Showing posts with label poetry. Show all posts
Showing posts with label poetry. Show all posts
Saturday, April 3, 2010
Friday, April 2, 2010
Sunday, March 28, 2010
Accretion Disk
*8. Stand Back
Views shift at this distance. You have blurred. Doctors say age as a question.
Corrective lenses give frames to the picture on a crooked face.
Watch this hand twisting as hours pass with sleep
on the periphery, or am I alice waking up to dream
Tim Burton makes me blond and marriageable, and yes
killing answers the question.
Translation VIII
This first memory of do not look at the direct sun: Look to the side, above, or under, or squint, and blurry the view. Bleed this sun across the sky or you may go blind in her sight, they said, and I have passed this along, said onto my son, Don’t look. I’ve led him away from stargazing, said, Don’t look, She is too bright. She will not blink, think twice about the scorched earth, the bitter evaporated salt, our caked skin. She is not forgiving.
He still asks about the corona, its temperature:
Is it as hot as the splitting sky, atoms cracked into blinding light? Imagine ruptured atoms and Ask:
What does nuclear fusion look like without a man’s slight hand or mathematical formulas branched out as chalkboard trees?
How did we imagine this?
Did someone see it first?
Was someone god, lower or upper case important without religion, institutional followers, or bother-ers?
Let’s make holes in this dark matter, she said with her fingertip on fire hydrogen and helium, make us combustible.
How long did time take for the first hole to lose control, explode into a singularity?
Did it guess we would theorize billions of years in the future about its existence, place lines and curves in an explanation-al order? Here, here is our portrait of a thing we cannot see. Is this comforting? When we look into light are we seeing the beginning of time, but wait, if we look closer still this gravity well, we are blind to everything but a radiating disk of stretched flight, so we hypothesize the unseen. Observe the bends in time, curves in light, guess at the center mass; this mess of out stretched arms swirling, let’s draw symbols. Express the heart we can never look at directly or we look but do not see. We cannot find a thing, or we find it unobservable sitting just a little outside of our line of sight. Do we still believe?
For all previously unseen things, we analyze the behavior of friendly objects, the motion of mates, the environmental dance: How this star moves binary, how this elliptical orbit shifts with a twin, swings a little wider with each twist or turn or pass; or how do we describe celestial mechanics; where Einstein becomes an alchemist and quantum equations become spells, and then wonders in all this explanation where is there room for wonder? Is it better to know, hypothesize, or guess than just let it sit?
Do we want to know what makes the Milky Way twirl, and is there life after death? My son asks, Is my father waiting? Does he see to this side of the paper veil? Does he know how old I’ll be when I die, and does he confide in god when he didn’t while he was alive? Does she sympathize, if he says he misses me? Does he know I miss him, especially at night, when I hold tight to the last time he laughed and I giggled after saying something trite?
I ask, will my son remember how much he is loved, when I am gone?
I know the world will spin in the same direction; the magnetic poles will shift by fractions; the continents will make contact again, but move a little closer in now, will my son have his own children? Will he love them as fragments, or universal, integral to a bigger picture? Will he believe there is no such thing as small beings, just degrees of separation necessary for existing?
Will he come to my conclusion:
I cannot love you all the same without disintegrating in a flame of loving you too much for this body to hold. I am too close to too full already, but I’ve seen you camera caught in magazines and tv screens. You were in front of your leveled house. You were huddled bunched body over your dead children. You were a blank stare standing at the grave of your machete massacred family, and I flinched, and then looked away. You were not standing close enough to me, but
isn’t it funny we don’t exploit you, explore you, or elucidate your life when you’re filled with joy? You are storied only when you are grieving. I have been in this picture. Camera caught with my son, we were hand in hand with grief, then hypothetically diagnosed with PTSD. I’m so sorry. Sometimes our lives are equated to bear like E=MC2. We become relative instead of related. How do I care when you are a stranger?
So you are relative to how well I know you, or someone who loves you. If I know your first name, see you every day, then somehow your everyday detail transforms to significant, rather than any other small moment in some other life I might pretend to believe, but bottom line I am blind when I wish I could see through this dark matter to the sun, who blisters my son with her kiss. If you stand back far enough she says, I look just like Andromeda.
