a gaze blank and pitiless as the sun
somehow we started talking about girl on girl aggression,
how starting young we divide and conquer ourselves,
exiling those who don’t follow unwritten dress codes,
and others with bodies that bloom too soon and glorious,
or those who say too much about fairness or justice.
it’s shameful how we act as patriarchal gatekeepers
at nine and eleven and seventeen, gleeful and righteous
as we embroider bloody As on innocent chests, pouring
poison into ears primed for it, spraying it over the internet,
spitting the toxic brew on our friends and allies in a mist
disguised as sugar kisses. all this struggle over the fickle
interest of bromancing boys seduced by games that will
never include us. perhaps we have earned, now, our lives
of quiet alienation, our empty houses, our pecking card parties
where -- gray and bent, shuffling alone toward oblivion -- we
hide behind cold smiles, dealing each other losing hands.
Sphinx pose
“a shape with lion body and the head of a man,” ...
oh sphinx, you know better, don’t you? not a man but
a woman, yes -- massive, stately, majestic, poised
stone and magnificent in the desert imagination, jutting
up from sere red dirt -- you hold the busy noise
of two thousand years in your massive mouth.
all around you “civilization” swirls and dies, clouds
scudding through hot skies. you survive famine, drought,
pestilence, war, petty gods and their humans. as loud
as extinction, your enduring silence roars on the edge
of our history, invention, struggle. the perfect marriage
of creation, predator, goddess, monument, religions
slide off your immovable haunches. wordless, you disparage
our attempts to stave off the inevitable, our puny deaths,
our desiccation, our return to rock, and sand, and breath.
Moving now to insight
I’m getting too old to be a participant in the usual madness.
troubles my sight
the world dims, colors flatten, faces
melt into paper thin shadows. my glasses
darken and refuse to clear, even in sterile
florescence. at the doctor’s, the eye chart
remains elusive, letters smeared over
piss yellow indifference, as the drops
burn into gasping retinae. i stare into
the tiny search light. well, he says, this
young puppy faced boyman, there’s good news
and bad. you don’t need a new prescription,
he says, that won’t help, because you’re growing
cataracts, but we can cut them out and then
you’ll see better than you have in a long
while --
my eyes may be cloudy but my inner sight
swirls in nauseating technicolor. the first
and last time i was sliced it was to free
our sleeping daughter from her fleshy cradle.
you can do it now, he said, or wait, it’s all
the same ... and in that infinite second of silence
i decide to stay in the fog for now,
to cling to dull shadows, to let the world’s shine
die
this terrifying while. to wait inside myself, afraid
to truly see.
Things are brewing …
a vast image out of spiritus mundi
maybe this is what’s at the backs of our minds --
some vast image, some supernatural notion
welling up at last in the collective unconscious --
a demon spawned in underground rivers
of lava and arsenic and radiation, earth blood
bubbling at impossible temperatures, taking on
insane weight and intention, and rising now
like a vengeful golem created to collect on our
massive debts. certainly, some of us are waiting
for this reckoning to arrive; some of us suspect an
incredible bill has come due, and the gods we raised
will refuse to save us, and (in short) we are
screwed. no prayers, no words, no magic will suffice.
this is how ou world will end: not in ice but in fire.
When I die, please bring me back as a tree
Only then will I have the wisdom I need to endure this world.
hardly are those words out
when I remember the grace and intelligence
of trees -- how they bend and sigh in
every flavor of wind,
their persistence in all weather,
their silent wisdom, waiting through
generations of human invention
(if that is to be their story)
or for their end in fire, flood, amputation,
bug infestation --
how they retreat inward with November
behind dark, mossy bark,
hiding their lives deep in roots
clutching frozen mud, or shake
shawls of snow from evergreen branches,
letting peckers and squirrels and robins
nestle in their leaves and needles --
how they breathe in our poisons with
detached compassion,
exhaling a healing oxygen --
how they never complain or attack,
and just convert their suffering into love.
Is it possible to be so freaked out that you’re bored?
I think I might be overloaded with fear for the future, so much so that I’ve lost the ability to really care.
surely some revelation is at hand
so many signs -- near total eclipses
60 degree days in February tree buds
popping loose in March daffodils breaking
through stone doors flying from planes
while passengers go batshit in the aisles
earthquakes in new jersey bombs falling
on hospitals shooters rampant in every
public space dictators’ flags flapping
over suburban homes female family
annihilators throwing their children
onto freeways insistent even aggressive
birdsong a constant soundtrack --
i find myself suspended inside a bubble
of ominous quiet like the eye of a hurricane
ears ringing in the sudden stop heartbeat
a ticking clock something massive is surely
coming welling up in the silence gathering
impossible force almost ready to explode
the worst are full of
whatever, you know.
the worst are full of passionate intensity we all know what this means and so I won’t belabor the point invent your own images to prove the case and for once I will fall back into happy abstraction
And now back to our regularly scheduled programming…
Not that you care, but today I’m feeling groggy, disoriented, sleepy, and vaguely disgruntled. It’s like all of the joy and hope I felt yesterday has left me with a hangover.
the best lack all conviction wandering, alone, dazed and confused in hedge mazes hewn from legal speak and wishful thinking. They stumble into dead ends and queer sand traps, gopher holes to snap their ankles, and hear the echoes of faroff voices, rising and falling like waves, over the clink of expensive silverware, the music of casual laughter, a muted string quartet. No wonder they lose all sense of direction and purpose, faced with such frustration, turning over and over into blind alleys lined with vicious branches, prevarications on a single theme of entrapment. Now, as it gets dark, it seems that distant party has been thrown only as a mirage, to torture these best few with the hope of release; this game works to keep these last persistent seekers circling endlessly back to the center, where a sarcastic bronze statue, mottled with age and cast long ago with the name TRUTH across its base, poises over an empty fountain, pissing air into air.
Happy birthday to the best boy/man ever!
This guy loves cheesy cards and making fine cuisine. He’s a kitchen singer, a fish tickler, and a goofball extraordinaire. I am DAMN LUCKY to be hitched to him for life.
And Now for Something Completely Different or Eclipse Birthday Poem for Dave Nature’s celebrating you today, slipping the moon in front of the sun, as if to somehow highlight your inner brilliance. Because you shine, darling, blaze in my imagination whenever I’m asked to “set an intention” or figure out all I’m grateful for -- like our friend Petty sort of sings, I got lucky, babe, when I finally met you, there on the U of A breezeway, third time the charm. True confession: I recognized your light from the first but refused, twice, to let it in, suffering my own emotional eclipse, craving the pain of inauthenticity and rejection, closing my eyes against unconditional connection. But here you are, 34 years later -- partner, heart, infinite source of warmth, love, life -- never any moon between us.
but then again…
Up and down the escalator of hope and despair.
the ceremony of innocence starts with a single clear drop, a wordless reverberation like a clap of silent thunder bodiless, it can’t be conceived or heard except as a wordless thought among thoughts that sinks into sod, gushes into hidden springs breaks concrete with silent menace that evaporates into April air, to be breathed in and out by lurking herds of wild and wordless animals that swells polluted rivers, rushing ever south through industrial towns stinking with silence to find the ocean’s many mouths and tongues ravenous for its wordless blood and drift out to nowhere, invisible island where salt and sun collide in merciless silence