Month: April 2020

There is no outside. Because we are dependent on language to structure perception, and because language is inherently ideological, the world is always given to us already ideologically formed. There is always relationship. When I was younger I kept lists but now I just sit or stand quietly outside and let them sing. Not only can you not take it with you, you can’t even hold it in the interim! I want to use the word “vireo” in a poem but don’t because I haven’t seen one recently but also am concerned this misunderstands a critical function of poetry which is to bring forth the world which one desires. The confusion of self-criticism with honesty makes all the lies make sense. On daylight savings Sunday we get to the horses an hour later than usual and they whinny calling us, tight coils like rope unfurling in morning chill. One of the stories I have not adequately told is about the dead calves and burying them with my father who like most men when faced with grief just dug a grave. Two cups of coffee into the morning and this is what you’ve got? In another setting, I write a permission slip for use of the word “soul.” I was pleased with myself once, the pleasure informing a lot of what continues to appear. Is it possible we confused our hunger for something else? The moon declines my overtures now. In my bed a wild rose bush, the folds keeping me up all night in the posture of one crying “mercy.”

Bright Venus in the pale blue dusk, not like anything I know how to put in words. You say “I’ll give anything to know you Lord” and the Lord appears and plucks your tongue out so you can’t tell anybody which – it turns out – was what you actually wanted, bragging rights to divine visitation. Was it always going to be this way? I stand aside Main Street, dizzy from looking up, toes going slowly numb, my son’s guitar faintly chorusing in the distant hay loft. February will end, winter will end, this body will end but there is something that will not end? “You can tell yourself anything,” says the Man without Shoes. Yet later, under heavy quilts my great aunt Muriel made in the 1960s, the poems return after several days away, unintentionally traded for the dazzling insights of four a.m.. “You can’t have everything,” says the Man without Shoes, who never met a witch who didn’t instantly invite him to inspect her ovens. One makes the case that it doesn’t matter if God is real or unreal and is surprisingly lifted, proof if proof were needed that God is not attached to any particular ontological status. Coincidence abounds, as if somebody somewhere wants to be with us. All echoes are the effect of longing! Coyote cries in the forest remind me that lingering too has its limits. I’ve forgotten something: or I’m hiding something. Am helping someone? Look at me, four years old all over again.

A long morning passes wordily, insights tumbling like black bears through bracken. Is it possible I read too much? The Man for Whom the World is a Living Text observes that the Man without Shoes is nearly always shod. It’s okay: or it will be. I breathe and each breath is a lifetime and each lifetime a gift for which breathing is sufficient thanks and praise. What happens happens and I promise you I am here for all of it. However deep the river gets, no law requires you to drown in it. Saint Francis was beautiful but also an aberration: be not haunted by his example. Knowing is possible absent speech, yet relationship is what binds us to living, and so speech by definition becomes us: this, too, is a law. Absolved of the specific fate of praying alone, I begin to visit churches again, including the one in which I was married. Waves lap a rocky Irish shoreline as sunlight creeps up a steep Greek hill? Our gentle love-making anchors a quiet in which the soul is free to profess its divine love at last. We are lambs, we are shepherds, we are children, we are parents. In the cycle I make by giving my word, the Lord declares me Family.

At last one understands the terms and conditions of their ontological paralysis, their crippled epistemology and the corresponding emphasis on photographs, fucking and bread. Beautiful frail clouds dissemble in the faraway sky and float east towards the sea as if borne on a river. It is not forbidden to cry to violets and bluets “oh rescue me please!” Prayer is a traveling song for the lonely who by definition must advertise their loneliness. Shall we go together, shall we come together, my dear shall we end together? I feed the horses, sometimes I feed the chickens and pigs, and one way or the other I feed – with Chrisoula – our children. Poem by poem, sentence by sentence, interior plastic leis by which the Lord consents to be obscured are slowly cleared away. Hail Darwinian breezes! Begone Freudian myths! Yes, the autonomy of the living ends in our mouths but mouths too are functions of living. Listen to you singing about honey bees and lavender, reminding me that even seducers have to sometimes swoon. Look at me in late February discussing what to plant in the garden come Spring: dragon beans and pie pumpkins and kookaburra spinach. It’s like beyond the mechanical body there is another body, a body of light, and beyond that body a fire, a luminous orange blossom endlessly producing itself for no observer but occasionally itself. Pistils neither empty nor full, stamens neither lost nor found. Under my tongue, roseate folds soften like an origami swan blissfully returning to its Boston origins. Oh beautiful Cailleach, oh Mother of Christ, for this I entered the forest. Swallow me so in darkness I might taste again the light.

