown”. Secret selves will be revealed
in the times to come. They know desperation
influences choices. Which illusions may end up real?

II.
This “new normal” hangs like a loose shirt,
an odor, a swallow. We are promised a brighter future.

III.
Philosophers and preachers predictions,
claims unproven, betray their nostalgia.
Doubts to the contrary raise suspicions,
an emotion of imagination and subjectivity.

IIII.
Uncertain and curious how permanent this now
will be is one way to recognize the game.
Loss, grief, time are the same measurement,
which requires comparison in some form.

IIIII.
The rich, and their need for luxuries, buy ready made.
Some beauty unimaginable, a pang. Sharp vanishing
click bait. Possession was an emanation: source.

a cult of one

| ginger k. hintz

It is necessary to permit error because information is not simply making the correct responses.
—Silvan Tomkins, from Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader; “What Are Affects?”

put some respek on my names, February 2019, San Francisco, CA

What wildness still remains to be explored
and why haven’t I moved in that direction?
The horizon to the south cracks light.

It rained fish in Texarkana, Texas—
during the last days of December
and no one is afraid.

Imagine being actively denied
of embodied experiences.
That sense of knowing.

2014, Oakland, CA

A clause (particular and separate).

“Peach blossom has a beautiful sensual pink, far from vulgar, most rare and private.”
—D.H. Lawrence, from Sketches of Etruscan Places; “Flowery Tuscany”

June 2020, Oakland, CA

What is positive about fragmentation?

||

The rest of the trees stand naked, unashamed, claiming a brighter future.

March 2012, Portland, OR

|||

When is it ok to stop remembering?

IIII

Crisis as a series, predictable, and, if you believe, a trick.

2012, Seattle, WA

Should I accept the end is near? Or deny the possibility in the swaying shadows?

like a rush

| ginger k. hintz

A list, after all, is an incantation.
—Lia Purpura, from the essay “Sugar Eggs: A Reverie”

September 8, 2021, 11:05am PT, Oakland, CA

I almost paid attention every day this just past year. There might not be an instant memory to pull from but I remember:

  • new pages filled: creating a full, whole life
  • [absence]
  • days moving with the sun
  • nothing urgent getting done anytime soon
  • a chain of days: learning

23 February, Tuesday, 2021 — we reached that unimaginable 500,000 deaths yesterday

By April, languishing was declared 2021’s dominant emotion. The experts were specific—languishing, a residual and continuously active tense.

But we are extraordinary now, more so than the before times. We have an understanding, a swallow of temporary obedience, having squeezed through another dimension. In the same way Cliff Swallows, federally protected migratory songbirds, continue to build their nests under overvalued condo awnings built on their well-known migration paths, we can claim we too are still living.

What’s next will be found in the ordinary, beyond the cleaved repetition.

reprise

| ginger k. hintz
July 21, 2021, Oakland, CA, 6:10pm

Traveling at the speed of days per hour.
Is it okay to celebrate survival?
(All this death. It’s inevitable.)
Arranging for false openings—second endings.
What marrow should we salvage?
Oblivion becomes subjugation
when aesthetics have agendas.
Only at the very beginning
did the freeway quiet.
Now, faint signals of endearment muted
as claw marks or socialized hope.
(All this death. It’s inevitable.)
At this point in time, there might be enough
to carry the rest of us curiously forward
full from holding unanswerable questions
in all this cropped light.

sifting through the ruins

| ginger k. hintz

If we do not forget, what is there to remember? —Mary Ruefle from “On Secrets”

found reality on a construction site sign, July 2011, San Francisco, CA

Suspension is a type of prayer
in the same way hard luck is still luck
or how clicking clocks make meaning.
Ending another year with reconstituted rituals:
unwrap an orange, warm the house with lights,
leave no trace and lament the echoes.

Interiors become accomplices
in a cascading culture of closures.
Reminding me the moon makes no light
of its own, and I don’t know
is the most honest answer I have to give.
This response to an unknown call,
how deeply personal an endeavor.

the saturation capacity of a week in December

| ginger k. hintz

That moment when the word incarnates, finds its skin: yes.
— Lia Purpura, from the essay “Sugar Eggs: A Reverie”

photographer: Leon Levinstein, New York, 1981

I’m gnawing off my own survival
and feeling full at the end of another year.

