With Oregon and August
come many storms
and brooding cloud-banks over high hills,
spread out west to our shore,
the last land,
the charnel grounds of the sun.
The thunderheads all hustle as far out
as they can over our poor city,
searching beyond the hills, beyond the ocean,
looking west as every lost soul does
when ambivalence digs in, real
for the first time.
The clouds in Oregon run the course
that set the pace for our ancestors to follow, first
in covered wagons with hollow hearts,
then in combat boots and backpack
bustling with collected notes,
hungry ghost of a script
that's to be written and then learned rote
and delivered, hands clasped
tight behind the lower spine,
pitch-perfect.
It is the song of all our time spent hoarding,
collecting and judging,
the song of every part of our lives
idly passed through too-easy boredom.
This yarn (spun of words pulled
from Mother, books,
graffiti on satchel, conversation,
nights
alone and waterfronts)
is the anthem of longing.
Our pioneer hearts weave it,
the red thread that connects all our artlessness in the morning,
when it first sets in (shocking
like the hothouse and then the frozen lake)
that you are alone and will be;
and at night
when the sorrow of a wasted day
wraps you up in a black
cocoon of dreaming.
Cavalier and lonely,
we are like the tall clouds
(they came first, and twist our ears
with bad weather and melancholy
when when we ignore them)
and we press towards the west
in a bedraggled but maddened
and maddening hoard.
Our hearts spawn in those
woods where the sun dies
and we push out West
to be born.
Friday, August 6, 2010
Wednesday, August 4, 2010
Sunday, July 25, 2010
Mamihlapinatapai
Mamihlapinatapai (sometimes spelled mamihlapinatapei) is a word from the Yaghan language of Tierra del Fuego, listed in The Guinness Book of World Records as the "most succinct word", and is considered one of the hardest words to translate.[1]
It describes "a look shared by two people with each wishing that the other will initiate something that both desire but which neither one wants to start."
It describes "a look shared by two people with each wishing that the other will initiate something that both desire but which neither one wants to start."
New Cloud
New York under New
Amsterdam cloud
salt and musty sea of mica-
crusted skyscrapers,
the city a moment of grave portent
on the ocean, crests
and briny foam frozen,
peaks
into our needling towers.
New York under New Amsterdam
cloud,
your river-valley sweetness
plunging into sudden void,
impossibly steep,
and I see into you -- palm
the full lengthiness of 34th street
with my eyes
and discover the hazy ghosts of Brooklyn
drifting,
balletic in their purgatory
east of the river,
east of Eden.
New York under
New Amsterdam cloud,
a high
and mighty wassailer,
grand
and wide-hulled as a ship, you,
cloud mountain--
nimbly surmount these rolling hills
with the same marked gallantry
that mingles with the city
lights
and which transmits
through perforated density
the soft and slanting
beams of morning.
7.20.10
Amsterdam cloud
salt and musty sea of mica-
crusted skyscrapers,
the city a moment of grave portent
on the ocean, crests
and briny foam frozen,
peaks
into our needling towers.
New York under New Amsterdam
cloud,
your river-valley sweetness
plunging into sudden void,
impossibly steep,
and I see into you -- palm
the full lengthiness of 34th street
with my eyes
and discover the hazy ghosts of Brooklyn
drifting,
balletic in their purgatory
east of the river,
east of Eden.
New York under
New Amsterdam cloud,
a high
and mighty wassailer,
grand
and wide-hulled as a ship, you,
cloud mountain--
nimbly surmount these rolling hills
with the same marked gallantry
that mingles with the city
lights
and which transmits
through perforated density
the soft and slanting
beams of morning.
7.20.10
The Artist and the Healer
Today the sky fades perfectly from white mixed with crystalline
blue at the horizon
to a deep and pelagic cornflower at its highest peak.
O, how I long to live in the mountains.
But I am torn--am I an artist
or a healer?
Being an artist requires incredible devotion to the self,
solitude,
and a superabundance of beautiful and lighthearted surroundings
to quell and satiate the depressive melancholy that everyone creative suffers.
The artist must surround herself
with organic and resplendent comforts, must
create a safe place within which she can be sensitive and receptive without
being forced to absorb (via the sheer
and uncloseable openness of her heart)
bad energy.
The healer, on the other hand,
must dwell, by force of her profession,
around people.
She must be willing to absorb, and indeed take pleasure in empathizing
with pain, suffering, and existentialist ennui.
Unlike the artist,
who spends her days searching for and defining meaning,
the healer must have already found
or decided upon
her true concept of reality, and be ready
not only to impart this knowledge to others,
but also to infuse their very bodies with it--to use her perception
of the fixed and definite order of things
to re-regulate a broken heart.
To be both:
open and closed
solitary and social
depressive and stable
seems impossible.
It is true that the healer must be open, too--
she must be absorptive.
But at this point in my understanding it seems as though the healer cannot process
or retain all that she absorbs,
for what she takes in is not only alien, but lethal.
In order not to be taken down with the sinking
and mutinous ships of her ailing patients' bodies, the healer must possess an amount of detachment
and mindlessness
that the artist does not and cannot have.
