:: :: :: :: terrible dragon: slaying the world one poem at a time :: :: :: ::
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
This way before you
A Thousand Strokes For Marlene
And your back becomes a pained temple of devotion. Pilgrims and acolytes move through bloodmuscle to place their worships in a thousand flickers, a thousand prayer wheels, a thousand bells sounding serpiginous ache to tremble through your limbs. This is what the sea does to you when you set out for her skyworn margins.
As each miracle exacts its riftless fee, so does salt pull tears in small fathoms from your abyssal flesh. You will not rewrite history this day as you are given what shallow conquers are afforded you and that will be that. Note this silently, with grace if you must, and let pressurous hands trace miles left vanished in whalefoam.
Soon you will come to know that a paddle is not something to stab oceans with again and again in spent effort to arrive at a place unreachable, but rather what stirs deep in the nautilus of a heart you share with leviathan, seafarer, siphonophore, and ray, with every other thing that has come this way before you.
The stubborn weed we pulled last month returns with a cousin proving again that roots have eyes. Two nights ago, I massaged the back of your neck and up along occipital places that carve dreams into pillows. Trust lives there, you said.
So I am at a party, young people mostly, at my cousin’s house and I ask her where her mom is. She answers thinking I’m speaking figuratively, one of many downsides in being a poet, saying she carries her in her heart always and excuses herself.
I realize I’ve forgotten that she is dead and has been so for some time, that this is my first time in her house since she died as a wave of deep weeping forms to rise and crash over me as I am swept out and away into a field of quenching sunlight.
Only later do I remember this being in a living room with young people, tuning guitars, strumming out the opening chords of Paint It Black, missing strings, unable to finger it correctly, life luxuriating among the guests as little matters with so much time ahead.
The weeds we pull today will return by August. We will pull them anyway and blind the root by spade or garden glove. You will come to bloom in my bed and I will run soft hands along green terraces, your pink shoulders trellised with trust.
wisdom is worth all we lose to attain it. ~aucassin verdé
i wonder if the artist ever lives his life-—he is so busy recreating it. only as i write do i realize myself. i don't know what that does to life. ~anne sexton
you must acquire the trick of ignoring those who do not like you. in my experience, those who do not like you fall into two categories: the stupid and the envious. the stupid will like you in five years time. the envious, never.~john wilmot, 2nd earl of rochester
art arises when the secret vision of the artist and the manifestation of nature agree to find new shapes. ~kahlil gibran
creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. art is knowing which ones to keep. ~scott adams
those who don't know how to weep with their whole heart, don't know how to laugh either. ~golda meir
i said to my soul, be still,
and wait without hope,
for hope would be hope
for the wrong thing.
wait without love,
for love would be love
of the wrong thing.
there is yet faith;
but the faith and the love
and the hope are all
in the waiting.
wait without thought,
for you are not ready for thought.
so the darkness shall be the light,
and the stillness the dancing.
~t.s. eliot