Purveyors of fine poetry since 2003.
Nothing is more innocent than snow.
It says: I am not of your world.
We wonder: What child is this,
what wool, what milk?
Then we look back & see our footprints
multiplying behind us.
Maybe this is nothing but a white flag.
But whose turn is it to surrender?
New snow falls & fills the footprints in.
We feel we are being measured for immaculate shoes.
what is wonder but knowledge of that
which we could not ever anticipate?
Light slants toward the west—
its passing brilliance sears
the eyes and leaves us often
breathless— as if for the first time,
every time. And do we know more now
than we did yesterday, or less?
The birds come back to search
for seed cached in the wintry soil:
under the eaves, in groves
of roughened trees— They’ve never
learned; or they are wiser, trusting
they will find their portion.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
Appetite, oh appetite we’ve fed, you’re hungry all over again—
Baked bread torn into chunks, dipped in a wide-mouthed bowl
coated with olive oil and sweet balsamic vinegar, its name
derived from fragrant plants with gummy oleoresins—
Eggplants roasted till their shiny purple skins
furrow into soft creases and their limp bodies
go into a mix of chopped tomatoes, onions, and cilantro.
How to manage the midnight cravings when there is nothing
in the cupboard except stale crackers and dubious green
jelly, nothing but the crumbs in an old pack of cookies?
Kippers, a hard-boiled egg, thin wheels of red onion.
Latkes with applesauce or sour cream, lox on bagels.
Meatloaf with a side of mashed potatoes. But
nothing quite satisfies the hunger for origins
otherwise known as the hunger for home, than
plates composed again from memory— At Christmas,
queso de bola and plump round fruit on the table,
ruddy with hopes for luck and wealth. Rich
stews flavored with olives, bell peppers, and laurel leaf;
tongue rendered tender in a mushroom sauce. The soul
understands what we hanker for: not just the outward
veneer of all these tastes and textures, but
what they signify: hands that diced and chopped,
extracted trellises of bone from milkfish and carefully
yoked shred skins back to their substance. Feed me, though
zen might be a state of bliss without the hunger pangs.
In response to small stone (184).
tree upended
made to flower downward
into the dark sky of the dead
who feed & return
who stand in circles
& spring after spring resprout
leaves of malachite
*
Wikipedia: “Theories about the site have focused on the idea of inversion, as represented by the upside-down central tree stump and the single post turned 180 degrees from the others within the circle itself. The theme of inversion has been noticed in some Early Bronze Age burials.”
It was winter then as it is now,
when ghosts emerge with the quick dark.
I wanted to swallow the stars,
dark-pointed and smelling of anise.
I wanted to put away for good those old
angers I thought I’d dispatched.
They flickered, elusive as ever
—though not as powerful.
When next I looked, only small
brown birds picking through gravel.
I’d seen that dirty mirror before, rubbed
its edges with the corner of a sleeve.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
It’s almost too perfect.
The roar of the presses that ruled these rooms has been replaced, just as we all suspected, with the calculated silence of the conduit that carries our data. This data, in fact. These very photos.
100 years from now, when another one of you goes spelunking around this basement, that data, those bits, today’s moments, will likely be long, long gone.
But the women on the wall might still be waiting.
The woodpecker’s red head still shines, and wind or rain or snow will fill the hollows in the coming days. When houses sway on their haunches, the toe and finger joints will creak at first light. In the cold, the muscles along one side of the neck have stiffened. You can turn your head, but with some difficulty. Pain is how you know the world has not in fact ended. The hours lengthen gradually as the earth tilts forward. Day after day you are learning how to trim the wick. The flame of desire is no longer a conflagration, out of control in the woods. Now it burns steady, a little pilot light.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
Before this farce of an apocalypse spiritual awakening passes from memory, I’d like to take a little more time to think about what the end of the world means for a civilization. One of the odd things about the New Age obsession with misinterpreted Mayan “prophecies” is the unwillingness to actually learn from the Maya themselves, who are not only still with us but who have managed to preserve an impressive amount of their traditional knowledge, and have not been especially shy about sharing it with curious anthropologists. New Agers like to see themselves as freed from the shackles of Judeo-Christian thinking, and love to pay lip service to indigenous wisdom. But reading books like Time and the Highland Maya, by an anthropologist who apprenticed herself to K’iche’ Maya priests, or the Popol Vuh, translated by her husband with the same priests as consultants, might challenge one’s preconceptions, and definitely requires sustained grappling with a very different worldview.
This unwillingness to learn from other cultures is deeply rooted in Western Christian culture. There’s a good Christian/Greek word for that sort of willfully ignorant pride: hubris. And for at least one outpost of Western civilization, such hubris — along with rigid conservatism, extreme religiosity, environmental degradation and a changing climate — brought about the end of the world as they knew it. I’m talking about the Norse settlements on Greenland.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xb95CWvo3z0
If you’ve read Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel (which I don’t necessarily recommend — it’s full of facile argumentation and poor scholarship), you already know the outlines of this story. But this documentary, produced for the PBS series Secrets of the Dead back in the millennial year, does an excellent job telling the story in the words of the scientists who finally pieced it together. And it was great to hear from the Greenland Inuit, who arrived a little later than the Norse but survived the Little Ice Age just fine. “Apocalypse? What apocalypse?” Which, come to think of it, is probably also what the Mayan peasants were saying when their parasitic city-states were collapsing 1000 years ago.
(By the way, if you’re interested in documentaries about the vikings, there are a number of other good ones collected on the new sagalicious page over at Twisted Rib.)
![Homeless guy with sign: "The End is Near [crossed out] severely overrated."](https://i0.wp.com/www.vianegativa.us/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/The-end-is-overrated-450x456.jpg?resize=450%2C456 "not to mention sore and half-frozen")
A tea gathering cannot be repeated, and the host and guests feel that this is an encounter that can only occur once in a lifetime.
—glossary, Japanese Tea Culture: The Omotesenke Tradition
The room isn’t right: too bright, too perfect,
despite its location in the most venerable
Zen temple in all Kyoto.
The one white lily is a cliché.
And the participants are far too numerous:
15 more than the optimal five.
Examining the implements cannot fail
to become a perfunctory exercise.
The wealthy ladies of the tea ceremony club
from Sakai—hometown of Sen no Rikyū—
sigh for the lack of wabi & sabi.
But then their special guest, a tall,
funny-looking foreigner, enters the room
& hits his head against a ceiling beam
with a satisfying thump.
He grins foolishly & everyone laughs.
How like Daruma now the kettle appears,
round & stolid! And the bamboo whisk
marooned in the dark bowl—how at home!
The foreigner settles into place
& the circle tightens a little
as everyone strains to hear his murmured Japanese,
so beautifully flawed.