coast starlight

| ginger k. hintz

The energy of attempt is greater
than the surety of stasis.
You too can be carved anew
by the details of your devotions.

—Mary Oliver

Emil Bisttram, “Creative Forces” (1936), oil on canvas, 36 x 27 inches

Mountains were backlit to look like cat ears
and the golden hills, deceptively gentle,
were engraved with generational cattle trails.
Sagebrush squat, tilted west. Backyard pools lay
calm behind rows and rows of houses maximized
to worship light from a perpetually setting sun.
Spacecraft occasionally crash-land this far west,
missing the Pacific Ocean by a magnitude.
And then the hypnotic groves of ripening oranges
murmur my fate. The trees changed. So can I.

strictly personal

| ginger k. hintz

The Consciousness Raisers

they meet on Fridays when
the women home from the factories & the offices
& on Sunday afternoons

At night they lie in bed
& hold hands
counting the stars

—John James from the collection Kinderlieder (1992)

September 2022

I.
I saw a dream catcher hung inside a USPS truck.

II.
There is a shadow side of salvation, of rescue, of deliverance from a foreclosed future. I want you to imagine the energy needed to be in a constant state of arrival.

III.
I dream. The Pacific Ocean waves are frozen solid; locked, raw and stilled. No sound.

IV.
The news circles like a drain. The production of meaning taking the path of least resistance.
I write about the weather to keep track of time.

V.
I dreamt the Washington Monument was draped in Christmas lights in July.

VI.
I take in the beg and prompt of morning. Familiar neighborhood sounds rise in courage and with stamina. My waking memory, still a hinge, holding onto yesterday.

on the eve

| ginger k. hintz

Sunday: a day of cathedral ascension
and perpetual penetration. Not yet: a ghost.
On the eve becomes perpetually threatening.
All the suspense of being on your knees,
heaven spread.

San Francisco, CA, October 2015

dissociation

| ginger k. hintz

To say that trees are immobile results from an anthropomorphism that impedes our seeing beyond our own time scale. It is as stupid as the history of aphids: In my memory, says the aphid, no one has ever seen a gardener die. Everyone knows that gardeners are immortal.
—Francis Hallé

666, May 2022, Oakland, CA

A day-to-night sky fades shades of purple.
Impermanent referents. A bruised ending.
I tried to tell you otherwise, before I knew.
We’re not quite trapped, but not free either.
Poetics are drawn from our dreams: escape
and waiting. Similar to the way cat’s paws
mean rip currents. That specific kind
of dissociation. What do I want to be?
What a terrible question to get stuck inside.

meteorology

| ginger k. hintz

“Sanity is our power of perception kept focused. And it is an open ended endeavor.”
— Etel Adnan

Jenny Holzer, Jesse 2, 2005, Polaroid, 33 x 22 in

Even starlight, and its perceived distance,
holds darkness longer
as these new days grow shorter.
Shadows spread. It’s their time of year
and we must learn to adapt under revised conditions.

The trees have begun shape shifting through color
and through ritual loss. We leave each other
in the waning dark of morning. I make the bed,
still holding warm from our collective sleep.
Our dreams now embodied and out walking in the world.

Physicality isn’t always an obvious feeling
like love or violence or how Earth’s atmosphere
blends, eventually, invisibly into outer space.
But here, now, I want to think about low-strung colored lights,
long-distance horizons, and desire lines back home.

call to warning, or a prayer

| ginger k. hintz

There are easier ways to say these things, but some things shouldn’t be said easily.
—Octavia Butler, Imago (1989)

SMILE FOR ME….., April 2022, Oakland, CA

The first season’s snow dusted the highest Sierra peaks.
Much later, I heard the falling morning light beg for attention.
In this origin story, and its evolving landscape,
the changing trees become the loudest voices.

I learned early that submission requires indulgence.
They called it grace, which was also a sympathy.
I remember there was laying on of hands.
At the edge of town, someone advertised a rummage sale.

Within this temporary interval of speculation,
fate feels systematic. I carry absence like an autopsy,
an examination as method towards truth.
I know how to hold time as a promise.

comfort zones

| ginger k. hintz

“And now I see that I am sorrowful about only a few things, but over and over.”
—Mary Oliver

July 2011

In June, I dreamt of New York City: the subway, tucked and nested shops,
sand dunes, snow drifts on the beach.

In July, at 6:47pm, so much light still.

In August, I prayed the cadence of life would find me awake and wanting.

