To slip
under you need courage, or
great fatigue. To float
requires a skeptic’s mind.
To breach into light, first the
surface must be expecting you.
Artistic creation as a radical act
The fact is that we are living in a time when the decision to be an artist, to continue to create in spite of everything that’s happening around us, IS a radical political act. This is, I feel, quite a dark time, potentially destructive to the best and most noble aspects of the human spirit. And that’s precisely why it is terribly important for artists in all disciplines to continue to create, even when it feels like there’s little market and little appreciation for our work. Just doing it, and making the difficult decision to continue to do it — to live creative lives that celebrate what life is and can be — is both defiant and affirming, and it’s crucially important. People need to know that someone they know — a neighbor, a friend, a cousin — is committed to the arts. Young people particularly need to know this.
Stone
The stone isn’t dull;
it’s just too shy to shine.
The stone isn’t still;
it’s just practicing an extreme economy of gesture.
The stone isn’t mute;
it’s just making up its mind how to begin.
When I lived in a glass house
it was my most honored guest.
Sieves
The hinge between them is slight: a moderate pull with the wrists,
and the chopsticks come apart. Pale, unlacquered: permeable.
She is lonely in that house: cabinets stuffed with old lace and chiffon,
flagstones of cracked shale. Eyelets, keyholes: equally permeable.
Mornings, I’d wake there to things that to me resembled light: clinked spoons,
smell of browned onions in the pan; bread rolls dipped in coffee, permeable.
I remember the sound of her old Singer sewing machine, the cushion,
the orange chalk, the pins. The needle makes surfaces more permeable.
Some things grow even more tenuous with time. The tin roof, never patched,
now leaks rain water into plastic pails. How does one seal what’s permeable?
How to fulfill duty in the midst of difficulty? In the end it seems I always
fall short; regretful I’ve failed, my best intentions pockmarked, permeable.
In response to small stone (129).
That Button
You were no less terrifying
for having been
entirely fictitious.
You were big & round
& very, very red.
I saw you whenever I squeezed
my eyelids shut
& faced into the sun,
practicing for the flash.
I worried that Reagan
might mistake you for
a jelly bean—
groggy from a nap,
groping for candy
he’d blow up the world.
However it happened, I knew
it was only a matter of time.
You were, after all, made
to be pressed,
shaped to fit the finger,
even if only for the briefest
of momentous occasions,
like an engagement ring
for a shotgun wedding.
Yet you wouldn’t have been
anything fancy,
just molded plastic.
When finally pressed,
you would’ve clicked twice—
no third time
for the charm.
Slough
Froth like salt encrusting the edges of the claw-footed bathtub, tendrils of hair on the margins of the beige tile floor— Remember, years ago in that first apartment, coming back from a trip to find a section of pipe sticking out of the wall? The neighbors said they heard the water rushing, saw the tell-tale gush spilling out the crack beneath the front door. Thank goodness there was no carpet— only stains on the wood down the length of the hallway floor. That winter, the child made repeated trips to the third floor balcony, trying to understand Galileo’s experiment with falling bodies. Feather and stone, feather and stone. Then a little swirl of turquoise trapped inside a glass marble, accelerating through the frosty air alongside the neon-yellow tennis ball. The hand-held timer clicked as they hit the ground. When I enter a room I can usually tell who has been there before: unwashed cups in the sink, damp towels on the hook; fingernail clippings more slender than grains of rice, scattered around the trash basket. The musty smell of bodies that might have lain too long in the dark.
In response to Via Negativa: Toenail paring.
Variations
Out with my daughter: in a blur of window shopping, we see autumn’s gold; persimmons,
muscats, rust browns— soon mirrored outside, for already the season is shifting.
Summer’s warm skins are sloughing off. Whose chill blade comes nearer? Just as one
issue’s resolved, another appears. Reason can hardly keep up with such shifting.
Listen to this work in two parts— opening with a melodic center, followed by fourteen
famous variations. Each section addresses the theme, even while visibly modulating.
Who has fingers of tensile strength, a heart fierce as a beast’s, the touch of sentiment
light as wings? Expressive declensions demand sacrifice: go deeper than technical shifting.
Five overripe figs remain in the cooler— their purply-green skins like tight sweaters
unraveling. Split one along a seam: sweet lesion slicked by the tongue’s shifting.
The heavy film of dust on each window sill accuses me of neglect: the days have been
languid— we’ve worshipped them like heathens. Chill mornings foretell a shifting.
Come love— Wind stirs the leaves and rain starts its preludes. The world tonight is prismed
with water. A raging flood is not like a Venetian canal, with slender boats gently tilting.
In response to small stone (127).
Toenail Paring
“But a toenail paring isn’t a body.” —Robert Hughes
A toenail paring isn’t a body. Nor is it a boat or a barrel stave or a C-section of—Lord help us—the crescent moon. It isn’t a smile or a parabola, a cradle or a wing. It seems as if should have age rings, like a tree stump or an artist’s conk, but no: it is as featureless as an eggshell, & its curl is the curl of a fetus. I am still always a bit surprised that I have managed to grow such an excrescence, & reluctant to part with it. Where to dispose of it—trash? Compost? Toilet? Like a shed antler, it doesn’t quite belong anywhere. I picture a lonely atoll at the edge of the North Pacific Gyre where all the world’s toenail parings eventually end up—long curved driftrows at the high-tide line.
*
Thanks to Marly Youmans for the Hughes quote.
Stroke
Tell me I’m lucid, says Josephine on the phone. Tell me my mind hasn’t gone. Tell me my speech is clear and that I make sense to you. I picture her on her hospital bed, trying to squeeze a rubber ball with her limp left hand. In sixth grade, during lunch or recess, we used to sit, books in hand, on a grassy knoll at the edge of the school grounds— away from the surveillance of nuns. To our left, a two-storey house with peeling paint, where music and art were taught— And in one room there, a gas oven and large work table where a sister worked with one helper to bake the Sacramental bread, the altar bread, the body of Christ, the host. Sometimes, when they felt generous, they gave us the lattices left behind after they punched circles smaller than cookies on thin sheets of dough; we ate them— unblessed— with our Coke. Just beyond, a row of latrines by the barbed wire fence. We held our breath coming over the path, past the overgrowth twined with morning-glories. There are shooting pains in my fingers, she says; and pins and needles down my side, all along my left foot. I tell her this should be a good sign: There is feeling left; and, Do you remember how we said we wanted to go to Bath? Think of how jolly that will be. Outside, the rain that has fallen all night now glistens on the grass.
In response to Morning Porch and small stone (126).
Reading Dawkins
You can make a bold claim — God is a delusion — if you exclude all good thinking on the subject and only focus on a straw man. Like Dawkins, I reject the fairy tale and instead use religion poetically. Thing is, we are not all eloquent poets. Many theists use the language of religious tradition but the essence of their belief is the same awe at the grandness of nature. I dusted off my old Psalter Hymnal and its Confession of Faith begins by saying that we know God by the “creation, preservation, and governance of the universe”.