“Who will help us descend into our caverns?”
The Poetics of Reverie, pg 149.

“It is an honor to be the wind
It is happiness to be the stone”
Alain Bosquet, as quoted in The Poetics of Reverie, pg 165.

“Each new object, well considered opens up a new organ of perception within us.”
The Poetics of Reverie, pg 166.

“As we tune that instrument, it is also tuning us.”
Douglas Leedy as quoted in The Seventh Dragon, pg xiii.

 

Thought is such an obscure cavern, and so is sound – both intangible, invisible. With crayons we can color in one moment of thought in to the outline of the brain, and we can make sounds jump across the paper in to ragged lines, but neither thought nor sound have been captured.  They remain elusive, too expansive to grasp in sight – we can only hold these intangibles in memory and imagination. We are bathed in the sounds of life and lust and intention and accident and gratitude and fear and love that all carry us, when we allow every movement to reach out and touch us, to taste us.

As we taste the oyster it tastes us.
As we write music, it writes us.
As we examine objects and passions they open new ways of seeing the world.
– By deeply seeing them, we learn how they see us.
– By entering their being, We see Us.

“While in the fields

Of this eternal childhood

The poet walks

And doesn’t want to forget anything.”

Jean Follain pg 110 of The Poetics of Reverie

 

 

Notes and Neurons and Me

 

Notes and neurons playing behind sight, beneath sound, after silence, above stars

Playing on tire swings together

In the school yard right where I wanted to be

With my notes and my neurons

When we were all inside on days seeping with sunlight

Notes and neurons sometimes whisked me away

On sun-dropped days

To the school yard and the sky.

We played in the white sands

And the grey sands of stars.

Notes and neurons and I reborn

As butterflies

Swimming though sound

Crystallizing in forests of dendritic souls,

Painting trees into color, in the shade

Of the dappled sun

Waiting for the bell

When the day was done.

And when the bell rang out

We didn’t wait ‘til the last note was cast

To jump from the desks and fly

To Saturn’s balcony

To tease the little asteroids

Who thought themselves moons

As we circled, never caught

By the gravity of substance.

What good times we had ~ playing

behind sight,

beneath sound,

after silence,

above stars

~ notes and neurons and me.

“The Soul and the Mind do not have the same memory…

O memory the soul renounces

Frightened to conceive you.”

The Poetics of Reverie, pg 104

I was also partly (perhaps mostly) inspired to write this poem by reading Marissa’s lipogram sem pass yesterday, and decided to leave out the letters in the word ‘Calm.’

Artist’s Note: When we are trying to escape fear and the other less pleasant sensations, are we not just fleeing from feelings painting the truth before our eyes?

 

Pounding postures of obsession:  Without C A L M

Fright pushes through the nests

Words wove with the twigs of bright

Spring visions.

They exist wedged into the rigidity of eons.

They writhe – they require progress in twists.

        Stroke this identity with your fingers

        Soothe the pounding postures of obsession

Never sensing the deep keys to these eyes

Or the devious keys to the birds of sight.

For I drive the ties of now

To drop off, drop down

        Surround this body in the stone surf

        Press your body into serene eternity

The ten gripping digits shorten ‘now’

To ‘no’

        Brush your retort in red behind you

        Sweep the beyond to the future

So the first returns to the end.

        Speed by this worry, hurry.

        Write with the severed pens of desire

To see fresh wings.

We weren’t designed to bend

So we now drown in depths

Of egrets dripping fibers of hope

To destroy the hue of truth

        Rub up, ruin the injury.

        Wed the poise of terror

– In her iron nest of spines you know

You know your tests.

P     I   A                               N                                                                   O

the graceful letter P am I. And you should have No questions as to my gentle character, but Oh!

How I have longed to be more than a breath of air forced from puckered lips;

Loved for my graceful shape, rather than reviled

For the spittle I have speckled on the back of many poor, unsuspecting necks…

I have been misused! Stuck in to words in the most preposterous places!

But in some, chosen with care, I am in perfect, peaceful harmony.

One of my favorite places to be is holding up the edge

Of the sympathetic and patient Piano

~ Especial the Grands – already poised in my pleasing and shapely image.

 

You might think I’m a bit pompous, and perhaps I am,

But I know my proper place,

And take on an appropriately unpresuming post

When I am brought to someone’s lips or pen tip

In the romance of the word ‘Piano.’

Ah! What joy pulses through my portly body

As I reminisce about her supreme purity,

The adorable plumpness of her, my dear panda-colored piano…

 

My simple and pedestrian nature, compared to the

Supreme compassion and pull of my tempting partner

Her pedicured pedals made of perforated metal

The pens scratching out compositions to her captivating presence.

Oh! I cannot compare!

 

I am hypnotized by her receptive and perceptive disposition

I am but the peduncle upon which the pleasant piano can perch…

I am but the peel, from which her precious pearl charisma can appear…

 

As I wrap up, and prepare to complete this compilation of words

I penitently proffer my apology for all my skipping and flipping about,

I assure you, it wasn’t for pretentious display out of pride

But more precisely, in order to persuade you to

Realize my importance, balanced

With my appropriately peaceable and prudent disposition.