being on the seashore

Is It the Kingfisher?



This is how I desire God on this island
With you today: basic and blue
As the sea that softens our feet with salt
And brings the living wave to our mouths
Playing with sounds of a primary language.
"God is blue," sang the poet Juan Ramon Ramirez,
Drunk with desiring, his hair, eyebrows,
Eyelashes turned blue as the kingfisher’s wings.
Is it this bird that greets us as we come
Round the eastern bend of this island;
Tells us the hairbreadth boundary between us
Is transient as the air, permeable to the blue
Of tropic skies and mountain gentian.
Where we sit on this rock covered with seaweeds,
I suddenly feel this blueness embrace us,
This rock, this island, this changed air,
The distance between us and the Self
We have longed to be. A bolt of burning blue
Lights in my brain, gives the answer
We’ve pursued this whole day:
Seawaves sing it, the kingfisher flies in it,
This island is rooted in it. Desiring
God is transparent blue—the color
Which makes our souls visible.





by Marjorie M. Evasco

on mystic writing

I.

another detail i recall:  her side of the bed is
side-by-side with a patch of leaves of grass.

this is another house.  not the same one
that had appeared in too many dreams, 

like a puzzle.


II. 

roger, the mystic says, do i not keep
a journal of dreams.  no, i say, no.

we are surrounded by dark green walls
in the middle of a steak house. it is noon.

how did the conversation move to dreams?
i tell him of the house that appears

recurring in my dreams, now for years.


III.

this house, stands at the edge of a land, looks
at a body of water. on its feet a lake, bay, or beach.

right of the house, a cliff.  where on one dream, 
i was standing on when i saw the house.

left, pebbly driveway where i manoeuvred 
my motorbike on another dream.

the driveway, next to a boundary wall.  
the driveway aligned to a small bamboo cottage

by the lip of the water.  in one dream, 
i was in a group beach picnic when i looked up

and saw the house is whitewashed wood.
with a large glass window on its forehead.

european design, but the location 
philippine. "two-storey?" roger asks.  

"yes," i say,
"and with a balcony up front."

he laughs.


IV.

it exists, he says.  
after the description in detail.
european house, by a lake in bukidnon.
cliffs, yes, driveway too.
and the short rocky, pebbly slope
to the lip of the water.
right, even the cottage.
an artists' retreat.
housed at one time, a poet.
in another, a painter.
heavy furniture imported 
all the way from germany.
constructed in 2011.
been there.
with g* and p*, he says. 
we took photos.  beautiful place.
even though
the house is hostile.


V.

i began dreaming of the house, 
2009.
in all the dreams, the sky
always in shades of gray.
the last time
i dreaded
seeing it.


VII.

didn't you mention about going on a writing retreat this summer?

white

the mornings are white.  and i try to shake off the remains from last night.  difficult when even sleep cannot make the forgetting.  when the waking is by a dream where i was calling in a makeshift

bedroom in a makeshift house.  the entire scene breezy noon, blaring bright.  the bare walls, raw plywood.  and plastered, bond paper size cut-out pictures of newspaper comic strip cartoons. the likes of peanuts. also a 1980s rock and roll star with a large nose. the pictures appeared random.  but 

possibly not, they all have clearly drawn noses.  in the dream i was showing someone the room.  and disturbed by the sight of the pictures, i called for her, i called aloud and i wake up in 

a morning white.  the curtains drawn, the room light with tempered sunlight.  i find myself in bed alone.

what happened to icarus

ICARUS


Only the feathers floating around the hat
Showed that anything more spectacular had occurred
Than the usual drowning. The police preferred to ignore
The confusing aspects of the case,
And the witnesses ran off to a gang war.
So the report filed and forgotten in the archives read simply
“Drowned,” but it was wrong: Icarus
Had swum away, coming at last to the city
Where he rented a house and tended the garden.

“That nice Mr. Hicks” the neighbors called,
Never dreaming that the gray, respectable suit
Concealed arms that had controlled huge wings
Nor that those sad, defeated eyes had once
Compelled the sun. And had he told them
They would have answered with a shocked,
uncomprehending stare.
No, he could not disturb their neat front yards;
Yet all his books insisted that this was a horrible mistake:
What was he doing aging in a suburb?
Can the genius of the hero fall
To the middling stature of the merely talented?

And nightly Icarus probes his wound
And daily in his workshop, curtains carefully drawn,
Constructs small wings and tries to fly
To the lighting fixture on the ceiling:
Fails every time and hates himself for trying.
He had thought himself a hero, had acted heroically,
And dreamt of his fall, the tragic fall of the hero;
But now rides commuter trains,

Serves on various committees,
And wishes he had drowned.




