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Loyalty

Tell me what you know
About loyalty
I've been breaking my neck
Making people like me
Holding hands with a shadow
I can barely see
Call it loyalty
I don't go roaming
Like I used to do
Cause I got a place to crash
When I need to
The doors are heavy
And the walls are blue
I can lick my wounds
I've been lonely
Can't pick up my phone
And I don't go out
I earned my living
On a low plane
Just shoveling dirt
Into the mouth of a cave
Got a couple of friends
That are doing the same
We'll fill it up one day
I've been lonely
Can't pick up my phone
And I don't go out
How long have I been suspended
Dust in the light
I am so good
At telling time
Tell me what you know about
Letting go
I can't stand to need you
With all that I know
Cause what if you go missing
While my eyes are closed
I don't wanna let go
I won't let go
I've been lonely
Can't pick up my phone
And I don't go out

Breathe

Tears fall gently onto my lap
Silent pain
Where is my compass?
Where is my map?

To stay here would be
A slow certain death
If only I could catch my breath

It’s funny, haven’t run a mile
Not even a few small steps
Yet I still can’t breathe

These walls close in more every day
The outside world just out of reach
“I know I can do this!”
Inside my head I scream

This merry-go-round of misery
I can break this cycle
I just need a remedy

Just one stroke of luck
A lot of courage
Bob, weave, duck

There can’t possibly be anywhere to go
But up from here
Fight against the angst
The terror, the fear
Been through worse before
You can do this, get up
Walk out the door

