Tag: Tanka Prose

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What We Choose to See

I slept well. The first night in four or five nights, maybe. I woke yawning, but clearer than I’ve been in a few days. This morning I noticed I put last night’s pork chop leftover in the freezer not the refrigerator. I also can’t find my nifty hole-punch pen. My first thought is that Leonard took it and hid it, since it scares the bejeezus out of him. It makes a horrendous “thwop” sound when I pull up on it, let go – and the coil slams the metal pieces together to drive a hole into the paper (and into the wood slab under the paper).

Yesterday when I was using it, he crawled up in E.’s lap – all 35 kilo-or-so of him curled up awkwardly in a rocking chair against the man he’s barely trusted for two-and-a-half years. I think E. secretly liked it.

Still, I doubt Leonard absconded with the thing. I should check the freezer.

It’s Easter vacation, but everything seems quiet. A friend sent me a photo of flowers blooming. She’s in a town a few hours south of here. Here it’s raining. The magpies are monopolizing the seeds we leave out for the finches. And I saw what I thought was a next while we were running on Monday, only to have E. point out that all the feathers were from the dead goose lying in the center of the “nest” in the reeds.

Mink have to eat, too, I suppose.

We’d stopped for a few minutes about 500 meters before the end of our run to watch two squirrels – playing? fighting? mating? I have no idea. But they were loudly chasing each other around the trunks of trees, and hopping from tree to tree. Flashes of deep russet in the otherwise gray day.

When I first began running – more than ten years ago – the flashes of the white tails of deer were my reward for getting out there. I took it very personally. A nod from the universe that I was doing well. But there aren’t really deer here where we run. In five years we’ve seen three. And worried about the unleashed dogs we know are there in the mornings. Dogs will go after a deer. But I am pretty sure the geese and the swans can take on any dog.

Now I wait for the cows to be let out of the barn every spring. I stop and talk to the heifers that wander near the fence next to the trail. Take their pictures, while the matriarch scolds them for whatever… I imagine they’re being called “attention-seeking” or “flirt”. At any rate, they are beautiful creatures. But I think I’ve written about this before? The under-appreciated beauty of a healthy cow.

When I lived in Kentucky the boys in high school called girls heifers. I swear, heifers are downright charming animals. In England, of course, “cow” is a common insult. What the hell is wrong with cows? Sure, there are ornery cows. But there are ornery sheep, and goats have devil eyes, and cats? Cats can be downright impish. Nudging things off counter tops while they stare you square in the face. I had a cat once, given to me by a boyfriend, who peed all over my new boyfriend’s things. But the cultural norm is to use “kitten” as some kind of sexy term-of-endearment. What is wrong with people and their relationship to animals? And maybe baby animals in particular?

For the record, I do not want E. to begin calling me a cow as a term of endearment either. At least not in public. I am not confident enough to be the vanguard of bovine re-branding.

I think our relationships with animals are as bizarrely “branded” as our relationships with people. We are all ugly messes – some of us are just better at public relations than others.

Stuck in a story
from a single perspective
– bite for bite – we eat
the elephant in the room
never apologizing

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Visceral Understanding

I have an odd pile of books on my desk this morning. Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry. Inconspicuous Consumption: The environmental impact you don’t know you have. How to Love a Country. Langston Hughes – Selected Poems. The Dialectical Behavior Therapy Diary.

There are nine other books and a rhyming dictionary also piled on. I need to sort through my shelves again. And I seriously need to stop buying books for a while. All the things I would love to do with my time. More reading. Perhaps reviewing. Certainly celebrating the poets I love. Deciding what projects to take on can be overwhelming. And there is fitting it into a life with a day job that can suck the joy right from the source at times.

Books make me feel less alone. Less peculiar. I have noticed that when I feel isolated and lonely, I go on book-buying sprees. Every book is a potential: this one will save me. I blame it on my religious upbringing: The Word is God. The answers are in the scripture. When every adult around you is an idiot, there is a near-ancient authority that has left riddles to be untangled.

There is hope, here: on the page. In the verses that sing.

I’m taking a course on visual poetry right now and am fascinated by asemic poetry. I am surprisingly drawn to it. Moved by it. After spending years studying formal poetry and analyzing poems with a chair and a rubber hose (despite Billy Collin’s objections), I am finding an instinctive satisfaction in holding the handwriting up to the light. Acknowledging the humanity, the creative mind present. The philosopher Denis Dutton said that one of the universal criteria for art is evidence of individual expression. Another is craftsmanship. Another is that the work is somehow imbued with emotion.

And in my mind poetry is the leap we make between the poet’s material expression and the poet’s subjective experience that demanded expression. In other words, all poetry is itself a meta-metaphor: the poem is the vehicle and the poet’s subjective experience is the tenor. And it seems to me that if we recognize this vehicle/tenor without putting it into words (creating new metaphors), then we are perhaps communicating in a more directly visceral way.

People have worked for years trying to decipher the Voynich manuscript because we recognize the human hand. We have this feeling that there is something important here. If someone were to ever unlock the code (if there is one) it would no doubt be anti-climatic. Our intellectual evaluation of the work would suck the joy right out of the visceral experience. We would lose the emotional connection with the artist by creating an intellectual one. One step removed.

Let’s not know. Let’s let the mystery be.

E.’s mother tongue is not English, and often when he reads my poetry he says: It sings so beautifully. Sometimes he has no idea what the ten-letter words mean. Sometimes I have leaped too far between vehicle and tenor the metaphor is lost. But it sings.

