music, poetry, art, anthropology
I missed the window
hit beak to brick
fell to the ledge
tried to write a word
and then the tv came on in the other room
drowning out the consonant waves
of dream and early morning light
breeze and sun, bird and a setting moon
now the canned laughter and staged outrage
my flight disoriented into brick
when I aimed for an opening into
the wide sky
simply that, in its destruction finds its function but to hold it is what’s sufficient the electromagnetic spectrum condensed, becomes a laden sum of place and affect to you, archaeologist, all are ostraca, fragmented letters from a discarded accounting, an anonymity celebrated as the revelation of a voice but there is more in being lost, then found than the mundane named
the confluence of structure fluidity mired in existence a seepage of muck, crud; in it, no breathable space and I find that the desire of it burns as strong as the impossibility of it crushes and I find that the will of it strives as hard as the negation of it suppresses what I need is time what I think is time what I must have is duration, eras pass in soft rotations my life is spent spent again newly acquired state of currency the now of it is the death of it seek decomposition re-entry into this food chain of vegetal life sacred work expired time to turn the muck over where time is the fifth element allowing for the breaking avoiding conflagration new form rendered molecular to be taken in and up and held so close to the center/heart that it becomes that which holds it
My son said “I know that time” in reference to the time long ago when trees and people lived together and were not enemies from a Miyazaki movie. And I know that he did. His depth of soul comes from a rooted being in the flow of time as human as soul as earth. Are we all earth and that is how we know, earth human, our species has a short depth of history but are we the reincarnation of another life form of earth, or are all speciations the further expression of earth of what we are as an integrated whole/system totality progressing in time growing in imaginative capacity. How are we different from the evolution of a Pleistocene flower to an arctic rose? What differentiates our generations, what is our connection to ancestry.
Does my progeny dream of me
As I dream of you, ancestor
Contemplative in the midst
Of the detritus of destruction
The embers still glowing
A path along the shore
I run with an effortless speed
as a child on a summer’s night
The water littered with the
burned remains of the Cedars of Lebanon
Do you dream, my children’s children
That I am standing in my old age
With a thought on my lips
smiling, hopeful?
The joy of contemplation
That I saw in my grandfather’s face
As he read the poetry of his Mother’s tongue,
Do you see that in my distant reflection?
I, who am not old or young now
These forty years a son and now a father
Standing at another shore of becoming
Mindful of a present destruction
The burning debris is not here yet
But if I can send a dream image
within the bend of time
through that channel of paternal love
I have faith
in our power of
contemplative imagination
weather all storms
see the new growth through
the sand choked earth
Not even cognizant of what has gone before I again attempt to use words as a medium of expression. Does it jibe against the impulse to paint with large swaths of discolored sound, the vibrancy of dissonance? I wonder how much of what I consider to be my creative impulse is developed from a fascination with the resonance of things and beings. Do I deeply believe in an animate world? Where all are beings and I relate through emotion. Spoken words come slowly. Tones flow freely.
Somewhat dissonant, intricacy of tone feeling, do you know it? I wonder sometimes if the obstinacy is in relation to my emphasis on degrees or shades of tone? My reluctance to speak reflects a hesitancy to utter absolutes, a tendency toward tone, resonance. What will become of my actions if they are not definite? Science was always too determinate, I succumbed to the story line, my intuitive leaps led me beyond the staid glacial movement of the controlled exploration of the known to the unknown. I felt it and then went for it. Thats all I do now in my new career as a no-good club crawler. Begging for scraps at the table of the drunken. Can you support a family with it? You have to sell it. But who’s buyin’?
My skill at the anthropologizing of the subject is lost to the trepidation of the immediate, and instead of stepping back I lunge forward and loooooosssseeee my words into tone and texture. Who knows it? I know it. And I assume that you will hear it eventually.