The Sweet Arab, the Generous Arab


Since no one else is mentioning you enough.

The Arab who extends his hand.
The Arab who will not let you pass
his tiny shop without a welcoming word.
The refugee inviting us in for a Coke.
Clean glasses on a table in a ramshackle hut.
Those who don't drink Coke would drink it now.
We drink from the silver flask of hospitality.
We drink and you bow your head.

Please forgive everyone who has not honored your name.

You who would not kill a mouse, a bird.
Who feels sad sometimes even cracking an egg.
Who places two stones on top of one another
for a monument. Who packed the pieces,
carried them to a new corner. For whom the words
rubble and blast are constants. Who never wanted
those words. To be able to say,
this is a day and I live in it safely,
with those I love, was all. Who has been hurt
but never hurt in return. Fathers and grandmothers,
uncles, the little lost cousin who wanted only
to see a Ferris wheel in his lifetime, ride it
high into the air. And all the gaping days
they bought no tickets
for spinning them around.

--Naomi Shihab Nye, from You & Yours

One must avoid ambition in order to write. Otherwise something else is the goal: some kind of power beyond the power of language. And the power of language, it seems to me, is the only kind of power a writer is entitled to.

--Cynthia Ozick

The Promise

Mysteriously they entered, those few minutes.
Mysteriously, they left.
As if the great dog of confusion guarding my heart,
who is always sleepless, suddenly slept.
It was not an awakening of the large, not so much as that,
only a stepping back from the petty.
I gazed at the range of blue mountains,
I drank from the stream. Tossed in a small stone from the bank.
Whatever direction the fates of my life might travel, I trusted.
Even the greedy direction, even the grieving, trusted.
There was nothing left to be saved from, bliss nor danger.
The dog's tail wagged a little in his dream.

--Jane Hirshfield

 

Empty as the taste of ice or water, the wheel of Mind I've spun and tossed about like a rigged carnival wheel or a crooked I Ching coin has rattled into stillness: a mandala waiting for a big hand to push its branches of sand together. Fearless in the disappearance of all its shapes and patterns as they disintegrate like crumbled cornbread will in a glass of frothy buttermilk. A silver bowl holds light where Mind's wheel once whirled and clattered: a chalice of connective circle, whole and intact. No path, no map, no distance, no compass. No setting forth nor travel, no leavetaking. No coming home.

 

It's midsummer and I'm standing in line at the airport, waiting for someone to check my bag. I burn my tongue on strong French roast coffee and try to read a letter I found on my car seat before I left home. The purple silk scarf tagging my luggage tickles my bare calf. I remember when I bought it, years ago when you and I still knew each other. It smelled like sandalwood then and you stole it from me for no good reason. It lived in the hall closet with your ties and an old woolen overcoat. You sheltered me under the deep arm of that coat when I called you from bars to walk me home through bad neighborhoods. One night I found the scarf in the coat's deep pocket when I stuck my cold hand down inside it. I took you to task for your thievery but you didn't want to hear it.

I remember the time I picked up a cookie from a chipped yellow plate on your kitchen table and held it to my face, inhaling the cinnamon and nutmeg. It was New Year's Eve and I wore a short skirt and the purple silk scarf but no coat. You were sober and I was not. We listened to Jerry Jeff Walker and took a walk downtown. You told me a story and I tried to listen. We looked at some fireworks behind a clock tower and burned our tongues on hot chocolate in white paper cups. You held my hand and I played a joke on you, a rare moment of successful sleight of hand that made me laugh and stagger. But you didn't think it was funny.

We sat on an old wooden bench near the post office and I ripped my red fishnet stockings on a splinter.

The dry air was cold, and a little boy laughed up in my face when the year turned. Not a mockery but a happy child's shout in the street. A banner of laughter that I wish I could hear when I play with the edge of this fabric, but which hides from my fingers and doesn't smell like anything much just now.

lks 6/14/09

These words of sky
open up the breath
I still remember

Their windows bring
that clean blue growl
my hands have missed

lks 6/18/09

Itself

The unseen
is seeing itself.

The unfelt
is feeling itself.

The unknown
is knowing itself.

The unspoken
is speaking itself.

The unmanifest
is manifesting itself.

--Adyashanti, from My Secret Is Silence

I've been reading a novel , Pattern Recognition, by William Gibson lately. It's not what I expected and I'm looking forward to reading his other books. I suppose it technically falls into the genre of science fiction, but it transcends genre for me. It's smart and crisp and engaging. He's the guy who invented the term cyberspace, and this book has to do with intrigue on the Internet and how it intersects with the non-virtual lives of the book's characters. Here's a link to his books at the Powells Books site:

http://www.powells.com/s?header=Search+Form&kw=william+gibson


His website is pretty much bottomless. I tried to upload a wonderful video from April 2009, but Gaia doesn't want me to upload anything but Youtube, apparently. But if you go to the Vimeo website and search for "Stand by Me/Playing for Change/Song Around the World" I think you'll find it. Here's a link to Vimeo:

http://www.vimeo.com/

In the meantime, here's a link to Gibson's website.

http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/index.asp

I wear a soft
growl
of warm color
a voice of clean
bone
free and ferocious
a circle of sacred
girl


--lks April 2009

When the Fiddlers Gather

Now they are become more than men we must know how
to tune up, to take
their flying root-and-stem light of joy
from each old hand as it pumps under the dunesigh
and liver-spotted leaf, learn
from lean gray men
hunched on a rail and singing to the waters the beauty
of breezeless gull-dotted dusk.

