Apr 262024
Apr 232024
Making art is the great expression of joy and optimism. Music, art, remind us of our fundamental capacity to create beautiful things out of the fuckeries of life.
Apr 182024
This morning before daybreak a thunderstorm
In the last hours before her death
her enemies came. A raccoon, that storm,
the FedEx truck manned by a gentle woman
who’d recently lost her own dog.
Considering the woman who was usually her enemy
our dog perhaps read the grief in her,
just as, the night before, a raccoon
along the fence backlit by moonlight
watched our dog drink noisily from the fountain,
her thin body so thirsty! never sensing
the creature who continued
along the fence and disappeared
So many things to learn, keep on learning
during these last days, watching us
with an awareness that we perhaps
have not learned but shall
Now we are less. How do we become more?
How to die courteous and beautiful
protecting her house, guarding our door
Apr 182024
The spaces
between
things began
speaking. So it was
I understood I
was now
to remain
silent. Saw how
we were all
plunged
into this new strengthening
silence. Was it
vision was it
catastrophe. This
first person
I use here
as a way of referring
to my being in
abeyance – to my
unknowing –
though who are we kidding,
it was not of the radiant kind
where we wait in line
willingly
eyes closed
for the tap on the high spot
of the soul
for illumination. No.
We knew all along
we were being driven
however kindly –
and always with water & treats
and names murmured
which had been bestowed
upon us
long ago
before we could resist
the temptation
of being made so
singular –
to slaughter.
So the things had seemed
secretly our allies,
but free,
so free.
They had not acceded
to these transactions.
Had remained mute.
Neither accomplices
nor witnesses –
mute …
This stand of trees
before me now,
and yes the one tree
my need for companionship
picks out,
that certain one
in its own light,
solitary
it seems to me.
It seems to me
we regard each other
here now, blazing,
at the end.
But it is no longer
my turn
to inquire,
to push around it & at it.
And yet how its branches amaze me.
How is it I
have not seen them before
for what they are,
these miles of nowhere-going
tangling & re-
directing this
October light, every journey
silver-grey with
roiling shadows going
nowhere
in the dawn wind.
What is nowhere
is the first thing
I make out
when it finally begins
to almost speak
to me. Listen to it
when it speaks to you – it is
the next world.
We are done.
The light is rising, the light is
sharpening
everything,
but not the mind.
There are no limits
to the world’s
imagination now.
Apr 182024
But words are things, and a small drop of ink,
Falling like dew, upon a thought, produces
That which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think;
’Tis strange, the shortest letter which man uses
Instead of speech, may form a lasting link
Of ages; to what straits old Time reduces
Frail man, when paper—even a rag like this,
Survives himself, his tomb, and all that ’s his.
And when his bones are dust, his grave a blank,
His station, generation, even his nation,
Become a thing, or nothing, save to rank
In chronological commemoration,
Some dull MS. oblivion long has sank,
Or graven stone found in a barrack’s station
In digging the foundation of a closet,
May turn his name up, as a rare deposit.