Archetypes

Often before our fingers touched in sleep or half-sleep and enlaced,
often I’ve been comforted through a dream by that gently sensitive pressure,
but this morning, when I woke your hand lay across mine in an awkward,
unfamiliar position so that it seemed strangely external to me, removed,
an object whose precise weight, volume and form I’d never remarked:
its taut, resistant skin, dense muscle-pads, the subtle, complex structure,
with delicately elegant chords of bone aligned like columns in a temple.

Your fingers began to move then, in brief, irregular tensions and releasings;
it felt like your hand was trying to hold some feathery, fleeting creature,
then you suddenly, fiercely, jerked it away, rose to your hands and knees,
and stayed there, palms flat on the bed, hair tangled down over your face,
until with a coarse sigh almost like a snarl you abruptly let yourself fall
and lay still, your hands drawn tightly to your chest, your head turned away,
forbidden to me, I thought, by whatever had raised you to that defiant crouch.

I waited, hoping you’d wake, turn, embrace me, but you stayed in yourself,
and I felt again how separate we all are from one another, how even our passions,
which seem to embody unities outside of time, heal only the most benign divisions,
that for our more abiding, ancient terrors we each have to find our own valor.
You breathed more softly now, though; I took heart, touched against you,
and, as thought nothing had happened, you opened your eyes, smiled at me,
and murmured–how almost startling to hear you in your real voice–“Sleep, love.”

- C.K. Williams

Envoi

"The truth is the thing I invented so I could live."
                                                    - Nicole Krauss

I write to you not knowing where you are

 or what form you might take. I know things

I never told anyone. They claimed parts of me;

mostly contents in the nether regions

of my brain, and a happiness that passed

before I knew it was. I marked them

from the corner where I saw the man holding

a woman’s waist as if she were glass; to the morning

they kissed and I was filled with knowledge

I failed to articulate; a toast to forgetting

what I’ve been waiting for; to love, in all forms,

within and outside the body; the need

to endure what I thought resembled it.

I made things I never told anyone.

For whom, is not important. I wanted

to savor the thought of knowing

someone could've heard. Perhaps

I made something worthy of time,

like I’ve always imagined.

Animal

Could you so arrantly of earth, so cool,
With course harsh hair and rapid agile pace,
So built to beat boys in a swimming race
Or drive with sheer terns to a salty pool,
So lean, so animally beautiful--
Your breasts look sideways like a heifer's face,
And you stand sometimes with a surly grace
And mutinous blur eye-fires like a bull--
Could you from this most envied poise descend,
Moved by some force in me I know not of,
To mix with me and be to me a woman,
Diana down from heaven could not lend
More ecstasy, or fill my faltering human
Heart's hunger with a more celestial love.

--Max Eastman

"And at once, I knew, I was not magnificent"

What ticks me off

Venting out because that's what occasional blogs are for, right?

It frustrates me when I try with all my strength and mindfulness to explain a very important point that represents the crux of my concerns. I find it irritating when a person simply shuts me off while claiming they did not understand anything I said. (If it's my failure to communicate that confuses or overwhelms people, why do others use this limitation to avoid important arguments? Why can't people for a second just stop and really listen. An urgent call comes in all unintelligible forms and yet its "incommunicability" doesn't cancel the fact that something is very wrong.) Worst of all, it angers me when these people dismiss my concerns for another petty "overreading" that's narrow/irrelevant/uncalled for. 

I beg to differ.

I think a person shuts off at the precise moment they stop seeing their own flaws. They turn a blind eye to their own errors, seeing flaws only in others, without correcting their own. The double-standards begin with the bias we have for ourselves. People commit "harmless errors" all too often that the errors become nothing more than "harmless habits." People even justify their actions by arguing that "other people have validated it and are doing it too." (I guess that's the price our society pays for perpetuating a stunted democracy in the age of severely deteriorating attention spans.) It annoys me how they can be so stubborn. They stop listening the moment someone calls them out on their misgivings. 

The most frustrating part?

They don't even acknowledge they were wrong (even in some shady aspect of the word). Hell, they would rather ride in their innocent delusion thinking nothing is wrong. If this form of denial is keeping them sane, I'd rather be swathed in madness! One day the walls of their delusion will crumble due to this unacknowledged internal defect they never bothered to address. 

I find it difficult to reconcile my emotions towards these kinds of people. We're all walking contradictions, I know, but that doesn't give any of us the excuse to 1) stop being good individuals 2) stop learning 3) stop listening. Your age and experience is not an excuse either. 