You’ve learned the ropes
Not time to sit here
Yet you sit here and mope

Get up girl
Dry your eyes
Your wings have mended
You can still fly

CHANNELLED WHELK


The shell in my hand is deserted. It once housed a whelk, a snail-like creature, and then temporarily, after the death of the first occupant, a little hermit crab, who has run away, leaving his tracks behind him like a delicate vine on the sand. He ran away, and left me his shell. It was once a protection to him. I turn the shell in my hand, gazing into the wide open door from which he made his exit. Had it become an encumbrance? Why did he run away? Did he hope to find a better home, a better mode of living? I too have run away, I realize, I have shed the shell of my life, for these few weeks of vacation.
But his shell—it is simple; it is bare, it is beautiful. Small, only the size of my thumb, it’s architecture is perfect, down to the finest detail. Its shape, swelling like a pear in the center, winds in a gentle spiral to the pointed apex. It’s color, dull gold, is whitened by a wash of salt from the sea. Each whorl, each faint knob, each criss-cross vein in its egg-shell texture, is as clearly defined as on the day of creation. My eye follows with delight the outer circumference of that diminutive winding staircase up which this tenant used to travel.
My shell is not like this, I think. How untidy it has become! Blurred with moss, knobby with barnacles, it’s shape is hardly recognizable any more. Surely, it had a shape once. It has a shape still in my mind. What is the shape of my life?
The shape of my life today starts with a family. I have a husband, five children and a home just beyond the suburbs of New York. I have also a craft, writing, and therefore work I want to pursue. The shape of my life is, of course, determined by many other things; my background and childhood, my mind and its education, my conscience and its pressures, my heart and its desires. I want to give and take from my children and husband, to share with friends and community, to carry out my obligations to man and to the world, as a woman, as an artist, as a citizen.
But I want first of all--in fact, as an end to these other desires—to be at peace with myself. I want a singleness of eye, a purity of intention, a central core to my life that will enable me to carry out these obligations and activities as well as I can. I want, in fact—to borrow from the language of the saints—to live “in grace” as much of the time as possible. I am not using this term in a strictly theological sense. By grace, I mean an inner harmony, essentially spiritual, which can be translated into outward harmony. I am seeking perhaps what Socrates asked for in the prayer from Paedrus when he said, “May the outward and inward man be at one.” I would like to achieve a state of inner spiritual grace from which I could function and give as I was meant to in the eye of God.
Vague as this definition maybe, I believe most people are aware of periods in their lives when they seem to be “in grace” and other periods when they feel “out of grace,” even though they may use different words to describe these states. In the first happy condition, one seems to carry all one’s tasks before one lightly, as if borne along on a great tide; and in the opposite state one can hardly tie a shoe-string, whether one is in grace or not. But there are techniques of living too; there are even techniques in the search for grace. And techniques can be cultivated. I have learned by some experience, by many examples, and by the writings of countless others before me, also occupied in the search, that certain environments, certain modes of life, certain rules of conduct are more conducive to inner and outer harmony than others. There are, in fact, certain roads that one may follow. Simplification of life is one of them.
I mean to lead a simple life, to choose a simple shell I can carry easily—like a hermit crab. But I do not. I find that my frame of life does not foster simplicity. My husband and five children must make their way in the world. The life I have chosen as wife and mother entrains a whole caravan of complications. It involves a house in the suburbs and either household drudgery or household help which waivers between scarcity and non-existence for most of us. It involves food and shelter; meals, planning, marketing, bills, and making the ends meet in a thousand ways. It involves not only the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker but countless other experts to keep my modern house with its modern “simplifications” (electricity, plumbing, refrigerator, gas-stove, oil-burner, dish-washer, radios, car, and numerous other labor saving devices) functioning properly. It involves health; doctors, dentists, appointments, medicine, cod-liver oil, vitamins, trips to the drug store. It involves education, spiritual, intellectual, physical; schools, school conferences, car-pools, extra trips for basketball or orchestra practice; tutoring; camps, camp equipment and transportation. It involves clothes, shopping, laundry, cleaning, mending, letting skirts down and sewing buttons on, or finding someone else to do it. It involves friends, my husband’s, my children’s, my own, and endless arrangements to get together; letters, invitations, telephone calls and transportation hither and yon.
For life today in America is based on the premise of ever-widening circles of contact and communication. It involves not only family demands, but community demands, national demands, international demands on the good citizen, through social and cultural pressures, through newspapers, magazines, radio programs, political drives, charitable appeals, and so on. My mind reels with it. What a circus act we women perform every day of our lives. It puts the trapeze artist to shame. Look at us. We run a tight rope daily, balancing a pile of books on the head. Baby-carriage, parasol, kitchen chair, still under control. Steady now!
This is not the life of simplicity but the life of multiplicity that the wise men warn us of. It leads not to unification but to fragmentation. It does not bring grace; it destroys the soul. And this is not only true of my life, I am forced to conclude; it is the life of millions of women in America. I stress America, because today, the American woman more than any other has the privilege of choosing such a life. Woman in large parts of the civilized world has been forced back by war, by poverty, by collapse, by the sheer struggle to survive, into a smaller circle of immediate time and space, immediate family life, immediate problems of existence. The American woman is still relatively free to choose the wider life. How long she will hold this precarious position no one knows. But her particular situation has a significance far above its apparent economic, national, or even sex limitations.
For the problem of the multiplicity of life not only confronts the American woman, but also the American man. And it is not merely the concern of the American as such, but of our whole modern civilization, since life in America today is held up as the ideal of a large part of the rest of the world. And finally, it is not limited to our present civilization, though we are faced with it now in an exaggerated form. It has always been one of the pitfalls of mankind. Plotinus was preaching the dangers of multiplicity of the worlds back in the third century. Yet, the problem is particularly and essentially woman’s. Distraction is, always will be, inherent in woman’s life.