That any private emotion can still be felt
feels victorious. Sure, sensationalism

feels good, but only for so long.
Invisible patterns, an intentional result,

form this temporality, which may be also be
averse pacification. It’s not even midwinter

and yet we want—phantom abundance.
The way marginalia signals scarcity.

That kind of resourceful:
our aggregate bodies immersed in attention.

Pasteurized sameness. But wait—
there’s still anticipation—

a specific kind of waiting.
What clouds teach us.

this side of heaven

| ginger k. hintz

God’s own calmness is a sign of God.
The surprisingly cold smell of potatoes or money.
Solid pieces of silence.

— Anne Carson, excerpt from “God’s Work”

photographer: Ashley E. Walters from When the Moon Was in the Seventh House series

The preacher leaned into salvation’s promise at the very end.
It was a funeral, no better time to coerce eternal life.
Collecting beloved souls feeds this corrupt and arcane desire.
Now, another claimed and sweetly celebrated as taken.
The rest of us will just have to wait our turn.

How death gathers us together—memories of memories.
Grief a double-edged fascination, overactive,
a disorder of obsession. Not here, anymore.

But on this side of heaven we must find a way.
Not wanting to arrive too late for the inevitable call
to forgive what has been left behind, and its remainder—
the sky laid open in exonerated glory and surrendered
its filtered light to be just as definitive as belief in faith.

a rendering

| ginger k. hintz

You can go home again…so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been. —Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed

David Bagnall, Eating by candlelight during a 1972 power cut (Ironbridge Power Station, Shropshire, England, in the background)

Winter constellations hang low in the blue-black night sky,
Gemini returns. Add homemade cherry strudel to the list
of memories unforgotten, folds and folds of circumstances
harmonizing with the grace of effort. Repeat the sounding joy.
Decades pass into desire for acclamation but are instead
filled with humble enthusiasm. Hard luck made this base.
Conceptually, all archived reality shapes heartfelt elegies.
Not even God knows all our translations whispered
into twisted defenses. Hope is the last to die.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

repeat the sounding joy is a verse from “Joy to the World”

hope is the last to die is a fragment from A Breath of Life by Clarice Lispector, tr. Johnny Lorenz

delight of movement on a static facade

| ginger k. hintz
Cascade from PDX to SEA, April 2008

Radiator hisses fill the space left
between a bright sun in an empty blue sky.
Expressive clouds reclaim their territory.
Rain and miso ramen for lunch.
Downtown buses trail each other like snails
as layers of buildings are held together by math.
The remaining oak leaves hang like ornaments.
This week, scientists proved birds sing in their sleep
but most of us already know how the body tries to protect.
Are you the audience? Have you been disciplined?
If not, pay attention to this year’s western light
slow accommodation to the rapidly sharpening darkness.

revision happens on Sunday

| ginger k. hintz

Now I become myself. It’s taken time, many years and places.
—May Sarton, “Now I Become Myself”

screenshot from As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty, Jonas Mekas

I’ve traveled far enough to remain the narrator.
The beautiful distortion of reflection,
time arrested. Star gravity.
Symbiotic or parasite? It’s both
and there’s only one answer. Details,
I need to add details. Salt air stains.
I am not doing anything wrong,
which is where we disagree. What does it mean
when the middle ground is now the high ground?
Sometimes the only place to start is right here.
It’s the same kind of living that believes
challenges are opportunities. Experts predict
the rapture will happen in the early morning
during the hours of softening darkness.
Show a smile; brave a tooth.
Imagine this as it is—a holy exposure.
Stimulate me, please.

looking for god

| ginger k. hintz

Saturn, it says, devours his children.
Yes, it’s true, I know it.
An ordinary man, though, a man like me
eats and is full.
Only God is never satisfied.

Ai, “The Good Shepherd: Atlanta, 1981”, from Sin, 1986

LORE, Berlin Oct 31, 2017

How we all get busy in not believing
in ourselves despite mixing in mantras
that repeat with each breath—
I am enough

and you in absence,
no more next year.

A week’s worth of grind makes edges
so soft they can’t be felt, just yet—
like observing shadows’ length and depth
and distant clouds thick as mountain ranges.

Day skies still hold starlight.
That kind of worth fighting for.

grasp and release

| ginger k. hintz
screenshot from “Alphaville”. Jean-Luc Godard. 1965.

