Still Snow

A tough patchy crust but the crocuses
and robins do not mind. There is enough
sun in the soil to survive. Winter
asks what we will burn, what we'll keep alive.
Spring finds what will take root and what will fly.
Holed up in darker corners of the earth
the dead, or so we think, remain unmoved
by new light as it filters through the trees'
new budded shoots. But, oh, how rooted things
do move! The sweetly buried come to me
by dream. By dream I build my garden here,
wait for the snow to sink, for buried life
to blast the crust, to rise and drink the sky.
Oh, how my lips would take that clear cold wine!


sonnet, yo.

muck.

The past week of thaw and ice and rain and wind and sun and mud and seismic shifts has meant a lot of shaking up, opening up, movement, movement, movement. I’ve gone mudding in a U-Haul, filled a not-quite-five-hundred-square-foot space with my worldly belongings, made a six hour round trip drive to sing songs and walk the dog and eat amazing cake, gotten sick and stayed home, covered for others when they’ve gotten sick, slept in the yurt with nothing but a little kerosene space heater and a lot of wool blankets, made two batches of waffles, shopped for more housewares than I’ve needed in a lifetime, and just generally stretched my perception of need and desire, love and friendship, honesty and trust. Funny how a little mud-season movin’ can turn everything upside down.

I will have photos of the yurt online soon, once I unearth my camera. It is beautiful and round and light and open and cozy and I can’t wait to settle in.  Gabe and I have not truly settled into anywhere together; we have been on a perpetual move for more than a year.  To actually be in a place I want to be, doing what I want to do is overwhelming; I wasn’t expecting it to happen—certainly not now, and certainly not here in this corner of Vermont I sort of pledged not to come back to.  This is why I don’t plan too strenuously; the world seems to unfold before me however it wants, and there is little control I can impose over how and where and when and why it pulls me. 

After reading voraciously through the winter months, March has brought a change. I am out and about in the world now, no longer holed up in the warm cave of other people’s words. There is so much to do--I can no longer afford the luxury of escapism. I want to make, make, make; I have a lot of catching up to do if I want to live my life with some impact.  

What that impact will look like I don’t know. I have spent a good deal of time this past week sharing my cooking with others, which has been more fun than I anticipated, and planning a garden, a good manageable garden, for the summer. I was reading some pretty bad poetry this morning and came across a poem that ended with a line that said, in effect, a word is enough to feed a thousand. Which is patently untrue. Immediately brought to mind a short poem called “Communcación” by Alicia Partnoy, a piece that I could remember in Spanish and had to translate into English in my head (a good sign of fluency):

Yo te hablo de poesía

y vos me preguntás,

a qué hora comemos.

Lo peor es que

yo también tengo hambre.

I am talking to you about poetry

and you ask me

when do we eat.

The worst of it is

I am hungry too.

Here’s the thing:  I know every Bread & Puppet devotee out there has heard the “Art Feeds You” mantra, and I love Cheap Art as much as anyone, but it’s not enough. And poetry may forever be the one constant in my life, the one endeavor I cannot ignore, but it doesn’t seem like art alone will ever be enough to sustain me.  For what, then, will sustain the art? Poetry may be like bread, but it isn’t bread. One of the most destructive things artists try to do, I think, is live on their art—whether in a literal or a figurative sense. It is different than living for art.

Last night, Gabe and I went to see the new Sylvain Chomet (of Triplets of Bellville fame) movie, The Illusionist. It’s far and away the best movie I’ve seen this year, and so heartwrenchingly beautiful it is worth mentioning here. I have no desire to dissect or even synopsize what Chomet conveys in this film; suffice to say it is one of the best treatments of art and poverty that I have ever seen, animated or otherwise.

I realize I am patching together only a vague portrait of what I find satisfying and dissatisfying in this world. I think I’m a bad blogger because I refuse to post for the sake of posting; when I write for the sake of writing, more often than not, I end up dissatisfied.  What I am writing in this moment feels frivolous because it is inconclusive and not self-contained, despite the fact that it is driven by some very real and unnamed sense that demands to be tamed and held and understood. I want to deal with the concrete and specific world. I want to make thought and language concrete and specific. I want to keep it all floating, and I want to keep it all from floating away.  

When the sun comes...

...and hangs around a while, then I will be happy. Oh February, what a tease you are.

I am steadily revising what feels like everything I have ever written, so there is not much new to give you. Here's a first draft that I keep meaning to chop up and make better, but you can have it raw:

Some Elegy

You stand separate from the crowd,

and still I cannot find you

in this place packed tight with bodies—

I never asked to breathe these smells.

So you find me, and weave,

more feline than thread,

through the rest.

At your approach, my first thought:

Who wants a woman with stick legs and a round face?

We were beautiful children,

we moved in light, in circles,

embraced the awkward and the lithe;

we smelled of snow.

Here you hold yourself so still,

not statue-still, not stone.

Yours is the stillness of bones

that have given up on flesh.

You used to refuse all skirts,

borrowed blue jeans from your brothers.

I remember you rosy and dirt-faced,

your weak spots so well-hidden

I believed you had none.

You have embellished yourself with shadows: 

long hair that hangs down,

kohl, the illusion of cheekbones,

clavicle and wingbones

more prominent than what they hold.

I don’t believe now that you ever were a girl.

But I like to imagine you on a bicycle,

or putting in order feathers, small stones and shells.

Determination would suit you better than pallor

if you still possessed a will.

With those hands,

the gardens you could plant!

This wan waifishness

disturbs my sense of you

who used to be a finer creature: 

glossy, wellfed, wily and soft.

The way you slipped between trees,

evaded every thorn and wayward root—

you had talent then, native and untamed. 

You are smug and fragrant now

in the most mundane of ways:

talcum powder and rotting fruit.

I would like to see you with apple in your mouth,

red skin like blood on snow.

I have no hope that you will ever taste

the world’s blood now, that dulcet mineral.

You do not give.

You are not strong.

Every promise spoken comes to you in foreign tongue.

I think you used to sing.

Nothing I give you can draw your eye

or breach your skin, all pale fickle flash,

one long impenetrable grin.

I have for you no name.

You crave color for your hair eyes lips and fingertips.

You have no color of your own.

A collector of longings,

No pulse ever stirs your surfaces.

You stretch like a cat, and yawn.

No different, you say, than any other.

But you hide your sorrow better,

dress your sickness warm and rough and well.

You could get away with a corset or a veil.

Rhetoric and rules, historical traces do not apply to you.

I used to think of oceans when I watched you,

of riverbanks overrun.

You stretch the limits of proper, of beautiful:

nothing normal about the ability to appear so ill

and so at ease in these skins that suit no one—

the way you shrink yourself, then swell.

Remember, there was wholeness in your every gesture;

your vocabulary was your limbs.

Your body a tool you are learning to use

with the coldest precision,

a locked box you’re learning to pick.

I hope you don’t give yourself.

I hope you don’t freeze.

I hope I forget you.

I hope that you don’t.

I cannot care any longer

for your words, for your limbs.

Don’t put stones in your pockets.

I taught you to swim.