* This is one section in a longer poem.
Views shift at this distance. You have blurred. Doctors say age as a question.
Corrective lenses give frames to the picture on a crooked face.
Watch this hand twisting as hours pass with sleep
on the periphery, or am I alice waking up to dream
Tim Burton makes me blond and marriageable, and yes
killing answers the question.
Translation VIII
This first memory of do not look at the direct sun: Look to the side, above, or under, or squint, and blurry the view. Bleed this sun across the sky or you may go blind in her sight, they said, and I have passed this along, said onto my son, Don’t look. I’ve led him away from stargazing, said, Don’t look, She is too bright. She will not blink, think twice about the scorched earth, the bitter evaporated salt, our caked skin. She is not forgiving.
He still asks about the corona, its temperature:
Is it as hot as the splitting sky, atoms cracked into blinding light? Imagine ruptured atoms and Ask:
What does nuclear fusion look like without a man’s slight hand or mathematical formulas branched out as chalkboard trees?
How did we imagine this?
Did someone see it first?
Was someone god, lower or upper case important without religion, institutional followers, or bother-ers?
Let’s make holes in this dark matter, she said with her fingertip on fire hydrogen and helium, make us combustible.
How long did time take for the first hole to lose control, explode into a singularity?
Did it guess we would theorize billions of years in the future about its existence, place lines and curves in an explanation-al order? Here, here is our portrait of a thing we cannot see. Is this comforting? When we look into light are we seeing the beginning of time, but wait, if we look closer still this gravity well, we are blind to everything but a radiating disk of stretched flight, so we hypothesize the unseen. Observe the bends in time, curves in light, guess at the center mass; this mess of out stretched arms swirling, let’s draw symbols. Express the heart we can never look at directly or we look but do not see. We cannot find a thing, or we find it unobservable sitting just a little outside of our line of sight. Do we still believe?
For all previously unseen things, we analyze the behavior of friendly objects, the motion of mates, the environmental dance: How this star moves binary, how this elliptical orbit shifts with a twin, swings a little wider with each twist or turn or pass; or how do we describe celestial mechanics; where Einstein becomes an alchemist and quantum equations become spells, and then wonders in all this explanation where is there room for wonder? Is it better to know, hypothesize, or guess than just let it sit?
Do we want to know what makes the Milky Way twirl, and is there life after death? My son asks, Is my father waiting? Does he see to this side of the paper veil? Does he know how old I’ll be when I die, and does he confide in god when he didn’t while he was alive? Does she sympathize, if he says he misses me? Does he know I miss him, especially at night, when I hold tight to the last time he laughed and I giggled after saying something trite?
I ask, will my son remember how much he is loved, when I am gone?
I know the world will spin in the same direction; the magnetic poles will shift by fractions; the continents will make contact again, but move a little closer in now, will my son have his own children? Will he love them as fragments, or universal, integral to a bigger picture? Will he believe there is no such thing as small beings, just degrees of separation necessary for existing?
Will he come to my conclusion:
I cannot love you all the same without disintegrating in a flame of loving you too much for this body to hold. I am too close to too full already, but I’ve seen you camera caught in magazines and tv screens. You were in front of your leveled house. You were huddled bunched body over your dead children. You were a blank stare standing at the grave of your machete massacred family, and I flinched, and then looked away. You were not standing close enough to me, but
isn’t it funny we don’t exploit you, explore you, or elucidate your life when you’re filled with joy? You are storied only when you are grieving. I have been in this picture. Camera caught with my son, we were hand in hand with grief, then hypothetically diagnosed with PTSD. I’m so sorry. Sometimes our lives are equated to bear like E=MC2. We become relative instead of related. How do I care when you are a stranger?
So you are relative to how well I know you, or someone who loves you. If I know your first name, see you every day, then somehow your everyday detail transforms to significant, rather than any other small moment in some other life I might pretend to believe, but bottom line I am blind when I wish I could see through this dark matter to the sun, who blisters my son with her kiss. If you stand back far enough she says, I look just like Andromeda.
* This is one section in a longer poem.
