Published 12 years ago, and written maybe 14 years ago

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.

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.

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.

Three

That winter, in the field behind my house, we laughed to see the trees stoop under the weight of their thick diamond blankets. The impossible burden buried the world in silence and the late night was ice bright. The snow muted our excited steps, the gleam crushed all care. The silence devoured our laughter and we three felt absurdly light.

That summer, in the field behind my house, the rain threatened to wash away the world beneath our feet. We struggled to find dry land to stand on in the rivers, we fought to speak over the din of that deluge. The sky broke in hail and electric staccato strikes. Forty feet from where we stood, lightning roared to ground and shook the slackening ground as we huddled under the carport. The roar of thunder drowned out our gasps and wonder.

Now, in the field behind my house, I stand alone beneath the barely waning swell of this so recently full moon. We three have gone our three ways to live three separate lives in three separate cities. The cottonwood trees are half emptied of their paddle-leaves but them that remain still hiss against one another in the bite of the lengthening night’s breeze. The grasses blow in this last, lost summer, a dry rattle of one hollowing husk against another. I stand transfixed, alone and stare into the depth of the lidded moon until I can swear I hear laughter carried on the wind, blowing from beyond the end of the field, in the dark silhouette of trees, ephemeral, inviting. And I know if I were to turn and walk into that darkness, follow that laughter, I would be gone and this world would never know me again.

But I wonder, in this field behind my house, in this newly-minted autumn, if that’s a journey started too late. If you two were here, perhaps, and we all three heard that call and made that trip, maybe that would be a worthy journey. As it is, I turn and head back inside. I think maybe tonight, this long chapter finally reached its end. Tomorrow I will have to start packing and preparing after so long, to leave.

And yet in the field behind my house, the crickets continue their surging song that marks each night, and will continue long after I’ve left this place.

For DM and DK

We are already on the Further Shore. We arrived while you slept.

Getting Back Up, XI: Epilogue, Where the Path Is Found Again

That feeling I got when I first saw Lindy Hop? I got another feeling just like it a few weeks ago, meditating. I hadn’t started actually dancing at the African dance class; I’d just watched the dancing two days before. In my meditation, I saw the studio where class was held. I stood at the door in terror. A raven flew in. The Morrigan was at my left shoulder. A taller version of myself, indistinct, seemingly molded out of light stood behind my right shoulder. An enormous bear trundled into the center of the room and stood up to his full height. He roared a bellow at every corner of the room. It was like light driving away shadow. But what he drove from the room was fear. Then a foot was planted in the small of my back and I was kicked into the room onto my face. I got up and the Morrigan was over me. Her face was contorted and her eyes were burning with ardor. She seized me by the shoulders and shook me stupid. She yanked me so I was an inch from her face and bellowed at me as loud as I’ve ever heard anyone scream, “Dance! Dance, damn you! DANCE!!”

I got tired of being bitter. I learned how keep myself from sliding back down that hole. I learned to trust fate’s rough guiding hand and consigned myself to the swift, ungentle current of life sweeping past me. And 15 years later, I got shown what to do again. I have no idea how long that will last. But I intend to dive into it and strive in that joy and hardship for as long as this new direction works for me. And when it no longer does, the next time life knocks me on my face, or pulls this or any other great joy out from under me, I intend to say thank you with every fiber of my being.

Thank you. And bring it.

Getting Back Up, X: Fire, and the Regreening of the Heart

So now, my heart is aflame, my mind is incandescent, my body is vibrating. I mean, I feel like anyone does—I’m just a person being human in the way we all are. But the difference between that feeling of baseline humanity and the feeling of the depth of severe, chronic depression is a drop that beggars perception. And being back nearer to baseline feels like some form of magic. And if the difference between Hell and Earth is perceptual, how much more so the difference between Earth and Heaven. So here I am, aflame. Why? The only answer I can give is, “Because I’m tired of running and I’m angry.” Why am I angry? Because my entire psychological and emotional reframing finally matured enough in my gut and my power was ready to shoot up out of my head. What finally caused that to happen? Luck. Or call it Fate. Or Providence. Or say rather that it was time for it to happen, so it had to. That’s the anchor. Thank you, Universe. I look forward to you knocking me on my face tomorrow.

Of course, the process isn’t over. I have so much left to do. Of course I do, right? We all do. You can tell if you have more to do by putting two fingers along the inside of your wrist. You have a pulse; you have more to do. Thank the powers that be for that, eh?