They walk like cowboys, recently dismounted. He eats slowly out of a Trader Joe’s bag, the one that has the laughing donkey on it. We wander to find new ways of understanding old ideas. Innocent babies continue to be born into privilege. Ordinary trauma is a slow build—swinging from want to need, and back to want to be taken. The multitudes of being consumed becomes a careful process of discernment like knowing the addictive taste of dispossession. Although sometimes, with frequency, the loop closes on you. Don’t worry. There is space here, stored as evergreen desires, located between patterns of waves formed from swallowing knowledge by association. It’s been recommended we might feel at the edges for faint annotations of alchemic personality. In the same way, men have learned to cross their legs at their ankles and global fantasies of catastrophe make us proficient in technology. Ritual is perfected suspense. It has already taken place. Events such as these are mere dreams; a tiger, white and mangy, tries to eat my hands from taking up too much space. A way to show how time is wasteless.

as time expires

| ginger k. hintz

Praise in the sense that it is an embracing of emerging experience. —William Stafford

Back from the market, Blizzard 2 series, Christophe Jacrot, 50×75 ed 10

A cloudless sky, mostly blue,
held remnants of peach
at its opening edges.

This longing permeates, resisting
a horizon—a working class assumption
of completeness.

Our culture is from men who recorded tides
before gravity from the moon was proved
by future men.

And we must keep living
in that absence.

fake crowds

| ginger k. hintz

The past beats inside me like a second heart. —John Banville, The Sea

A Marilyn Monroe Simulacrum, December 2011, Sioux Falls, South Dakota

From football to cult rallies on glacial plains,
America excels at strategies of deterrence.
There is generational learning behind knowing
the difference between submission and giving.
   Release is forbidden.
Americans’ reflective accolades penetrate the best
as fervent belief converts to trembling devotion.
The point being none of this is supposed to make sense.
As true as death, reality always fades.

chatter

| ginger k. hintz
Mona Hatoum, Deep Throat, 1996. table, chair, television set, glass plate, fork & knife, water glass, laser disc & player

This feels influenced…
in the same way as
believing in tomorrow
is a predictive narrative.
Futures become quid pro quo
throbbing, mid-life lust.
Fog pushes inland, offshore swells.
Well-earned suspicions form furious
visceral optimized expectations,
soaked in publicly circulating emotions
from day-trading warlocks and wardens.
Waste is fantasy. Plastic generations
replace curiosity with optimism, a commodity.
Hoarding ironically creates emptiness.
Ask any aspiring millionaire.
Habitual behavior now discounted reward.

going all the way

| ginger k. hintz
unrequited OKCupid inquiry (January 2015)

one hundred hours spent
+ one hundred hours taken
= affectual transactions

a certain level of suffering
is required to earn a dollar
I put enough here to fill that hole

Hard learning

| ginger k. hintz

“These are my Confessions and if I say nothing in them it’s because I have nothing to say.” —Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

Seconda Emerging, Barry Stone, 2015

is to know where the bones are buried.
Synonym: institutional allegiance.
Why is risk so often in your mouth?
Your answer, “That’s where the desire swells.”

It’s true the end of a river is also a mouth.
Waves form unnoticed. We tell each other stories—
unanswered questions worth more conceptually.
Wanting words that hold their form
both as concrete nouns and confluent verbs.

No subject is stable you often tell me.
Following the principle of least astonishment
is probably how we got here.
The living room pictures hang crooked
from the last noticeable earthquake.

Lesson: survival is a false dichotomy.

carry the message

| ginger k. hintz

“What use having a great depth of field, if there is not an adequate depth of feeling?”
—W. Eugene Smith

Barbara Kruger, The Globe Shrinks (video still), 2010

The park’s grass is ankle deep,
again. Promises of everlasting life
continue to hold their sway.

It’s 2021, and I just learned
gold seeks gold.
Bounty hunters still scheming.

When will the rich suffer equally?
Is that even the right question?
Forests burn to their crowns
while babies drown in basement apartments.
What frequency will you hear
the trees screaming? Repeat yourself.

The neighborhood birds continue to sing
their morning songs. We must still be ok,
for now? Surrender—then acceptance—or
is it the other away around?

Certainty needs urgency
to keep it potent.
Embody your devotion.
Watch the ocean replicate.

All those Sunday sermons
soaked deep within.
Knowing, that convinced feeling.
Accuracy a worthy reliquary.
Be an animal, again.

panic in the pocket

| ginger k. hintz
personal screen shot from the film “Utuqaq” by Iva Radivojević. Text reads: “There is a time/space interval between thought and fear.”

≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡

“To imagine that turmoil is in the past and somehow we are now in a more stable time seems to be a psychological need.” —John McPhee, Assembling California

≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡

In Audre Lorde’s 1984 Creative Writing Workshop in Berlin, she had two requirements:

  1. Read at least 10 poems a week. Keep a log of the poems—name of poem and poet—and write a sentence that will help you recall how you feel from the poem.
  2. Keep a pen/pencil and paper with you at all times to write things down (“it will not stay in your head”).

≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡

In claiming this emotional space every week, anchors of memory and experience structure a highly unstable body of work. I arrive inhabiting this swath of living, or as Lauren Berlant said in her essay Cruel Optimism, “deflating the symbolic into the somatic”.

After all, islands are the tops of mountains. Perception as slant, signaling both perspective and insight. That sweet trigger of embodied habit. Writing from an ascetic life.

What earned reward lays in wait? Is it focus as illumination? Maybe the reward is endurance inside an anxious limbic system. Simply, a need gets satisfied. A temperance of honesty that there is no final outcome to this effort. That this predictive text, and its energy, may be read as art. That this is worthless.

≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡ ≡

“If I resisted, I was lost. If I gave in, I was saved.” —Didier Eribon, Returning to Reims

manic melancholia

| ginger k. hintz

Everything is just enough to be the same—
delusional observation—everything except
for the unwelcome return of an orangered sun.
The sky is no longer a place to look up to.

GOD IS MY VACCINE, Frank Stoltze, LAist (August 2021)

Wednesday news: 34 wildfires
have started in the last 24 hours.
Have started is an example
of present perfect tense.
As in, trees of all types and ages
have started screaming.

WHAT

So many remain illiterate
about events they claim
have never happened—to them.
Blind to the sound of yellow. Deaf
to exploding blues and facile ghosts.
Forgive me, you wanted this memory to be precise.

forced to opinion

| ginger k. hintz

with the animals dying around us
taking our feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
thank you we are saying and waving
dark though it is

W.S. Merwin, last stanza of “Thanks”

photographer: Mark Steinmetz

Afghanistan is falling. Call me.
Pulling out resonates
inside the soft mouths of liars.
Strategic slants concealed
into compressed scrolls [timelines].
Repeat. The future of artificial
intelligence will be a series—trying and failing.
Like the original version of intelligence,
it presumes. It bleeds into itself.

Audacity is roiling. Shhh—
your contemporary affect is showing.
In rooms with no windows, meetings crosstalk.
Taunting, we call out to god and beg
his celebrity angels to rescue us.
Suckling angst between pauses of incidental music,
our atmospheric knowledge tells us to take comfort
knowing even the rich are mutually suffocating.
Our shared psychosis now bonded as emotional reality.

itinerant habits

| ginger k. hintz

I lean into the throat of summer.
—Jenny Xie, “Chinatown Diptych” from Eye Level

if she had it or NOT

You assume you’ve seen this before,
this familiar demarcation of transition.
What promises or expectations did you bring to this?
You know you can never step in the same river twice.
Are you listening to remember?

edgeplay

| ginger k. hintz

“No matter what disintegrating influences I was experiencing, the writing was the act of wholeness.” —Anaïs Nin, In Favor of the Sensitive Man and Other Essays

OWING TO LACK OF INTEREST, TOMORROW HAS BEEN CANCELLED, artist unknown

A local politician sells
subtext. Mixing patterns
of outbreaks, denial, aggressive
neglect, profit, waste.   Time
monetized into relativity of spectacle.
Subterranean realities. July descends into August.
Clouds sail by dry as bones. Crowns above spread
shade. Our vernacular noisy wagons, isolated
oak savannas, quarantined in translation.
Wanting to do what we see; evidence.
Let’s take these metastasized days
and ride them into darkness. Be silhouettes,
featureless. Are you aware of all the consequences
when accepting the advertised risks?

regeneration

| ginger k. hintz

Write about love,
long evenings,
the dawn,
the trees,
about the endless patience
of the light.

Adam Zagajewski, from “Letter From A Reader”, trans. Clare Cavanagh

7:16am

The sun is out,
bright marine layer.
A bus kneels at its stop.

7:30am

Every morning
a renewal
of acceptance.

7:31am

An honest question: how do you balance hope with truth?

8:22am

electric hum

| ginger k. hintz

How good it felt: to want something and
pretend you don’t, and to get it anyway.

