23 enero 2013

we’re not yet ready to leave

I did a bout of weeding

Mike finished his outdoor tasks

I cooked everything

we ate roasted squash, jook, & ribs

I introduced Glen to sewing circle

gave away lots of veg

ate three delicious kinds of cookies

now to wash the dishes

then coffee

before I pack

Elizabeth Robinson [pic courtesy of Poetry Society of America]

from Elizabeth Robinson’s Counterpart (Ahsahta 2012)

The sense of becoming disturbingly real to yourself, that point where the interior conversations begin, like daylight picking its way over a bridge, over there to the further shore to shine its brightest. The difficult shell halved and the sparse interior looked into, a voice appearing and disappearing with the light that fell on one’s single self. Difficult to arrange this monodony. A necessity, the act of discovering where the self starts, hears, itself, and repeats the instructions. [BarbaraGuest]

Once More (Sleep)

Sleep in its rounded mound,

soft and ashy.

Sleep — feathers of the unformed —

and ample to fill a pillowcase, then

blow from its seams

the indentation of the head that never was.

Again.

A summons

reneged. That drowsing

finger, charcoaled,

smears off the first letter

of any word’s repose,

of the soft powder

fills in the impression.

“I”

One site in the alphabet

needs mending.

What might be provender

releases its dissimilar

twin: empty hourglass

upended.

Corybantic silence,

unravel the echoes stitch

by stitch to make such cloak

then wear it. As in the gait,

uneven, “of a man forever in fear of falling”

so as to see to

the restoration of that letter.

Death’s doppelgänger

is truth.

But do not believe that madness has ever left us. Like pain, it lies in wait for us at each stage, I mean each time we run up against the word hidden in the word, the being buried in the being. [Edmond Jabés] . . .

now we're ready

expect my next post from Chile