This one, his time come, nods, clamped jawbones
patient as a crab's,
years of notes loosed now, ear tufts and
silver hair drifting like streamweed, sways, pours
down his last gamboling sweat
for the world to out-
sing itself. Then another from the bed of his leg
lifts fiddle, begins to cuddle

and counterstroke the dying-out strain that a gone
grandfather sang to
the end like a man fearing God (so cries
the tune-whipped and untucked brother of their
right hand.) When he buckles,
the next bows quickly
in feeling his boots already tapping the dark line
of his hewn fence. It must be

like entering a world where every breath turns dead
reckless and pure as gull
song tuned by nothing but ribbed sea light,
where hard-headed fathers rise up slowly
among crocus and bluebell as if
only moments before
sleep whined like a gnat. And it could be standing
simply in the lightning-

like motions of such nameless, hardly to be believed
angels, we come at last
into the unfretting wish to be nothing else.
for there rises from bow's graze and struck strings
not only land's lute, but eerie rapture
stunning the sailor
who feels at first daybreak a peace slicing wrist-labor
as if before storm or prayer.

--Dave Smith, from Floating on Solitude

image courtesy of Georgia Rhythm
http://www.georgiarhythm.com/

And you can hear Dave Smith reading some of his poems here:
http://wiredforbooks.org/davesmith/

I teach my sighs to lengthen into songs.

--Theodore Roethke

(artwork by Ben Laseter)

Space. No work I absolutely must do. No definitive claims on my time. Freedom. A growing sense of divestment from my preconceived notions of how things have to look and seem.  It's empowering but often highly unsettling. For the past several days I've struggled a bit to find the usual limiting, sometimes encroaching metaphorical walls of imagined obligation and self-imposed polarities of choice to place my palms against and they just aren't there. They seem to have fallen away. What's left is a richness of creative possibility that can be paralyzing but wants simply to be felt and met and leaned into, in a bodily way really. The succession of choices has a voice that wants to be invigorating but can be so daunting:
Do I try to write poetry? Prose poems? Pieces of remembrance that might become part of a larger memoir sometime? the beginnings of short fiction?
Or do I work on my photography? Begin organizing and assembling images to go along with my own words in some initial halting semblance of a narrative or theme-based project?
Or do I really get into collage art more fully? Take the handbuilt sculpture class I've always wanted to? Begin putting all the funky textures and fabrics and hunks of wood and cloth and metal and stone and sand and glass that I've collected into assemblages and patterns that may give them new energy, new power, new shadows and shapes?
People like Dawn inspire me with their energy and what seems to be not necessarily focus but the willingness to move along without the mandate of focus. I can do this sometimes but it generally takes externally imposed goals and structure. What I want now is to learn what helps me just do what my creative heart yearns for. Not in a linear way necessarily, but perhaps in the sloppy, tangential, branch-y way that feels right for me. The problem (for me) with coming at creative work with this allowance in mind is that things tend to get abandoned or ignored or forgotten about or neglected or completed in a slipshod, half-assed manner. So what I seem to need is a way to allow myself what my students would call "random-ness" without the negative self-expectations and scripts. And, of course, that means finding ways to follow through consistently and yet playfully, without the onus of that stern imagined voice tapping a metaphorical watch and demanding I finish up right now. (I'd appreciate it if anyone has any ideas or experience with this stuff.)
One thing I have learned (or re-learned) recently is that for me, creative energy needs to be sparked and cultivated physically. Engendered in a sensory way, awakened by a reminder of how that energy feels and hears and tastes and smells and sings and sees the world's body's language in a reciprocity of immense grace and presence. This experience is not always pleasant but it does mean being awake. It means getting out of my head and into everything Else. It seems that the head part comes back around if I begin to do this, to be more present in my body's experience of its world in a moment to moment way. One of my favorite ways to do this is to get my feet wet in running water. It is better just to go ahead and submerge and float and even swim, though. Eating fresh fruit slowly is a good one too. Thich Naht Hanh wrote about chewing milk, how he would soak bread in milk and eat it so that every bite was a slow koan of texture and flavor. He didn't rush it. He just let his mouth have the milk and the bread. A sacrament of bodiliness that was so simple and so grounding.
I think I'll go sit with my feet and legs in Talking Rock Creek and eat some fresh blackberries. See where their prickly purple flavor and the gurgle of the creekwater around twigs and stranded pinestraw takes me. Maybe swing as high as I can on the swings there, until it feels like I'm about to make some kind of circle complete.

lks 6/29/09