Black Zodiac

Darkened by time, the masters, like our memories, mix   
And mismatch,
                             and settle about our lawn furniture, like air   
Without a meaning, like air in its clear nothingness.
What can we say to either of them?
How can they be so dark and so clear at the same time?   
They ruffle our hair,
                                        they ruffle the leaves of the August trees.   
Then stop, abruptly as wind.
The flies come back, and the heat—
                                                                 what can we say to them?   
Nothing is endless but the sky.
The flies come back, and the afternoon
Teeters a bit on its green edges,
                                                           then settles like dead weight   
Next to our memories, and the pale hems of the masters’ gowns.
________
Those who look for the Lord will cry out in praise of him.
Perhaps. And perhaps not—
                                                     dust and ashes though we are,   
Some will go wordlessly, some
Will listen their way in with their mouths
Where pain puts them, an inch-and-a-half above the floor.   
And some will revile him out of love
                                                                   and deep disdain.
The gates of mercy, like an eclipse, darken our undersides.   
Rows of gravestones stay our steps,
                                                                  August humidity
Bright as auras around our bodies.
And some will utter the words,
                                                         speaking in fear and tongues,   
Hating their garments splotched by the flesh.
These are the lucky ones, the shelved ones, the twice-erased.
________
Dante and John Chrysostom
Might find this afternoon a sidereal roadmap,   
A pilgrim’s way ...
                                   You might too
Under the prejaundiced outline of the quarter moon,   
Clouds sculling downsky like a narrative for whatever comes,
What hasn’t happened to happen yet
Still lurking behind the stars,
                                                       31 August 1995 ...
The afterlife of insects, space graffiti, white holes   
In the landscape,
                                 such things, such avenues, lead to dust
And handle our hurt with ease.
Sky blue, blue of infinity, blue
                                                         waters above the earth:
Why do the great stories always exist in the past?
________
The unexamined life’s no different from
                                                                          the examined life—
Unanswerable questions, small talk,
Unprovable theorems, long-abandoned arguments—
You’ve got to write it all down.
Landscape or waterscape, light-length on evergreen, dark sidebar   
Of evening,
                       you’ve got to write it down.
Memory’s handkerchief, death’s dream and automobile,
God’s sleep,
                       you’ve still got to write it down,
Moon half-empty, moon half-full,
Night starless and egoless, night blood-black and prayer-black,   
Spider at work between the hedges,
Last bird call,
                           toad in a damp place, tree frog in a dry ...
________
We go to our graves with secondary affections,
Second-hand satisfaction, half-souled,
                                                                        star charts demagnetized.
We go in our best suits. The birds are flying. Clouds pass.   
Sure we’re cold and untouchable,
but we harbor no ill will.
No tooth tuned to resentment’s fork,
                                                             we’re out of here, and sweet meat.   
Calligraphers of the disembodied, God’s word-wards,
What letters will we illuminate?
Above us, the atmosphere,
The nothing that’s nowhere, signs on, and waits for our beck and call.
Above us, the great constellations sidle and wince,
The letters undarken and come forth,
Your X and my X.
                                   The letters undarken and they come forth.
________
Eluders of memory, nocturnal sleep of the greenhouse,   
Spirit of slides and silences,
                                                    Invisible Hand,
Witness and walk on.
Lords of the discontinuous, lords of the little gestures,   
Succor my shift and save me ...
All afternoon the rain has rained down in the mind,   
And in the gardens and dwarf orchard.
                                                                        All afternoon
The lexicon of late summer has turned its pages   
Under the rain,
abstracting the necessary word.   
Autumn’s upon us.
The rain fills our narrow beds.
Description’s an element, like air or water.

                                                                                 That’s the word.

-- Charles Wright

Personal History

"I would love you ten years before the flood."
                -Andrew Marvell

A long time ago when cataclysms were common
as sneezes and land masses slid
around the globe looking for places
to settle down and become continents,
someone introduced us at a party.

Later on, as the Rennaissance flowered,
I fell in love with you, egged on by the sonnet
and the idea of your individuality.

We married during the Industrial Revolution,
coughing on a brown lawn above a city
humming with flywheels and dry belts.
The ceremony went like clockwork.

When we rattled the world, we shut the blinds
and huddled under a table while sirens harmonized.
Everything but our affection was rationed.

Now we find ourselves in the post-modern age,
using one of its many Saturday nights
to drive to the movies in a Volkswagen.

"It doesn't seem we've been together that long,"
you say, looking at my profile,
contractig the past into the rearview mirror,
beaming the future into the tunneling of our headlights.


-- Billy Collins