One eye open. One eye closed.
She does this.
Category: writing
When what where how.
she had sung aloud, when’st alone quite unabashed she was
only the doors have opened and the room turns amber
where’st the sun has peaked its head around the corner
alas there is the stopping of the hands
alack there is the stopping of time
alas there is the stopping of forward’d fate
alack there is the how’st and the why’st of stopping
alas there is the flooded eyes and softened lips
alack there is the recollections of complex tapestry
alas there is the memory of fall’d robes and Turkish towels
alack there is the opening up and there is trust
(And so this is Christmas, and What Have We Done?)
and there are their quietudes and their poetry and their wonder
there is this year, fate, deed, word, thought, destiny
“Every time you say it (or read it) you make another copy
In your brain”
– touch like this, hold like that –
once loved, and awakened, there is no sleep
Gustave Klimt knows and he knows and she knows
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They know five graces.
An aria is an elaborate composition, replete. It is stone fireplaces and unguarded glances, champagne and living in a place where all the rest of the world has pushed pause. O! Oratorio! The most gorgeous song, rendered beautifully. An aria, she thinks, must be sung so that it reverberates off the tiled art where one bathes.
She is performing in the most bittersweet opera, wondering if it will end in a duet or a solo – the chambers of music torn open or sew’d shut. All the best opera are based in hope. The tragedies have no quarter when compared to the lifting of the soprano and alto, the tenor and bass of the spirit soaring above earthly cares.
Operetti, singing the songs of this life. These singers, they deserve happiness. She knows little, but she knows this: BEN şarkı şarkı sevgi. She sings the songs of this life.
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Poetry is life, or life is poetry.
In December. Time moves fitfully and yes, there is still poetry. For those who find they cannot write because Creativity has other places it visits at Christmas time, there is still, thankfully, all the millions of verses that bring pleasure to the senses. Were it writ, or were it read, the poems and their beloved lines comfort. Time to revisit the poems that for years and years have sounded their beautiful swells.
e.e. cummings, one of her perennial favorites, gives us this gorgeous offering:
somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond any experience,your eyes have their silence: in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me, or which i cannot touch because they are too near your slightest look easily will unclose me though i have closed myself as fingers, you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens (touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose or if your wish be to close me, i and my life will shut very beautifully ,suddenly, as when the heart of this flower imagines the snow carefully everywhere descending; nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals the power of your intense fragility:whose texture compels me with the color of its countries, rendering death and forever with each breathing (i do not know what it is about you that closes and opens;only something in me understands the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses) nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands
Writing is breathing.
She will write. Prescription, albuterol! Asthma pump against her lips…she can’t not write.
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The universal ultimate agency by which the order of things is presumably prescribed.
What happens when she can’t write? When even words, her very best friends and the marchers who never break ranks, when they won’t come? Then, she falls into the most indulgent contemplation, the most abstract romanticism, where Gustav Klimt and all the Romantics resided.
She remembers contemplating fate once, imagining that fate (grand destiny) must play itself out, and if it does not, that all the clocks in all the world must simply come to a stop and time will start to go backward, for minutes, then years, then eras, finally eons, until the moment is discovered when fate went off it’s rails. And then, fate corrects itself, lifting itself back onto the treads, and time resumes. All is right with the world again.
Every moment since she was born, every step, has led her to this place. And those around her, to their places. Where they converge, into fire and into brilliant light and into an understanding that only the very fortunate ever get to glimpse, in their one life, this one. She is thankful she gets to see it.
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They want to know everything. Panic. Radio. Acceptance.
The animal lit upon the the panic button, paws and fur and limbs pressing upon it hard, helpless against the threat of being at the mercy of a lion who may embrace her, may desert her.
The animal exhibited all the typical responses, fully in Fight or Flight Mode:
Acceleration of heart and lung action
Paling or flushing, or alternating between both
Inhibition of stomach and upper-intestinal action to the point where digestion slows down or stops
Constriction of blood vessels in many parts of the body
Dilation of blood vessels for muscles
Inhibition of the lacrimal gland (responsible for tear production) and salivation
Dilation of pupil (mydriasis)
Auditory exclusion (loss of hearing)
Tunnel vision (loss of peripheral vision)
Shaking (the interminable shaking!)
The animal tells herself to gather her courage. Be brave.
She is a small animal, licking her small paws, waiting for the Crown’d King to call her to the glory of his audience…he, the host of the kingdom.
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Solar energy has the highest density of generated power.
“The future is now!”–Photovoltaics are the way in which one energy, solar, is converted to another kind of energy. The vibration of such power makes her heart beat faster, her fingertips tremble upon the keyboard when she goes to write.
And so it is discovered that energy, conduits, ions of feeling are still alive after such a long time lying dormant..a photovoltaic transfer, All the bravest writers from all the most typical places, for all time, have sought to find this very place.
Hope, it is the thing with feathers*, it soars past the earth, into the heavens, up up, higher, above…
Photovoltaic…indeed.
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* Emily Dickinson
At sea.
The word he used was “strife.”
strife: /straɪf/[strahyf]
noun
1.vigorous or bitter conflict, discord, or antagonism: to be at strife.
2.a quarrel, struggle, or clash: armed strife.
3.competition or rivalry: the strife of the marketplace.
4.Archaic. strenuous effort.
Strife meant, to her, that last one. The arcane “strenuous effort.” She had done that–listed for miles and miles, starboard, in a ship constructed of strenuous effort. No land in sight. From the lookout from where she stood, there was no home. Just the vast ocean of gray sea.
But it was not always so. Once:
She was a girl who played library as a child. At the kitchen table, she quietly opened book after book and pretended to stamp a due date into their covers. She solemnly slid the books across the table to the invisible borrower, and would say in an authoritative voice, “Please do not be tardy returning your books. Enjoy reading this, it is one of my favorites.”
He was a boy who had a brilliant thought as a child. He climbed to the top of his mother’s house, to the roof. With faith born of magical thinking, he jumped off the roof, believing a garbage bag would be a suitable parachute. Perhaps he imagined his small form floating softly to the ground.
They had big imaginations, once. They didn’t know Webster’s entry for strife. They knew the particular latitudes of freedom, where the ocean met land and they could find their landlegs. She knew of books of poetry and stories where heroic acts take place. He knew the dizzing freedom of flying through the air without knowing what the landing would be.
(One life. You get to live it.)
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Magic tree.
Like a thousands-year old tree before it clear-fells in the forest, she is rising out of the earth to meet a sky, to show her face to the sun. Her hopes and desires are timeless. She only wants what hearts thousands of years ago also wanted.
But – a lumberjack, burly and bearded, swinging an axe, the heft of it comfortable and fully real in his hand, he approaches the majestic ringed oak and with a roar that scatters all the birds in the forest to all the corners of the heavens, he heaves the blade into solid trunk. He feels the reverberations in the handle of his tool, it travels up his arm, it finds the top of his head.
He repeats his labors. And in time, the tree succumbs, it is brought to its knees. (Does anyone hear its cries? The calving? If there is nobody in the forest when it finally acquiesces its fate…that old question…)
And so it is with her. If her story isn’t named, it still is. (The lumberjack for her is reality, or it is details, her lumberjack is time and space.) Her experience still exists in the verdant and loamy forest. There isn’t the need of spectators, of observers, it is a quiet time. It has no fury or direction. Her time carries itself in the natural world, outside of society, inside the beats and special tempo that nature commands.
Alive, her blood moves quicker, here in the woods where sun streams its lovely incessant amber heat down through all the green. She is sumptiously warm, here.
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mary june brown 