For to be a woman is to have interests and duties, raying out in all directions from the central mother-core, like spokes from the hub of a wheel. The pattern of our lives is essentially circular. We must be open to all points of the compass; husband, children, friends, home, community; stretched out, exposed, sensitive like a spider’s web to each breeze that blows, to each call that comes. How difficult for us, then, to achieve a balance in the midst of these contradictory tensions, and yet how necessary for the proper functioning of our lives. How much we need, and how arduous of attainment is that steadiness preached in all the rules for holy living. How desirable and how distant is the ideal of the contemplative, artist, or saint—the inner inviolable core, the single eye.
With a new awareness, both painful and humorous, I begin to understand why the saints were rarely married women. I am convinced it has nothing inherently to do, as I once supposed, with chastity or children. It has to do primarily with distractions. The bearing, rearing, feeding and educating of children; the running of a house with its thousand details; human relationships with their myriad pulls—woman’s normal occupations in general run counter to creative life, or contemplative life, or saintly life. The problem is not merely one of “Woman and Career”, “Woman and the Home”, “Woman and Independence”. It is more basically: how to remain whole in the midst of the distractions of life; how to remain balanced, no matter what centrifugal farces tend to pull one off center; how to remain strong, no matter what shocks come in a the periphery and tend to crack the hub of the wheel.
What is the answer? There is no easy answer, no complete answer. I have only clues, shells from the sea. The bare beauty of the channelled whelk tells me that one answer, and perhaps a first step, is in simplification of life, in cutting out some of the distractions. But how? Total retirement is not possible. I cannot shed my responsibilities. I cannot permanently inhabit a desert island. I cannot be a nun in the midst of family life. I would not want to be. The solution for me, surely, is neither in total renunciation of the world, nor in the total acceptance of it. I must find a balance somewhere, or in alternating rhythm between these two extremes; a swinging of the pendulum between solitude and communion, between retreat and return. In my periods of retreat, perhaps I can learn something to carry back into worldly life. I can at least practice for these two weeks the simplification of outward life, as a beginning. I can follow this superficial clue, and see where it leads. Here in beach living, I can try.
One learns first of all in beach living the art of shedding; how little one can get along with, not how much. Physical shedding to begin with, which then mysteriously spreads into other fields. Of course, one needs less in the sun. But one needs less anyway, one finds suddenly. One does not need a closet-full, only a small suitcase-full. And what a relief it is! Less taking up and down of hems, less mending, --and best of all—less worry about what to wear. One finds one is shedding not only clothes—but vanity.
Next, shelter. One does not need the airtight shelter one has in winter in the North. Here I live in a bare sea-shell of a cottage. No heat, no telephone, no plumbing to speak of, no hot water, a two-burner oil stove, no gadgets to go wrong. No rugs. There were some, but I rolled them up the first day; it is easier to sweep the sand off a bare floor. But I find I don’t bustle about with unnecessary sweeping and cleaning here. I am no longer aware of the dust. I have shed my Puritan conscience about absolute tidiness, and cleanliness. Is it possible that, too, is a material burden? No curtains. I do not need them for privacy; the pines around my house are enough protection. I want the windows open all the time, and I don’t want to worry about rain. I begin to shed my Martha-like anxiety about many things. Washable slipcovers, faded and old—I hardly see them; I don’t worry about the impression they make on other people. I am shedding pride. As little furniture as possible; I shall not need much. I shall ask into my shell only those friends with whom I can be completely honest. I find that I am shedding hypocrisy in human relationships. What a rest that will be! The most exhausting thing in life, I have discovered, is being insincere. That is why so much of social life is exhausting; one is wearing a mask. I have shed my mask.
I find I live quite happily without those things I think necessary in winter in the North. And as I write these words, I remember, with some shock at the disparity in our lives, a similar statement made by a friend of mine in France who spent three years in a German prison camp. Of course, he said, qualifying his remark, they did not get enough to eat, they were sometimes atrociously treated, they had little physical freedom. And yet, prison life taught him how little one can get along with, and what extraordinary spiritual freedom and peace such simplification can bring. I remember again, ironically, that today more of us in America than anywhere else in the worls have the luxury of choice between simplicity and complication of life. And for the most part, we, who could choose simplicity, choose complication. War, prison, survival periods, enforce a form of simplicity on man. The monk and the nun choose it of their own free will. But if one accidentally finds it, as I have for a few days, one finds also the serenity it brings.
Is it not rather ugly, one may ask? One collects material possessions not only for security, comfort or vanity, but for beauty as well. Is your sea-shell house not ugly and bare? No, it is beautiful, my house. It is bare, of course, but the wind, the sun, the smell of the pines blow through its bareness. The unfinished beams in the roof are veiled by cobwebs. They are lovely, I think, gazing up at them with new eyes; they soften the hard lines of the rafters as grey hairs soften the hard lines on a middle-aged face. I no longer pull out grey hairs or sweep down cobwebs. As for the walls, it is true they looked forbidding at first. I felt cramped and enclosed by their blank faces. I wanted to knock holes in them, to give them another dimension with pictures or windows. So I dragged home from the beach grey arms of driftwood, worn sati-smooth by wind and sand. I gathered trailing green vines with floppy red-tipped leaves. I picked up th e whitened skeletons of conch shells, their curious hollowed-out shaped faintly reminiscent of abstract sculpture. With these tacked to walls and propped up in corners, I am satisfied. I have a periscope out to the world. I have a window, a view, a point of flight from my sedentary base.
I am content. I sit down at my desk, a bare kitchen table with a blotter, a bottle of ink, a sand dollar to weight down one corner, a clam shell for a pen tray, the broken tip of a conch, pink-tinged, to finger, and a row of shells to set my thoughts spinning.
I love my sea-shell of a house. I wish I could live in it always. I wish I could transport it home. But I cannot. It will hold not a husband, five children and the necessities and trappings of daily life. I can only carry back my little channel whelk. It will sit on my desk in Connecticut, to remind me of the ideal of a simplified life, to encourage me in the game I played on the beach. To ask how little, not how much, can I get along with. To say—is it necessary?—when I am tempted to add one more accumulation to my life, when I am pulled toward one more centrifugal activity.
Simplification of outward life is not enough. It is merely the outside. But I am starting with the outside. I am looking at the outside of a shell, the outside of my life—the shell. The complete answer is not to be found on the outside, in an outward mode of living. This is only a technique, a road to grace. The final answer, I know, is always inside. But the outside can give a clue, can help one to find the inside answer. One is free, like the hermit crab, to change one’s shell.
Channelled whelk, I put you down again, but you have set my mind on a journey, up an inwardly spiral staircase of thought.
~Anne Morrow Lindbergh