Friday, February 19, 2010
Inspired by John Ashbery and Jeanette Winterson with a dash of Adrienne Rich
Communion
This is where your story starts in the warp and weft of a used blanket. You covered yourself against a world that spun and circled beyond your grasp. You have been afraid of loneliness, so you reached out and touched the stars, briefly, pulling back because, yes, perhaps solitude would be best. You might not be hurt in isolation. You remembered this when you were burned by their touch, and in the middle of your terror, you longed for that intensity again. You are afraid of transmutation by fire, because you suspect you are kindling, and once lit you will disappear in memory of smoke and vapor, yet you cannot forget that consumption, or the intoxication you felt when just the tip of your finger glanced the edge of her core fragment as she passed through your orbit. When you first met her, you thought she would answer all your questions, and you would find happiness at the end of her. You thought, if she ate enough of you, she might absorb your uncertainty that from inside her you might be able to look out and see through a clearer lens. She liked telescopes, and imagining the galaxy smaller. When she was talking it was always important, even when, hours later, you could not remember the content of the conversation, only its quality and the relief that welled up inside you, as if the heart of the matter had been buried, and finally uncovered; it could not contain its joy and spilled across the day, so each time you saw her you tried to continue that singular conversation. You wanted to re-capture each speculation in quantity, so you might horde it, save it for a time when you might not listen, or she might not speak. You were stuck in that journey, attached to being; you could not sever the connection to the existence of you, so predictable, so foreseen, so day to day to day to day. Your journey had become stagnant, stuck in a single room. You were tapping walls looking for a flaw, a weakness; you might exploit, and escape the inevitability of you when you stumbled over her lying beside you. She fantasized herself as historic, and assumed to be unique and original. She laughed at loneliness and aching, and called them mythologies and excuses, said you cannot be alone when at least the moon is always with you, and thinking alone can be a gift of no interruption and no hope for a help that will not come. She wanted to be selfish with her problem, have it belonging only to her, so when she saw the many intruding with offered hands, she retreated to a single room with a single window to bring the world inside, where she placed it against the opposite wall, and tried to decipher the sides turned away from her view hugging their own corners of the room. She saw herself duplicated, a thousand doppelgangers holding clones of her fears and her problem. She saw herself smaller. She saw herself in triplicate and wondered, “we start with one thought that divides into many, then we build frames, and add doors, and we close them,” so she dreamt herself opening. She saw roads and rivers beyond, she saw her problem on the shoulders of millions and felt lighter. She went beyond the idea of a doorframe, saw the walls as the problem, and described the act of demolition. She pictured fields with an outstretched ground that invited sprinting until breathless, and in this imagination she saw the glimmer of an uncertain end, and thought, for the first time, she could not reach her desire by flying, and at last, the end was not important, that her feet were the thing; that the step, the arch, the bend, the contraction, and the pull were the relevant substance. She declared this, and uncovered us, folded our prologue into quarters, placed that part of us in a neat corner, and then she reached for me with one hand, held the sun in the other, and together we rushed to the open, searched for the question, realized the answer was not what mattered.
This is where your story starts in the warp and weft of a used blanket. You covered yourself against a world that spun and circled beyond your grasp. You have been afraid of loneliness, so you reached out and touched the stars, briefly, pulling back because, yes, perhaps solitude would be best. You might not be hurt in isolation. You remembered this when you were burned by their touch, and in the middle of your terror, you longed for that intensity again. You are afraid of transmutation by fire, because you suspect you are kindling, and once lit you will disappear in memory of smoke and vapor, yet you cannot forget that consumption, or the intoxication you felt when just the tip of your finger glanced the edge of her core fragment as she passed through your orbit. When you first met her, you thought she would answer all your questions, and you would find happiness at the end of her. You thought, if she ate enough of you, she might absorb your uncertainty that from inside her you might be able to look out and see through a clearer lens. She liked telescopes, and imagining the galaxy smaller. When she was talking it was always important, even when, hours later, you could not remember the content of the conversation, only its quality and the relief that welled up inside you, as if the heart of the matter had been buried, and finally uncovered; it could not contain its joy and spilled across the day, so each time you saw her you tried to continue that singular conversation. You wanted to re-capture each