What does it mean that I saw myself in the wind?
A horned beast in the Grass, and Christ in a Cow?
How can it be that Thought sounds like Love,
that Heart equals Mind, Snow has an eye,
and Water plus one is Eternity?
These things are somehow true;
the voice of Meaning drowns them.
Our words grow dry and empty
as eyes look through, not at them.
They point us to the world inside,
but Outside points to us.
The Wind has never ceased to listen.
Self Portrait in Wind
I thought I knew what Love is;
it sounded like my Eye, and I
told you how I Love so much I couldn’t tell you Why.
But the moment I belie Wo’ Ai,
you have another Eye:
A coiled Thought like Buddha sitting
claims the label “I”.
I thought I was Love, but Love is Ai. (I know for sure Wo’ Ai)
But what of I? It can’t be “E”,
because Sun and Moon make “E”.
The Sun and Moon make Change in me,
and lizards in my mind,
but I and Ai, I still can’t see–
which one of them is mine?
“Begin and rebegin to … replunge us into the foam indefinitely dissipating the grains of sand innumerably enumerated by the light when all this i remember and again remember that unforgettable moment that moment of poetry of twenty-five years ago when i saw on the page and began the beginning of reading the first syllables the first lines immense and long and taut of the GALAXIES.” Roubaud, in Perloff, P. Unoriginal Genius (pg 78).
“Memory, which keeps this synthesis “in mind” even after its object has vanished; and imagination, which enriches perception and, coupled to reason, can conceive of new ways to achieve a goal.” Deheane, S. Reading in the Brain (pg 321).
“Hearing, after all, is a specialized form of the sense of touch.” Sullivan, A. The Seventh Dragon (pg 5).
I felt inspired by the blurring of the lines between prose and poetry, and wanted to imitate Roubaud’s style in my own voice while blurring the lines between memory and imagination.
Feelings of sound vanish, objects of sight vanish, taste of smells vanish but are kept alive in our cortical workspace where neurons meld and mold memory and imagination to create and recreate the future where the warm splash of memory will rise, as tangible as fog, and as eternal as the silent silence echoing between the stars where life and light and choice evaporate into the re-remembering of the neuronal recycling of clouds, in white amorphous masses while i lie on the soft green hillside, touching the world around without sight, and the world, reaching out to touch me with the vibrations of movement through sound (all we hear, condensed into one small word) reverberating and reflecting the tiny bones in my ears which bring me back to this world, having dragged myself out of the earthen air of unconsciousness and into the blue of this reality where my finger strikes a key, strikes a string, rolling one sound upon another, painting time, until i stop and the facets of meaning caressing my ear slowly disintegrate into the space between stars.
The Love-Song of J. Alfred Prufrock – By T.S. Eliot
“There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate; 30
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions
And for a hundred visions and revisions
Before the taking of a toast and tea.”
“Some people are convinced that letters have well-defined colors that can be seen exactly in the mind’s eye. The experience is called synesthesia – a strange intermingling of sensory modalities that constitutes further evidence for neuronal recycling.” Dehaene, S. (2009) Reading in the Brain. Penguin Books, NY. (P. 215)
“Whatever you can do with your hands gives you a small world that you can actually cope with.” (Wilson, F. (1998) The Hand. Random House NY. (P. 219)
Words – the black on the page – transmitting colors, sensations, emotions. Voice, sound, substance evoking memories, ever present. Fear and indecision ever needing the distraction of hands, of creation.
The articulate hand
Seeing voices
Musical grammar
My melodies speak when…
Handiwork – “the ways of hands“
Express, gesticulate, create
Paint, pick, weave
Edit, write, see
Try to feel without imagining what it looks like
Touch just to remember the color of sensation
The sound of the smoothness
of each key under
each finger, sending velvet waves
into the universe
(I wonder if each key is like a stone being dropped into a pond – the pebble sinks out of sight and the ripples flow one into another, one after another. The pebble coming to a halt at the bottom, and the ripples ever reverberating off the edges and resonating together)
Substance – Void
Empty shelves, devoid of substance,
(Books being the ultimate substance)
In a library – the ultimate holder of voices – vice of voices
I see the hands taking books from shelves
With no minds
Hands flying minds…
Minds flying miles
Away, away from time
Sound forced from covers slapped together
Ideas rubbed against each other as two books meet
Three full rows empty. Devoid of substance
The clamour of voices from the neighboring shelves muted
Here in the silence, the void
Devoid of substance and voice.
The Magician
The Magician points to Earth and Sky;
a banded piece of agate – a looking glass – rests in hand.
I am cradled between a nurse log and the tangled roots of an ancient tree;
birth and death are one here, our mother makes no distinction.
The forest exhales deeply into my lungs,
expanding them until, I am lifted.
A glass portal appears before me, nestled in soft folds of old growth.
I enter.
The cloud-sky space between fractal lines suddenly darkens;
my eyes begin to pulse, the world is bathed in emerald-green drops of dew.
My Heart is all that remains,
the rest – disintegrates into a swirling prismatic void of fern and cedar.
I can hear the voice of matter here.
Everything is vibrating.
Warm-green Goddess,
I hear you, I am you.
What is this world without passion?
What makes a lawyer start a firm
What makes a doctor practice
Theres no cheat codes in this game
But you got control all you need is practice
Virtuous vigilance is very vindicating
Indicating that my stance is where I should be waiting
Now I know that I would never waste a day away
Because my passion drips from my tongues tip to take the pain away
Some may find it a trending topic or maybe even fashion
It’s a part of me not apart from me
and hopefully It’ll never be I imagine
Have we all been morphed into sheep?
Waiting in line to be stripped naked, our pink flesh exposed to the cold chill of reality.
This makes us more vulnerable, more likely to follow the crowd, weak, if we feel we look ugly.
The aesthetics of the emotion of feeling alone.
because nothing seems better than feeling high when you’re low.
Have we all been morphed into cattle?
Food fed to us and thrown into the bowls we continue to eat from.
I can’t digest corn, so why would you feed it to me?
To make me fat, more tasteful to the evil taste buds
coating the monopolistic tongue that is this country,
but my value makes me tasteful.
Fertilizing your grass and feeding your children.
I am not something you can control so easily.