grains of salt

GRAINS OF SALT
Most of the time when I try and explain how my brain works, I have a really hard time, and this time is no different. It’s just hard to put into words, I guess, no it is very hard to put into words, however; I will try. I am not saying that I do not believe in God, what I am trying to say is that I do not believe in any one religion’s perception of God. Human beings are fallible, period. Therefore, our presumptuous attempts to interpret God will be mortal, self-serving, it is wholly in our nature as human beings to preserve ourselves, as we see fit. And, more often than not, it is a very selfish endeavor. I do not believe that any one religion is “the truth”, for they all speak volumes, they are all truthful, truthful about our nature as human beings. We are a very nearsighted species, no matter what we say. How we try to spin the story of what “we” are doing, how it is the “right” thing. If you listen to your heart, look inside of your soul, you can see. See. We are all human beings. No matter where you live, what color you are, how healthy you are, how old you are, how good you are, how bad you are, how rich you are, how poor you are, no matter how you are, no matter who you are, we are all the same. I believe in beliefs. Believing in something strengthens you but believing that your beliefs are the “Only” belief, the “Right” belief, weakens us ALL. Everyone knows what they should or should not do. I think we should ALL put on our glasses and look at the bigger picture. I don’t think God is very happy with us. Because we have let our human nature take us further away from him. I do not believe for one second that God would want us to be quarreling over this beautiful, abundant paradise he has given us. Destroying this gorgeous planet, that God made. Our entire planet is the garden of Eden, don’t you see? But God also gave us our incredible brains that unfortunately we have used to our own ultimate demise. Free choice. Free will. He gave us everything we could ever possibly need and look what we have done with this gift. It is heartbreakingly horrendous. Pretty sure God had a different idea than us playing “I’m the King of the Castle”. Just imagine what could have been, what could be, because God gave us our imaginations too. If I were God, I’d be pissed off as hell…..

