A Wail Green Green WIng

Milk and Think Upon the Utter

...Was

walking around Mary’s Lake in the wind holding a copy of Leaves of Grass. At first the wind seemed too much, a nuisance, a neighbor with music up too loud too late. But of course I don’t really mind the noise, have trained myself to steady my perceptions and to love the sounds of humans living. I remembered Japan, the winds so high coming through the pass between two mountain ranges, it seemed a living creature, a will of its own, a material spirit, a constant  immaterial pressure on one side of one’s body. It caused the snow to fall from the ground up to a starless dark heaven. Here on the lake it pushed and snaked on top the waters, making waves and wild flurries that seemed alive.

I found in the distance a protrusion of rocks that seemed to offer shelter in the lee and made my way there. Sat and watched the air from the mountain press the sunlight on the surface of the lake, a little wobbly pool clinging to the stones of the slinging planet. Our world is immense. On it there are many  worlds. I sit on Mars, I breathe Jupiter, I am the moon. A pride and pleasure to be among the little furry beasts that gather round the little sustaining spaces among the rock and ice and void. A small guilt at that pride, as though I think myself above others who do not see the precarious infinite beauty of their own universe and its impermanence with and within them. Why should I compare anyone else to this experience? Cannot I simply feel blessed and happy and feel no sorrow nor superiority towards others? Nay, I am king of this moment. My bliss outshines the sea. My joy unbinds the heavens. All may find rest within me.

I sat only a little while breathing. I read from where I’d left off in Whitman, picking accidentally to read the inspiration of my tattoo, “these are the words of all men in all ages and lands, they are not original with me…”

…which goes on…

“This is the grass that grows wherever the land is and the water is,

This is the common air that bathes the globe,

…

Do you guess I have some intricate purpose?

Well I have . . . . for the April rain has, and the mica on the side of  a rock has.

Do you take it I would astonish?

Does the daylight astonish? or the early redstart twittering through the woods?

Do I astonish more than they?

…

In all people I see myself, none more and not one a barleyhair less,

And the good or bad I say of myself I say of them.

And I know I am solid and sound,

To me the converging objects of the universe perpetually flow,

All are written to me and I must get what the writing means.

…

I do not trouble my spirit to vindicate itself or be understood,

I see that the elementary laws never apologize,

I reckon I behave no prouder than the level I plant my house by after all.

I exist as I am, that is enough,”

I have marked my body with a reminder of all of this, curiously enough not from this book but from an essay by Jorge Luis Borges, in which he quotes the line from Whitman to build evidence (along with some Emerson also) that every poem ever written was penned by the same poet. Today was my first time reading the words in context, and it certainly has much to do with context. When we convince ourselves to be, we sound rash and omnipotent and stubborn. When we are, we see all others as they are to us, we are to ourselves, and eventually we simply are, and that is enough.

from Elephants

And so. There are the flying kind. And what is the mechanism of an elephant’s flight? What is the posture he takes before careening off? Surely this is a blundery ordeal, an elephant taking to the wind—grunts, half charging the crows, tusk in all upward thrust, thrushes up from the grass uncertain hovering like flies, a great mass of grey skin heavy bone weighted folds of fat and tendon, jerking short neck up, rampaging on for dear trumpeting earth until a slender plane of dirt kicks up before us and another and another, the entire clearing shrouded in red and brown white clods of wild cloud. Just at the bright height of a craned eye, we might observe the hurtling shadow of an airborne pachyderm. 

Do some do it differently? Simply lift their short tails up in a flapping breeze and follw it into the air like a baggy balloon?

And here we might rest, except that the insistence of what follows will never allow it. Whatever happens, I am next.

Thus go I to Lisbon in a dream, so that I may be here with myself and not dying. The flap of the cover wears bashfully little. And many crannys yet undiscovered nooks yet just there like the road bending through the village again out of sight. Lisbon is a name to give a place without a name, a city known to others more deserving—that I may deserve that knowing, go I thus in dream to Lisbon. In Winter Gillespie pipes Olipso, paint peeling from the sides of the narrow trains, what so many are the names echoed from the sea to have said this gently, the mapmaker, that it is the place for sailors and poets. Thus dream I in a going to of Lisbon.

Hazuntah! Purple or Otherwise, Stated is Stated

Carried away and such. Being carried. Getting carried. Passive little baby all over the insistent here of always things. No matter where she is, she was brought here, must blame the carrying hands. I got carried away and such. Lost something like it. The novel eyes of wild conversation. Glasses clinking in the winter. It's easy to forget how far away so many things are when I am here all the time. Here in Boulder. Here on the Ship, circumnavigating the sun, a forgetful chore that gets done whether I commit to it or not. I have been looking around at Poetry. Here in Boulder. Here at the book store. Here in LuNaMoPoLiS. Here in love. Here in Boulder in love on the stairs down into the boogie ballroom. Here and there heads crested in rugged silver shroud yawps of desperation or sentience 3 of one half half a dozen of the other. I wish I could share this. I wish I could share with. Share this with. With. I can be home by then. Whenever is fine. I wish. I wish. I guarantee. With someone. Well we'll see. So strapped for time. Seven months. A good guy. He's a good guy. I wasn't sure. I wasn't sure. That's kind of nice. That's what I need. I wish I could share. They say in a loop by the windows all day long. And really I hear them sometimes. I have ears that way sometimes. It's sort of sad when I do. And I've been hearing them sort of back and forth in a thaw, too, when the wind picks up in Spring and all the good music breaks out spilling like rivers in autumn. The ghosts wander the open grasses asking for a partner to cry into the dirt with. And there is so much poetry. Here. So much that I must say something to it...

[dramatic shift] which not the broken words but the words that break the broken magnet magenta not unless you in He was touching her all during this we were digging for ghosts bones of ghosts alarming haunted ligament delighting at the hinges what new causes stirring the broke bodies tied to forgotten causes stirring eaten by the Crocodile there’s no such place as broken 6 I linger you still a while on you while still come wan der of the barren o the water wheels cobbles tulips settled into grooves a long into the long snows there to be un held 7 a spring of crying out wat evidence! of matter see: the matter wat matter to we heart the heard out crying in the evident was we is in matter was studying the surprise in the kneebone when all the spirit so entered in again wat matter vacated wat the matter was 8 if you if I quiver you I god have you quiver you wagon your tail so many nights in the vacant breath given 9 she I caught up where water seam to bend my caught light where water green caught in light low long longed for you so then I love you so then so then I love you so then caught in the carried current where the water found still and body and so and then when the wat of long was returning green where the wat of the water long went low again 10 and in the window that opens and in the glass of the dust sun and in the sunlight warmed and in the tea-stretched honey so lopes the long red leg so mane and many when wanted so simply just was now just sung out there in the window sun so carefully with a cradled wrist relate so the greeting goes it is time you knew the reaching does not ever reach the touch (you know this in your sleep) it is time you knew your sitting space they burnt ‘im there she said remembering the cinnamon bread they burnt ‘im in the city center and I leapt with such a yearning joy which made me come shy with shock and held it close savoring my bedroom shame so then if you must embrace my body do it quickly while I am still ready so then my hands will fall to my hips so then my knuckle give a backbone bend a nd clutch and chuck and try and not so then