When I think in poetry,
I draw diagrams of meaning
inside larger circles of words
made of symbols for windy sounds
constricted.
Packs of baseball cards on the racks
as I walk past into the supermarket
enclosed me in a scent memory
of cardboard and bubblegum
a distant feeling circle
so immense I could never
get outside of it.
Now my limiting circles have expanded
to reach stars and inverted
down to microbes and electrons,
my enveloping skin stretched
so thin I could pop me with a thought.
| 27-May-2005 | ||||||||
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That there is such a thing as local Mars time seems to stretch my mind. The fact that a dust devil whirled across a desolate plain in front of remotely monitored device millions of miles from any person and that an image of it was captured for as long as the technology exists to replay and eyes that can witness it. For a mile it danced and then dissolved into atmosphere and falling particulate.
For some reason, it makes me think of all those songs we sent out in the Voyager spacecraft, and especially the haunting sound of Blind Willie Johnson’s wailing blues, and hugeness of what we don’t know about our own planet and being human. A man I know died today. I did not know him well, though I greeted him almost daily for 2 years and was lately working with him in therapy. The details of his life, his catastrophes and loves, were mostly unknown to me. How do I balance the hugeness of a life that comes down to decisions made without much thought that lead to incidents that leave a person struggling to breathe and the fact that I know that there are dust devils on mars and what the local time was when they happened. What was the local time on Mars when this man died. I didn’t know he was dead until I couldn’t find him. I thought he was out napping in the sun. I moved through my day shuffling other patients into his slot and thinking. “He’s out there relaxing and having a smoke and snooze, because that’s what he does on nice days.” All this has somehow connected in my mind in ways I have not quite figured out yet. My life is not greatly changed by a man’s death or dust devils on Mars, but they are both markers that send the imagination reeling into the abyss full possibilities and inevitabilities that spring out of nowhere even though they are with us and have been long before we sent machines to Mars or we were launched into this life.
Wait until now becomes then, then you will see how happy we were.
Paraphrased from Susan Sontag, Unguided Tour
I ride your bicycle hands,
backwards through the dark ,
reversed and inverted
the wheel magnetized to
a grid of printed instructions
for unfolding origami lines
rolled balancing,
over hills of rags and bags,
tottering stagger
plunged
and battered into muddy pulp
compacted into veins,
pumped in blood
and squeezed out
Moaning into the morning light,
from the tightly turned tourniquet
of night.
Orgasm, a rent controlled apartment, retroactive denial and in rare cases minor flashes of wistful annoyance.
 | randomyriad on Mosaic II: A Drawing in P… |
 | suburbanlife on Mosaic II: A Drawing in P… |
 | cabrogal on A Dangerous Woman |
| randomyriad on Ink Mosaic |
| suburbanlife on Ink Mosaic |
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