Snowmelt

Melting snow makes me melancholy.

a mind of winter

It is the problem of time.

Nothing that is not there 

Melting snow is the image of time’s passage–in it we see the anticipation, the actual snowfall, and then

and the nothing that is

the moments where the snow is a concrete element in the world.

The snow that has no name/this snow

When the snow was in the world outside the kids sledded and the dog and I cross-country skied the neighborhood, using sidewalks and streets as our paths.

blankness filling 

Even sound travels differently over the snow–and the hush of absent cars. From the park next door, we heard the bells of the church toll noon.

Often, awakening suddenly at midnight

The dog and I walked the remnants of snow this morning. I know part of my discontent is from memory–in Ithaca, the snow remained for months–with the rapid arrival and departure of Seattle’s snow, it feels as though time is sped up. Also, of course, memories of Ithaca bring memories to the fore of a recent loss, because Ithaca was an adventure shared.

The sudden, overcast quiet of the past tense.

My birthday is this week. It’ll be my second for this new oddly solo place I’m in. The children are already preparing their gifts. They’ve told me. They are also evidence of time’s passage but there is too much of the present in them for the past to be painful.

I have bound twine around/these hands too

Not like the snow whose melting only reminds me.

nameless you walked toward me/And I knew you

****

quotes are by Wallace Stevens, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Larry Levis

Chochín

The wren, the wren, the king of all birds,

St. Stephen’s Day was caught in the furze

The wind moves like a cripple among the leaves

It is time for games–I choose opacity over transparency. It is time for the hunting of the wren.

A living wren tied, knocked to stillness but still alive, tied to a stick and paraded for coins or other trinkets. An inexorable crush. A place between what one is and what one is supposed to be.

she/must learn not to subdue the fear

I am hiding this post in broad daylight. Or, more accurately, night. Good night. With enormous moon winged in flight…

or some such thing.

you are becoming gone

Sometimes I wish I too was dead inside. My depressions come in raging and furious and violent with sensation.

I see that I’m running a fever
I see that I’m afraid

One upon a time

The world’s carbon emissions increased by 5.9% in a single year

One upon a time

The permafrost started to melt and up came gases,methane, carbon dioxide. The gases emerged dancing delighted by their newfound freedom and hugged the globe hugged the heat of the sun tightly.

It is love

Once a fear pierced him

the shadow

Once upon a time

18 years or 20 years of a life, on a single day, with typescript and a handful of dollars, shut the door on itself.

I am become

Now that my ladder’s gone

I imagine that when I am an old woman, if I get to that place–and sometimes I do in my mind

mountains; cliffs of fall

I’ll be alone. There are things we settle into in life and then they are over and we turn back, surprised, because we’d thought we were something other.

I grow backward

Now she’s done for

It is hard going to the door

I have written too much. I have been too transparent

cut so small in the wall where

the vision which echoes loneliness

The Bewick’s have visited me from the cold brush–do I think on them more because the hunt is on my mind? Or is it that they are more present right now, they and our thrushlike robins, in great flocks. The leaves have left space for me to see.

Oer his white banes, whan they are bare,

It will soon be time for the hunt.

The wind sall blaw for evermair

Bewick’s are safe from sticks or, at least, they aren’t the targets of Lá Fhéile Stiofán. Whatever the betrayal I do not believe the wren played a part. Nor do I believe the knife sticking out of your back is sent there by the hand of our now rising king.

should she smother it?

The wrens know what I am tending. My little seedling, I’m tending it as though it might, some day, yield an ear of corn, a piece of bitter fruit

I must lie down where all the ladders start

blossoms rank as breath

ˆØˆØˆØˆØˆØˆØˆØˆØˆØˆØˆØˆØˆØˆØˆØˆØˆØˆØˆØˆØˆØˆØˆØˆ
Quotes are by

Kashock, Christensen, Keats, Yeats, Stevens, Creeley, Plath

Soundtrack (for those on spotify) is at SPOTIFY

Redención at The Quail Diaries

Hopefully it is–go check them out and read what is happening The Quail Diaries

Drive baby drive: Wheels, baby birds, dead moles–

There is a reason I want to enter a Buddhist convent.

