Enough
“You are not enough.”
She said it out loud.
Tagged with: fiction, imagination, moments, narrative, poem
Falling
All I knew was that I had to hurry. My muscles tensed. My blood rushed. I wasn’t even sure why. I rolled forward into the night. I pushed through the crowded city street. My own heartbeat fell in with the footsteps, the car horns, the tires thumping down the avenue. I was outside in and inside out. We all blended—all the beats and the clangs and the whines. My pulse was no longer my own. I had lost the rhythm.
And then it happened. The staircase must have been there all along, and I missed my step. I tumbled down. I heard myself clatter and clack. I saw the air turn. And I landed alone in a clump at the bottom of the stairs. A dim light gleamed over a closed door. The outside rhythms had stopped. There was no push inside. No rush outside. I lay there a long time, at the bottom of that staircase, waiting for a pulse. My own steady beat. My own. Steady. Beat.
Tagged with: poem, story, struggle, words
A Christmas Morning Poem
Give us This Day…
A certain piece of bread tastes
like no other.
Its outer crust gives way
to the soft melting underneath.
Tagged with: poem
Bardo Again
Came across this quotation from Lionel Trilling:
“Between is the only honest place to be.”
Tagged with: connection, poem, quotation
Bardo Poem
Here is the poem (perhaps still in progress) that grew out of my lessons in negative space and my introduction to the buddhist concept of bardo. Thank you, Kennon.
“A Lesson in Negative Space”
Tagged with: connection, moments, poem
Bardo - Between the Islands
I had dinner the other night with Vanessa and Kennon. They travel all of the time. I told them that traveling makes me anxious. Kennon asked me why. I told him that transitions are hard for me. He explained Bardo—a buddhist concept that, according to Wikipedia, means an intermediate or transitional state. Apparently bar means between and do means island. Kennon explained that the most fundamental transition is the one from life to death. He looked at my denim jacket, and he said, “Consider taking off that jacket and putting on another. Consider that transition. Consider the movement from life to death as being that simple.”
In my drawing class, the instructor spent a whole class period on the concept of negative space—that being the shapes that happen between and around the object you are trying to draw. For instance, if you look at a chair, you see the seat, the back, and the legs. But if you look at the space around and between the chair, you see something else. In drawing the negative space around a chair, you end up drawing a chair.
Tagged with: connection, learning, poem
Past
In exploring the poetry of my past, I am discovering a part of my writer self that I thought I had lost. I want to find a way to reconnect what I am doing now with what I did then. And it is happening. I just finished one last draft of my novel—now called, tentatively, New Moon Falls. As I revised, I found that part of my writer self from years ago—the part of me that wrote this poem:
Fossil
Tagged with: connection, discovery, poem, process
"Aren't Us"
September 11th, 2001 has been on my mind lately. I just enrolled in a new drawing class, and so I have been looking through some of my drawing/painting exercises from past art classes, and I came upon pieces I had done in 2001, months before the horrible event. Looking at those dates—May 2001, August 2001—I could not imagine what it felt like to not know what I was about to know.
And the other day, in looking through an old textbook, searching for teaching ideas, I came upon a poem I had never read before:
Tagged with: connection, discovery, poem, truth, words
A poem to center me/you
I cannot find my center. Or so I have been told. I scheduled a session with a chi running instructor so that I could learn to “run without pain”—as the chi running book suggests I can. Chi running is based on the principles of Tai Chi. My “coach” came over yesterday, and we walked down to the Arboretum for our session. He said, “I see by your website that you do not feel centered.” I said, “How did you get that from my website?” He said, “Some story you wrote about not finding home.” Of course, once he said this, I obsessed that my website makes me appear not centered.
In the midst of my uncentered life, I happened to listen to a podcast about Elizabeth Bishop, the poet. Her long time friend, Lloyd Schwartz has put together a new book about her, and that book includes a poem he transcribed from one of her notebooks before she died. I was a bit stunned to learn that she never knew he copied the poem; and now—it is there for all to see. Of course, I wondered about the ethics of his choice until I heard the poem. It is so good. Here it is. For a moment, it centered me. I hope it does the same for you.
Tagged with: center, discovery, poem
Living Room
In the living room
she sits—
In a chair,
the upholstered kind,
old-fashioned with winged arms—
a chair made for conversation
or reading.
A floor lamp illuminates her.
And next to the chair, a red walker
complete with wheels
waits to take her other places.