speculation in quantity, so you might horde it, save it for a time when you might not listen, or she might not speak. You were stuck in that journey, attached to being; you could not sever the connection to the existence of you, so predictable, so foreseen, so day to day to day to day. Your journey had become stagnant, stuck in a single room. You were tapping walls looking for a flaw, a weakness; you might exploit, and escape the inevitability of you when you stumbled over her lying beside you. She fantasized herself as historic, and assumed to be unique and original. She laughed at loneliness and aching, and called them mythologies and excuses, said you cannot be alone when at least the moon is always with you, and thinking alone can be a gift of no interruption and no hope for a help that will not come. She wanted to be selfish with her problem, have it belonging only to her, so when she saw the many intruding with offered hands, she retreated to a single room with a single window to bring the world inside, where she placed it against the opposite wall, and tried to decipher the sides turned away from her view hugging their own corners of the room. She saw herself duplicated, a thousand doppelgangers holding clones of her fears and her problem. She saw herself smaller. She saw herself in triplicate and wondered, “we start with one thought that divides into many, then we build frames, and add doors, and we close them,” so she dreamt herself opening. She saw roads and rivers beyond, she saw her problem on the shoulders of millions and felt lighter. She went beyond the idea of a doorframe, saw the walls as the problem, and described the act of demolition. She pictured fields with an outstretched ground that invited sprinting until breathless, and in this imagination she saw the glimmer of an uncertain end, and thought, for the first time, she could not reach her desire by flying, and at last, the end was not important, that her feet were the thing; that the step, the arch, the bend, the contraction, and the pull were the relevant substance. She declared this, and uncovered us, folded our prologue into quarters, placed that part of us in a neat corner, and then she reached for me with one hand, held the sun in the other, and together we rushed to the open, searched for the question, realized the answer was not what mattered.
I'm taking a Poetry Workshop at UHM with Professor Susan Schultz this semester, and John Ashbery's "Three Poems" has been the most recent subject of our poetic investigations. As a writing exercise, Susan has asked the class to choose a poem of the semester, and then to re-interpret this poem every week through a different poetic style, form, or voice.
I chose a passage from Jeanette Winterson's "Written on the Body" as my poem of the semester, and the prose poem above is my attempt at translating Winterson through Ashbery, and I couldn't help but add a dash of Rich.
Friday, January 8, 2010
Losing Poetry
Early today, I was listening to Morning Edition on NPR.
My first light ritual is laced with half listening, and coffee. Real thought rarely breaks through until two hours of vertical life have passed, but an interview with the band, OK Go, broke my usual stupor.
They were promoting their new album, and no, this is not a review of said album. I haven’t listened to it, but I did listen to them talk about a song they called, “Before the Earth was Round”. The lead singer, Damien Kulash said, “It’s an absurdist allegory where the whole world figures out the Earth is round. They have knowledge now, and everything goes wrong because of it. They lose mystery and poetry."
Do I have this right…if we gain knowledge, we lose poetry?
The interviewer compared the discovery event of OK Go’s song to the first bite of the apple, which tends to paint the acquisition of knowledge in a very negative light. Can it be that gaining understanding could be synonymous with the loss of poetry?
Kulash acknowledges that it is an “absurdist allegory”. I tried to find the full lyrics to the song, but failed, so I will assume that part of the absurdism is the idea that receiving knowledge will make everything go wrong, and is equivalent to losing poetry.
I have, in my worst moments of cynicism (which is often), believed fear of knowledge (and lack of poetry) to be a core problem with our US educational system, and thus the state of the union in general.
Life feels easier when we are not “knowing”, and as a population, we are easier to control when we have no interest in learning about the worlds and lives beyond our own, unless they are chopped, shopped and packaged for “reality” TV, which offers no real information. It just keeps us….in front of the TV not reading poetry, and not discovering that the world is indeed round, and much bigger than us.
I admit that in my own (written) poetry I resist the obvious revelation. I like secrets. I like secrets a lot, but I have no wish to be an obstructionist. I do not want to write my secrets into language so obscure that no one will ever have any idea of what I’m talking about, and wow, if I was one in a gang of people who discovered the earth was round, I like to imagine I would say, “yea, no edge to fall over! Now I can just keep on walking, and see what else is out there…who’s with me?”
My first light ritual is laced with half listening, and coffee. Real thought rarely breaks through until two hours of vertical life have passed, but an interview with the band, OK Go, broke my usual stupor.