~ Edward Field

encountering a deer

have you ever placed your hand on a breathing body of a deer on an otherwise perfect path, broken only by the sight of its beautiful body that should have been running away from you, but there instead, lying warm and heavily breathing its lasts?  it is a beautiful creature, the deer, a gentle untamed-ness reminiscent of cool breeze on a night when there are no stars and a version of your self holds the hand of someone dear--no, not a lover yet--while the both of you find your way in the fallen woods through the forbidden part of camp. a brook can be heard from somewhere and a new moon promising.  the deer has eyes like pools that when you closely look you can only closely look at yourself.  what drives men to cut their heads and adorn walls with their decapitated gentleness?  how the deer's antlers remind you of roses' thorns trying to protect itself, in good faith.  when the heartbeat under your palm slows down into a gradual stop, the woods would feel darker.  there would be no birds.  and sometimes no matter the brook, the new moon, the perfect path, the someone dear close to you, the world becomes a colder, less gentle place on your way back to camp.

Into the place where the answers are kept

HOW TO LIKE IT

These are the first days of fall. The wind
at evening smells of roads still to be traveled,
while the sound of leaves blowing across the lawns
is like an unsettled feeling in the blood,
the desire to get in a car and just keep driving.
A man and a dog descend their front steps.
The dog says, Let's go downtown and get crazy drunk.
Let's tip over all the trash cans we can find.
This is how dogs deal with the prospect of change.
But in his sense of the season, the man is struck
by the oppressiveness of his past, how his memories
which were shifting and fluid have grown more solid
until it seems he can see remembered faces
caught up among the dark places in the trees.
The dog says, Let's pick up some girls and just
rip off their clothes. Let's dig holes everywhere.
Above his house, the man notices wisps of cloud
crossing the face of the moon. Like in a movie,
he says to himself, a movie about a person
leaving on a journey. He looks down the street
to the hills outside of town and finds the cut
where the road heads north. He thinks of driving
on that road and the dusty smell of the car
heater, which hasn't been used since last winter.
The dog says, Let's go down to the diner and sniff
people's legs. Let's stuff ourselves on burgers.
In the man's mind, the road is empty and dark.
Pine trees press down to the edge of the shoulder,
where the eyes of animals, fixed in his headlights,
shine like small cautions against the night.
Sometimes a passing truck makes his whole car shake.
The dog says, Let's go to sleep. Let's lie down
by the fire and put our tails over our noses.
But the man wants to drive all night, crossing
one state line after another, and never stop
until the sun creeps into his rearview mirror.
Then he'll pull over and rest awhile before
starting again, and at dusk he'll crest a hill
and there, filling a valley, will be the lights
of a city entirely new to him.
But the dog says, Let's just go back inside.
Let's not do anything tonight. So they
walk back up the sidewalk to the front steps.
How is it possible to want so many things
and still want nothing. The man wants to sleep
and wants to hit his head again and again
against a wall. Why is it all so difficult?
But the dog says, Let's go make a sandwich.
Let's make the tallest sandwich anyone's ever seen.
And that's what they do and that's where the man's
wife finds him, staring into the refrigerator
as if into the place where the answers are kept-
the ones telling why you get up in the morning
and how it is possible to sleep at night,
answers to what comes next and how to like it.

--Stephen Dobyns

Like

truism

here is a photo of quiet, from a long lost time together.  there are never any wrongs on a sunset.  and almost never anything the matter on a sunset shore.  i have learned to cast many of the questions to the universe.  and learned never to expect answers.  on the matter of truth, there are multiples. in spite the existential absolutes.  and so, too, on love and the beautiful.  and all the large and the un-graspable.  here is a photo of quiet.  from a summer long enough ago.  long enough to be able to say it was a time so beautiful.  that it was, at its time, true. 

pomegranates

do we still look for Virtuous? the tribe
has long vanished.  gone after its
last, and last farewell parade.  how 
they had come together, a flock 

merging from crevices of mountains 
wet mounds of rivers, wides from flatlands. 
i look past the large glass windows
of the 15th floor and wonder

was Virtuous ever real at all? or are they
as real as stories of nymphs
no longer believed and yet, men
dreamed in the kept hollows 

of their minds? do we still look for 
Virtuous? on the streets, there could be
a nun, a student, a lawyer,  a thief,
mother, father, children, aunts, uncles

a strange array of the Less
--this whole world--including ourselves
who, after having bitten 
the pomegranates of the underworld

attempts every day
to rise Virtuous above the self.

a dinner

He says their language had a name for the storm surge
what has been forgotten by the language's own people

the name was kept in a vault that was kept in the marrows
between tongue and memory.

This, of course, was no surprise to every one 
seated around the table, the man to his right

had spoken on ethno-epic only an hour ago.
Every one agrees 

on memory keeping and cultural work and sense 
of identity;  the woman among them says "yam"

the night's metaphor on roots 
of self, bearing from the underground.

Of the five, two are most uncompromising; 
two, being won over

one sits noncommittal in the background.

On working for making a better world

at the end of the day, dark after work, i lay my self exhausted and burned from working on love.  wondering if knowing that passion burns is any help at all.  in the morning, the questions flee from the bright light.  and i burn for love again.