//\\//\\////
Even the philosopher and the artist are different; I see this myself.
In all my efforts to create, I forgot
about the importance and the pleasure of processing
or analyzing, of pattern-seeking,
rather than simply making forms. I want to do both--
I want to do all.
7.18.10
blue at the horizon
to a deep and pelagic cornflower at its highest peak.
O, how I long to live in the mountains.
But I am torn--am I an artist
or a healer?
Being an artist requires incredible devotion to the self,
solitude,
and a superabundance of beautiful and lighthearted surroundings
to quell and satiate the depressive melancholy that everyone creative suffers.
The artist must surround herself
with organic and resplendent comforts, must
create a safe place within which she can be sensitive and receptive without
being forced to absorb (via the sheer
and uncloseable openness of her heart)
bad energy.
The healer, on the other hand,
must dwell, by force of her profession,
around people.
She must be willing to absorb, and indeed take pleasure in empathizing
with pain, suffering, and existentialist ennui.
Unlike the artist,
who spends her days searching for and defining meaning,
the healer must have already found
or decided upon
her true concept of reality, and be ready
not only to impart this knowledge to others,
but also to infuse their very bodies with it--to use her perception
of the fixed and definite order of things
to re-regulate a broken heart.
To be both:
open and closed
solitary and social
depressive and stable
seems impossible.
It is true that the healer must be open, too--
she must be absorptive.
But at this point in my understanding it seems as though the healer cannot process
or retain all that she absorbs,
for what she takes in is not only alien, but lethal.
In order not to be taken down with the sinking
and mutinous ships of her ailing patients' bodies, the healer must possess an amount of detachment
and mindlessness
that the artist does not and cannot have.
//\\//\\////
Even the philosopher and the artist are different; I see this myself.
In all my efforts to create, I forgot
about the importance and the pleasure of processing
or analyzing, of pattern-seeking,
rather than simply making forms. I want to do both--
I want to do all.
7.18.10
Ode to the Light in the Evening
The earth is an ordered body, just as we are ordered
beings
and she reflects and resonates
the same warm streams of electric, amber light
that every living creature feels coursing through their physical bodies,
connecting the mind and the heart,
and filling up that space between them (the chest cavity
that overlies our holiest organ and contains
the soul) with golden spaciousness.
This is why the light turns
all warm and glowing in the sun's preamble to its setting;
the sun, messenger between earth and sky,
is a visceral embodiment of these rays, and it grows
most intensely lovely
and magical in the moments before it finally settles into the bosom of the earth, and delivers
to her own glowing core (both iron, both like blood)
all the infinite wisdom
that it, the holy messenger sun, has gathered throughout its day
spent with the moon, and clouds,
and veiled but still existant stars.
7.18.10
beings
and she reflects and resonates
the same warm streams of electric, amber light
that every living creature feels coursing through their physical bodies,
connecting the mind and the heart,
and filling up that space between them (the chest cavity
that overlies our holiest organ and contains
the soul) with golden spaciousness.
This is why the light turns
all warm and glowing in the sun's preamble to its setting;
the sun, messenger between earth and sky,
is a visceral embodiment of these rays, and it grows
most intensely lovely
and magical in the moments before it finally settles into the bosom of the earth, and delivers
to her own glowing core (both iron, both like blood)
all the infinite wisdom
that it, the holy messenger sun, has gathered throughout its day
spent with the moon, and clouds,
and veiled but still existant stars.
7.18.10
Ode to the Sky and Her Clouds
Her formidable clouds obsess me
to the point that I fix my gaze constantly upon the blue bowl that contains them
and I become the circadian sunflower: my entire life
spent experiencing the sky.
These cloud giants
are what first allowed me to conceive of her,
the planet,
as magical.
Looking up at their whiteness,
their decidedly un-geometric and abstract beauty, I realized
that they existed
not in another realm of coldness
and sparse air,
but in the center of a vast vault,
our skin,
that connects this world
indefinitely to all the others.
The science of their bodies,
the ephemerality of their forms (a solid-seeming
thing made up of water)
is what revealed to me the true miracle of this world:
we are
from top to bottom
an open system,
and all parts cohere in a manner as precise and scientific as the laws that allow
our amazing clouds (just
simple wisps of gas) to form.
It was that dense condensation that opened my heart
to the regularity and perfection of nature.
7.18.10
to the point that I fix my gaze constantly upon the blue bowl that contains them
and I become the circadian sunflower: my entire life
spent experiencing the sky.
These cloud giants
are what first allowed me to conceive of her,
the planet,
as magical.
Looking up at their whiteness,
their decidedly un-geometric and abstract beauty, I realized
that they existed
not in another realm of coldness
and sparse air,
but in the center of a vast vault,
our skin,
that connects this world
indefinitely to all the others.
The science of their bodies,
the ephemerality of their forms (a solid-seeming
thing made up of water)
is what revealed to me the true miracle of this world:
we are
from top to bottom
an open system,
and all parts cohere in a manner as precise and scientific as the laws that allow
our amazing clouds (just
simple wisps of gas) to form.
It was that dense condensation that opened my heart
to the regularity and perfection of nature.
7.18.10
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