Suddenly, it is October. It feels like beautiful trouble, like tasteful nudes,
both a precipice and an orientation towards receptivity.

For the first time in a long time I’m not worried.
I know how to wait for the giving to begin.

end of the third quarter | 2022

| ginger k. hintz
Alex Prager, Anaheim, 2017, 60 x 45 inches

“It is a time for tons of verbiage, activity, consumption.” —Mark Rothko

The end of the year is coming, again.
Will you claim you are satisfied,
so far? How will you commit
to these remaining days? In this interlude,
what to cherish, what to improvise,
what to root, and what to let go?

I am still learning to pretend
the difference between memories
of a past gone and memories of a past unknown.
A loop on its return becomes a harbinger
of sentient evidence, now personal phenomenology.
It’s best to surrender to messianic joy

at this horizon point in a vanishing year.
Update your maps of what remains of your calls
to provisional responses. Name your beloveds.
There’s still time for passionate cadence and
appreciation of light’s lengthened silhouettes.
That space, that pause, is an insider’s point of view.

These longings pull from long-shadow days and nights.
Return, again, repeat. That kind of essential
permanence, palpable. Cross reference your embodied index,
then become a territory beyond meaning.
Enable new, interpretive beginnings. I flicker—an epic
verse. Your alterity is my resonance. Ride with me.

happy ending as chaser

| ginger k. hintz

To strangers I must seem
alive.

—Jane Kenyon, a line from “Now Where?“

I THINK IM DUMB / MAYBE IM JUST HAPPY (creator: unknown)

Based on rumors of math, scientists believe if they move Jupiter’s orbit the Earth will be “more habitable”. I have the same foolish desire when capturing moving light by using future perfect verbs and modified nouns.

What might be translated from the way light sounds after saturating iridescent city pigeon feathers? I think light and time become sacred geometry. Ordinary as questions ruptured clever and bright.

Your majesty is now gender neutral. Please comply. Receptivity remains bearded as you wait for affirmation. That you found lack of detail a form of stillness means I can trust you to keep secrets. Plumb that male gaze.

What are children learning to feel in this newborn century?

hope is a hairshirt

| ginger k. hintz

“Die knowing something. You are not here long.” —Walker Evans

Québec / Montréal / 1983 / © Gil Rigoulet

I don’t want to complain. It’s the morning light, bright and orange, that is angry.
Do not read this as a confession but more guided by the belief: a month of Sundays.
It may be true; I have a furious wish to rearrange time. This is not a mare’s nest but more deceptively a half-full moon. Breaking has an edge when the loudest crowd is guided
by psychopomps muted mouthing and demented. Sound waves are dependent upon temperature to carry their messages too. I’m learning town names and their geography
by following wildfires. Not quite pastime, like writing, but more gradual like buried cities now exposed. Reminders that it is the slanting light who is sharing this memory.

fawning

| ginger k. hintz
Glad I Live In The 21st Century. Seattle, 2012.

The sky is black.
I sneak in a writing session
after work, dinner, and shower.

A dream interpretation told me
I will receive good news. I wait
to tell me you are on your way home.

stack the days

| ginger k. hintz

“Today was one of those non-days as if in a parenthesis, …” —Etel Adnan, Shifting Silence

“Busy Being Born”, Matt McCormick

Workers move the product from the field
and from the factories to the trucks
to the table and into the mouths of bosses
so full from efficiency they are starving.

like an electrical storm

| ginger k. hintz
I AM HAPPY_Louis Wain

A love for language and its capacity to remind,
to provoke, to destroy, to build—all ways
to make meaning within life’s chaos.
That duality of attraction and repulsion,
to be godlike, to declare a voice,
to make nothing something.

I’m retraining my algorithms to understand me

| ginger k. hintz

“Absence is harder to accept than death.”  —Etel Adnan, Sea and Fog

TECH DESTROYS, Portland, OR, June 2022

August is a month of dedication.
Be like the cloud-burning light,
and ask yourself, was it on purpose
or an accident, and then try to decide
which wrong answer is easiest to forgive.
Is your faith in the disembodied voice of unlearning
or the recollections of a still life, untouched?
That’s the kind of sensory deprivation I echo.

