The Garden, the Hearth, the Loom and the Well
There’s a distinct and persistent feeling of having been away. But how do I recognize what I do not know I have lost? How do I return myself to myself, recognize the gesture, the true groping gesture that will bring me to making love again, but this time alone? Or perhaps, there will be no love making, perhaps it will be like death to finally return. I heard something recently, a certain pleasing dissonance coming through like glass bells ringing during a storm. I think they might break next time if I listen hard enough and stir the storm that drives the wind of this weird storm. What if they break and I’m alone in this waiting silence again like I’ve always been? “Waiting coils inside here and licks and licks it’s paws”.
The Garden
When it rains my feet get muddy sloshing around. I’ve decided to let the weeds grow in. I like geraniums. I don’t mind their ordinariness. If someone were here tending the place it might be more dignified, might have some sense about it, a certain geometry of color and reason. But there’s something appealing about the uncanny familiarity of imperfection, it has it’s own rhythm and pattern; keeps me at a distance so that I don’t stop wanting to touch everything.
She admits to liking a “dull motionless light”. He admits that the vase pretends against real death and makes all flowers dead, even though it’s still hard for me to admit this, I know it’s true and keep walking. It’s raining after all and I’ve known for some time that there’s no going back.
There’s a place that already exists in the vines of unknowing that grow up and down crooked legs from the wild garden in my belly. It’s a place where rambling and meandering are permitted, a place where people brood on distant horizons and question the things that are called forth when we plant our own land. What I mean is, the scale of things might be smaller in this place, humankind in proper relationship with nature, small like the figures of people perched on a craggy cliff in a wind blown Japanese landscape, sepia ink on paper, not indelible. It’s a place where trees have their rightful place in cities, and stone, and rain and hunger and sun and fresh air occupy the wild reaches of my eyes as I contemplate horizons and let them be forever distant and unknowable, wild like the garden in my belly.
The Well
She whispered to me when I was about to begin “things take time here, take time to go down, just listen. ”
“I don’t know if I can do this in time, I said. I need room.”
Then I knew, that any small movement would do. This would be a kind of time beyond time, pure space/place.
“I can even be afraid of this kind of time.”
“That’s only natural. It is so spacious you might become dizzy at first, lose your bearings, but that’s alright.” she said.
To ease into the descent I’ll just listen then to these whisperings, coming and going like the tides of a deep cool ocean. But, I’m not accustomed to all this whiteness. I thought it would be pure darkness. I’m falling, but suddenly there’s white all around and no edges, no temperature. I do taste something soft, like a feather. I can’t make it out. The feather is lying on a patch of green now, a soft grass stretches out in all directions, but there is no sky. No, suddenly there’s a red sky, meeting all this green and the feather is white and soft, drifting first this way, then that. I don’t know if this is inside or outside, or where I am in this scene, it just is. Now the scene has changed to a red sea and the sky is a sage green and the feather is floating away, soaking in red and I feel something in my body like the urge to cry.
The white expanse has returned like a slow sap, a white sap and I feel the stickiness, taste a sweetness I want to hide from. I can’t see anymore, now. I’m just smelling citrus, a green citrus, like limes just squeezed and I want that taste of sourness on my tongue. There’s a warmth to it. Now this place feels like a solid plane, smooth and wide and dry and the cool lime juice is refreshing. There’s a soft wind now and that white feather is dry again and white. I want to sleep. My body is waiting for a sound, like a bell. There, snap, a spark, a dark spark in this wide empty space.
What is that whispering ringing now, a glass bell is ringing somewhere incessantly and the wind is blowing harder. In the distance the sky fills with a sheet of red and tumbleweeds fill the plain in a profusion of spindly balls, multiplying, multiplying, filling every inch of this smooth, wide plain now rough with motion, pulsing and teaming edges and crackling branches. The red is gathering in places into swirling pools and spinning with force into a rushing, raging torrent of motion. Everything is motion now. There’s a crushing storm all around hurling sheets of red that become long sharp needles as they fall, penetrating my skin with minute punctures and now I feel the red threads accumulating around my body.
I’m wrapped in this binding of storm threads and feel my skin now cold and wet. It’s been raining, I hadn’t noticed at first. A wetness fills a kind of air. I’m breathing, I’m lost. Maybe these threads of image and meaning bind me. I need to wait to lose myself in sound, slip out and spread myself out and over smooth surface and make my body sounds a slicing cool slippery meandering muscle. There’s a mechanism of tension. It’s an opaque calling — that white again. Maybe it’s me that’s dark, a deep black cavern of unknowing, warmth, smell of geraniums, red flowers, candlelight, willows, oranges, grass, dandelions, a riotous heart, an ocean on fire, feathers raining down in white clouds of softness, a simple showing of dizzying whispers, green now and ripe, trembling, waiting, listening, spinning sounds and language laid out, breathing, echoing this whispering with light all around and dark inside. Then suddenly the vision and sound of Gloxinia seeps in, full and unquestioning. Then again, an inversion, a darkening outside and this burning white inside, memory pressing like the taste of sugar, sweet, undone.