A BRIDGE TO TERABITHIA


What is that face more naked than the body
There to be. When not-now ends, when why not

known there reemerges and who-receives is empty
in its recognition that this forcible unlikeness

cast and matter have endures to be endured.
When knowledge that refusal of its present

self-constructed out of aggregated vagueness
validates itself alone, prefers itself pursue

this not-same new disfiguration of potential
re-remembrance animation, unintended

in construction or reception, that might act
the viewing and the feeling of to see and feel

its medium as medium, a presentness of all
the things receiving means that will not look

away- what then. There is no attribution left
when in receipt no more receives because a thing

that happened here can’t happen now again
because eventness is now localized in say-so meant

beforehand where beforehand lacks
the chance to matter. Here, the matter does itself

to move itself to there from now by here to make
inside a sequence. A sequence as its means complete.

a sequence that’s unmeant to mean outside
potential coil and rise and fulcrum filed

toward its on and on. Its heels and reaches leave
the ground now forward for the pure continuation

ground now background needs to be complete to be
the path its built to be in leans that only lean.

Exactness of protrusion as a constitutive fact
Enhanced by lacked abstraction and by start then it

then end. As acts-based act’s opposing of the cast
half’s recommitment to subtraction of it’s doing

to submit to presentation all its out-behaving
its behavior in a picture-act that means to mean

itself but not itself by making seen whatever its
abstraction is without perception as unpresentness

so fit with autodialogic flex enough it slips divisive
asks of ideation and admits the everything

nonsimple and now not. It’s all right there. It’s still
refusing use of step-name, play, and arms in space

because it must be transformation, say, or birth
because it can’t just be some dance made dance

by motion not by dance. It is an ends-view
means in opposition to the makings of the end

without its means. Which means: a talk is only ever
tongue to teeth or song. That sounds amass to master

understanding and retract the understanding
predicated on receipt and being as a making

on its own in favor of a preestablished theme
that’s preperformed by title; or the manifested

outcome tract and fold make mechanistically.
Fulfillment of a form. Taxonomy as endgame.

Space stays space but a place we can change places.
Yes, now, yes; leaving bodies that set off in space

now forward with the limbs in strict adherence
here to setting off require preaacordance

one to other of appendage, yes. But even when
the movement-act is intercepted by a pause

we see and known to be the sudden visitation
prior guilt within without makes, an interruption

brought to predetermined gait is just a landscape
made from place to place and not determination.

But if there is a sign, a print- or paint-based
Sign, made near to us that reads deform or feign, a fever or

the end, the wait the body makes is only words
on signs and sign alone regardless of the eyes

now taking in a guilt it hasn’t read there.
Insistence on this seenness means these acts of acts

now hope to overcome a roteness but insist
this thing of not-things seen can only ever be

the thing it’s said itself to be. That is: the beauty
to be meant or not-now meant. Shaping us inside

this making-of divide provides an absolution
for the body from its body, gifts a stillness

some self needs or says it needs to see its self-same
past then cross its path with by and by without

the intervention other bodies bring preventing
the reduction of it all to some one thing it has

to have that happens with an end but without
claim. This devolution of the implicative means

that what we do now isn’t really, really moral
but the thing that’s what’s now done. It means

we didn’t mean it. It means we did but didn’t
call it what you think it is so you can call it

what you want so long as you accept the wrongness
that your life now is. There is no more a story

in a book about it. Just a blankness titled on
without you on its own and language acquisition

deployment now opposes. The story that once was
the exhibition of becoming is no longer

in itself a thing itself: now, once alive, a life
does not exist to not die dying, but exists to die

a vacuum or meant emblem to ignore us
our endurance for the nothing that’s beyond

not knowing how to say. Not knowing how to say
a hand that tried to stop itself, a shoulder’s fold

agrees. The way the touch of unfamiliar knees
beneath a table feels unclean. Because we know

the saying and its how-to means we’d mean these gestures
mean the meaning of what’s meant without us

all alone. That they alone convey the undeveloped
acts-to-be the sayings-by-not-saying mean to make

by giving our becoming in their forms without
the words for that one thing without an end

we predesign. We’ll call it nearness. Name it us
so others, too, will know that we were once.