My heart’s deliverance is unassailable. This is the last birth.

There is a reason I’m giving myself the gift of revisiting this idea in 15 years.

Now there is no renewal of being.

Here we are in the wheel of suffering.  All that lives suffers.

In other words, all is Duhka 

which is untranslatable but which we call suffering.

I make no sense

Here is something more concrete for you.

This mole is dead.

She looks alive but she is dead.

Do you think the girl should write it down, or/should she smother it?  

all beings suffer–doesn’t that help you make sense of it?  the end of suffering?–what about that?

Another example from Nisqually

 This starling nestling in the middle of the road was going to die.  It just was–he just was.

watch/the flashing stitches of my scalpel.  It will answer–/it will connect us with blood

I did pick it up

there is blood on my hand

but just a broken feather

this bird sat in my lap and I breathed with it and I felt….

You will be found wanting/

On the I-5, in the noise and the speed and wind and this tiny quiet sense of borderlines between life and death and me and other things

And, you do not make rich the soil.  

Where what I am needs to not invade what the other is.  Where all I have is warmth. Where I am all alone except I’m not.

may all beings be free of suffering

And, you are not capable/of feeding fish and birds with your corpse

$@$@$@$@

I’m inclined to find that the deep spiritual-philosophy behind the most basic aspects of Buddhism help me see the fissures rather than the masking.  But.  I am new and naive.  But, I reject, from deep in my gut, any sense of spiritual arithmetic.  For example

we suffer because of original sin

or

you are suffering because you have accumulated karma–he will be born a lower form in his next life because of the karma he is accumulating.

(lower?!  Lower! really…)

These are both about the human need to find meaning.  I don’t believe in meaning.

Is this masturbation or possession?

Is it possible/allowable to use/investigate the methods without this sort of arithmetic?  Is is possible/allowable to encounter some of that internal unifying sort of thing without pretending to accept hierarchy, or retribution?

What if night vision?/Nevertheless, we see it.  You are hallucinogenic or visionary

Now that we are rapt–score us.  Use the knife.

With the fire of passion, say I, with the fire of hatred, with the fire of infatuation; with birth, old age, death, sorrow, lamentation, misery, grief, and despair are they on fire.

—

quotes are by The Buddha, Kristen Kaschock

Fare thee well, Aprille

April is the cruelest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire

It is become cliché.

And also, because it is T. S. Eliot’s, problematic.

But, though I hate to admit it, I’ve been saying The Wasteland’s first three lines over and over in my head since before this month began because it comforts me.  Because, though I’ve understood the agony that comes of mixing memory and desire for many years, in this year, this spring, it is almost too much.

the rock needs incisions

And the earth needs furrows

I cannot be more explicit with you.  I just can’t.  And because of this, my writing is circling and never finding its way to the center.  I do think there is something linked between my repetition of the words and my current obsession with WWI.

yet what that one does

Nobody knows

As I’ve mentioned earlier, the last veterans of the Great War are dying and their memories go with them.

What the memories take with them is an attachment to that reality which is, with the battle of the Somme alone, for example 420,000 British,  200,000 French men and 500,000 Germans

A traveller walks

With the other,

Photographs and footage (here) exist but they are unreal.

unreal city

They only intensify the alien quality of that war.

but what is this

But I digress.   The Wasteland was written in the wake of WWI.  In the wake of unimaginable destruction and death.  And in the utter disillusionment with the capacity of those in power, whether it be in the military or in politics.

I am not the only person who has compared then to now.  Except, it isn’t the same and it doesn’t help anyway.  Except, inside of me sometimes it does.