You must assume there is truth in this translation.

maladaptive daydreams

| ginger k. hintz

summer avoidant
sadder than green oranges
—not yet

March 2012, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, DC

Diminishing returns on man-made misery:
take drinking water to put out wildfires
then create full-color murals of mercurial martyrs
underneath burnt contrails that suggest messages
of conscriptive curtailment. There is some hope
as we begin the slow pilgrimage towards autumn.
But, last year was a mast year. Abundant loss.
What should we barter for an underdog future?

post-errata

| ginger k. hintz

You have to find your own way of stilling time. —Mary Ruefle

Cleveland Hopkins International Airport March 24, 2012

Alchemic wishes and wants, memories
and miracles disintegrate—
muted into mythology of lives lived.
A texture felt both like a shadow
and a daydream or the loss of time found.

View from Main Terminal, Cleveland Hopkins International Airport, March 24, 2022, 2:27pm

It’s ok. A sense of panic is inevitable
when half of this year is behind us.
Please promise me you’ll decorate
for Christmas in July, and in between
all the holiday seasons after I’m gone.

Westlake, OH March 23, 2012, 9:07am

Even machines take time to integrate
their learnings. Make the pause sacred
inside this constant state of readiness.

shadowbox

| ginger k. hintz
Paradise, Oakland, CA, July 2022

Summer funerals, holiday funerals, GoFundMe™ funerals
become parades of divinity serving a false purpose:
time progresses. Thrust takes the shape of a noun
and a verb; slow entry
repetition is seduction is violence is compliance.
Mutilated men archive intimacy inside avarice
and finger the crumbs left behind.

escape as an active present tense

| ginger k. hintz
1994, Berlin, October 2017

We seem to be trending, again.
That familiar sense of ascension,
of a ride. Time given, if we may be honest.
Relentless associations: abortion and rape,
vengeful anger and ketchup-stained walls,
parasocial relationships; unaware and informed.
Is my morning bus late or did it simply not show up?
July arrives. Come, unknowing.

summer testimony (no. 7)

| ginger k. hintz

That things “just go on” is the catastrophe. — Walter Benjamin

Gil Rigoulet, England series, 1970-80

The poppies were still asleep.
Cats, the ones who never let me pet them,
stare past me as the sun migrates west.
It is summer. I am feral, again.
Or maybe this rumor wants to be about withdrawal,
an urge for a substance being withheld. Within,
there can be acceptance, resistance,
and something possessed delicately in between—
unknown, suggestive and loose like spontaneous prayer.
The atmosphere, thick with notes of jasmine and rose,
wanders around my morning shadow. It traces vintage memories
swarming unsolicited and holy: 4th of July rodeos,
tomato sandwiches, shedding cottonwoods, and parental neglect
so pervasive it remains material witness to all those lost summers.
Of course gravity is physical, but who will study its somatics?

surrender

| ginger k. hintz

“Death is hidden in clocks… in my youth I chose as my motto
the ancient Latin maxim festina lente: make haste slowly.”
— Italo Calvino

HORSETOOTH, Coast Starlight (North), Eugene, OR, June 6, 2022

In between the gaps
where sunlight reaches—
shades of green extend.

Shawls of fog dampen
the moving silence.
I surrendered to Time

as the backsides of train towns
and tranquil boredom took me
closer to you and then back

home. Somewhere past the darkness
where distressed light of forests spill
into borders of thriving attraction,

I dreamt bravely. I named it joy.

5:53AM, Coast Starlight (South), Sacramento Valley, CA, June 11, 2022

of the now

| ginger k. hintz

“Nearly everyone in the world has appetites and impulses, trigger emotions, islands of selfishness, lusts just beneath the surface.” —John Steinbeck, East of Eden

Miklós Turtle, Hungary, 1999

If you read the daily news,
you are told to be afraid.

If you read the poets,
you see why the sun sings.

If you measure that gap,
slightly more oblivious than
upholding divine rights of kings,
you will find yourself.

If you are quiet, enough,
your erasure will light the way.

nothing but expression

| ginger k. hintz
Full Moon [glitch], October 2020, Oakland, CA

We drown out,
floods of thoughts
and prayers—desperate gasps.

///

Obsessively tracking
celestial bodies:
full, new, eclipsing.

^^

Making meaning, semantic as memories,
plumbed from cult-like sacrifice
and stolen, inverted landscapes.

#

This prelude is redemptive work.

real was the last reality gap

| ginger k. hintz
fragments, Los Angeles, July 2018

Blue fading pink light transitions the sun’s nightly disappearance as a star.
Earlier the concentrated sunlight, setting late, hit a distant window—
just right. The bright reflection took shape of an ordinary reminder.
A reminder that temporal sequence as closure is felt, a sense.

What if we are actually expanding instead of contracting?

