Iceskating

There is that moment of fear
right before each skater lands;
your heart flinches to soften the
intended blow, tightens and
then releases with a sigh
as they land and float like
swans, across the frozen pond.

I wrote emo poetry in high school: Exhibit A

I steep in misery
the bitter brew secreted from my soul
diffusing into the cup
to linger at the bottom with the dregs and hopeless dreams.
It hangs on the back of my mouth
long after I swallow and grimace.
If I let the tea leaves lie long
after the steaming mug has gone tepid
will they mellow, losing their bite?
Can hopelessness and anxiety
be washed off with scalding water?
or will I only be damp and depressed,
borrowed British serenity fading away
as the tea cools in my stomach?

Dozed off in the middle of 'Alice'

Dozed off in the middle of 'Alice'
dream'd of things wild and wet
and woke to just a hint of Carrollian imaginings lingering on the tongue and crusting about the eyes.

a heads-up

I'm digging out journals from four years ago, and I will be cringing as I (mostly) faithfully copy them out. I really did compare my soul to a teabag. I was in some distress at the time. Share with me the humor of some of my early works when viewed in hindsight, and critics, please realize that the writer was an extremely shy sixteen- or seventeen-year-old with a great deal more books than experience, who would probably take comments very personally, and internalizing them, would write more bad poetry on her yearning for a turtle's shell! Thankfully I am a bit more sturdy now.

Spring flowers at Vassar

lines written inside a gift and then forgotten

This is a camera.
Use it to capture the wide sweeping landscapes and close-ups of glittering trash in a gutter, the laugh-wrinkles on an old lady's face, and a sweaty, adolescent embrace.
Sow a garden in the mind of your reader, of ideas to burst into fruition.
But write always with an old-fashioned fountain pen. It's the secret to really good writing. Something about the ink flowing with your creative powers. The closest thing to goose-quill.

Being

This quote by Albert Einstein keeps following me.

"A human being is part of the whole called by us the universe, a part limited in time and space. We experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings, as something separate from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from the prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. The true value of a human being is determined by the measure and sense in which they have obtained liberation from the self. We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if humanity is to survive."

More Earthsea

As I said, Ursula K. LeGuin is good if you have trouble with your shadow.

"Ged stood up, and took his staff, and lightly stepped over the side of the boat. Vetch thought to see him fall and sink down in the sea, the sea that surely was there behind this dry, dim veil that hid away water, sky, and light. But there was no sea any more. Ged walked away from the boat. The dark sand showed his footprints where he went, and whispered a little under his step...
He strode forward, away form the boat, but in no direction. There were no directions here, no north or south or east or west, only towards and away...

At that Ged lifted up the staff high, and the radiance of it brightened intolerably, burning with so white and great a light that it compelled and harrowed even that ancient darkness. In that light all form of man sloughed off the thing that came towards Ged. It drew together and shrank and blackened, crawling on four short taloned legs upon the sand. But still it came forward, lifting up to him a blind unformed snout without lips or ears or eyes. As they came right together it became utterly black in the white mage-radiance that burned about it, and it heaved itself upright. In silence, man and shadow met face to face, and stopped.
Aloud and clearly, breaking that old silence, Ged spoke the shadow's name and in the same moment the shadow spoke without lips or tongue, saying the same word: "Ged." And the two voices were one voice.
Ged reached out his hands, dropping his staff, and took hold of his shadow, of the black self that reached out to him. Light and darkness met, and joined, and were one."

sensitivity

Right now I drink
the slightest sound.
I am a still pond
and my whole being
is dizzy with listening,
waiting, watching.
I am so wrapped up
in sensation, so wrapt
in my attention
the slightest dip of a robin's wing
is enough
to fill me completely.
I am a pregnant tummy
so full of my own being,
that funny egg-question of a soul,
tapping on the shell, hearing
echoes from the world, dreaming
of no time at all, resting
in the dark and quiet, changing
ever so softly.

Changing.

While the golden egg
of my mind waits,
I need not say or do
anything of import.
That waiting itself
holds a gift.
I will bear my mind's treasure
on some sandy shore
and swim back out
to the milky stars of silence.
I have no room for anything else.

wink

Here it is, the poem
towards the end of the book
about fireflies.