—last two lines of Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz’s “July”

“Whose Values?”, Barbara Kruger exhibit, Getty Museum, July 2015

Trust your gut. I don’t want you to get lost in the details. This is a map, a blueprint, a ledger of interactions, process or form or whatever you’ve been taught to see.

Guests of former selves clamor. There are fires and no water. Heat domes and variants. Return-to-work and shelter-in-place. Critical race theory and Big Lies™. Long division and 4th of July car sales. Blueberries are rotting on the bush and border theatre sells out. The routine of keeping it together. Line by line, word by word, click by click. 21st century prefabrications.

How can I hurl myself deeper
into this life

—Ellen Bass, “The Long Recovery”

I’m a maximalist by virtue. I want more than an average understanding. I’m the oldest daughter of an amateur bull rider. Surface-level commonality is temporary as an ocean wave. I want to be like the tides, consistently influential to the point of unforgettable. Inverting the fates, nothing unimportant.

proportional speculation

| ginger k. hintz
Les Krims, 1970, spitting out the word p-h-o-t-o-g-r-a-p-h-y

Hope was my greatest sin. —Clarice Lispector, from “The Disasters of Sofia”

Your and my immunity are fated these dragged, hot days.
In a burning world, my dreams saturate. Mostly trees,
thick, green, with moss thick as absence. Caution—
only longing and sunny winters ahead. Toward is a feeling.
Away a noun. What luck has found us both still breathing?
Our futures have become increasingly jealous of the past.
Portents of death a spammed life—forgettable.
Self as a frequency. Do you know how to want less?

wasted on apparitions

| ginger k. hintz
WHAT ARE YALL LIKE ON A GOOD DAY, 2021

The pattern is there is no pattern. Only thrills split from the inside of nightly dreams. Fireworks imploded. In the background of Jaws, the captured sound of the ocean insistent. Tumbleweeds untitled. Lives carefully leashed. Forgiveness now sold at cost. It’s cheaper than a full-bodied excavation or postponing uninsured vacations. Those flag waving contests, sacred competitions, enunciate the ascendant feelings. Clear and bright. Rising suspicions, surges of delusion, all of it natural as dredged wetlands or pipelines exploding to spectacular affect. The variants are just following the rules of long division. A simple prayer; please. Insert more coins to keep living. The transactions of ordinary time. Freedom to fill an empty page. Phantom whisper networks now interstellar contextual markers. Parabolic welcome wagons. There is no pattern, only recognition.

an observer’s song

| ginger k. hintz

“How innocently life ate the days.” —John Updike, Couples

Oakland, CA, June 2020

All day long, she sits behind windows
watching swollen ancient clouds
echo along abraded front lines.
She traces their carved patterns
and records distorted stillness.
Parting seductive, the bruised grey sky
swarms off to her west and opens wide.
Some might say she’s damned
but that’s a different parable
for a different time. Today,
she’s thinking about sanctity of attention.
Relationally vast in its deviant transience,
she listens to sovereign urgent voices
like well-fingered coins tossed into wishing wells.
This form of anticipation reclusive and incessant,
unyielding as the agency of water.
An observant song now broadcast as western light.

summer testimony (no. 4)

| ginger k. hintz

“What happens when you reposition agency away from power?” —Ocean Vuong, episode 227 of Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso

Hayashi Waichi, Large Chrysanthemums, 1981

I’m writing this down
as proof of memory.
The sky is almost always
a solid backlit blue
unless it isn’t.
A specificity shared
by anyone who lives beneath it.
Not unlike knowing poppies don’t unfold
until midmorning and being aware, now,
how summer here blooms—
if you’re paying attention.
Gradients of time punctuate
while light cascades unnoticed.
In other words, there’s devotion
and there’s feral experience.

present perfect tense

| ginger k. hintz
bright / waiting, East Bay Times, May 25, 2021

Time is visual—
the sun an arc,
we are the curve.
On the cusp of a new year
time has been absorbed;
last year not yet finished.
Unless otherwise stated,
no one is coming to save me.
Time now swarmed with qualifiers,
its own forgotten circumstance.
Lead me gently back to place.
My tense present perfect—
not yet.

pay me for this time

| ginger k. hintz

Pleasure is productive; it produces itself. —Arielle Zibrak

Clouds stretch fluff
over million-dollar hills.
That clock stopped years ago.
The plants grow taller.
Evacuations have started,
master prompts. This land of fault lines
under a sky so blue, suspended in hope.
Responsive is the desire, a memory.

