These words will form a pattern
taken from memory and borrowed
from belonging and unspoken blessings
whispered just behind your tongue
broken from grief and unanswered prayers.
Some of us will believe and some of us will know
the difference between honest forgiveness
and having eternal debt as talismans. Mirrored poetics
of suffering and ecstasy find a home here.
Take this interpretation with you
when you ask for help, a gesture of emotion.
Let’s pretend time will render joy
and devotion will save us beyond survival,
beyond stimulus and response.
The miraculous is everywhere and in everything. Waiting for us to notice it. Waiting for us to appreciate it. Waiting for us to love it.
—Kobi Yamada, Noticing
We moved a lot growing up.
There was no logic
to the dynamic loops:
only uproot and start again.
I learned how to memorize
places instead of people.
Absorbing landscapes by relearning
the way a sun found a room and
trusting seasons as my calendar
to digest thresholds of familiarity.
It’s that time of year when the light finds you.
Tell me how you discover its presence.
When I am in witness to oranges turning orange.
It’s the time of year when memory chooses you.
Share what remains.
Grief becomes an extravagant home.
It’s that time of year when ascendant darkness requires faith.
Map out your rituals of living.
Listen to the hissy rustle of palm trees;
observe the jade tree bushes thick as thieves
and their starry blossoms popping off pink
during the winter months; absorb the audacity of wanting
to pet the family of gray and white feral cats on Balfour Ave;
and return to a sense of arrival.
—Naomi Shihab Nye, “It is not a game, it was never a game”
from THEY LIVE (1988), director John Carpenter
It was only a month ago. The setting sun, around 6:15pm, illuminated the golden crowns of the majestic oaks below. Now, a few defiant leaves hang loosely in a 5:30pm darkness.
I thought about the phrase “threatening clouds” to explain the immediate energy found in ordinary language. I had been influenced by Kay Ryan’s essay “Derichment” a few days prior to observing how early winter sunsets’ slow movement down Mandana Blvd was all in present tense. Ryan wrote: “There are ways in which pleasures become deeper when they are repeated.” It was the consistency of pattern seeking; a divining rod, of sorts.
Agnès Geoffray, sans titre from Incidental Gestures series (2012)
It wasn’t exactly participatory if you never said no.
A theory: hands tight around throats force a mutual feeling of enlightenment. I saw planets shining bright even in all that light pollution. Somewhere, a cleaved iceberg floats south unaware of its significance to the project of witness. Volume has multiple meanings. So does martyr.
As you told me stories of your life, you let a wasp kiss
your open lips. Held in both fear and in raptured fascination,
We believe in the power of gravity: weight is worth.
—Kay Ryan, from her essay “Notes on the Dangers of Notebooks”
personal screen capture from film, DERRIDA
*
What calls me this morning is dark matter.
It proves its own existence by showing up.
**
Interred is in the news, again.
Transitive, it needs an object to be understood.
***
In a land of myth, timelessness marks its specifics:
There were no people here before us.
We made this place useful.
Our destiny is unbought.
You belong here.
****
This place is measured by its sunlit hours.
Warm colors seem closer to the observer.
Apologies are evidence: absent presence.
*****
The sky is percussive.
Rain falls in delight.
******
There are exactly ten Sundays left this year.
Is this concession, a thing conceded,
or translation of a revengeful confession?
The point is to be inside entropy, a sense of border and calculation.
Not quite religion and the opposite of science, something more
like keeping time and understanding place as landscape, salt, and glare
of light regardless of season. It is the sound just beneath
your most emphasized words that hums a necessary undoing.
*******
Topographically speaking, a saddle is the gap between two peaks.
Offset, understood in this way, is why distance is a hungry ghost.
Kiss the back of my knees like a desperate symptom of anger as luxury,
as a transitive verb and an exercise in yielding when the line breaks.
Maybe this will clear things up:
even our galaxy is filled with corpses.
Dead stars make for obsolete
maps and unmoored gravity
along with other tricks of perception.
What persists is memory,
which tends to isolate itself.
Essentially, no one is home.
It’s the light, still emitting,
that we diligently remember
and direct our wishes towards.
That feeling of possibility—an appetite.
we’d entered that part of July where the days begin to swallow themselves
—Bryan Washington, Lot: Stories
Ikko Kagari from Pervert Rush
Technically, my shadow is shorter in the summer. All that light absorbs.
I, as audience, am distracted and bored. I recognize how my obsessive seasonal observations are necessary in this never-ending series of California summers. This persistent consistency starts to feel unrecognizable as ignoring rising heat signatures on concrete. Not unlike how the ultra wealthy call interactions with other humans “touch points”. It’s more like the theory that black holes have been singing for billions of years. The darkness around us is deep vibe.
I can’t afford the apps that sell healing frequencies by the hertz.
Venus is currently retrograde in Leo, which echoes the apparent motion set in late summer of 2015. It was not the first summer you disappeared in dramatic fashion. Yet another resurrection with the burden resting on proof of return. I told no one to act as if it never happened. I was like the California sun—indifferent to the calendar season.
Our collective horrors are not equal. Neither are the songs we sing to self-soothe. Instead, teach me the wonder of your despair without ever touching me. Listen to my empty hands.
“You can’t separate the disaster from the star.” —Jorie Graham
early morning flight, Oakland (October 2020)
White-stacked clouds
pull shades of wind
from green swaying trees.
You wanted to know, how long does the affect of birdsong last?
Now thoughts evaporate inside my head.
It’s ok. I can embody
unwritten memory.
I painted a sky empty of clouds
to abstract its brevity.
The horizon arrived
at a moving blue-gray ocean.
Almost like the minute we were born
when Saturn squared exact
to an early June Scorpio moon.
Remember: summer and its want for neglect is to be expected.
“Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.”
—Gustav Mahler
Some days everything collapses. Tessa Posthuma De Boer (2007)
There is always a promise.
A hint of certainty—an offering of control.
Then, a volcano erupts after knowing its status: active.
As covenant, trust and belief mutually inspire.
I know you know this translation and how it must feel
when holding sharp fragments—intergalactic vibes:
to want summertime oceans and prairie skies.
All this suggestion begs for minor mysteries
whose performance is a habit. Asking for discretion,
a hint of sin, and longing that chooses you.
Now that most of the neighborhood trees have leaves,
there is extra music, percussive, inside the offshore winds.
LOVE IS $, Oakland (October 2021)
Grieve the affects of a closed throat. No sound, only devouring.
Bright—brilliance in its injury. An echo. Observe the moment,
vestigial and temporary as spring’s abridged shadows.
NEVER WORK, Berlin (October 2017)
In the end, it’s only abstraction and phenomenon.
I hope you have choices too. The ability to revise.
That you demand the real, and push beyond memory.
This movement is discretion at its finest.
Refusal, grace and her technicalities, extends perception.
That angle, visceral, is what creates this poetic materiality.
An open prairie, a reservoir, raw mediums of nomadic attention.
This urge is to live my life swollen with blank spaces.
It’s mathematical, distance and time add up to shadow.
—Li-Young Lee, The Winged Seed
train to NYC, November 2007
The speaker’s ear is etched in memories
like a fragrance as faint as margins
of collateral or remembering a dream
of who used to be here. An erotic mania
exchanging an ever-present now.
Retrograde amnesia. Lazy echoes. A headline
claims we can’t grieve if we don’t remember.
Displaced pretext, panic attacks, then ghosts.
Wind chimes glitter as place separates from time.
Snow falls in the lower hills as if in documentary.
Cache Culture 