Everything we’ve never done but meant to do
once left unsaid is still there sitting next to you

meaning on its own. And the problem isn’t this
persistent emphasis upon the anti-pluralistic

takings-in of us, it’s that we now embrace
reduction as a sum. Refusal as a call

to arms of only arms to point or not to point
at that that’s known because we said you know

because we said that’s what we meant, or not
at that that’s there because there’s nothing more

to know about a form as form. There is nothing
now in not-now here. The eye will act in concert.

We call a thing a thing. Although we say we don’t
know how-to or to say, there is no need for us

now not to know the nothing that not-knowing is
that makes us known to us. There is no reason

now to say to know it is what it is to own a moment
all our own in just the way we meant, when all

the moments need to be is need that looks like need
that looks like us the way the us did not intend.

The body does and takes and plays and isn’t going
anyplace that you or your intention don’t now mean

to mean made meant again. The difference is: a body
meant just isn’t different. The body that was meant

before to mean the way you meant it then to mean
the name you said aloud to mean its meant—it did.

It meant. And might. But didn’t, too. And won’t.
Because it can’t because you left it. Which is fine and all

but know that. That, beyond that, that before that, even
when there was a when there when there wasn’t there

this state of nothing-left-of-you-there left of you
that is now all it is now in that place and when

you made it, and even though you could, in theory, make
to recreate it and re-access as a habit act

the it-image you’d fashioned at, because you left it
there it’s only ever still there still. Because it’s here

where we are. With the rest us now you. In not-now here
where everything unisolated difference is

resists the fixities this matter-cast insists
the differentiation of the part and parcel isn’r.

right for, and insists upon, instead upon,, an end
the discontinuous and unavoidable might make

unbroken and escapable non-ends of. Sort of like
stray hairs. They aren’t just hairs. They have no place

defined as theirs to be specifically, and yet, a self-
conception of what’s stray and where by mapping

stray as stray without a saying or a sign or being
told the place, allows them to exist or not as draft-made

strands one knows to fall a profile all awry, to make
slight lines of lines or not by light or lack above

the indent in the distance see to sound, to cross
this recess to permit or not, or cede or not, occasions

now to read particularities of selfness not at once
now told about. That these unknowns—if made

to mean this way by stray one—in order to be made
require one to say that these, this series, these

pieces made of form now indirectly shield
the place one can’t not call transubstantial

relocation of whatever hollow claim we have
to balance place: that beneath them, in the margins

rests a center given centerness existence makes
the place where all this breath and all else is

despite its distance from the breathing place
to me, who is now us. This light, or lack, makes

the connotative sameness temple and devotion have
a something we can see. A something to be named

a something known if we were able to convince
ourselves or others to believe ourselves or others

we had time for cause or call to care, except
we have before so don’t. Every downward look

a want-based shame or shy disdain makes
now is neither made. To no one. The smallest vowel-

shaped place some minor suddenness or sun
on days the day meant gray might make a mouth

create when former re-remembered expectation
deviation or that prior over-gray place that one time

the sudden light was comes, won’t be made now either
either way. Which is to say: there isn’t now a face left

there to be when not-now ends. There is a mandible
unmeant to make mean but meant to make be

the system instrument it’s meant to be beside
conditionless prefigurement of meaning meant

before the being brought to be and also to be said
before the bringing of it lets eventness make it

ours the way we say. So we won’t say. We will be still
here still with all our us and our not knowing near

the nearness that we named before but will not name
aloud because not-saying means this being near

the nearness here allows us now to be the body
next to us ourselves, which is the one that will not

say what is not ours or us all our once not near.
The body here we mattered for and made toward

