This is a special way of being afraid — first line of third stanza in “Aubade” by Philip Levine
do you feel fear ineffably?
personal, not public — self as an other
the social distance in between
hoax and binaries and stimulus
do you feel subtleties?
curated indoor skies — measuring light
efface negation
imperfect present
do you feel like you are repeating yourself?
ritual or repetition — your reputation
“Be wicked, be brave, be drunk, be dissolute, be despotic, be an anarchist, be a religious fanatic, be a suffragette, be anything you like, but for pity’s sake be it to the top of your bent – live fully, live passionately, live disastrously [if necessary].”
— Violet Keppel, in a letter to Vita Sackville-West (1918)
Monday’s sky rolled out baby blues and soft power pinks with creamy lilac contrails. Yesterday’s news was the same as today: promotional micro-divisions, myopic hyperbole, and regrets familiar as hard-coded hegemonic language.
Cloud banks wander wistfully south where it is summer.
For almost fifteen years, I’ve willingly come to this empty, open place. This returning is one of my most illicit love affairs. Responsible only to self and the swells of intuition, I may decide to write passively because that shadowed edge has the most depth or I show up with a cathartic vendetta that has begged for its own release. This virtual space a catalog of conversions, an alchemy of early-morning meditations transmuted into an ever evolving contemporary poetics. Here, time is measured as equal parts fumbling through curated distances and urgent absolution. This is a sacred practice that I’ve revised, distilled, and kept wild.
The redwoods are watching, thinking, and breathing just like me — and you.
Even now this landscape is assembling. Neither melancholic beast nor hyperconsciousness of a benevolent god’s perversions could keep me away from this erotic ritual of pleasure making. It is glorious how I have taken, and keep taking, what is useful to me. The violence of past sins have not failed me. It is precisely this ancient chorus that has finally connected curious inquiry to my formerly disembodied soul.
Let us start here, again, reimagined.
We want what a god wants: to own it, all. — Beth Bachmann, from “Oasis”
Muses come and go. Some take root. Some show all their promise up front. With almost no context, I understood what he meant by “reputable entry.”
Dropping into a new line can feel like that.
We are bodies of evidence, revised. Show me, again, how to leave and return tender inside all this fragmentation. Generate reality out of hoarded information. Find traction at the edges and distill purpose in application as integration.
… :this page is confronting
you. Come on out. Be ready
inside your voice. People have read
too many names. Now, addressing
what was here before, remind them:
in the hollow after you have spoken
a whole world is trying to be right.They’ll see, those people, how chaotic
a place this is, without us to hold off a reckoning.
Once this poem is over, all the unmanaged
begins to flood in. …— excerpt from an edited copy of “You’ll See” by William Stafford
“Are we witnesses or actors?” – Carolyn Kizer from “Twelve O’Clock”
From a tender age, we learn to anticipate expansive boundaries. This is how we survived.
Our inheritances can be found folded into cornered spaces where silence occupies itself. A similar appreciation to realizing how much our eyes have adjusted to darkness. We trade today’s exhaustion for speculative futures. Assassinations happen daily.
Diversions become elegant beginnings when you realize resistance has immortal roots. That’s why performing for an absent savior is a dishonest practice and violence is a loop of fractured sounds. Do you hear that echo abdicating its own existence?
The sun feels yellow today. Birds still relay their news through song. Incantations woven over and through the roar of their own destruction. A natural and honest alchemy. Such revision signals there is enough, a gathering of effort.
When they ask how you survived this century, what will your answer be?
I could have spent my whole life in that quiet.
I have to start somewhere and this is a good place to begin. I want this early reflection of my time spent at the William Stafford Archives to be a conscious wandering.
I knew I couldn’t finish. There was too much. I needed a respectable and intuitive pace. I had to make quick and deliberate decisions on what to capture and what to let go — a practiced, indulgent impulse.
“I would like to be known as an action philosopher.”
– Banana Yoshimoto, from the novel Kitchen
I wrote what came to my attention and catalogued patterns — wind, mountains, snow, trees, rocks, and secrets to name the most prominent. It felt the best, and most honest, way to honor Stafford’s daily writing practice. It was what I had learned to do from You Must Revise Your Life and Writing the Australian Crawl: Views on the Writer’s Vocation.
On August 17, 1993, eleven days before he died, he asked:
“What can butterflies do if they get mad at each other? Should they express their anger? Stop and get even? Are these questions about a butterfly trivial? And about you?”
And on May 13, 1951, at the age of 37, Stafford wrote:
“How do we know our perceptions have the same feel as others’?” (emphasis in original)
Graceful inquiries such as these found their way into Stafford’s daily writings, which also included his dreams remembered in the darkest shadows of morning light. Intimate and rooted in place, Stafford recorded the present in all its creative movements.
I learned how deeply mountains listen when trees and rocks tell their ancient stories.
Stafford’s lifetime dedication to following and listening — carefully — to what wasn’t being said, or said loudly, was powerful to witness. His repetition was seductive. A rhythm visualized into meditative language that demonstrated “…all living things are afraid (20 June 1975)” and a steady truth that “your hope keeps you awake (20 May 1975).”
What comes next is unknown and that’s exactly how it is supposed to be.
“As if a tenderness awoke, a tenderness that did not tire, something healing.”
— Sylvia Plath, from The Collected Poems; “Three Women,” (1962)
I was born into an isolated, literal Evangelical culture. A place where time was on always on trial and faith was righteous as pride. Our promised future had already been written. We were urgent. The rapture was past due.
All of us who knew even a fraction of the story internalized why Jesus hadn’t returned. Acts of a vengeful god are common and welcomed in this scenario. It was also true when you knew the ending tipped in your favor, knowledge became seductive. A blessing disguised.
To have learned about the world this way feels like a subtle theft. Trauma works that way too. False recognitions bound to real sounds, smells, touch, twists of phrases, and, if lucky, fading re-creations. A true con.
Decades later, I am still carving an existence that is receptive to invitation. There are no answers inside all these non-moments of relentless judgement. That clarity is its own rushed reality. Adapting gracefully to change is an ancient sermon. This is a map to all this undoing.
I don’t swim away from
the greedy snapping of breath,
but my throat…well,
terror owns each kiss.
stanza from “Here” by Amber Flora Thomas
As waves of morning light
survive extravagant centuries
I follow a thread of words
primary gravity safety
broken just enough to fit in
‘I see’ ‘with my voice’ — Alice Notley, from The Decent of Alette
our learning is from the news
a nurtured condition
⁄ it is eclipse season
shadows are light ⁄
our call is to imagine, to conceive
defend against performance-enhancing speculations
visionary blight
= fragmentations
our hands worn from self-caress
please see management
it takes a lot of energy to kill a god
Δ long division
I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.
T.S. Eliot, from ‘Preludes (IV)’, The Waste Land and Other Poems
concerts of effort
sounds better inside a fragment
forgive that this starts out so slow
posting at me to me with me
I’m casual to realize
to follow your our vision
is to be organized into spacial moments — threads
a witness of curation
the: father son and holy spirit
faith is within your standing
some think it is earned
as for me I was taught to be innocent
later learning curiosity had its own beneficiaries
a lesson on just how few original ideas are assigned majestic
fueling dark appreciations for wild abstractions
until it is as uncommon as creating reminders to breathe
I know this all sounds strange
you can call it: new wave vengeance