relent

| ginger k. hintz
SFO to PDX, March 2012

#HolySpirit trends
as the jet stream moves
torrid seasons west to east.
The Arctic Circle holds tropical.
We start to make summer plans—
then actually book them.
“Space to breathe” or “create
new memories” congregate
fragmented within threaded comments
like when Roland Barthes says
in A Lover’s Discourse,
“this is the paradisiac realm
of subtle and clandestine signs:
a kind of festival not of senses
but of meaning”. Maybe this summer
will feel more like a communion—
public intimacy sanctioned.

click, if you must

| ginger k. hintz
unrequited OKCupid inquiry (May 2015)

Stay longer in me, take roots. — Vera Pavlova, “If There Is Something To Desire”

In this kingdom, we intend to be recognized
as permanent guests and move around like trees.
Semblance is our currency. We become fixed
points on a map, a place arranged
by analogous topography and revelatory grief.

In this kingdom, endlessly contextually forsaken,
such transfigurations build our shelters
and show up in our mentions. We augment trust
by automating our needs to the indentured bidder.
Occasionally, we find survival inside failures.

In this kingdom, probable threat is enough to act.
Near future, present pasts, all of it exchanged
under systems of calculated instinct. We whisper
feelings and their cousins opinion and belief
as our syntax preserves its subversive hiss.

a stranger’s response

| ginger k. hintz
Wincenty Dunikowski-Duniko, Breath, 1976

I regret to inform you the rich have begun
harvesting Mars’ oxygen;
inter is in the written news again.
They claim no correlation nor ask for forgiveness.

I am worried you aren’t worried.
You might not be paying attention? Public
policy is stillborn. Impulse
thoughts and prayers are batched releases.

I want to relax. Find a way to watch
the Milky Way spin its slack spiral.
This slow death of heat and tempers rising
does not hold the sweet promise of sublimation.

I need rapture, not the heavy-breath version
on repetitive pulpits and news shows where
mouths of pundits and preachers whip
contagious affect for our infinite reconciliations.

I crave that immediate pause
left behind after release. Once shared,
this can no longer be mine nor exclusive.
Now, simply, the evaporating breath of a stranger.

condolences

| ginger k. hintz

Having the equilibrium of a poet, I kept falling in love. — Frank Stanford,
“With the Approach of the Oak the Axeman Quakes”

Felicia Simion, Self Portrait, 1999

And everyone’s competing
For a love they won’t receive
‘Cause what this palace needs is release
— Lorde, “Team”

The neighbor’s laundry hung drying in the wind generated from our conversations below. It listened like well-placed ears as your observations unraveled my patterns: cold penetrates while the sun strokes. You said in order for this to work, we must agree to be happy but your gaze was hard, questionable. My tone grew suspicious. Wandering fragmented and feral as virtual imagination, I drifted. Our poetics of pleasure and devotion now kindred mysteries. Illusions of prophesy, or was it property, told us we could own each other with infinite monthly payments—no money down—an absolute steal! A flashing sign said Don’t Eat, Touch Only. Absorption may reduce your wing span and there’s not an airport within hundreds of miles from here. Yes, of course this is a competition and you’ve been eliminated before knowing all the rules. Love, now a cathedral built from simulation, was defined for us. The laundry, dried hard as bones, was pulled back inside.

revival

| ginger k. hintz

… Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

— Wendell Berry, last four lines of “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front,” from The Country of Marriage (1973)

Chieko Shiomi, EVENT FOR THE MIDDAY IN THE SUNLIGHT, 1963

Monday:
Beneath a gray sky, backlit bright,
the persimmon tree is full of leaves
as if it hadn’t just been naked for months.

Tuesday:
If you find an orange
on the sidewalk,
one solitary orange,
what kind of luck is that?

In Olivia Laing’s opening essay in Funny Weather, “You Look at the Sun”, she references Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s concept of a paranoid reader. “A paranoid reader is concerned with gathering information, tracing links and making the hidden visible. They anticipate and are perennially defended against disaster, catastrophe, disappointment. They are always on the lookout for danger, about which they can never, ever know enough.”

Distilled: “to prove what we already feared we knew”.

Wednesday:
I fingered the begging-for-it jade trees.

Thursday:
As the flowers slept,
still curled tight,
the sun floated above me
already round and bright.

