writing by feeling

Writing by feeling is ostensibly a junk exercise, a serial malpractice; of, recklessly explaining the rivers of oneself out loud with feverish expectation of complete loss and futility. An ample test of tepid rejection; one I try for and pass. I cannot help it. That first nameless street leaves me predisposed to loss and no simple words to explain it. It being: imminent loss. unreachable loss. I was small and spun a plastic globe and could understand that distance meant so much more. So I dig, write, not to tell of oceans but of rivers, the narrowest ones. Invite rejection, make accidents. Both are easier to accept that way.

Sleeping on the train

The motion made my eyes close
my lungs sigh.

I was thinking of closets and separating
what all doesn't fit right.
What to keep or give away.
The end of work day conundrum --
to accept life or
sleep through it.

I was jolted --
his deep voice behind me a few seats over
as I heard him sing like gospel on a swing:

Life is a-waltzin'! 

He broke out in a raspy old tune and cleared
his throat to the metal wheels clacking faster
faster as we pulled away from South station.

(I could tell from how South station makes my bones feel.)

I held in my smile, let out one more sigh.
Ours was a traincar clicking west.
west. west.

Muscle memory and counting clicks.

From behind I hear the young new couple giggling her
thin leg draped over his their
four arms tangled like doves in knitted stupor.

So what about that! they exchange a long
long sheepish
look, the type --
you hang love on.

Uniformly their limbs untwist,
their bodies rise
nervously in splendor --

Love is anyhow
a spectacular occasion no matter the era

(It is their first trip into the big city.
She has dressed for this and he in his father's suit).

In slight mock and the rest excitement
they share their very
first dance
on this train
to his bluesy wisdom:

Life is a-waltzin'! Baa-ba! 
Daa-badee-da!  

Through rusty metal humming and cement tunnels
I hear her old time smoky heels and his wingtips
her bouncing curls and warm red lips as he reaches
low to tip his hat and
steady her hips.

I'm not going to turn to watch because
I am afraid
of the fiction but
I open my eyes,

and did because imagination
gets every last one of us.

The traincar was colder and dimmer
than when we left.

Today's newspaper was rolled
loosely
inside his worn black fingers his
gaze caught elsewhere.

We slowed to still.
Picked up west,
west again and
I don't recall him leaving.

Somehow I found myself alone and
mourning a man singing, crying
life is a-waltzin' 
to no one,
not even me.

Life Observation #8

On holding hands:

two hands holding feels like two hearts sharing one prayer. 

What Bert taught me

1. Nothing, and no one, is invisible to God.

2. Spit is an art tool. So is sand, and hands, and sticks. And his story reminds me: there is no creative poverty in God’s economy. 

3. Some art forms are nameless. But every artist has a name.

4. “For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” Matthew 6:21. God’s holy map leads to every single heart. Bert, and so many like him, knows this better than me. Before I see disability and strangeness, I need to start with their beating red heart. God, help me to remember Bert, and how he, without agenda, taught a famous artist the art of quiet awe and passing.

5. The canvas of earth is 4.5 billion years old. The Bible tells us our lives are but evaporating mist upon it. We are here and in long generations from now no one will know we lived except by the traces of how we loved.

And my faith tells me: we are evaporating elsewhere.

I stayed

I stayed
watching the little leaves dance
upon cooling September asphalt
like they knew this will end.

she thinks poetry

Poetry is the only wind my wings know how to fly in. Though, I am in love with the mystery of creation of all kinds; the microscopic planets on our eyelashes are as much art as the universes inside our hearts; everything spins and wants to express something; the caterpillar wants to become the butterfly, but what is the butterfly trying to express? Questions are the genesis of artful thinking. So I am in love with the stranger who tends his lawn meticulously because it says something that he cannot as much as I am in love with the stranger who is in love with something else far beyond tending to his grass and shade. We all have something more to say, this I know like the caterpillar knows; though what is that something more? That is the mystery of the butterfly.

The space, the timefullness Makoto Fujimura describes in his book Refractions is the linen-thin act of whispering more upon paper or crying more upon canvas or molding something more from inside our inner world out. The pain is in the grip and never the release though we protect the inverse of that reality because, well, it is easier. Like praying between snooze alarms. But the courage of unfolding ourselves is lightening from God. Sometimes thunderous and catapulting. But sometimes as simple as a switch. And sometimes not on to light, but on to listening. Listen, listen, listen. His word is everywhere. Upon the mystery of the planets on our eyelashes and in the crevices of our cleaning corners and in short essays of books that bring people together like chapters of a story. Like verses of The Good Book. We are each refractions of each others’ light. The small art space of the blank white page tells me this tonight.

Poets love the symbols of words; maybe it is the poets, by nature of their craft, who can most nearly articulate the highest capability of artists, which is not to create lovely things–which is lovely too–but to have awareness of the symbolism of all things; like metamorphosis, like blades of grass, like love. Like, of course, love. Love is a symbol for God, for God is love; an Entity so incomprehensible and unsearchable that He infused love as the symbol for who He is. Love is uncapturable; try holding love without metaphor or measuring it without scale. But as artists, we try to come as close as we can. Truer art comes when the artist is truer; closer to what they believe they feel than how they imagine others think they ought. Art demands faith; but with the demeanor of Christ. “Come child and create. Represent who you think you are and who you think I Am. Think deeply, have faith, and try.”

I have not written poetry by head or by hand for many months because I have been creating other things like to-do lists and excuse lists and many other lists that I cannot list here. But after reading Fujimura's essay Second Wind today, I listened, God. I tried.

she thinks poetry

She thinks poetry as she sits in cool white sunshine. On a pinewood bench

her four-year-old son splinters thin branches

by the grip of his small hands.

She holds the word but the mid-morning breeze feels too beautiful

against her neck and it lifts her upward gently and with kindness

to the top of two towering oak trees. They cross and turn into shapes of

questions and she asks: Which of you grew these spindly toys for my son?

However did they break away from you? Was it

in a violent storm or self-sacrifice

or did they crack from the weight

of two black squirrels quarreling over acorns for

December?  Her lips are forming answers when –

he dashes in laughter beyond the oaks to search for his balance.

Uneven rocks and airplane arms and

imagination defying gravity. But while she was

ascending the trees

he must have laid the tiny timber next to her feet

in quiet trust

that she would save them for next summer. She watches as he forgets

and her toes tuck the nature pieces

back beneath earth and away

from sight of his memory because it is

in the making,

the trying. in the

breaking

apart and noticing.

She calls his name.

He moves closer inside light and shadows and she wonders

what else may come.

ebb and flow

ebb and flow

wish and woe

sand dollars wishing

to be starfish and

never writing of it.

but yellow is never purple so

she should write about that.


she writes words

she writes

then goes dim.


retreats.


returns shy

but returns

when art and gravity

God and depravity

seek light enough to meet.