before has left itself a lovely almost nothing
left below it, close below it; so close to it

the breath of it, its own, when breathed, it breathes
and breath
comes back almost at once because there isn’t now

safe distance or desire to maintain the prior
self-extensive tendency to cultivate
a saving place the body sought between itself
as self and everything then facing it. There’s just this

thin and endless flatness there above the breath
received and there below the breathing it, which was

once us, but is now not. And if one were to look
from far enough away, they would not know

it’s eyes are shut. If someone looks at it
again, from far enough above, they will not know

it’s on all fours. Or was, before it let itself
lay down. To make itself not-known. To let the seeing-act

not-see the leaving-acts not left. There is no more
a ground in forms of forms or by design to leave.

There is only us we made this it that welcomes
watchers come and visit it and you who comes

to watch. So come and see. Come and make believe
you knew and knew you knew and take, in all your

rightness, all your everything you ever said
in all the ways you knew were true. Right here. With it

here, right here, and all for you. And it will let you
use your hands. It will let you use your hands

to take a fistful of its hair to get its head up off
the ground for you. You can even pull. Pull and then

pull past for you the point distention makes the neck
look like a purpose if you need one. But you don’t.

All you need is here now clan and clear, once you
smear away the dirt the eyes and mouth now hide

behind and look for you what’s there for you to see:
A face that is a face that only you can make to mean.

Thomas Hummel

No Market for Moonscreen

The fascination with the Moon started long before Pink Floyd

Moonlight cannot harm us.
We stare at it and do not go blind.
We can stay out in it forever
without burning. Over two million songs
about the moon, and only seven about the sun.
Okay, I used poetry math.

Because it is there and not there,
visible in parts. It hass that oo sound
we make at cows and sporting events.
Because it does not warm us.
Because of the kiss.
Because of the wolf.
Because it belongs to no one.
Because of dancing barefoot in dew.
Because, tilted bottle.
Because, exposed breast.
Because being led home down a dark deserted street.
Because ukulele and bonfire and smokey light.
Because the soul. Yes, the soul, and how we call it,
oo oo oo oo oo oo oo oo oo oo oo oo oo oooooooo
how we call it, and sometimes, on clear nights,
it comes.
Jim Daniels

Chenille

There two facing peacocks
Or a ship flapping
On its own white tufted sail
At roadside, near a mill;

Flamingoes also are hanging
By their bills on bedspreads
And an occasional mallard.
These you can buy anywhere.
They are made by machine
From a sanctioned, unholy pattern
Rigid with industry.
They hoard the smell of oil

And hum like looms all night
Into your pores, reweaving
Your body from bobbins.
There is only one quiet

Place-in a scuppernong arbor-
Where animals as they
Would be, are born into sleep- cloth:
A middle-aged mans grandmother
Sits in the summer green light
Of leaves, gone toothless
For eating grapes better,
And pulls the animals through

With a darning needle:
Deer, rabbits and birds,
Red whales and unicorns,
Winged elephants, crowned ants:

Beasts that cannot be thought of
By the wholly sane
Rise up in the rough, blurred
Flowers of fuzzy cloth
In only their timeless outlines
Like the beasts of Heaven:
Those sketched out badly, divinely
By stars not wholly sane.

Love, I have slept in that house.
There it was winter.
The tattered moonfields crept
Through the trellis, and fell

In vine-tangled shade on my face
Like thrown-away knitting
Before cloud came and dimmed
Those scars from off me.
My fingernails chilled
To the bone, I called
For another body to be
With me, and warm us both.

A unicorn neighed; I folded
His neck in my arms
And was safe, as he lay down.
All night from thickening Heaven,

Someone up there throwing
Bedspreads upon me.
Softly I called, and they came:
The ox and the basilisk,

The griffin, the phoenix, the lion-
Light bodied, only the essence,
The tufted creative starfields
Behind the assembling clouds-

The snake from the apple tree came
To save me from freezing,
And at last the lung winged ship
On its own sail scented with potash

Fell sighing upon us all.
The last two nails
Of cold died out in my nostrils
Under the dance-weight of beasts.
I lay, breathing like thread,
An inspired outline of myself,
As rain began to greatly fall,
And closed the door of the Ark.

