Wednesday, November 23, 2016
The snowflakes that wait by the road
Dear Friend,
Are the leaves falling where you are? The view of the mountains where I am are beautiful in a quiet and almost sad way whenever it is autumn. Mountains in autumn remind me of both hope and bruise, and that space in between them without a name. Also of Native Americans and the colored people, black, brown, yellow. The weight of history is heavy and long, and though we may want to refuse it, the times remember for us. The length of its memory, the memory of an elephant. Have you ever placed your open palm on a grown elephant? Gentler than the dog's, the dog who loves you and sleeps by your side as though there is nothing else in the world to ask for.
The tree right across my window is black and bare. It is sleeping now that winter has begun. Since my arrival, I have noticed two stray cats called by their names at night by a woman's voice. The cats are not hers. I have seen her on an occasion feeding them in a corner. Sometimes the cats are by porch steps when I arrive; they look at me and I try to put a name to what I feel. I am wary. Though I can count by years the length of stay, moving is always inevitable and necessary. Someone, many years ago, engaged against it: she said there are things that cannot be changed. I let her have her way, though I did not agree and still don't; although admitting, I must say a part of me wants to believe it.
I think about the birds, and the squirrels, and the stray animals at times these days, their lives no more lesser or greater than the lives of those in the Third and war-torn worlds, in conditions where gentleness remains to exist.
On the last days of this semester, students tell of long and heavy histories of themselves; art, again, as always, a catharsis, although...you must have sensed by now I remain grappling: to old to believe and un-believe. Hope. Is Always An Expensive Thing. We buy in exchange of spirit.
There is plenty of sadness and pessimism to share. And yet there remains joy in things so little, like the snowflakes who lives ever so momentarily only to fall and wait by the wayside, to lose itself and rise again.
Signed, P
Saturday, November 5, 2016
the teddy bear and the doll
Simone de Beauvoir might as well have corrected
Freud, showing him without raising her voice,
how the lack is not the girl's, but the boy's.
Freud had glorified the boy's little thing which
Simone describes as wart, in other words,
insignificant. She says
everyone begins protected and pees sitting down,
until the boy
is weaned again and is told
"Stand up, you are a man."
"Stand up, be a man."
And so the pain is converted, becomes aversion.
The want, into compensation.
And then both of them meet, Freud and Simone,
on the same road noting the girl with her doll
and the boy with his penis and his animal toy,
the teddy. Notice
it is Freud, as nearly all men, who is trapped
in his family name; it is Simone who has her own.
As nearly all women, able to move fluidly
one house into another, belonging truly to
no one but herself. Her own name she keeps
no matter the changing family names.
It is all, really, a matter of perspective.
Whenever I see a woman, I know how small I am
against the mystery of worlds, the layers
she knows of life and living and loving, depths
I can never be, trapped on the shallows.
How I compensate, like everyone else.
Thursday, November 3, 2016
what the mind says
what the minds says/ is altogether different.
i take walks in the morning, walks
in the late afternoon towards evening, evening late
the lights becoming/ is altogether different.
i have to keep remembering now, nearly
all the time what made the decision to keep on
this way beyond distances and times of day, past
the roads seen ahead/ what the mind says
is altogether different.
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