“where the hummingbird, wherever there is a fuss,
just rises and floats away”
—Mary Oliver
To make the attempt
at something more
than the least and the longing
somehow to venture upward
into blue fine ethers
where wanting is not misfortune
where time does not steal
where happiness is an aching
and the shine of history
turns new and nubile
every morning by sunlight
spilling over sunlight
and without lament
Absence has the flavor of meaning
but not the force
a quiet wind speaks
a clear draught of unspoken frequencies
reverberating in chambers and rivulets
of undiluted soul
the undeniable something
with no name and no braking
justice is a caravan of individuals
their dreams shifting between confluence & conflict
languages chosen or accidental
crossing a distance immeasurable
your voice alone in the humid sphere of competing midnights ancient unswerving clarion ready to unravel the monsoon or burn away its floods with a whisper Continue reading Your Voice Alone
these days everything bends toward conspiracy
—the wealth of nations the family bound
by democratic ideals as applied the outliers
united in opposition to time’s flow
the problems the solutions the stories
that recount what is or is not yet known—
all at once both natural & unnatural
—we are each of us a conspiracy of tendencies
the adopted pragmatic mischief of semi-
conscious cellular life an organized adventure
in unification toward culture toward elevation
a demonstration of the conscious capable self—
if your road is wine-dark & you drink
& your blood is sunlight & swimming
if the little freedoms that form you
taste like clean winter air
if the whole of time finds itself & disappears
in the geometry of your breath
if you are prone to becoming
those things you always doubted
if genuflection is an artform
& you place all questions inside it
if politics brings in equal measures
epiphany & raucous fatigue
We must, in this age of integration and complexity, work to recognize those areas where we can learn from cultures that build into our own, that enrich or sustain us, that give humanity, broadly, its metaphysical sense, its creative-adaptable quality. We know France as a place of great culture and profound philosophical insights and a highly developed legal system. But we tend not to think of France as a country whose most famous culture is simply one of many that came to dominate, and very really did stamp out the other cultures competing for survival, in a fractious agrarian society outside the capital, in the 19th century.
Landscape of desire timing and fluctuation all the improbable flurried tasking we undertake thinking that nothing else can be or can be justified or can be ours to own and savor the gaunt topography of willing beyond the shadows and the sifting of impermanent colossal pretensions made of sand… Continue reading Like Egypt & Strawberries
Tight sectarian interim
Waiting for news of successes of fortitude
Waiting for hope to make gains on quiet panic
An army of would-be critics is massing
Time is being distilled to its essence
Pressing compressing
Misery comes winnowing hindrance shimmering into view
Hunted by satirical improvements over small dominion
This world is a sketch tattooed into weakness
Limbo
The dream is another chance at dreaming
But rest
First the perfect rest
A militant but unknowing rest
Anything untenable
Waiting for a break in the pulse
Drumbeat
Pushing toward… Continue reading “The Silt Quarry : negotiations with silence”
he speaks one hopeful half-truth
because the whole truth is unknowable
or pregnant with peril
& she hears most but not all of the half-truth
because she too has filters erected
a discipline for “seeing rightly”
if not clearly
& they agree in part
& fail to agree elsewhere
& more than half of this process
remains concealed…
The Poet Economist 