Invites, or seems to,
An interaction.
Wind, wisp
Of its white silk
Entices,
Like a belly dancer,
Undulates,
Pulls the gaze
And flesh
Of these water bubble
Eyes.
Well I hope to be writing here more often. I got out of the blogging habit and miss it a bit. Spent the day Friday hiking the Wesley Preserve and then Mendon Ponds. A glorious day of warmth and sun. Tonight, snow returns to the North Coast, my son Jackson took the garbage out and returned with this years first snowball.
I am in the vortex of swirling blue, broken by umber arcs of the branches of an Oak. The last warm wind of November twitters a lone leaf, torqued by it's own drying, stubbornly clinging to its thin twig extension. The tessellations of the air around us engulf the curvature of my right arm and palm that rests gently against his trunk. He stands alone, in a minor clearing of tall grass and Milkweed. The raucous chickadees in the stand of saplings to the left has been silenced by my lumbering approach. As I lean in the afternoon, I hear a loud flutter and my awareness attaches to the red flare of a male Cardinal that lands at the edge of the stand.
I turn my awareness back to the Oak and the energy that flows through the conduit of my arm. Tenderly, each individual finger presses into the furrows of the tree skin. Inhaling I relax my gaze, I feel the small swirls of energy in my forehead, heart, and navel gently shift and come into alignment with this great being; with his presence. This is how we speak, palm to bark.
Spread across
pages, junk,
detritus, hunks
of cabbage,
grape leaves
tossed in a heap
of verbiage.
Gloss,
dental floss
covered in weak
gum blood leaks
across flattened papyrus
in an antiquarian.
Land mines loose
meanings lanyard
meanderings of flowocitical curves.
We pick through minutia
with tweezers,
scissors, pluck them
in metaphorical
lumpectomizations.
Lobotomythic citation
excursions in humus.
A truck
A plow
Goes yawning into the night
Snow in sheets
Peels off bent steel
Sent reeling
Sleet darts
On window glass
Dark molasses sky
After midnight
The sky
Of Imbolc
Darkens
A bit at
Dusk
Branches
Still
Reach up
Stretch black
To gray
Flake after
Flake
Each embodiment
Of the sea
Drifts
Heavily
In desire
For the
Land
I have been reading the objectivist poets. In particular Zukofsky, Oppen and Rakosi.
Zukofsky has a music but is so hard to parse. Then I read the following in Jacket magazine, in an article by Peter Quartermain
"Half a year later he would exclaim, in another letter to Corman (25 August 1960 [Origin 63]), that as for “content, . . . the sooner I can get that out of the way & buried in the music of the whole thing the better.”[13]
The uncertainty – of “Belly Locks Shnooks Oakie,” “The desire of
towing,” “the wriggly Wrigley boys” – is part of the poem and
essential. Zukofsky withholds reference and meaning because he want you
to think through the uncertainty, by means of it. The
uncertainty is itself the material and the ground of thought, for
uncertainty is, when all’s said and done, how we go through the world
in which those particulars we call objects are, finally, inscrutable.
The poem is a way of being in the world without claiming power over it."
This has given me new insight. I read with new eyes.
Headlights swing into the line of wind
pouring up the driveway; a car door slams.
Her quick footfalls rush towards me.