The Position of My Dreams

There’s geography in my dreams,

Where ribbons recoil and poetry joins

Our discussions, bookmarked…

Like the body that remembers,

Or the navigation between us, where

I sit hundreds of miles to the north.

What We Choose to See

Your fires start with the sound of the axe splitting wood in the garage.  Only a man who’s in love with me would build me a fire.  I admire your wintered masculinity, the leather gloves you wear as you carry the bundles of split wood into the house, the focus of fire pressed deep into your eyes, the scent of cold ash that escapes from the open glass door of the wood stove, and the splinters that stick like lint to your sweatshirt.  With every fire, you kneel before the wood stove with your back to me: I see the backside of prayer.  

Childhood Light

The beauty of the mountain evolves with each season and impregnates my mind.  It becomes an ever-growing presence, dovetailing its wild and mystic manner with life on Glen Echo Road.  Shades of green, amber, and sunflower yellow sporadically slip off the mountain and into the paintings I create in my room.  There is always something for me to see, I just need to look for it.  And I find, regardless of the seasons, that love and loss is simultaneously cradled, almost as if they rely on each other for their existence.  There is no way to separate them from one another.  I scribble the day’s event in my diary.  Love opens up, always knowing the right words.  I watch a golden globe for a sun sink in the backdrop outside my bedroom.  The moonbeams come out early in the summer.  We’ve tried to catch them outside our house before…standing there with empty jars and lids, our arms swinging together, crashing like cymbals.  How long will the light live?

Love Travels

Love Travels

I recently read, “If you dismiss your heart, you will end dismissing theirs.” The more I thought about this statement, the more I stumbled over it. Yes, it true…we’re only capable of receiving love to the extent we are able to give it. Simple, but profound. Is it a case of where the laws of attraction become validated? Perhaps, but it could be a bit more complex and involve the basic components like, trust, or hope. On the other hand, it could be a result of more definitive circumstances, such as loss, growth, and finally allowing yourself to reach a state of unsurpassable vulnerability that the risks (and the true nature of trust) are completely dismissed, and you become blindsided in the act of absolute living. But are we capable of surrendering to a continual vulnerability? Does it work if forced?

Being vulnerable requires a total eclipse of submission. It’s another level in the semi-state of unconsciousness, and perhaps even leans towards the edge of insanity, a type of madness where love has a chance, a real chance to bloom, and whereas the conditions present themselves where the seedlings of desire can finally take root. So, if you’re denying yourself love—simply through the act of “dismissing your heart,” then, are you in an essence, denying your existence? I believe so.

In the poem, “Consort of Viols,” by Kathleen Raine, she says in the second stanza:

Your life my death

Weeps in the night

Your freedom bound

To me, though bound still free

To leave my tomb

It’s as if she’s already recognizes that she’s unable to reach the “freedom” of the other, perhaps the one she loves is but a prisoner, and possibly a prisoner of her own heart. I can understand that, but I also know what it's like to love from afar--and I wonder, can love travel that far?

Risk

For the ones that risk to feel or share their stories, energy and dimension is possible.


~ ~ ~ 
I wrote this weekend on a train journey. I watched the Central Valley turn from scrub to the beginning of the Bay Area. I watched the light surrender, falling into itself, becoming shards of gray sky. The fog loomed in the distance like an old friend, a reminder of what has happened, and what is about to come. 


In my departure, memories pressed themselves against my heart. I've been here before. My future became hypnotized; my mind lengthened, and I wept as I watched the landscape move in reverse, my eyes stretched to see the last of your face.

Overcast: Passion & Wars

"What do you want here today? the desert asked him. "Didn't you spend enough time looking at me yesterday?"

"Somewhere you are holding the person I love, " the boy said. "So, when I look out over your sands, I am also looking at her. I want to return to her, and I need your help so that I can turn myself into the wind."

"What is love?" the desert asked.
"Love is the falcon's flight over your sands. Because for him, you are a green field, from which he always returns with game. He knows your rocks, your dunes, and your mountains, and your generous to him."

~~

"That's what alchemists do. They show that, when we strive to become better than we are, everything around us becomes better, too."

"Well, why did you say that about love? the sun asked the boy.

"Because it's not love to be static like the desert, nor is it love to roam the world like the wind. And it's not love to see everything from a distance, like you do. Love is the force that transforms and improves the Soul of the World. When I first reached through to it, I thought the Soul of the World was perfect, but later, I could see that it was other aspects of creation, and had its own passions and wars. It is we who nourish the Soul of the World, and the world we live in will either better or worse, depending on whether we become better or worse. And's that's when the power of love comes in. Because when love, we always strive to become better than we are."



-- The Alchemist - Paulo Coelho (p. 144; 150)

Undertow

It’s a wonder…

Convinced

It’s all related,

As if we were

Fused together,

A tale of two:

Cosmic fusions,

Underwater lights

From life above,

Eyes retract,

Your heart slips

Into brain deep,

Caught and no way out,

Even when desire

Can’t set you free,

And, all I want

Is to stay with you.

Low Tide

for L

Some times, the personable is unexplainable. Personal perception (through experience) is just that...a personal thing. You can't change perception for someone, and as much as you want the light to reach them, they may be in an unyielding position, submerged by their personal history. 


Every moment we fall deeper, not in love, but into the narrative. If words can cut like a knife, then what's the potential for silence? 


I can see the horizon; and yet, there's nothing. I can't point this out to you, not the sea or moon; I am incapable of lifting your eyes. You're lost to a microcurrent of delusional borders. A tide pool is just that--a separate entity, existing only at low tide.


John Steinback once said, "It is advisable to look from the tide pool to the stars and then back to the pool again." I wonder if you'll get it. You may have already turned your back to the sea...

The Case of Too Many Frogs

In light of this case, someone recently told me:

In order to detect counterfeit money, you study the real thing, not the counterfeit, so when the impostors come, it quickly becomes evident it's not the real thing.

A Book About Light. An Online Magazine Forward.

(Photos by Dalkey Archive Press and/or Numero Cinq Magazine)

One of Poland's most acclaimed writers, Andrzej Stasiuk, publishes "Dukla." (Translated by Bill Johnson)

Andrzej says,


“There’ll be no plot,” Andrzej Stasiuk writes in Dukla, “with its promise of a beginning and hope of an end. A plot is the remission of sins, the mother of fools, but it melts away in the rising light of day. Darkness or blindness give things meaning, when the mind has to seek out a way in the shadows, providing its own light.”


In a recent online article in Numero Cinq Magazine, Jason DeYoung says, "The guiding structure in Dukla rests with his metaphysical ideas, repeated insights, and a desire to write, notably about light"
Andrzej, goes on to say:


"I always wanted to write a book about light. I never could find anything else more reminiscent of eternity. I never was able to imagine things that don’t exist. That always seemed a waste of time to me, just like the stubborn search for the Unknown, when only ever ends up looking like an assemblage of old, familiar things in slightly souped-up form. Events and objects either come to an end, or perish, or collapse under their own weight, and if I observe them and describe them it’s only because they refract the brightness, shape it, and give it a form that we’re capable of comprehending."


To read more about Andrzej or read his essay, Rite of Spring, go to: 
http://numerocinqmagazine.com/2012/04/22/the-resurrection-of-experience-a-review-of-andrzej-stasiuks-dukla-jason-deyoung/