I love this song.

Unholy Sonnet 4

Amazing to believe that nothingness
Surrounds us with delight and lets us be,
And that the meekness of nonentity,
Despite the friction of the world of sense,
Despite the leveling of violence,
Is all that matters. All the energy
We force into the matchhead and the city
Explodes inside a loving emptiness.

Not Dante's rings, not the Zen zero's mouth,
Out of which comes and into which light goes,
This God recedes from every metaphor,
Turns the hardest data into untruth,
And fills all blanks with blankness. This love shows
Itself in absence, which the stars adore.

--Mark Jarman, from Questions for Ecclesiastes

Yes. Though sometimes what is in front of me is enough and I don't seem to need to know more.

Between these waves
of winter salt
and the fingers
of deciduous stillness
that arc and lean above them,
beached and whittled
into the sparse clarity
of speechless ghosts,
there is a space like breath,
like air but greener,
generous with wind,
learning the lightness of
release.

lks 8/15/09

(My old friend Max challenged me this morning to write something to accompany this photograph. It had to include the word deciduous. It was fun. )

For Katey Walters

She conjures forth bubbles of fire from frozen lakes. I heard it on the radio, circling the dark lanes of a parking deck. A big blue Suburban nearly backed into me as I listened to her talk about the flare of methane against the Siberian sky, just above the dense Russian ice, when she freed the gas from the face of the percolating lake. She is in love with "the power of water in its frozen and unfrozen forms," and she unlocks it, standing back as it lets her have itself, a propulsion of conjured chemistry, beloved and unsettling, a threshold of flow, a heartbeat of alchemical liquid strong enough to free boulders with the rise of its release.

lks 2007/2009

I reworked this poem from 2007 into a prose poem this morning, making a few other changes besides that structural one as well.

http://oldcoveroad.blogspot.com/

I'm worn out by pop-up ads. I love you people, and I am not leaving Gaia really, but I have set up a new blogsite for anyone who happens to want to stop by.
Peace,
Laura

The teachable moment likes to hang around near the back of the classroom, slouching a bit and keeping a low profile until she feels the need to force her hand and say her piece. She despises rubrics and the rectangles of spreadsheets. She lives for the marriage of whimsy and cynicism, for the freedom to cool her throat with spring water from dented plastic bottles when she's thirsty. She yearns for challenges issued from the innocuous scritch of bitten pencils clenched in the hands of quietly subversive children who want to know more than how to force comparisons into the overlap two whiteboard circles share. She smirks at Scantrons and loses worksheets in the hallway, folding them into paper airplanes dull with smudges and angry Gothic doodles. She listens for gaps in instruction, for space between the disembodied squares of vocabulary words scattered across the wall at the back of the room like laminated flash cards with no answers provided. The last time I saw the teachable moment, she interrupted me in class to ask a question about how sheet lightning is different from those bright and jagged electric bolts that stun people's hearts and leave steaks of scorch on the ground around them. I stood still for a minute and waited to hear the raised and eager student voices of explanation and anecdote to rush out in an unintelligible frenzy, but all anyone had to say was, "That's off topic. What are you thinking?"  The teachable moment crossed her arms across her desk with her head down on them and fell asleep.

lks August 2009

This piece was inspired by Dave Bonta. Here's a link to his prose poem, found at his blogsite Via Negativa:
http://www.vianegativa.us/2009/07/teachable-moment/

I'd forgotten about this guy and ran across something about him on NPR.

This man's poetry moves me. My father's computer won't let me cut and paste a link to his website, but I will try again later.

Everything is based on our own uptightness. We could blame the organization; we could blame the government; we could blame the food; we could blame the highways; we could blame our own motorcars, our own clothes; we could blame an infinite variety of things. But it is we who are not letting go, not developing enough warmth and sympathy---which makes us problematic. So we cannot blame anybody.

--Chogyam Trungpa

In reading this, I was struck by the distinction between acknowledgment of societal sickness and blaming that sickness, all that dysfunction, for our own miseries and struggles. What Trungpa is alluding to here seems to me to be about owning responsibility for the state of own's own heart, about developing compassion and the ability to connect to and even serve others with openness and generosity. A tall order for me and for pretty much everyone, I think.

178

I cautious, scanned my little life-
I winnowed what would fade
From what would last till Heads like mine
Should be a-dreaming laid.

I put the latter in a Barn-
The former, blew away.
I went one winter morning
And lo - my priceless Hay

Was not upon the "Scaffold"-
Was not upon the "Beam"-
And from a thriving Farmer-
A Cynic, I became.

Whether a Thief did it-
Whether it was the wind-
Whether Deity's guiltless-
My business is, to find!

So I begin to ransack!
How is it Hearts, with Thee?
Art thou within the little Barn
Love provided Thee?

--Emily Dickinson

I'm by nature deeply nostalgic.  As someone who tries to be a writer and artist of sorts, I celebrate and glorify and reinvent the past in ways that are benign, jubilant, playful, reflective, sorrowful, and sometimes angry. There is no Truth in those spaces of recollection, obviously, because they are essentially empty. I fill them up with my own speculations, stories, self-talk, poetry, imagery, projection, creative reinvention, and daydreams. Much of this is simply part of the dynamic of trying to be a writer and photographer and calling on one's own experience for material. But mindfulness can include and enclose some of that, I think. It is possible to be present in the smells and textures and colors and music of now without abandoning one's stories. The quesion for me seems at times to be how do I let myself be permeable to *this* moment without forsaking the richness of narrative my world has offered and continues to offer me?
I used to dwell in "the wreckage of the future" more than I do now, but I still go there. I don't visit the potential splendor and grace of the future very much, though. I am not sure if I should try to or not. The grace of now is big enough to hold all my stories, or so I like to hope.

Yesterday the universe said to me

fool

sister

when you speak
with the red angel
of self
remember the blue
bone of grace
she could celebrate

lks 8/30/09


(This is one of those things I put together from time to time using the haiku magnets I have, or the ones online, at magneticpoetry.com. These came from the online version.)

Its perversity. Its immutability.
Really "nature" is neither beneficent nor evil, and actually it's anthropomorphization to imbue it with the quality of perversity or any other trait based in cognition and human affect.  But the cracks and sags and collapse of "nature" are what move me. The imperfection that will never make it onto a slick landscape calendar. The unretouched encroachment of vines. The gravity of winter and all the other seasons, the space of shadow. This is the part of "nature" that can take you by the throat with what you make out to be its kind heart and then spin you around into the muck and tangle of a gully you've never seen before. It probably isn't somewhere I want to live, that gully, but it's much more interesting than a flawless waterfall tumbling over perfect rocks into an imaginary purity of river water.