Abstract as repentance or glory—a transitory representation—is the distinct learning from unknowing, an experience of active living. A day of rituals, smooth from habit, bloom into conscious discipline. Nothing less than a lived response will do in these warped times.

Another week soft as cat paws sneaks past me. The sounds of the radiator and freeway now so familiar, I consider the silence around the noise. Maybe this form, an oblivious infinite loop, finds function waiting like the persimmons? Or maybe this release continues to demand merging threads fleeting as sunlight passing through morning clouds. It’s just as possible all that happens is that I learn to love myself a little more.

Friday:
What if
this whole time
I’ve been writing my future?

future fluid

| ginger k. hintz
a spill of light, Detroit 2016

For the first time in any recent memory
the sedimentary accumulation of details shift.
Cloaked like nerves and tucked inside,
we weren’t on any kind of edge at all!

Sometime, much later, Mars reflected bright
suspended above the light-polluted city limits.
Clouds clocked MPH. A smooth sense of validation.

The poets disagreed on the finer points
but we all agreed faint light still finds shadows.
Some called it art.  For now, it was simply enough.
Tea leaves will have to broadcast what’s next.

The questions endless: courage or nostalgia?
Our timelines no longer mediative glory holes.
We, the animals, will follow the sun rising.

mend the hole

| ginger k. hintz

Loving feels lovely in a violent world,
—first line in “Community”, Marge Piercy

Wisconsin, Photo by Kenneth Josephson, 1979

I relished pleasures of the mind and the flesh equally.
—Marge Piercy, Sleeping with Cats

mind that gap
somebody must know
the biochemical difference
between fear and excitement
that moment
trees with new leaves
look fresh next to those
who keep their looks all year round
same view, thoughts recycled
blandly overstimulated
40 more hours squeezed
into future dollars
performing “ordinary life”
(overheard on morning NPR)
all of this so-called-living
     still
to be cherished

junk stats

| ginger k. hintz
I CAN HEAR THE BIRDSONG CARVE SHAPES IN TIME, screen shot from Fishcakes and cocaine

“I shrug whatever is gone and welcome the changing truth.”
—William Stafford, 25 September 1975

* crosswalks are supposed to keep you safe *

Consider this to be a true story. Send a self-addressed stamped envelope to learn more.

* a moment, a chance, they are everywhere *

The orange tree has been gone for at least a year now?
It was one of those bright and sunny days.

* perpetrators hidden in plain sight *

Home is a loop, shadowed at its edges.
Go out and gather. Return /
insubordinate.

wish you were here

| ginger k. hintz

“I find it easy to admire in trees what depresses me in people.”
— Marge Piercy, last two lines of “The Doughty Oaks” from The Moon Is Always Female

ART PEOPLE, Sioux Falls, South Dakota, March 2021

Spring finds us haunted. A seasonal feeling after witnessing winter’s passing, but it’s acute this year. Blue skies expanding. Nests of birds explode in sound. Time is the fulcrum. I love you fills the past, present, future. Now weightless, light cracks through early morning clouds. I thought about the scam of resurrection. Some never fully accept death as loss, permanence unchanged. They believe death can be cheated. The obvious irony is you’ll suffer from wanting what is not possible. Time is the fulcrum. Flexing, palming, sucking off temporal attention.

Through the eyes of a non-believer, the sharpened edge of dilution, I miss you.

how to write a eulogy

| ginger k. hintz

My stride is for life, a far place. —William Stafford, Run Before Dawn

South Dakota, March 2021

The first thing to know is everyone but you, and a few precious others, will move on. Push that reactionary and perceived disrespect to a corner in your heart you’ve saved for petty grievances. Forgive them, eventually, for they simply did not know your joy. You’ll be better served, in these early days, to center your scattered energy by paying attention to the way your days and weeks advance as you begin to revise your life. This or that part of your previous life is no longer applicable but you’ll still find yourself performing the phantom shapes of a visceral routine. The memories you form in this emerging now will feel like new bones growing, indescribable aches. When you notice you’re no longer performing for the past, breathe. In that space of awareness, allow laughter and evocations of pleasure to strengthen you. Remember, most of all, to praise the mutual life you were able to create together.

Repeat.

Repeat.

The next number of infinite steps is to continue gathering the integrity of love.

 

zugunruhe

| ginger k. hintz
Gelatin-silver print (1925) from the movie “Ways to Power and Beauty” by Wilhelm Prager & Nicholas Kaufmann

When translated to English, zugunruhe (German) literally means “migration anxiety”.