Who is watching? At night, before anyone else is awake, I take my dreams into the cold hay loft, spread them before me like Tarot cards, and kneel and pray to still-hidden gods. When my eyes that can see open and see what they see is the moon in strange locations, as if teaching me that the order to which I’m clinging will no longer suffice. These antique glass bottles half-filled with sand and stones, these cheap prisms dangling off fishing line and kite string. What but the Lord would afford so much blessing to one who offers so little? Hansel is forever at the mercy of women which for most of my life I’ve translated into a tense alliance between obedience and seduction but what if that’s not what works? Just after the first light of dawn – a blue hint of hills to which Emily Dickinson was no stranger – birds begin singing about food and mating and food. Without shoes I go forward on the crusty snow of late February, as deep into the song as I can, and at last see how it will never be enough. Before the snake, was the toad merely resigned or frozen with grief and terror? I was seven years old and nobody told me the dog was going to die until just before the dog was shot. Witches know something about hunger that you don’t, which is why you’re still on your knees. Oh Sean, invoke Christ or don’t but for Christ’s sake invoke. “My pretties,” she croons, “my chickadees.”

The curriculum requires a willingness to be sensual which I’ve managed mostly through food and steadfast refusals to sleep in ways a body wants which – surprise surprise – is not enough. Swans appear off the highway outside Boston, moving us to lamentations, a sense that something somewhere has gone fatally wrong. One way or another one vocalizes and relationships – both intended and otherwise – began their gorgeous raveling. Lately I begin to understand my sexuality in terms of a vast but failed project to dissuade the Lord from loving me and wonder is it too late to wonder who I should go to for help. Some impossibilities appear as trails one can follow unto death, hence the need for partners who are willing and able to interrupt us, redirect us, et cetera. Late at night, after walking far beyond the village in order to star-gaze and partake of the solitude my living appears to depend on, I stand on the front porch and piss in a high gold arc east. I miss you Dan, wish all the comforts of the dharma upon you, and thank you profusely for your friendship in the difficult years of my early twenties. Warm beer, Hank Williams songs, barely manageable inclinations to topple off high places. For example, hastily jerking off in order not to be tormented later by certain images and their attendant forbidden narrative. I stumble into these sentences under the watchful eyes of a witch who is allowed to choose whether to save or eat me. In the choir loft one realizes that some messes cannot be cleaned because of a not-so-secret desire to make things even messier. Oh Christ, this body, oh Christ, this cross, oh Christ, these nails growing thin and translucent.

Dawn appears slowly through drawn curtains while I empty the coffee mug, gray light filtering through the prayer like sunlight pillaring a mid-summer lake. Travel plans that come to naught, as eventually all travel plans must. One finds oneself in a dream of dogs, a narrator (whose voice is oddly familiar for one so comforting) gently informing the dreamer it is time again to live with dogs. Skimming in order to determine what is necessary vs. what is merely interesting and not clinging to anything under the false rubric of “maybe one day.” Jesus is an invitation to live in ways that confound our basic human nature, which living is a) possible and even broadly helpful but b) more fun to argue against than actually work to embody. The eyeglasses of the poor, the teeth of the poor, the shoes of the poor. Unloading hay one hears what sounds like gun shots and pauses briefly, alarmed. Beginning yet another intellectual sortie into the nineteenth century – this time Darwin – which sortie failed approximately thirty years earlier. Also realizing in one’s early fifties how much of their living has been influenced by Freud, that arrogant fabulist, that panicked poser. Sunlight illuminates in a fatal way minuscule prisms of frost blossoms that like the rest of us fade as we speak.