Story Time: this was the last page of a book I just finished;

It was nighttime and we sat by the fire stretching our arms towards the flames as we listened to stories and watched the moon and the stars retire. The red coal from the firewood lit our faces in the dark and wisps of smoke continuously rose toward the sky. Pa Sesay, one of my friends’ grandfather, had told us many stories that night, but before he began telling us the last story, he repeatedly said, “This is a very important story,” He then cleared his throat and began:
“There was a hunter who went into the bush to kill a monkey. He had looked for only a few minutes when he saw a monkey sitting comfortably in the branch of a low tree. The monkey didn’t pay him any attention, not even when his footsteps on the dried leaves roses and fell as he neared. When he was close enough and behind a tree where he could clearly see the monkey, he raised his rifle and aimed. Just when he was about to pull the trigger, the monkey spoke: ‘If you shoot me, your mother will die, and if you don’t, your father will die.’ The monkey resumed its position, chewing it’s food, and every so often scratched it’s head or the side of its belly.
“What would you do if you were the hunter?”
This was a story told to young people in my village once a year. The storyteller, usually an elder, would pose this unanswerable question at the end of the story in the presence of the children’s parents. Every child who was present at the gathering was asked to give an answer, but no child ever did, since their mother and father were both present. The storyteller never offered an answer either. During each of these gatherings, when it was time to respond, I always told the storyteller that I would think it over, which of course was not a good enough answer.
After such gatherings, my peers and I—all the children between the ages of six and twelve—would brainstorm several possible answers that would avoid the death of one of our parents. There was no right answer. If you spared the monkey, someone was going to die, and if you didn’t, someone would also die.
That night we agreed on an answer, but it was immediately rejected. We told Pa Sesay that if any of us was the hunter, we wouldn’t have gone hunting for monkeys. We told him, “There are other animals such as deer to hunt.”
“That is not an acceptable answer,” he said. “We are assuming that you as the hunter already raised your gun and have to make the decision.” He broke his kola nut in half and smiled before putting a piece in his mouth.
When I was seven, I had an answer to this question that made sense to me. I never discussed it with anyone, though, for fear of how my mother would feel. I concluded to myself, that if I were the hunter, I would shoot the monkey so that it would no longer have the chance to put other hunters in the same predicament.

The Rowan Stave


Upon the hill above the kirk at moon rise she did stand
To tend her sheep that Sumhain eve, with rowan stave in hand.
And where she’s been and what she’s seen, no living soul may know,
And when she comes back home, she will be changed—oh!

When midnight came, the owls cried out, the shepard girl did hide;
She saw the churchyard dead come forth, from graves laid open wide.
And where she’s been and what she’s seen, no living soul may know,
And when she’s come back home, she will be changed—oh!

When all the dead but one returned she neared the empty grave,
And ‘cross it’s narrow earthen sides she lay her rowan stave,
And where she’s been and what she’s seen, no living soul may know,
And when she’s come back home, she will be changed—oh!

“Oh who has barred me from this grave I left for Samhain tide,
I’ve journeyed far to Denmark’s shore; I left there as a bride;
And where she’s been and what she’s seen, no living soul may know,
And when she’s come back home, she will be changed—oh!

“If you will let me gain my grave before the end of night
I’ll give your babe a magic stane that he may have the Sight
And where she’s been and what she’s seen, no living soul may know,
And when she’s come back home, she will be changed—oh!”

history

There is no great and no small
To the soul that maketh all:
And where it cometh, all things are;
And it cometh everywhere.

I am owner of the sphere,
Of the seven stars and the solar year,
Of Caesar's hand, and Plato's brain,
Of Lord Christ's heart, and Shakespeare's train.
~Emerson
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