In accordance with their inherited calendars, birds get an urge to move.
—William Fiennes, The Snow Geese

It is restlessness with a specific depth—you can feel it. I know because its anticipation first pools sweetly and intimately inside my dreams thickly layered into a time-bound mix of memory and myth. We can call it instinct. I didn’t chose these fragile liminal structures but I listen to them for the survivor messages they inevitably surface.

Those messages, that calling, is from a place where threshold holds both its meanings; what must be exceeded for a reaction to occur and an entry. It is rudimentary—basic at this point—that I must relearn anticipation is also a kind of hope.

I imagine myself arriving new, and again in return.

test. do you copy?

| ginger k. hintz

The western sky was a blaze of pink, the east still rising blue.
A new page to fill: birds, sky, trees, feelings.

The jade trees pop pink bright with crowned extensions.

That flutter in your heart? That sensation is the path to stay on.
Forward; dedicated. External validation is a half-life, decayed.

The bus stops. No one gets on.
Passive, it holds its line.

The news talks. I’m pretty sure the crows called out my name.

July 13, 2015 6:44pm PT

hype

| ginger k. hintz

On Wednesday, I learned trees are biologically immortal.
The sun-warmed puffed clouds stray. Daffodils bloom
in trickle-down light bent abstract buttercream, back swallow,
just breath and heart beat. We configure ourselves
to fetishize normality as told-you-so’s make history
then serve up alignments so remote multiverses constellate.
Skies of baby blue, that texture, now future tense.
It’s ok if this revision won’t translate just yet.

YOU, Detroit 2016

method making

| ginger k. hintz

“I set the limitations. The limitations of course are the color, the size, the wind in the room, and how I put the paint on.” —Pat Steir, Pat Steir: Artist

San Francisco, 2011

Can you quit something that doesn’t exist?

Portland, 2012

trace the traces
unknowingly, knowingly

Oakland, 2015

stay curious or die

respond

| ginger k. hintz

I am not writing a history of these times or of past times or of any future times and not even the history of these visions which are with me all day and all of the night.
— Anne Boyer, “Not Writing“

Hubert Hilscher, cover of Projekt No.1, 1969.

You asked me if I had responded to the response.
I thought about those high school boys from Tennessee
bragging about their football conquests in the Mariott hot tub.
They were beautiful, hard like toy guns
full of manufactured bravado.
Again, you asked me if I had responded.
I remember witnessing a new moon’s illumination.
A simple and ordinary texture of perceptual darkness
worn resilient and smooth as a natural pearl.
You asked me when I will respond.
I answered with a question wound around reactive
need, a homegrown suspicion. Where, in my body,
won’t I respond based on all this surveillance?

hush money quiet

| ginger k. hintz

People don’t notice whether it’s winter or summer when they’re happy.
Anton Chekhov, The Three Sisters

Gertrude Stein, from Complete Works; Stanzas in Meditation; “Patriarchal Poetry,” c. 1952

The new year feels rushed,
already flush with grievances.
Obscurant clouds glide smooth
as lies repeat until slick with intent.
The news claims we are living
through revolutionary times.

Remember, there is no trophy for second place.
Record the collapse as memories as silence
fills the jagged edges. I close my eyes and rotate
the plants toward the light. The sun is eager to begin.
Birds have started to sing.

accumulated chatter

| ginger k. hintz
Alexander Calder, 1966

Are your feelings loud enough to be heard?
Will they last long enough to remember
these stretched thin and cheated days?
How should I trust the slant of this sound —
as a temporary glance, as weather, or as
a debatable response? Is this everyday
violence dystopia or social change?

As if the media makers and media takers
are building the same empire. As if they
fantasize to the same thrills.
Explain where god can be found in this.
Rectify the impossibility of knowing.
Show me the value of undivided attention.

Where faith’s enforcement tends to
get stuck is wanting results. Shame on me.

politics of knowledge

| ginger k. hintz

: you use a multiplier factor, the language. — William Stafford, 11 January 1976 (source)

Wet Hands (2015), Sanya Kantarovsky, Oil, Pastel, Watercolor, and Oil Stick on Canvas

It’s always the details.
You know the cliché.
The public is personal.
It’s just business
or fun
or boys being boys.

Years ago, now,
I asked about the narrator
in a room full of narratives.
I was told “story not facts”
is how we would “win.”
All the narratives nodded
into well-trained echoes.