Take me
in. Want me how a sentence wants
an end, how a memory wants to be
spoken. With the urgency of breath
when the bag is finally removed
from the head.
Savannah Brown, “Current events”
What reminders of fate exist?
Will you find them
according to the difference in hours
when the mountain exists
and when it is absent?
Magnolia flowers push through their felt cocoons.
I play the anticipation game, which fuels my attachment fears.
In my defense, the seduction is honest and hard-earned.
In the time it took to reach this conclusion,
Mt. Hood glowed peach. When does it become wrong?
When it becomes too much?
Restraint feels good too. Different.
Anticipation becomes the preverbal call and response.
The in-between. I can hold hope here, gently and with full intention.
I am looking for something real—an effort unchallenged. Less questions.
More of a slender inquiry like a river narrowing, entrenched.
Spelling out exit wounds as two bodies enjambed.
Taking is a kind of giving,
sometimes. This is a lesson
etched inside of me. It is hard-wired,
a learned behavior. I’m spying on the self
and its tendencies towards destruction.
Choices made at full speed—from spiritual delusion,
rapture and ecstasy.
Science says twilight is that time just before.
That too exists.
“I do not force myself, ever…I have regard for the inner voice.”
—Lee Krasner (1977)
Genocide, immolation, massacre, breaking news,
poetic language, one million acres. Plan for the futures
in front of us and don’t look too far back.
There is nothing there. Just begging for mercy,
for immunity, for more than you deserve.
The bus is a warm refuge. Foggy windows blur
still naked trees. I trust their knowledge
on when to show up. A sky threatens collapse
and still a rainbow appears. Like that
kind of majesty. That kind of being in witness.
In sensuous fuzzed-out light,
I was held long enough to be astonished.
All this dedication textures delicate.
Fresh consciousness. In this flex,
my ears are open and eyes quiet.
As Robert Frost says, “way leads on to way.”
But every day is a portal to the rest of your life.
—A Conversation with Marilyn Nelson
In this transition
spring feels close
enough to believe
in evolution.
You’ve heard the saying
comparison is the thief of joy?
I know better than to borrow desire
from future seasons.
It feels good to feel
good—in all its slow glory.
Taking it in. Change is beautiful.
From flower to orange.
There are no events but thoughts and the heart’s hard turning,
the heart’s slow learning where to love and whom.
The rest is merely gossip, and tales for other times.
—Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm (1977)
A new year begins tomorrow.
Just like that, we must adapt—
devour what remains.
Extract what feels like success.
This annual closure is a practice of trust.
What seems true: the future is in motion
and its relationship to being in witness
demands us whole because this year’s event horizon
finds us waiting at a finish line yielding
a parade of roses and rapacious bombs.
I will remember the good and honest times—
a trick of light, slants of perception.
Let’s release these whispered translations
and bury the vanishing year.
I am doing something I learned early to do, I am
paying attention to small beauties,
whatever I have—as if it were our duty
to find things to love, to bind ourselves to this world.
—Sharon Olds, “Little Things”
What lies on the other side of this year?
It’s probably something simple and complex—like love
shaped by the cumulative affects of borrowing grief from the future
then trimmed all the way down to knowing my worth.
This year was carved from modest moments of exchanges eclipsed
by better circumstances when I decided to unlearn
variations of devotion that left me prone to seek forgiveness.
This context remains as measured promises swallowed whole.
Of course I did the math. There are two eves remaining this year.
What I carry forward will hold language large enough to be found.
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.
We believe in the power of gravity: weight is worth.
—Kay Ryan, from her essay “Notes on the Dangers of Notebooks”
*
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:
****
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.
What is left after the essence has departed?
—Olivia Laing, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone
Two men speak loudly about numbers as proxy
for success. The loudest lectures on “execution”.
They both agree scope is a form of worship,
which they named “synergy”.
I notice trees are slowly undressing themselves.
Even light sheds, abstract in its positive expectation.
Another war; more rage. Drones and rumor blush bright.
When impulsive is reparative, fear is sacrifice.
Two women discuss leaving an abusive partner.
One quietly asks the other: “Does god exist?”
I almost mistake the lure of absolution as pleasure.
Forgiveness is letting go of all hopes for a better past.
—Lily Tomlin
Imagine a river flowing north towards ancient coniferous forests.
If you are into unbinding desire, you’ll understand the reference.
This immense verdant abundance is a secret hoard of light.
It is a felt experience where light casts both warm and shadow.
The machine logic of algorithmic propaganda will not understand this.
We swallow the discipline of seasonal change and its nostalgia—
the purpose of death unfolding before our eyes with brilliant fascination.
In this portal of harvest and grief, we remember why even the gods rest.
What remains in the graduating darkness is a promise of something better.
I try to calculate the time it takes to scratch these words. Thoughts fade and flare. Ink across the paper registers a kind of time theft during which I fictionalize an ongoing present, the ever-elusive me, you, here, and there, all existing somehow in a slightly fraudulent now.
—Gretel Ehrlich, Unsolaced: Along the Way to All That Is
An ache, August slides through us. Anger is a desire.
To be over, to feel done. It’s exhausting to be inside this repetition.
But there are people to love as dirty dishes sit waiting in the sink.
You suggested I seek forgiveness—self—and absence—perspective.
I felt ambitious in the suspense and tried to relax my anxious heart.
I waited for the world, for the arc to return to a luminous point.
As reference, I believe love is best when it is enduring—
steady as starlight or accountability and September light.
Notice who is around you; who shows up.
What will be left in this new space is courage.
we’d entered that part of July where the days begin to swallow themselves
—Bryan Washington, Lot: Stories
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.
We’re in the wilderness now,
confused by the signs,
with a shortness of breath,
and that postmodern feeling of falling behind.
—excerpt from Big Grab by Tony Hoagland
I want the promised inheritance
of cheap summer thrills
found in dogeared roadmaps
offering the seduction of roadside attractions,
ghosts of winter breezes haunting humid nights,
disposable film photos obscured with thumbs,
green tornado skies, retroactive forgiveness.
These are the smallest habits of living expanded
into the fullness of ordinary time.
But what I crave
is a casual pleasure. One that absorbs
the radiance of wholeness
as night fireworks explode
bright inside the thick marine layer.
“It’s the sides of the mountain which sustain life, not the top.”
—Robert M. Pirsig
A summer sun lurks behind the marine layer.
Patient ambient light indicates scale
and relation. What is arriving?
What counts is the hope. That demand
to experience a transformation.
Revelations of perception
act as units of active witness
after past lives fade.
The sensation of an idea—
like walking on green plastic lawns.
Now that most of the neighborhood trees have leaves,
there is extra music, percussive, inside the offshore winds.
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.
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.
Cache Culture 