But I have no right to this place in time, though I do have a right to Eliot’s words because we all do.

your shadow at morning

Forgive me my trespasses on the solid ground of a past I had no part in.

your shadow at evening

Forgive me my immense banalities and my elevation of the quotidian.

fear in a handful of dust

Forgive me the fact that I obscure everything about why memory and desire and mourning (not in people but in things) are words that I am using to to describe my state.

has died and is lost to me

Forgive what is in and outside of me.

lies

For ever and evermore.

Beside the grottos of the sea

–

quotes are by TS Eliot and Friedrich Hölderlin

Go To

The Quail Diaries

That Garden, Yoga, and Time

I’m only writing because I have to.  I walked by a garden yesterday.

when the combat was finished…everyone returned as smoke

Sometimes, I suppose this has happened to you(?), we imagine ourselves held by particular lives

A loved garden, a pathway and a swingset

present or past or future, all rolled together

Foot falls echo in the memory….towards the door we never opened

so that I can walk by the garden and think, I lived here, I live here, I will live here and not a single one of these thoughts will be true.

are you one of those witches?

We all need to be awakened, it’s just I’d like the awakening not to be quite so uncomfortable.

 

I am mourning, I am, mourning I

Place the moon at [their] eyes and her whiteness shall devour

My words are to be taken cautiously

I’ve been practicing yoga at home lately.  I am forcing myself to go slowly when my inclination is to do a practice where I am always moving–pose to pose to pose to pose–with the intellect usurped by the body.  I want to move because in moving in a controlled manner between poses the vinyasa becomes

a trap for the mind

Except, when my mind has such trouble stilling, because  in the stilling is pain, I do not think the vinyasa traps my mind anymore.  I think it runs in the ruts of my ever flashing thoughts.

the Dakinis…the Mothers,…pumped up to the rain clouds

When I leap alone into this practice, of moving through transitions, through poses, with the breath, but alone so it is nearly uncontrolled, it feels at times ecstatic.

on the powerful winds raised by the tantras

But I end the practice, often, having physically hurt myself–my shoulder and my wrists most often. And my thoughts have not been stilled nor captured, but rather blown around into some kind of furious cyclone.

I fear lest it may bring you some harm or be recognized if by any chance you should be wounded.

My solution to this is to slow down, to hold the poses each for longer than five or so long breaths because this is in opposition to both what I want to do and to what is happening in my mind and my body.

she draws back all of time and space into herself at the end of a cosmic eon

 

But, unless I practice more and longer, I am afraid.  Or maybe I am supposed to be afraid?  Or maybe I am supposed to feel uncomfortable?  Or maybe everything I do I do incorrectly and…maybe

even the linen sheets, and leathern straps of the saddle, when handled, emitted sparks

the spirit would remain separated from the body, and after it was buried the spirit would wander forever

Great happiness came to her [who] felt the pains

*******

quotes are from the Rg Veda, T. S. Eliot, Charles Darwin, Mary Queen of Scots, David Gordon White, Troiano de Attimis, Paoli of Iassico, Susanna Clarke, Alex Forman

The Great War–and…

Today Frank Woodruff Buckles died at the age of 110. He was the last United States veteren of WWI.

each second seemed an hour, each minute an eternity

he did not see combat but he was over there and survived. And then he was in the Philippines in WWII, a civilian POW, and survived.

Footfalls echo in the memory/Down the passage we did not take

I have no right to this history–and I, with a bit of shame, was thinking today,  of how all my obsession with WWI is like looking into a distorted mirror. And really, what truth can be found in that sort of reflection?

Just unhurried ghosts are there
Hanging in the wire

I read about this old man, who I never met, will never meet, did not know of, only now I know that he died.  I have no right to his history but I miss it.  I never even knew it existed and now it has passed.

until that day no man had, during those many months since the first battles, stood on that same ground in daylight and lived

all time is unredeemable

—-

quotes are by T. S. Eliot, PJ Harvey, Private E. N. Gladden