It was closing on dawn and they had whittled away the moon. All that hung was a swept blade or a whispered spoon, glinting in just so much sun. The stars were lost in their reveries, drowsing in their remaindered light. Again my hands were folded, this waking moment a little dry and a little cold. Again there was a horned owl speaking clearly somewhere above me. Just another marker I couldn't see.
It happens that the earth was glutted by so much recent rain. It happens that the dawn unfolded with its usual retinue of egrets and crows. The song bird clutter in the trees and on the power lines. The slow waking spirals of vultures, dazzlingly still in rapturous flight. I have heard frogs chirping a few times in the warmer tides of these storm swept nights. I haven't seen frogs around here in years.
I have witnessed the green fields of winter turn to summer golds, and those dry fields hidden beneath the pavement. Watched the tattered housing and cheap store fronts change and fade, blocks turning to streets and streets to so much more gutter. Raccoons and rats work their angles, crows forage from plastic cups and paper bags. The world bent to casual appetites, the sun has lost another bet to the storm and the night. Another dusk frittered away by a spattering of rain. Another dusk without a moon in sight.
Monday, February 8, 2010
Sunday, February 7, 2010
out there
Faith makes its arguments from the lack of evidence. Faith insists from the heart, it proclaims from the soapbox of experience, that perpetual as if, that sense that unseen eyes are upon us. Faith places its placards beneath windshield wipers and beside the pizza coupons on the screen. It always know better than you. Faith always has a lot to answer for.
Biology breaks it down into deceptively simple chemical markers, behavioral alchemy based on the pressures placed upon our shared ancestral pool, and upon the recent received wisdom of culture. We see the bushes shift and sway, then we see an animal burst forth. We learn to expect the hidden, anticipating ambush, projecting an enemy from the insides of our minds. The price of mistaking an empty wood for an ambuscade is a dose of anxiety and some wasted time. The price for mistaking an enemy waiting for an empty wood is everything. There are errors that are much cheaper to make than our notions of perfection allow. We learned to hedge our bets, walk careful, and talk low. We learned to pray to unseen actors, just in case.
I wouldn't say that there's nothing out there. Most of our many modern cultural mistakes have been those of hubris, thinking because we get one answer right, that we have aced the test. We bury old truths for shiny beads, listen to the voices of mechanized ghosts and forget how to sing. We package ourselves so carefully and completely that a hermitage would be a redundancy, believing sad, statistically impossible models of utility and success. We treat our deities like football teams, cheering our one truth on towards victory. The spirit only knows freedom, the religion only knows restraint. Whatever is or isn't there, it isn't what you think. It isn't what I think, either.
We are a convolution of happenstance and time. Each of us is a community, derived from an ancient compact between animal and plant, each cell a temple of this mystery. Swarms of viral agents, legions of bacter, armies of fungus. Sense and sentient is a continuity, rather than a pinnacle. We stare in the mirror and think ourselves chosen. We think we are stars when we are at best a colorful walk-on in an long complex ensemble show. We are shaped by the secrets of the eldest of hungers, we are altered by the world we turn and twist. There is dismal sorrow and great joy in us. But those things were there before us, and they will be around long after we are bones, junkyards and strange statuary of stone and bronze and steel.
Words are sounds and words are music. Words are art and they are tools. I use them liberally and with little care. Without giving away the playbook, that is the point. We are bound and released by language, and by silence, by act and stillness. Some journeys are laden with purpose, some seem to refute even the notion of meaning. Some aim for heaven, some for hell, some for the wealth and comfort of the world. Some strive for nothing more than absolute extinction, sleep of sleep, retreat from all that is manifest. I leave a trail of ink and kisses, wandering ever deeper into the unknowable.
Biology breaks it down into deceptively simple chemical markers, behavioral alchemy based on the pressures placed upon our shared ancestral pool, and upon the recent received wisdom of culture. We see the bushes shift and sway, then we see an animal burst forth. We learn to expect the hidden, anticipating ambush, projecting an enemy from the insides of our minds. The price of mistaking an empty wood for an ambuscade is a dose of anxiety and some wasted time. The price for mistaking an enemy waiting for an empty wood is everything. There are errors that are much cheaper to make than our notions of perfection allow. We learned to hedge our bets, walk careful, and talk low. We learned to pray to unseen actors, just in case.
I wouldn't say that there's nothing out there. Most of our many modern cultural mistakes have been those of hubris, thinking because we get one answer right, that we have aced the test. We bury old truths for shiny beads, listen to the voices of mechanized ghosts and forget how to sing. We package ourselves so carefully and completely that a hermitage would be a redundancy, believing sad, statistically impossible models of utility and success. We treat our deities like football teams, cheering our one truth on towards victory. The spirit only knows freedom, the religion only knows restraint. Whatever is or isn't there, it isn't what you think. It isn't what I think, either.