That matters.

I am, however, not convinced that I can unlearn everything I have worked so hard to more-or-less master. I have been thinking that surely someone has already studied this with regard to the modernists. I am sure there are books on my shelf now that I would better understand were I to dive in now and read them again.

But I’m not going to. I’m going to stay here with the visceral, practical work. I’m going to move my hand over paper and play. And look at all the beautiful evidence of humanity on display.

A circle with lines
radiating from a center
and I understand
she feels the sun on her skin
and knows how to tell me this

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A Confident Middle Ground

Rarely is my day so turned on its head. I should be in bed now, not typing. And technically, I shouldn’t be having a glass of wine. But here I am. And the day has been… tolerable-to-good. And lately, that means very good.

I didn’t write this weekend because I was working on the manuscript. Finishing, proofreading, formatting. It is incredibly satisfying. I still have moments of insecurity – of full-on panic – and then moments of resting in a kind of contentment.

“I made this.”

How do we hold on to that feeling and resist showing the work to someone for that (for me anyway) inevitable disappointment when someone says, “it’s good”. Like it’s a fallen souffle. Or at least it leaves me feeling very much like a fallen souffle. I always ask myself: What do you expect? Fireworks? I don’t know.

You would think at my age, I could just relish the helium-my-chest feeling and not need verification.

Memories flood back to me. My family of origin expected very little of me. Didn’t hide their surprise when I did something well. When the school asked to put me in the gifted class, my mother said I was too lazy.

Okay. So now I have slipped from personal to private in this diary. And from relatable to – well, not. That is why I should write in the morning with a cup of coffee on the desk, not a glass of whine.

Confidence is a slippery fish, isn’t it? Good to have. But if you carry it around too long, you stink.

Promising, they said.
I have caught up with myself –
middle of the road –
where I can walk fearlessly
into an unknown future

(Not much this Monday, but it is a commitment met.)

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A Convincing Blue

Every year I forget what a lapwing sounds like. Last night, walking Leonard after sunset I heard a familiar voice literally circling me. I spun around, following the direction of each call, to try to get a glimpse of the bird flying low to the ground: lapwing?

But I slowly realized it was an oystercatcher. They’re back.

The lapwing won’t be far behind.

This morning the sky is such a convincing blue, you’d swear there’d never be another day of white winds and sleet.

I am ready for a change of season. Even if it means clearing out the greenhouses and beginning again.

Not going in to the school to work these weeks has been slightly disorienting. I lose track of the days. The months, even. But I have managed to pack all of those concerns into a box and stick it in the corner of my headspace. I’ll get back to it. But for now, all is quiet. There’s no kicking from inside the box. No noise. I am hoping when I open it again all the drama will have sorted itself out. When I am ready to open it, I will dig around and pull out Hope first. And let her sit beside me while I sort through the rest.

I’ve been waiting for a nudge from the gut. A little sense of lack, a desire to “get back to it”. I should be missing my students by now. But not yet. A cup of tea, the tapping of the keyboard’s keys, the squawk of the crow out the window is enough for today. Again.

Leonard drops onto the rug in this tiny library and sighs. This is enough.

I am easing back into my old routines with yoga and meditation before writing. It’s still not easy. I keep thinking of Sisyphus getting that rock going. And of Jack and Jill and the frightening joy of tumbling down. When was the last time I lay in the grass and rolled down a hill?

Spun until I fell down?
Chewed on a dandelion?
Let an ant crawl on the back of my hand?
Shook sand out of my hair?

Yeah, all this “forest bathing” I do, and I am still just observing.

I watch and listen
as though being separate
from the world this way
were the safest thing to do
– this way to preserve a life

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A Changeling

I look down at my fingers on the keyboard and have to remind myself that there is nothing here to be ashamed of. These twisting bones should be honored.

But it’s not easy.

For months I’ve been working on the manuscript for Impermanence, which is all about embracing change because there is nothing else real.

It’s as though most of us were immortal creatures swapped at birth, faeries misplaced among humans. Puzzled by our strange bodies. The cellulite that comes with menarche, the skin-tag-chaos of cells gone feral. The relaxing, the what’s-all-the-fuss attitude that these creatures, our bodies take on.

“What’d you win for all that work?”

I make a lot of things harder than they are. Putting my attention on ornamentation and packaging instead of the essence of this thing that is living. Even in the middle of a delicious bit of creation, I can step back and judge it. Shift the point of view. Objective, not subjective. Passive, not active. Contemplative, not experiential.

Clearly, I believe in the value of contemplation. But in service to the experience, and not vice versa.

Oxpeckers prevent parasites from sucking the blood of an animal by plucking them from the skin. But an over-eager oxpecker can open new wounds. Can prevent healing.

All medication is poison.

And the metaphors go on. And on. Because this neutrality is the truth of the world.

The neutrality of time. It is interesting that we say, “passing”. Because the metaphor fixes “time” as a thing that moves past us. Personified as a series of creatures that wander through our lives. Or through the world. This time, that time that was.

I am having a difficult time (!) conceiving of time as a continuous present and nothing more. (And believe me, I’ve been toying with this idea for months now). Time does not pass. Time is the only constant and the only reality and everything else is a story in the present.

Maybe this is what the faerie knows. And just can’t relate it to human semiotics?

spaces between open:
the highs and lows, the terrain
of years – a topography
of living more visible
before the final closing