Cadence
The breath of light that holds our bodies at bay
pales and flares, drumming the hollows
like twelve hours of seawater, a liquid prism
held between two silver slivers of glass.
I ride a reaching tide, your trigonometry;
it rams cell into cell amid the rich silt
that swims in the basin of my brain like sparks
shouting, "Live!" across a childless ocean.
But then this slim caesura breaks.
The circling Earth buoys you up
and bears you away, where far to the south
another beach awaits your advance.
Abandoned to this empty expanse, damp,
salt-kissed, I ache in the smothering mist
to be again pinned to your naked, unbreachable
breast, where I know from the hum of your heart
that I am alive.
Thursday, November 4, 2010
Published 13 years ago. Written perhaps 15 years ago.
Tide
The cleft that is the breath's brief span is spent;
the soft enfolding moment's music dies.
The cord drawn taut from mouth to ear is rent,
and you have wiped my sleep from out your eyes.
While much like music, ardor wanes and swells
with measures both of stillness and of tone,
I fear that every silent breath foretells
how at your core all sound of me is gone.
Though I may dry to dust I won't be blown
from off the sentinel branches of life's crux;
your name anoints the hollows in the bone
and sates with faith opinions still in flux.
Though clouds conceal the water from all sight,
you pull the ocean up the beach each night.
The cleft that is the breath's brief span is spent;
the soft enfolding moment's music dies.
The cord drawn taut from mouth to ear is rent,
and you have wiped my sleep from out your eyes.
While much like music, ardor wanes and swells
with measures both of stillness and of tone,
I fear that every silent breath foretells
how at your core all sound of me is gone.
Though I may dry to dust I won't be blown
from off the sentinel branches of life's crux;
your name anoints the hollows in the bone
and sates with faith opinions still in flux.
Though clouds conceal the water from all sight,
you pull the ocean up the beach each night.
Archeology
I'm a writer. I say that despite that fact that I rarely write anymore. To be fair, I wasn't particularly prolific at my high water mark either, but it was more than what I manage today.
To say that I'm my harshest critic is perhaps too excoriating a condemnation of criticism and critics. I am my meanest bully. And though I consider myself a person bound to the need to create, my creative impulses bear the worst burden of that bullying.
Through the years I've explored a number of creative outlets. And I've enjoyed all of them intensely. A variety of visual media: from pencil drawings to charcoal and paint, computer graphics and design, 3d animation, architectural drafting and modeling. Dance. Writing. Photography. Music. Most of these outlets have been closed, atrophied in disuse, shut down out of a hopeless inability to live up to my own expectations. And I assure you, my expectations far outreach yours.
I do not say as much out of pride. Why bother hoping to write the Great American Novel, when you can hope to write the work that defines the next two thousand years of intellectual discourse? How's that for overweening? And while it begs the question, "Where does something like that even come from?" and while I've come to a few answers on that count, it begs a far more important question: "How do I go about dismantling such an enormous, detrimental construction?" I'm finding such demolition work is perhaps the effort of a lifetime.
I can still write some, before I'm shut down, and I continue to press on in dance, despite how many minefields I've laid out there too. I've found a bit of a work around in dance--I switched dances, where I could cultivate beginner's mind again without as much self-recrimination. It's not as easy in writing, but it occurs to me that the important aspect of the work in overcoming the self-bullying is not the success, but in the continued focus and determined intent. So I will keep writing, but it will probably continue to be less than I could produce. But then, so what? How much less is it bullying, telling myself I'm not writing enough?
Anyway, what brought this on is the fact that in unpacking all my books yesterday, I found two literary zines a friend published 13 years ago. They'd been sitting in a box in my closet for the last seven years. Two of my poems got into them. They're pretty much the only two things I wrote that wasn't ad copy in my entire post-college 20s. I'll be posting them here in the blog entries that follow.
To say that I'm my harshest critic is perhaps too excoriating a condemnation of criticism and critics. I am my meanest bully. And though I consider myself a person bound to the need to create, my creative impulses bear the worst burden of that bullying.
Through the years I've explored a number of creative outlets. And I've enjoyed all of them intensely. A variety of visual media: from pencil drawings to charcoal and paint, computer graphics and design, 3d animation, architectural drafting and modeling. Dance. Writing. Photography. Music. Most of these outlets have been closed, atrophied in disuse, shut down out of a hopeless inability to live up to my own expectations. And I assure you, my expectations far outreach yours.
I do not say as much out of pride. Why bother hoping to write the Great American Novel, when you can hope to write the work that defines the next two thousand years of intellectual discourse? How's that for overweening? And while it begs the question, "Where does something like that even come from?" and while I've come to a few answers on that count, it begs a far more important question: "How do I go about dismantling such an enormous, detrimental construction?" I'm finding such demolition work is perhaps the effort of a lifetime.
I can still write some, before I'm shut down, and I continue to press on in dance, despite how many minefields I've laid out there too. I've found a bit of a work around in dance--I switched dances, where I could cultivate beginner's mind again without as much self-recrimination. It's not as easy in writing, but it occurs to me that the important aspect of the work in overcoming the self-bullying is not the success, but in the continued focus and determined intent. So I will keep writing, but it will probably continue to be less than I could produce. But then, so what? How much less is it bullying, telling myself I'm not writing enough?
Anyway, what brought this on is the fact that in unpacking all my books yesterday, I found two literary zines a friend published 13 years ago. They'd been sitting in a box in my closet for the last seven years. Two of my poems got into them. They're pretty much the only two things I wrote that wasn't ad copy in my entire post-college 20s. I'll be posting them here in the blog entries that follow.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)