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Graduating To Wet Stones "I had to
learn why I would rather die than love..."
-Anne Sexton
I will be twenty-six in July. But you,
barely twenty-one, will still be
young
for another year or two. We sit and watch
the water stroke over
sand, a restless petting.
Small stones tossed from their ocean boudoir,
ride
the foam, nestle in irregular piles; lie still
and washed.
I keep recalling the last time you were here and I
was not. No summer thrills, but plenty of shocks;
they politely called it therapy. I could almost smell
the brine on the silky cardboard breeze you'd sent me.
When they said I might never share that pacific harmony
with you again I, being a shade more stubborn
than weak, pushed back the death dreams.
I can tell you what they will never know: how the mind
can cling to one single moment, how that liquid image
like some
impulsive wave, can lift and carry you
through a maze of voodoo chemistry,
and more. Their cures,
the drugs, that alter my crooked psyche will never make a moment
as clear, as these wet, simple stones, freeing themselves.
Succession
Death will be aghast and so will
nature, when
creation rises again
to make answer to the judge.
-Thomas of Celano
These humid seconds, rush past, leave me with
no sense of their
origin; more restless
requests for creation. In moments when
nothing emerges as palpable, I
wonder how it was all done. Were images of
Man swimming inside the dream follies of
some creator? Were fragments plumbed like rough
orbs from the pink, gapping mouths of oysters;
discontentment our mother? Did she, like
Logos, set loose a river, persuade breath
out of still matter? Now I find myself
her inheritor, awash in the same
dim inquietude, as was she, before
freeing the stars to illuminate. But
where is it, that rational, that blazing
reason? Without, I am left holding these
dank minutes, blank seconds
without any
vision. These simple tools, passed down to
me on tilted synapses, rough outlines
wanting form, what can I author
that's not
been concieved inside the mind of such a
skilled artisan?
For now, I can only
hold this gritty sand and imagine pearls.
wanting form, what can I author that's not
been conceived inside the mind of such a
skilled artisan? For now, I
can only
hold this gritty sand and imagine pearls.
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