They were promoting their new album, and no, this is not a review of said album. I haven’t listened to it, but I did listen to them talk about a song they called, “Before the Earth was Round”. The lead singer, Damien Kulash said, “It’s an absurdist allegory where the whole world figures out the Earth is round. They have knowledge now, and everything goes wrong because of it. They lose mystery and poetry."
Do I have this right…if we gain knowledge, we lose poetry?
The interviewer compared the discovery event of OK Go’s song to the first bite of the apple, which tends to paint the acquisition of knowledge in a very negative light. Can it be that gaining understanding could be synonymous with the loss of poetry?
Kulash acknowledges that it is an “absurdist allegory”. I tried to find the full lyrics to the song, but failed, so I will assume that part of the absurdism is the idea that receiving knowledge will make everything go wrong, and is equivalent to losing poetry.
I have, in my worst moments of cynicism (which is often), believed fear of knowledge (and lack of poetry) to be a core problem with our US educational system, and thus the state of the union in general.
Life feels easier when we are not “knowing”, and as a population, we are easier to control when we have no interest in learning about the worlds and lives beyond our own, unless they are chopped, shopped and packaged for “reality” TV, which offers no real information. It just keeps us….in front of the TV not reading poetry, and not discovering that the world is indeed round, and much bigger than us.
I admit that in my own (written) poetry I resist the obvious revelation. I like secrets. I like secrets a lot, but I have no wish to be an obstructionist. I do not want to write my secrets into language so obscure that no one will ever have any idea of what I’m talking about, and wow, if I was one in a gang of people who discovered the earth was round, I like to imagine I would say, “yea, no edge to fall over! Now I can just keep on walking, and see what else is out there…who’s with me?”
Wednesday, September 2, 2009
I-IX
I
I do not want to know,
about sediment layers of substances
found in your quiet veins,
about spider scars coursing your thighs
the undersides of your arms,
about the awkward angled tilt of your head
signaling the severed cord,
about the blue smudged grey of your chilled skin
when they found you|
I do not want to know
what you were thinking,
as that last step
fell away
forgetting itself beneath your shifted tread|
I do not want to know
if the unquiet shrieking lost breath,
if the grotesque phantasms faded,
if you knew oblivion was sanctuary,
And they will not tell me|
Just in brief embarrassed hush
they will whisper, you
are finally
Safe and Silent|
II
I don’t want to remember the first time
you saw shadows in the peripheral|
You said they were fierce and demanding|
You said you could hear them,
you could not stop them talking urgent
at the back of your neck|
I don’t want to remember that I almost heard them
when I fell through the backs of your pupils,
dilated bled to black bordered blue|
I was inside of you drowning|
You begged me to listen to the constellation shades hovering
in your twilight|
You said if I was quiet
I would hear them screaming|
III
Do you remember
when we sailed off
the edge of the world,
passed sea serpents,
leviathans,
and sirens singing us to shores
we once dreamt into being/
Do you remember
how we plugged our ears
with blunt fingertips
immovable in our search
for gravity/
Do you remember
how I held your hand,
how you whispered,
Wished three Times that I
could save you
from falling/
IV
Here is his atlas|
It is crumpled unfinished, tattered
at the edges|
Do you see here
in the island chain strung along the middle,
Here was his brilliance
burning his own body to ash|
Do you see this continent
at the bottom of the world/
This was his anchor
weighed with breakable regret
and half spoken desires|
Do you see this ocean
littered with dragons and poison/
This was his therapy swallowing continents
and islands
into startled voids|
V
Here is my memory
in flat palms up facing|
I offered this to alchemists and magicians begging
for wellness|
Here is the answer|
There is no cure|
For chasing phantoms and hallowed voices|
For not believing
in anything|
VI
In white washes
I once stood next to him,
as he was stripped naked in blue jeans and a nameless shirt,
surrounded by doctors
metal bars and suicide watches|
I could not hear
over the sound
of my own breathing
thinking this is what breaking looks like|
VII
Tell me Someday he will get better
VIII
I have been dreaming of road map directions,
and picture coded legends
with a clear line towards sanity|
The warehouses holding inconvenient and untreatable,
the factories building chemical composites of maybe
have dissolved into myths|
IX