Go into the twilight.

I've been thinking a lot about the end of the world, and our slow-burning chosen apocali. Would apocalypses make more sense? It's sick that we could even think to pluralize apocalypse, but we are dying by chemicals and radiation and wearing away all the capacity of our own planet to protect us from the sun, from the extremes of nature's capriciousness, and so it is not just one thing but a whole host of endgame players, check and mate, the confluence of our self-will and the world's will, our intent suicidal and the world's, homicidal. In that, I suppose there is only a singular, apocalypse, to describe when it finally becomes too late for any actions to sway the course of fate and annihilation is assured.

autumn's ghost

Crisp sky and the crunch of gravel,
leaves slip through the air in an
evasive dance around my hands,
the scent on the wind hints at frost,
And the uphill climb stretches unused leg muscles.
My mind's eye sketches your outline
against the falling leaves,
tracing the ghost of your footsteps.
Your imagined presence warms me
as much as the climb
and a small hope twinges as the leaves
spiral through the space
where you could stand.
I keep walking, but I glance back
to watch the shower of yellow,
sundappled in the empty road.

Ritualized verse for everyday occasions

The inspiration for these little couplets or single lines I owe in part to Jason, and his recommendation for finding lost objects. Now it is not only Catholics who utter a short couplet prayer to St. Anthony:
"St. Anthony, St. Anthony, please look around,
my _____ is lost and cannot be found."
St. Anthony takes his time, but he has never failed me yet.

Anyway, the concept behind this little ritual struck my fancy, and I've been dreaming up little singsong rhymes for more occasions than I can count. The rhymes may not be very good, but I think what is important and healthy is opening up one's mind into prayer, addressing the universe in a formal-humble-intimate way using 'thou' and 'thee,' and taking a moment to say something beautiful about the world. Prayers of gratitude are shown to be much more effective than prayers of supplication in changing our perception of goodness in the world. The words you speak have never been used before in the exact same combination, so each of your sentences is a new creation. Might as well say something that has a positive effect, at least in yourself if not in the world around you. Here are some lines I have come up with recently:

When watering plants: Thou gentle spirits of earth and air, be well.

When in the shower:
To thee, o power of water I yield
myself to be cleansed; my wounds to be healed.

When picking up a musical instrument: O beautiful instrument, grant me congress with the air.

When lighting a fire:
Flame of the Earth,
strong before our birth
begin with a spark
from the deep and the dark.

When moving into a new house: This dwelling is dedicated to the Earth, whose shrine all homes are.

Arrivals & Departures

I looked across the grey
water to where white wings
splashed on the grey sky,
and I thought how grey it
must all look to people in airplanes:
grey and sleeping.
And I thought how Liz would
have us, once she got off, and
it wouldn't be grey anymore for her.
And I thought that everyone
should have someone, you know,
for color. To brighten up
their grey terminals.

history from inside the bars

It's important to remember that our agricultural industry is our war industry. Chemical fertilizers were generated by our war engines and pesticides were converted from nerve gases. Beat our swords into ploughshares, have we? Then instead of buying war bonds, we buy cereal. We feed our animals subsidized corn, and grow fat with surplus. We won a war but lost ourselves. We consumed the battleground and now are eaten by it.

Earthsea

I have reread Ursula K. LeGuin's fantasy masterpiece A Wizard of Earthsea. Always a good decision. Especially if you have trouble with your shadow. Predictably, I find nature sorcery riveting.
"Ogion let the rain fall where it would. He found a thick fir-tree and lay down beneath it. Ged crouched among the dripping bushes wet and sullen, and wondered what was the good of having power if you were too wise to use it, and wished he had gone as prentice to that old weatherworker of the Vale, where at least he would have slept dry. He did not speak any of his thoughts aloud. He said not a word. His master smiled, and fell asleep in the rain."

"He stood in the innermost room of the House of the Wise, and it was open to the sky. Then suddenly he was aware of a man clothed in white who watched him through the falling water of the fountain.
As their eyes met, a bird sang aloud in the branches of the tree. In that moment Ged understood the singing of the bird, and the language of the water falling in the basin of the fountain, and the shape of the clouds, and the beginning and end of the wind that stirred the leaves: it seemed to him that he himself was a word spoken by the sunlight."