Hours as measured by:
clouds slipping by
    exhaust pipes
glaciers melting
street pigeon’s stuttered coos
gossip economy news cycles
a flock of geese in V formation
rivers carving out gorges
indigent centers
      exhale

Can we claim survival as the measured depth of a body of water?

An ending does not always need to follow a chain of events.
Duality alters thresholds, choices, interpretation.
These ongoing attempts become accumulations, layers,
a structure of ongoing being. There’s worship and fetish.
A complete world.

milk teeth

| ginger k. hintz

Perhaps I did not succumb to ideology…because I have never seen myself as a spokesman. I am a witness. In the church in which I was raised you were supposed to bear witness to the truth. Now, later on, you wonder what in the world the truth is, but you do know what a lie is.” —James Baldwin interview with Julius Lester, May 1984

Rather Be A Lightning Rod, San Francisco, August 2017

The surge is back.
We are hosts, again.

Feeling nothing but empty.
A physical sensation.

I am left wanting, again.
Never not forgotten urges.

Restraint is an evocative need.
Its own stimulation.

Free will is in the news, again.
When the wave comes, go deep.

Be a seed, insistent as memory.

analog fever

| ginger k. hintz
STICK YOUR FINGER IN THINGS, source: unknown

In a Christian context, responsibility of discernment
makes meaning a gambler’s holdout. I mean that literally.
It is the same mechanics when a moment can be a monument,
dramatic affect to overactive nervous systems—tense:
a knowing. Which indicators of such deception are most valid?
The idea is: what you saw isn’t always accurate.
Are we simply machines preprogrammed to make complexity
out of the simplest of ideas, like wanting to be loved
unconditionally and without remorse?

plastic as plants

| ginger k. hintz

A bitter taste lingers—
stringent, punchy
mouth feel—tongue maps.

Rebound special—
I dreamt, again, of moving.
A task of packing things
you forgot still exist.

We lay in bed, innocent
until forced to engage
with the world under a sky
quiet, grey milky light.

NICE KID, June 2014, Portland, OR

In America, I regret to be informed
war and rising gas prices
are equally traumatic. There’s panic
at that trigger-shaped pump.

Some reread biblical stories—
extracted citations of plagues, sin,
and salt. Fear finds us hungry.

Evacuation trails of refugees are littered
with what is no longer essential. Left behind;
rapture. Calculations shape bitter mouths,
reactions and policy becomes oracle.

In America, I regret to be informed
speculative fantasy and prosperity, a state,
are the gospel. Instead, I demand nothing exists.

Some claim emerging trends tell the story,
not knowing all data expires. The disconnect
of what has been with what is becoming unravels—
desperate inflations to make sugar from light.

lonely crowd

| ginger k. hintz

“I dream too much, and I don’t write enough, and I’m trying to find God everywhere.”
—Anis Mojgani

weiners for sale, South Dakota, 2009

Pussy willows bloom. Predictive seasons
filter a fuzz of sunlight; valedictory
transitions hold onto their return maps.

This prayer is a practice of communicating.
A form of knowledge or disciplinary violence?
Experts debate experts into echoes.

Meaningless noise fills sacred silence.
Our bodies desire ancient patterns,
a narrator’s reticence; sublime observations.

eavesdropper

| ginger k. hintz

Tender twilight skies and creamy clouds slant
the light of morning’s dedicated return. Birdsong opens
with the begging calls of fledgling Pacific Wrens.

Waking, we scroll through images of liminal threat so often
it’s either propaganda or the truth. The state says
don’t worry, control is what will save us.

I wish I could explain it better—it’s not about them.
Offering reconciliation, two halves of a whole,
agreement, I give you the keys to open your own cage.

Ready? photo: edward atlee

smile, with your eyes

| ginger k. hintz

Dangerous, but careful. Wanting everything, I tamed my anger, smiling wide and innocently. —Dorothy Allison, from “Steal Away,” Trash: Stories

photographer: Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen

An old man carries two oranges,
the size of his fists,
in a red see-through plastic bag.
The oranges swing inside its corners.

I know I need to throw away
your wilted memorial flowers.
The moon is in its last quarter.

