“Ask yourself: Why am I seeing and feeling this? How am I growing? What am I learning? Remember: every coincidence is potentially meaningful. How high your awareness level is determines how much meaning you get from your world.” —Ansel Adams
Screenshot from 1974: La posesión de Altair, Victor Dryere (2016)
Yesterday, not an ounce of sunshine so I read old love letters.
I hoard my integrity and stash joy wherever I can find it.
There is muscle memory and active imagination.
There is something called living in between these extremes.
I kept the love letters. I liked that they still held their refrains
from a recent past. I remember to cast its spell.
There is ceremony and letting go.
There is something I call living in between those extremes.
Fortify yourself with contentment: that is an impregnable stronghold.
—Epictetus, Fragments
WHAT A RIDE, Oakland, January 2022
Let’s look at the ocean until we grow old and
drag the thread of time in between murmurations
as their shadows break the bright winter sky.
To our west, memory spools present tense
as a setting sun moves into its next future.
We are movements of repetitions, constellations,
imaginary museums, ancient light.
Out of all the days and all the cumulative years,
what we hold together is dedicated to what remains.
“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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
“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 is 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.
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.
“but i am running into a new year and i beg what i love and i leave to forgive me”
— Lucille Clifton, from I am Running Into a New Year
“your dream is my nightmare,” (trans. google) Berlin 25 Oct 2019
Always, an airplane in the sky. Our big, beautiful world is dying. We string colored lights in windows. This time of year requires letting go of what cannot be undone. The freeway flows forward, always. Birds sing in tune with worn out brakes of city buses. Today I will laugh. Where does the grotesque fall away and where is the real? Knees. Ribs. Pelvis. Hips a spacial reference to another’s manipulation. My body woke me in the middle of the night. I wasn’t sure if it was fair to tell you this truth. I disassociate enough to protect my sensibilities and made myself small to accommodate your vision of a world that owed you. I kept my mouth shut for fear of casting a shadow on your carefully carved out spotlight. I need new vocabulary to describe this headstrong ritual. Joy and excitement is replicable but they won’t be to scale. Yesterday I watched a woman kiss pigeons. Gently and respectfully, she kissed the bravest on their greedy beaks. In a sea of bread crumbs and feathers, she shared her love with those who surrounded her. Come back into it. My body won’t relax. I pick up the slack. Evening’s receiving light follows me home.
But where I come from withdrawal is easy to forgive. — William Stafford
Rupprecht Geiger, Zu Licht und Schatten (trans. To Light and Shadow), acrylic on plastic foil, 40 x 35 cm, 1972
She said she loved me.
She loved me.
Loved me
became an anthem,
a melodic hook.
Stacked like clouds
fists tucked
ready for a fight
bent over or
how horizons form.
Don’t believe me?
Study the moon
and sun’s partnership.
A story of graceful friction.
Literally magnificent light
now wild from abandon.
AN ARMY OF LOVERS SHALL NOT FAIL – title on cover of The Lesbian Tide, Apr. 1973
Road to the Ranch, 1964, Georgia O’Keeffe
this feeling of war is different from other war feelings I’ve had.
it is a conscious scan of knowing where the exits are located.
it is a wanting of quiet and stillness
inside all this (up)loaded aggression.
it is a particular kind of collaborated knowing.
bodies bend closer in fantasies without violence.
a genre of collected mundane details:
dishes in the sink
airport air thick with fancy perfume
the memory of water.
I study nothing, obviously.
I like that space
in between.
crowded spaces. public spaces.
being ignored in isolation.
strictly speaking, we think we know
what is happening
because we study history.
if we believe we are more manipulated today,
do we fulfill our own prophesies?
In three years and just shy of three months I intentionally curated one hundred hours of aesthetic meditation. For six thousand minutes, I listened and watched the ocean perform. The consistency of each unique breaking wave reminding me that this, too, is living. That doing the same thing over and over for no purpose other than feeling pleasure is the goddamn point. Time worth its exchange in salty kisses. I’ve written how empty landscapes are familiar, safe. Home. Blank page, empty horizon. Now, neither scare me.
31 August 2018
I respect the crash and appreciate the ability to pull back into myself. It is energy in motion. To swell. To release. To be seen. To be heard. To be so elegantly agitated. To retreat. To join. To rise. To start again. Already good enough.
Home is here—and out there. I wish to never lose my quiet roar.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
title is Dorothy Allison’s Two or Three Things I Know for Sure (1995)
Rochester, New York, Nathan Lyons, 1978, gelatin silver print
I want a revolution as reckless as cowboys with broken backs.
Throwing restraint to the western winds, a favorable direction,
& towards that edge where darkness is shaped into possibility,
I wait familiar in shy quiet impatient.
I want a revolution as prolific as chants for collective safety.
Born from burn scars so large you can see it from a distant
universe, a reminder we will never be in control so long as
money motivates our hustle for pretentious liberation.
I want a revolution as tender as loving in present tense.
An immediacy that respects our inherited kinetic energies.
Until then, I’ll gather productive & discover curious tensions
sensual as thunder replying to lightening’s transfiguring danger.
In protest and in wealth, I want a revolution that gives as much as it takes.
“writing…is a process of relying on immediate pervasive feelings, not an escape from them…” — William Stafford, Writing the Australian Crawl. pg. 88
I’M HERE FOR LUCK. Louis Wain (1926)
I haven’t found a way to say I love you that isn’t complicated, so I practice loving you every day. Sounds of terrorized children broke through all those hours of visual noise. Hope is a map. A place to begin.
The distance of decades doesn’t always make things quieter. Calendars are more form than function. I learned early and repeatedly that love must be earned, and value is measured by others. An intimacy of detachment.
Addicted to seeking approval is one way of saying yes unconditionally. Instead, imagine a private collection of silent hymns. These days, I take care to mend memories as a way to create acceptance. A public chorus swelled.
Broken into speculative practices, writing things down reinforces pleasure and importance in tandem. Together, through famine and fortune, what stands out is love. An oxygen where sacrifice is not born from competition.
“But your pleasure understands mine.”
— Clarice Lispector, The Sharing Of Loaves
Betsy Eby (American, b. 1967), Rise, 2017. Encaustic on canvas over panel, 35 x 48 in.
At 39,000 feet, clouds rose like mountains
fading to dark as the blushing sun set
to black as the thinnest winter ice.
Ice we learned to turn our wheels into,
and when done correctly, such surrendering
was proactive evidence of a survivor’s effort.
In spring, we plant rosemary to remember
our deepest buried beliefs. We harvest
and revise our most shadowed secrets like wanting nothing
but distant empty horizons and bodies that do not betray.
We sculpt these altered thoughts and declare them working dreams.
In trust, our shared wishes for a braver future were coming true.
“And is is strange how experiences blend and enhance each other.” — William Stafford
22.10.2017 Berlin
It is not that what I know today is necessarily different from what I knew yesterday, or that I have replaced prior knowledge with a brand new extended spectrum of understanding. It is more subtle than a transaction, more gracefully defined as complexity. This feels like transformation. A shift.
Love fits into this equation as a multiplier. The critical variables that come next are a matter of routine, a particular and conscious genre. A ritual.
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