We are a convolution of happenstance and time. Each of us is a community, derived from an ancient compact between animal and plant, each cell a temple of this mystery. Swarms of viral agents, legions of bacter, armies of fungus. Sense and sentient is a continuity, rather than a pinnacle. We stare in the mirror and think ourselves chosen. We think we are stars when we are at best a colorful walk-on in an long complex ensemble show. We are shaped by the secrets of the eldest of hungers, we are altered by the world we turn and twist. There is dismal sorrow and great joy in us. But those things were there before us, and they will be around long after we are bones, junkyards and strange statuary of stone and bronze and steel.
Words are sounds and words are music. Words are art and they are tools. I use them liberally and with little care. Without giving away the playbook, that is the point. We are bound and released by language, and by silence, by act and stillness. Some journeys are laden with purpose, some seem to refute even the notion of meaning. Some aim for heaven, some for hell, some for the wealth and comfort of the world. Some strive for nothing more than absolute extinction, sleep of sleep, retreat from all that is manifest. I leave a trail of ink and kisses, wandering ever deeper into the unknowable.
Friday, February 5, 2010
day by day
Was there still a moon that knows me? Was there some poignant satellite, some folded romance or finger-light trifle? Something left to look for, once looking is allowed. Maybe it is the season, maybe it is only me. The light goes on, the light goes off. I forgot the color that means go.
I swallowed that truth, like a swallowed some fortune. There is a romance to the dealt hand, the finished set. There is completion to the chance that is taken last. At least this moment done, this war ended. At least there is something more in the crusts and rinds, the tea leafs left once the meal is done. That chance that last is surpassed and surprised.
The calendar promises everything, so many more days to sort out, so many marks to make. But look to the sky to reach this last sentence. Look to the heavens before you settle on rain. I look out, hoping that this shine will reach my eyes. I look out, seeing my hope gazing back.
I swallowed that truth, like a swallowed some fortune. There is a romance to the dealt hand, the finished set. There is completion to the chance that is taken last. At least this moment done, this war ended. At least there is something more in the crusts and rinds, the tea leafs left once the meal is done. That chance that last is surpassed and surprised.
The calendar promises everything, so many more days to sort out, so many marks to make. But look to the sky to reach this last sentence. Look to the heavens before you settle on rain. I look out, hoping that this shine will reach my eyes. I look out, seeing my hope gazing back.
Thursday, February 4, 2010
we all wait-
Another hour has fallen from the table. Another day begins, the clockwork turning with dogs barking and the weather just aching to change. Fingers stumble over the same set of smudged keys and unknown reasons. A light burns in some window, someone steps gingerly upon an unmarked grave.
Water has its spells and steel its persuasions. The distant sea and the beckoning blade. All the bled out dreams and notions of cold tableaux. A compulsion never the same thing as a freedom, though they are much the same taken from nature. No-one knows, and still offer wan prophecy. No-one knows, and they would rain the world with their frogs and gods. The hand is only stayed because the sickness demands its action. Survival at its most perverse.
Sleep is another battlefield, too fraught with fire and ache to handle along with all these waking hurdles. Words are empty and ephemeral, spat out symptoms, droned out directions to places that no longer exist. The clock keeps winding down. We all wait, when there is nothing else we can think of. We all wait, claiming every little fire as our own.
Water has its spells and steel its persuasions. The distant sea and the beckoning blade. All the bled out dreams and notions of cold tableaux. A compulsion never the same thing as a freedom, though they are much the same taken from nature. No-one knows, and still offer wan prophecy. No-one knows, and they would rain the world with their frogs and gods. The hand is only stayed because the sickness demands its action. Survival at its most perverse.
Sleep is another battlefield, too fraught with fire and ache to handle along with all these waking hurdles. Words are empty and ephemeral, spat out symptoms, droned out directions to places that no longer exist. The clock keeps winding down. We all wait, when there is nothing else we can think of. We all wait, claiming every little fire as our own.
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
so what
The saddest light spills from your eyes, as the moon grows crooked whiskers and gentle music fades. The light pours out from this sliver of your unblinking gaze, this trick of layers of technology and the odd drift of physics. This trick of memory and the ebbing refractions of my untidy mind. I remember most the times I made you cry, so even in pictures when you were well past me I imagine the hints of tears. It was what we have in common, well into this other, further world. It is how the life of our crimes so exceeds any of our lingering kindnesses. So this other moment is only another moment that is spent, and reoccurring in my heart.
I am brutal and I am broken, and I am terribly unrepentant. My sins and my hubris, my violence and my bile, all just symptoms of this fumbling. This journey through the graveyards of gods and truths. This illness that wears me each day more and more. Uselessness too is a muscle: you need to work it to keep it strong.
I know still that you remember me. The depths of my passion, the earnestness of my touch. The hunger for you with which I trembled and I sang. I know that you remember, so I know you would never want to see me again. The bad dreams, the broken promises. That sadness that only the truth can light.
I am brutal and I am broken, and I am terribly unrepentant. My sins and my hubris, my violence and my bile, all just symptoms of this fumbling. This journey through the graveyards of gods and truths. This illness that wears me each day more and more. Uselessness too is a muscle: you need to work it to keep it strong.
I know still that you remember me. The depths of my passion, the earnestness of my touch. The hunger for you with which I trembled and I sang. I know that you remember, so I know you would never want to see me again. The bad dreams, the broken promises. That sadness that only the truth can light.