Yesterday slipped past me
like a stranger. These artificial
gaps of light both score inner life
and the sounds of meaning.

corral

| ginger k. hintz

In war, mourning the loss of art, be it actual or anticipated, is not separate from mourning for the senseless disruption and destruction of human life. To live is to build, to repair, to illuminate, to leave traces in the fabric of time and space. Until an empire’s fist hits it all and smashes it to smithereens. In the face of its onslaught, human life is as fragile as the glass that bears humanity’s loving traces. —Yuliya Komska, A Stained Glass in Lviv (emphasis mine)

A Fragment, San Francisco, CA, April 2018

Officially, it is spring. Wars are an endless reality behind opaque glass screens. We are learning to feel non-solid things in the hype. The sound of analog reflected in a digital world hits different. Open your mouth away me. Climb out from underneath those emotional thumbs. There’s overtime to be made fabricating virtual systems. Memory tracers betray our line of sight. Some rooftops grow trees and some of us are proficient in the logistics of nostalgia. Do your fantasies prepare you or scare you? Tongues are cut to remove coherent confessions; supplemental augmentations will cost extra. Always cultivate a feeling of waiting for the next disruption. Faith’s orientation requires an artifice, requite deprivation. It’s really like that. Geography as corral, gathered. A rotunda of light. The curtains hung themselves outside the cracked window. This dramatic neglect obscures strategic purpose and tides are never mentioned in the Bible. Its promises another proxy of obscene revenge.

apex

| ginger k. hintz

That the forests grow back with patience, not rage;

—Tony Hoagland, “Peaceful Transition”

artist: Helena Almeida

Digitally speaking, I’ve trained myself to feel distracted.
I’m occupied. As numbed witness, in muted sound and fury,
today’s testimony dissolves into lyrical indirection.
Sharp, warm shadows of morning light strike a blooming spring.
From formalized fragilities of fear, from the perceived aggressor
in endless wars, or from slants of perimenopausal sales pitches
as rumor and pre-emptive threats, it’s all terrifying.
My daily diversions upsold. Propaganda is climax!
The psyops of weak kings is an advanced state of dissolution.
I imagine a moment that lasts so long everyone craves
its optimized chorus—it has been like this forever.
This is the loop, an exquisite incantation, that never deviates.

there is a perception of threat when a loved one dies

| ginger k. hintz

Teach me mortality, frighten me
into the present. Help me to find
the heft of these days. That the nights
will be full enough and my heart feral.

Jack Gilbert, “I Imagine the Gods”

“Heart Aches”, Berlin, October 2017

For most of the morning,
a banner declaring I LOVE YOU
hung visible from the hotel window
until housekeeping removed it—
to keep the room unsentimental.

Blue sky so bright, a harbor
to distract my voyeurism. Later,
a business man made a phone call.
Tie, no suit. Shadows from behind the curtain
portend a drama is breaking beneath the horizon.

Cherry blossoms explode on scene.
The trees have begun their spring planning.
Extending their grace & hope forward,
it would be wise for us to start doing the same.
We are well over 900,000 dead & barely counting anymore.

It’s the last week of February.
Angled rooftops, a single pane of glass
holds my wandering perspective.
I’m probably not telling you the right story.
Sun-marked rooms were the sentient witness.

scrawl

| ginger k. hintz

I’m begging you. Please don’t use this time wisely.
I want you to waste every swollen second
as your breath catches inside your abandoned throat.

Untitled, Louise Bourgeois, 1999

I’m sure you’ve felt this ineffable pleasure before?
Being unwanted, unseen, silenced: useless reputations.
What these words leave inside you matter to me.

thriving inside all this repetition

| ginger k. hintz
God is. July 2018, Berkeley, CA

“Everything is more beautiful because we are doomed.
You will never be lovelier than you are now.
We will never be here again.”
— Homer, The Iliad

Approaching the beginning of an end
is a crossover event. Convergence is likely.

Getting past, moving beyond, over it.
This consistency drowns its own promises.

At frequency, invention pretends tenderness
and, if lucky, courage. A day’s combined darkness.

mild paranoia

| ginger k. hintz

Like a good ride, it takes you somewhere.

I’ve dissimulated…, screenshot from Derrida

Show proof that you’ve lived.

Do habits (routine) flourish inside sunk cost?
Maybe normalization is radicalism?
Have you tried being more passive?

Don’t betray your stray background.
Don’t deny changing constantly isn’t boring.
Don’t forget the true believers.

Secrecy waits for something to happen.
We all have unreliable narrator fears.

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,
unproven claims, 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 is 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—we are languishing, a residual and continuously active tense.

But we are extraordinary now, more so than the before-times. Those of us who survived 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 on overvalued condos built on top of 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 are 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.
Another soul 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 how the slow accommodation
of western light adds 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.