the steady rhythm

There is a steady rhythm in the pulse of the universe.
This I believe 
At the same time I believe

The necessary erratic erranty of the cosmos.
The Great Barrier Reef is dead
And the thousands of salmon continue living

Their lives all about the long return.
So ours, also, must be.

From where to where, from whom to whom, the definitions
May not be necessary.
What is it that we truly long for?

That which is repeated over and over lying between
All the lines and names and breaths
Including the time we stare at the seemingly 

Boundless sea.
Have we moved enough yet? 

Farther or closer who is to know.

The Act of Remembering

A dangerous thing, this act.
Betrayal to one's own mind who
once decided and precariously
ordered the will to 
severe part of itself, 
preserving most 
of what spirit remains.

And then suddenly this-- 
re-collecting, bringing back
to make as part again
what had been 
intentionally let fall away.

When still young, there was 
so much strength to push
ahead, against the gusts.
To keep forward the head
steady from not looking back.

Perhaps because the road
was still long, the young
eyes still unable to sense
what lies by the by, 
by the bend.

Our immortal's time.

Now here we are. Here I am.
The familiar autumn 
on my back. I try, I try
to push against the gusts.
To keep away from the act,
from surrendering to
remembering. I do not want

to say I am afraid that come
this winter, the bones will,
on their own, remember.











  

Miracle Fair

Commonplace miracle:
that so many commonplace miracles happen.

An ordinary miracle:
in the dead of night
the barking of invisible dogs.

One miracle out of many:
a small, airy cloud
yet it can block a large and heavy moon.

Several miracles in one:
an alder tree reflected in the water,
and that it’s backwards left to right
and that it grows there, crown down
and never reaches the bottom,
even though the water is shallow.

An everyday miracle:
winds weak to moderate
turning gusty in storms.

First among equal miracles:
cows are cows.

Second to none:
just this orchard
from just that seed.

A miracle without a cape and top hat:
scattering white doves.

A miracle, for what else could you call it:
today the sun rose at three-fourteen
and will set at eight-o-one.

A miracle, less surprising than it should be:
even though the hand has fewer than six fingers,
it still has more than four.

A miracle, just take a look around:
the world is everywhere.

An additional miracle, as everything is additional:
the unthinkable
is thinkable.

[by Wislawa Szymborska; translated by Joanna Trzeciak]

what are words

maybe they are

like a woman's 

cupped hands

holding space

for the fleeting.







-shane

on relative "reality"

if one holds a cup here, now, long enough, one sees how the cup dissolves into something else, how the here, the now, turns into a something a somewhere else between spaces and places and things.  a kind of non sequitur.  how do we resolve the fluid contradition that is also known as real?  perhaps the surrealists have it right:  how we live separately and simultaneously in liquid dreams and reals; two or more mirrors facing each other creating more worlds; the strangeness of being one same person and different to different persons.  

such nuances; such fine, fine thread; such attempt--no matter how inevitably futile-- to climb the height of the ladder in attempt to see the worlds.
























    

under a tree

to understand is to stand under
stand under a canopy
of something

on questions with no answers

1.

this business with poetry.  almost no wonder why 
poets were sent away from the republic.
all questioning that could, on any day, be meant
to mean subverting  what has been 
a long held belief.  e.g. the world is flat. 


2.

this city is connected to the others by two steel bridges.
mornings and evenings, people fall into long, long, long lines:
all in a hurry to leave at first light
all in a hurry to return by dusk fall.
they all curse under their breaths in between.


3.

in poetry reading class, the students' thoughts
are thick like fabric.  the professor has opened
a window, has let something in: 
postmodernism:  a poem in footnote form;
gender theory:  a poem on the satire of normative roles;
philosophy:  a poem on memory's palimpsestic quality.

the students' thoughts
clutch their bibles, reciting verses.

not one of them has ever seen a firefly.




 

light reruns

When we came in to see the feature, two girls at the back row were already whispering to each other in a kind of annotated version about the film.  We caught the word "mind fuck".  So the movie was a mind fuck eh?  We settled on our seats.  Earlier, the poster near the counter had showed a large ship with a face that looked like a skull; something familiar in the countless times I've visited shops of videos-for-rent, looking for suspense thrillers and horror or action films (never gore) to kill time.  After watching these films for some time, one would notice running threads, both explicit and implicit, that one may actually read them anchoring on cultural theories.  How these films do not as much depict actual monsters than monsters as re-presentations of society's inherent, unarticulated fears.

Anyway.  

In the next few minutes it became apparent that the film, Ghost Ship (2011), wasn't the movie I've already seen, though they were of the same title.  This one wasn't remotely horror, but of something else more interesting.  My date and I would discuss the film soon after, and marvel at the movie's concept.  How the movie was not as much about the plot than it was about the concept.  Or the play of the concepts of fate, and choice, and possibilities lived out from the variations brought about by the "intervention" of human decisions in the grand scheme of things.

The ship in the movie was named Aeolus, of Greek mythology.  The name itself distinct; as Aeolus, in the mythology, were three separate characters whose lives became intertwined in a way that each Aeolus becomes indeterminable from the others.  That the characters boarded the ship sets the theme and tone of the film's entirety; though, of course, I also think that if we attempt further to "read" the ship, we may also most likely arrive at the idea that the ship, of course, could mean something else.  Like life per se, etc, considering that the ship as it is, and the sea, and the act of voyage, are themselves metaphors of something else.   

Then. 

So Jess, the character played by Melissa George, lives the varied, yet singular turn of events as a number of her selves attempted to make decisions to get out of the cycle.  In some instances, she watched these selves, and at some point, even engaged with them.  One always manages to follow a certain variation of events which inevitably leads to killing the other self; but always the cycle remains.     

What did the film say about fate?  About the power of choice?  About the metaphysical world and the so-believed parallel universes where each of the possibilities of our decisions are played out as lived?  About life in general?

We did not answer the questions and let them hang open and called it a night.  At home, the dogs welcomed, and they were let out into the humid, star-filled summer night.