Element
Blustery when I enter the bale today, trees tossed and swaying arhythmically down through their trunks. Some sprung tension in the spoken words, plans for travel changing around plans for ceremonies that changed plans for someone’s birthday. (A different present, is all that means.) Plans suspended and cast around like leaves in the fire of mid-day sun. Taking Sweet Orange to the heat island today, for ceiling fans, to make our own air. As we batten down the nearest future, temper possibility with the need to live in it, with shape and stability of steady wood. BUT how it whips through locks of hair, skims past cloth to know by touch the skin, which raises spirit into chills of fresh sensation, altogether un-imagined, is the wind-kissed exhilaration of promised days beyond ground, beyond even gravity, when we (or whatever we have become) will live in aerial dimensions, as shapes unbodied, unbuilt, and fleeing toward an ungovernable unknown.
Blood on the Tracks is the sun of my Bob Dylan universe. Desire is the moon. (Welcome to Bob Dylan astrology, by me.) I consider myself to be Earth. “Tangled Up in Blue” is where I am, right now, (and sometimes “Idiot Wind” album version, other times Bootleg Series version, you should listen to them one after the other for best effect. Obviously,) “One More Cup of Coffee” is right previous to where my blog is. (Listening to crickets tonight. Softly, like a crystalline froth of sound, from all around the rice paddies, in which there is no time, no history, only countless grains and some one infinite self, dissolving.)
Given the Anthropocene, a weather report in its accuracy becomes a poem. Instead of saying “It will rain,” or “It will not rain,” the weatherman, (witnessing subject as substance), says, “We will rain,” or, “We will not rain.” And if he speaks winged words, “It is raining in my heart.”
Woken by earthquake. Between clean sheets, a brief interval of (probably insufficient) alertness. Light rattle of windowpane. Being moved. Doesn’t stop so much as fade into a wobbly hallucination. Pathos, a (mercifully) gentle reminder. That ground is also made of shifting-in-relationship pieces.
Sky from home (3).
Wijaya kusuma (3).
Sometimes the scent of a pale peach rose is the cool feeling on your cheek of the breeze blowing from the west through the rice fields in central Bali that might bring more rain tomorrow but has cleared away the rain from yesterday.
Offering for fish.
Intensification and a crushing-in by sound that triggers claustrophobia. Awake in dark. Loudness outside everywhere pressing in on our small room. An image comes, half-speculation, of rushing rising from below, lifting up this piece of earth. Anxiety of infinitude. How (could it not be empty yet)? Where (is it all coming) from? The sheer scale of element overwhelms the primate calculation. Ocean, immense. A spare fraction of her being is enough to wash us (and drowned dreaming) all away.
(Stop thinking about anything else, stop writing, cover eyes, and become fish.)
Finally, all are home. Precipitation never stopped. Heavy mood of endless rain, (which oddly doesn’t appear on any radar map), shadowless medium fades to thickened black. Cloaked under cloud, enshrouded by water, all but forgotten by the outside world. The relief of becoming profoundly inaccessible.
Morning of puddles, drips, gurgles, the persistent lap and blur of water on glass, glossy leaves nodding under plonks of rain, tucking in noses and toes to keep warm and dry. Homecomings expected, green shadows, grey shining, detached from specifics of time, but waiting. Sunlight without direction.
Bat at sunset.
Sound of rain, to look up, and admit that morning’s reverie is over. The incense of an offering, long since out. The fact of having eaten, (or an empty plate, sitting there), without clear memory of it. A heavy sigh as day changes position, rolling over into evening, and shifting atmosphere blows trees into an ocean, cooling. Jeki appears, we choose an herb responsive to the coming dark. Feed her and strike a flame. Turn it into smoke, inhale a little nighttime air, and go to bed, quite early.
Blue is the moon in her transparency,
And dark the sky, when she looks to the star
Without whom we would all be rock. We would
Be third person, un-personed remainder
After love, with unbound freedom, to scream
Anything and go unheard, unspoken.
So, blue becomes the face of unrequited
Silence. Earth, displaced from selfhood, touches
That, the final leaving off, so that it
Might grow conceivable. And that being
It, empty of form, pure as blue, still as
Clear water, shows her, heavenly, a home.
Indifference remains unwed, yet breaks
Open in the absolute reflection.
Sky from home (2).
Stirring the cauldron. // Today is the last day of the waning crescent and it seems I am borrowing her shape, words keep surfacing these last few days that just aren’t ripe enough to make fruit. So instead of putting out, I add them back into the whorl of thoughts, wondering, (about unruly kittens), if they can break down and remix into a shape more suitable for survival.
The Darwinist, with his recommendation of adapting, not for the present, but for the future, thereby advises that she who wishes to survive, become versatile. (“And do the right thing, as quietly as possible.”) We work on this project. What is more versatile, human life or the written word? What will prove itself thus? What words could survive us? Questions for history and technology.
Of course, the first (woman’s) question was (and always has been) what, if anything, is worth anything at all? What of this life is worth living, whether I am (always) anger or (possibly) grace, and whatever could it be that I am trying to save from the burning city. Because it isn’t my visible self, in the sense contained in these dying words. The heart of someone I have never reached, whose emanation I am sensing with every cell, for whom I attempt transparency, self-finding through self-erasure.
(Perhaps, one works to save fire.)
Tomorrow is dark moon, rest day. So the work of today is preparing for sleep, negating the slim shape, and mothering oneself with a soothing song. That there is nothing more versatile than the churning depth of a dream.
Wijaya kusuma (2).
But cats are only ever half-tame and you’re never sure which half is in play, which one aflame. Familiar look, at any moment liable to anger (or just disappear). Stranger-purpose, brought intimate. Cuddly soft, leisurely cruel. Wild cherished messenger. Children to be kissed, cradled, and obeyed.
I guess I live now in a world of rain. Always about to rain, and sometimes does, and if I wash dishes, my face beads with moisture, from me or from the damp air, pores open, passable, sensitive, vulnurable, and everything must be said in a whisper, as at a funeral. Borderless, spherical. Thoughts too cutting for snails and frogs, who would breathe them in like blades, must be shared without syllables. With touch, immediate, tears tasted by skin, and that this world could dissolve in compassion.
Wijaya kusuma (1).