I know the dissolution of madness|
I remember your mind shrieking
against brittle smiles of indifference|
This is our inheritance
our foolish eyes wished blind by apathy|
We would do nothing but watch the drowning
sink below the surface,
watch the grasping waters close quiet around them dying|
I know this path of pretended beauty|
I know this cold face turning away|
I know the crosshairs fixed on unforgiven|
I know I walked away
when you were still trying to hold my hand/
when you were still dreaming of sirens calling us home|
I know tonight I will dream in topographical notes|
I will see you beside me breathing your next life
stripped of lunacy
Without half truths
Without lullabies
Without night terrors|
I know tomorrow I will remember
because I must know the tapestry weaving us together|
I must know the first breath of birth
the last gasp at the surface
and the struggled crawl at the center|
I must know there is not that much between us
small angles of separation|
Look, there in the window reflected,
we are almost
the same|
I do not want to know,
about sediment layers of substances
found in your quiet veins,
about spider scars coursing your thighs
the undersides of your arms,
about the awkward angled tilt of your head
signaling the severed cord,
about the blue smudged grey of your chilled skin
when they found you|
I do not want to know
what you were thinking,
as that last step
fell away
forgetting itself beneath your shifted tread|
I do not want to know
if the unquiet shrieking lost breath,
if the grotesque phantasms faded,
if you knew oblivion was sanctuary,
And they will not tell me|
Just in brief embarrassed hush
they will whisper, you
are finally
Safe and Silent|
II
I don’t want to remember the first time
you saw shadows in the peripheral|
You said they were fierce and demanding|
You said you could hear them,
you could not stop them talking urgent
at the back of your neck|
I don’t want to remember that I almost heard them
when I fell through the backs of your pupils,
dilated bled to black bordered blue|
I was inside of you drowning|
You begged me to listen to the constellation shades hovering
in your twilight|
You said if I was quiet
I would hear them screaming|
III
Do you remember
when we sailed off
the edge of the world,
passed sea serpents,
leviathans,
and sirens singing us to shores
we once dreamt into being/
Do you remember
how we plugged our ears
with blunt fingertips
immovable in our search
for gravity/
Do you remember
how I held your hand,
how you whispered,
Wished three Times that I
could save you
from falling/
IV
Here is his atlas|
It is crumpled unfinished, tattered
at the edges|
Do you see here
in the island chain strung along the middle,
Here was his brilliance
burning his own body to ash|
Do you see this continent
at the bottom of the world/
This was his anchor
weighed with breakable regret
and half spoken desires|
Do you see this ocean
littered with dragons and poison/
This was his therapy swallowing continents
and islands
into startled voids|
V
Here is my memory
in flat palms up facing|
I offered this to alchemists and magicians begging
for wellness|
Here is the answer|
There is no cure|
For chasing phantoms and hallowed voices|
For not believing
in anything|
VI
In white washes
I once stood next to him,
as he was stripped naked in blue jeans and a nameless shirt,
surrounded by doctors
metal bars and suicide watches|
I could not hear
over the sound
of my own breathing
thinking this is what breaking looks like|
VII
Tell me Someday he will get better
VIII
I have been dreaming of road map directions,
and picture coded legends
with a clear line towards sanity|
The warehouses holding inconvenient and untreatable,
the factories building chemical composites of maybe
have dissolved into myths|
IX
I know the dissolution of madness|
I remember your mind shrieking
against brittle smiles of indifference|
This is our inheritance
our foolish eyes wished blind by apathy|
We would do nothing but watch the drowning
sink below the surface,
watch the grasping waters close quiet around them dying|
I know this path of pretended beauty|
I know this cold face turning away|
I know the crosshairs fixed on unforgiven|
I know I walked away
when you were still trying to hold my hand/
when you were still dreaming of sirens calling us home|
I know tonight I will dream in topographical notes|
I will see you beside me breathing your next life
stripped of lunacy
Without half truths
Without lullabies
Without night terrors|
I know tomorrow I will remember
because I must know the tapestry weaving us together|
I must know the first breath of birth
the last gasp at the surface
and the struggled crawl at the center|
I must know there is not that much between us
small angles of separation|
Look, there in the window reflected,
we are almost
the same|
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