Desert bed rain forest rain red angel bard
snitch selfish itch
skin soft falling fly
once and for all fall
fingers pick at rocks buried
dry earth packs a powder of pondering
pondering ponder flounder far flung floundering
fickle desire conspire to fire burn
kindle mistletoe feet — feats of daring this
itch scratch at dirt digging
bard blast selfish angel
one soft rock finger kindle pondering fire
conspiracy desiring dry snitch this itch again a bitch
an angel pondering once rock fall bury mistletoe
buried missile sizzling ponder wander wild itching
dig digging itch skin bard bitch angel missile toe, wild
kindle kindling fire fall falling fire conspire ice cold
rock hard resolute mining, desolate itch blast fickle bitch
angel snitch sister heart fire hearth desire rock hard descent
dissent against empty itch mister snitch selfish bitch kindle
angel conspiracy heresy, heretic hearth fire fall pondering wandering
fire desire once and for all earth daring wild fire wide angel
wild sizzling conspiracy of heresy wild life roots a tangle a
mangle mangled wild desire fire inspire ditch the bitch stitch
angel hair dark sister air keeper creeper keep her
deep tangle hassle fire life strife stitch witch
hunt hearth loom room garden fondle
funnel well wild vine wine vintage witch hunt fire conspire wire
tireless pyre winter root rock well rock waterfall angel bitch bard witch
angle rain forest chalice malice fallacy freak streak loom room
spinning rainwater forest forage desert ghost dance bone bride
marrow princess blood wedding
The Hearth
He never wanted me to leave, didn’t think in the end I’ve have the courage. He knew I had the strength all along but kept me distracted with the weight of his wood. It wasn’t mine to burn, he said, but I could stay if I tended the fire, his fire. It was work and it made me feel useful. What a pathetic turn of phrase, as if I couldn’t have simply enjoyed his warmth. I wanted to do just that, but I was cold all the time no matter how hard I worked. I felt as if that hearth were mine. I watched my heart burn in it for years.
hunt hearth loom room garden fondle
funnel well wild vine wine vintage witch-hunt
fire conspire wire tireless pyre winter root
hassle fire hair sister dark dance
The Loom
There’s a certain endless quality to winding thread, my body suspended before the end and completely forgetting the beginning. The turning is like breath, the sound of footsteps echoing as someone passes on the street. Where was I going? Away. I’ve been away remember, but I, I can’t go back. These words wrap around me in a tangle and I’ve just begun. Coming back to touch and rhythm, the reel appears and I can disappear again. It’s a red thread right now, rough in places, soft in others. It’s just thick enough to give me access to a narrow tunnel, away. I’ve been away, but I still need to go farther. I remember running away when I was a little girl and being astounded when I returned that no one knew I’d been gone. “People and things conspire to make it seem as if you had not been away.”
The Well
It’s been raining and there’s a fullness that reminds me of the thirst I was born with. I can’t make out the way to go from here. I remember vaguely the idea of losing something and maybe it’s down here. Where this swelling is, where there’s an ache and the sound of glass breaking. What happened I wonder? Where did the “first flower go, the hidden beauty, the secret meaning of the world.” I listen to a certain Chopin and I remember something, the light on a windowsill and the Mexican embroidery on my new blouse, my red velvet pants. A bit of wind blew the curtain away from the edge of the window and I could feel the texture of paint with my eyes. I don’t know why I was that hungry and satisfied at the same time but I think it was love rushing in with no reason.
Then there were the trains criss-crossing Germany and the songs that kept coming into my head like nonsense when it’s most needed. The sugar on steaming hot crepes in December were like a homecoming. But in here now as I am I recognize the real welcoming it was and the man I was with couldn’t or wouldn’t go with me. It’s all that sweetness I guess, Neruda can take it but not many other men I’ve known, it’s too dangerous after all. So, I’ve been away as I said, on a journey, if you don’t mind the plebeian term. I’ve been on foot for sometime lost and wandering with this weird storm that gathers and builds from time to time keeping me moving. There’s a restlessness that comes with stormy weather. Everything seems to come alive and mix with a strange longing for something to come unleashed, for everything to come unhinged.
rock hard resolute mining, desolate itch blast fickle bitch
fire desire once and for all earth daring wild fire wide angel
The Garden
When I lived beside an orange grove I used to spend afternoons making little towns and roads with sticks and leaves and rocks. We played Indian there too or wild horse, and that’s where I took all my mice and let them go in the field before I had twice as many, which would have been quite a few. I felt as if letting these field mice go back into a field was the right thing to do after all. This became glaringly apparent when I left the brand new babies with the adults in the same cage one summer. They shouldn’t be confined like that together. There was the alarming discovery of just two headless baby bodies left from that new litter at the bottom of the cage.
The Hearth
“What becomes of the broken-hearted . . .” wafts in on the wind and the word “surrender” makes an entry in neon right above the hearth.
Dissonance is harmony she said, She says that is what she wants in music and in what she writes me/you and in what she paints are geometrical lines that crisscross in space and form a discordance that she can understand. It’s pure it she says. She says what she’s telling me/you is very important.
The Well
fingers pick at rocks buried