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
cleaving close
Speaking, we cleave close to ghosts. The secret wanderings of our words, the mingling of meanings and of tongues. Each breath exhales small histories, these exalted mysteries of culture and of kin. Each sentence both the inscription on a tomb and a marker towards tomorrow. Quicker than blood, our voices tell us of the inheritance we honor, and of all the intentions we leave behind.
Culture moves with Lamarckian speed, with the magic of the written word increasing the weight of old knowing we can hold. We write with-in the ley lines of knowledge, the collisions of cultures and of faiths. We write out the terms of conquest and the songs of surrender, the inevitable melding that translation takes as it's due. All a species, with tens of thousands of breeds and bands. The blood is slow, our ancestors a gathering legion.
I owe the glum worship of the Greeks and the Romans. I owe the varied Semites and the intense beacons of North Africa. I owe the ravenous drives of Viking and of Germanic freebooters, the iron of the Celts, and the mythologies of a dozen different tribes. I owe those earliest ancestral wanderings, crossing deserts and oceans 40,000 years ago. The civilizing press of the Mongols, who worried about goods and order, not about gods and temples. Then the brutal feudal wranglings of Europe, hungry for the wealth of the majesty of China, the silk road lavishings of work and want. The great scholarship of Islam, preserving those Romans and Greeks my illiterate and barbarous ancestors would have just as soon burned as read. And the blood debts of slavery and migrant exodus, the hope and lie at once of the American gamble. I haunt each page with multitudes, thinking I am speaking alone.
Culture moves with Lamarckian speed, with the magic of the written word increasing the weight of old knowing we can hold. We write with-in the ley lines of knowledge, the collisions of cultures and of faiths. We write out the terms of conquest and the songs of surrender, the inevitable melding that translation takes as it's due. All a species, with tens of thousands of breeds and bands. The blood is slow, our ancestors a gathering legion.
I owe the glum worship of the Greeks and the Romans. I owe the varied Semites and the intense beacons of North Africa. I owe the ravenous drives of Viking and of Germanic freebooters, the iron of the Celts, and the mythologies of a dozen different tribes. I owe those earliest ancestral wanderings, crossing deserts and oceans 40,000 years ago. The civilizing press of the Mongols, who worried about goods and order, not about gods and temples. Then the brutal feudal wranglings of Europe, hungry for the wealth of the majesty of China, the silk road lavishings of work and want. The great scholarship of Islam, preserving those Romans and Greeks my illiterate and barbarous ancestors would have just as soon burned as read. And the blood debts of slavery and migrant exodus, the hope and lie at once of the American gamble. I haunt each page with multitudes, thinking I am speaking alone.
Monday, February 1, 2010
fossil
Remembering a kiss that cut my lips, I taste tequila and blood. That tangled fervor, fire smoke and sea air, a collision of bone and limb as I held you by your hips and hair. That native urge to devour encompassing every thread of intent. Your flesh radiant with the residual sunlight, glowing beneath the hot press of my hands. Salt on my wounds, the grip of ice spilling from the hidden starlight, echoes of the ocean grinding fresh sand from so many lost stones. That one moment when you were most.
There is little evidence left. A tattered photograph in a dusty box, a few cards and letters imbued with every essence of passion and belief. Chains of bitter strangers strung out between us. A series of constellations and collisions. Dreams more real than the sorrow that waking brings. The harrowing brevity of that journey from enchantment to bereft, the mirror not even holding a clue to this inevitable transformation.
These lost passions, do they sink into the sediment, awaiting the drift of continents to reveal their ossified remains? Do they resonate so intensely in the senses that the ache of their absence, the repetition of their honed impermanence gain them the huddled passage of ghosts, to stretch and creep in wheels of spent feeling in the dark stretches and the lonesome places? As the only proof of experience crumbles, as memory bleeds into fiction, as history becomes myth, what traces remain as matter steams into new and graceful states? The exchange of breath and appetite, this ancient grasping we wore the way any soldier wears the Iliad, the way all water carries the word. The overwhelming flavor of a moment where everything was possible.
There is little evidence left. A tattered photograph in a dusty box, a few cards and letters imbued with every essence of passion and belief. Chains of bitter strangers strung out between us. A series of constellations and collisions. Dreams more real than the sorrow that waking brings. The harrowing brevity of that journey from enchantment to bereft, the mirror not even holding a clue to this inevitable transformation.
These lost passions, do they sink into the sediment, awaiting the drift of continents to reveal their ossified remains? Do they resonate so intensely in the senses that the ache of their absence, the repetition of their honed impermanence gain them the huddled passage of ghosts, to stretch and creep in wheels of spent feeling in the dark stretches and the lonesome places? As the only proof of experience crumbles, as memory bleeds into fiction, as history becomes myth, what traces remain as matter steams into new and graceful states? The exchange of breath and appetite, this ancient grasping we wore the way any soldier wears the Iliad, the way all water carries the word. The overwhelming flavor of a moment where everything was possible.
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