The ways we go

Two nights ago, I dreamed of pulling a tooth---
two, an incisor and a molar.  There would have been
third, but in the dream it stopped being loose---

and I woke up distraught.  Dreams of teeth

are not good in this country of dreamers, they mean
death.  I spent the rest of the hours watching
for light.  Morning, she tells me, 

death in the family, but it could also mean simply

change

exactly the way I was told the first time
a reader explained the cards before reading.
A transition, she had said, gesturing at a cup.

What do I know?  What do I know?

I called my mother in the dark of morning
she replied, pray.
In the corner I watch the stillness and the quiet

Who knows?  Who knows?

J-- had a stroke of luck right after our meeting, 
and passed away.  A woman with terminal cancer
brought her oxygen tank to listen to a poetry reading.

The Danish neighbour hit the truck at the freeway

the same day my new motorcycle arrived.
His wife and months-old child I had greeted just that morning,
and she had spoken kindly to the dogs.

Who knows?  Who knows?

There is an envelope upstairs waiting for the last paper.
There could be a leaving, but do I dare 
finally go?

Stumbling upon another poem

Stumbling upon another poem
while wading through all these daily
words, like warm tea on quiet
afternoon feeling like a respite.
Like an adolescent lost (again)...
If all the doors were open, there

would be more than mere 
associations.  All of us might have 
trouble from all the remembering.  
Lucy van Pelt; and of her father whose got
a reputation, a plane tree; also, others.
Here, a poem on water, on ocean, perhaps
in a jug, in a well.

To Drink

by Jane Hirshfield

I want to gather your darkness
in my hands, to cup it like water
and drink. 
I want this in the same way
as I want to touch your cheek--
it is the same--
the way a moth will come
to the bedroom window in late September,
beating and beating its wings against cold glass,
the way a horse will lower
his long head to water, and drink,
and pause to lift his head and look,
and drink again,
taking everything in with the water,
everything.

on essentialism and selves

possibly not the same person who takes the foil and the épée and point at another's chest to kill.  for sport.  a physical version of another involving the killing of hundreds and millions in several stages until one's own pawn becomes greater than another's king.  plans for war.  kill time while sharping the mind.  possibly 

not the same person who tends the basil, the tarragon, the wild mint, the parsley, the dill.  who takes time to watch the sunrise glow and dreams of sea.  not 

the same person, angry and a vise, who throws without regret, lines, lives.  not the same one who collects.  memories and serenity, joys in souvenirs.  the one who sings with a guitar and writes

the world as it is as is, and life as is, it is. 

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.
























    

palimpsests

some days ago, two young men made a performance called "white wall".  it was made of a white sheet held high and wide, with two cuts on it where the men placed their lips and talked between themselves.  the audience were meant to overhear.  their conversation short: about how nothing signifies something; how something could be anything; and anything, nothing; and how even nothing means something; and something, anything...finally the men ended their play, possibly out of breath chasing their own conversation's tail.  i thought about bertolt brecht.  and waiting for godot.  someone from the audience whispered virginia woolf.  i said nothing, thinking of the young man who thought of the performance.  how difficult it is to be "new" these days.  how the world must be older than we think.  older than it lets on...

yesterday, a korean artist brought out her painting of a girl whose head was lost inside the clouds inside an upturned fish bowl.  the goldfishes swimming on air outside the glass, swimming beside her ears. her other painting was of a girl with extra large rabbit ears.  surrealism.  how she recalls dali in the background of her figures, in the strokes and colors she chose.  how her portraits call frida in the length of her women's necks, the slopes of their shoulders, the immobile staring of their heads. 

today, i begin reading The Portland Vase...