Resistance is Key
Who said that I should address you
in this manner
after so many years
away? Is your hair
now as long as your children
are grown?
Who made the decision that they
should be born? Not their mother,
father.
Or is birth itself an act of resistance
the same way the making
of a poem is always
an act committed under duress?
To accept birth specifically:
to be born, to invite oneself
to the invitation.
To resist is to be homesick.
To be homesick
for what we got we deserved.
In Time, All Fragments Become Love Letters
Change of address.
What arrives
arrives misdirected.
Crease and greasemark.
Paper cut.
Warble of water stain.
Love was resemblance.
A broken thing recognizes its former self;
replenishes.
The love letter was an awkward, miniature
dictionary of cognates.
Sounds like, sounds like:
the texture of it under the fingertips.
First the memory, then the growing
familiarity
of an accent. Its
soft lust, the adhesive
eroded from the flap of the envelope
crossed by the tongue so many times.
Sadness Improves Your Memory
Day follows after day, tidy but with slight overlaps.
Memory was a series of days.
Memory was preoccupation--
days previously occupied
and hence their sadness.
Sadness was not personal, but an immense
organism—the world’s largest—decaying
into memory.
In Hygeine, Colorado, also:
the world’s largest cottonwood. It died
before I got there. But I climbed it anyway,
scraped my forearm on its
many days. The insects and birds
remembered that they continued to live
there. The tree’s occupation followed it
into death, therefore , the scientists
came to study it. Told me to get down.
*
Logic, like days, desires order and receives itself
with slight overlaps.
The way death and life are not discrete categories.
The way in which the tree seemed to be dead while it hosted
so much life.
Sadness is a form of logic, par excellence. An extended
and intricate syllogism that rounds back on itself, just as
a root system that circulates through the organism is
also a form of memory. Also.
Also.
Someone may tell you to get down, and you recollect
the way you climbed up. Also refusal demonstrates
the excellence of memory.
Replacement Clouds
“how commitment to repetition is default construction”
—Randy Prunty
Clouds.
Once
I was an agent of recognition.
I looked up:
sharks,
goats,
balloon dogs,
collapsing roofs.
Then I was an agent of cognition.
Collapsing roofs.
A hand, potentially mine, pulls a tuft
of fur from the dog and it lofts up to the clouds.
Cloud as weather while insubordinate to weather..
Cloudy vector of resemblance, of gesture:
“Looks like:”
Cloud steeped in unreality
like a tea bag in hot water.
Resemblance begins to look like
its own cycle. Possessive.
The steam rising from the cup
to the cloud. Repeating its own
construction. Because cliché
looks like resemblance
until the weather shifts. The excess
squeezed
from the cloud, tea spilling
in drops that commit themselves
to something other than repetition,
the relief that breaks through resemblance.
Discarded wad of fur matted with it.
Who said that I should address you
in this manner
after so many years
away? Is your hair
now as long as your children
are grown?
Who made the decision that they
should be born? Not their mother,
father.
Or is birth itself an act of resistance
the same way the making
of a poem is always
an act committed under duress?
To accept birth specifically:
to be born, to invite oneself
to the invitation.
To resist is to be homesick.
To be homesick
for what we got we deserved.
In Time, All Fragments Become Love Letters
Change of address.
What arrives
arrives misdirected.
Crease and greasemark.
Paper cut.
Warble of water stain.
Love was resemblance.
A broken thing recognizes its former self;
replenishes.
The love letter was an awkward, miniature
dictionary of cognates.
Sounds like, sounds like:
the texture of it under the fingertips.
First the memory, then the growing
familiarity
of an accent. Its
soft lust, the adhesive
eroded from the flap of the envelope
crossed by the tongue so many times.
Sadness Improves Your Memory
Day follows after day, tidy but with slight overlaps.
Memory was a series of days.
Memory was preoccupation--
days previously occupied
and hence their sadness.
Sadness was not personal, but an immense
organism—the world’s largest—decaying
into memory.
In Hygeine, Colorado, also:
the world’s largest cottonwood. It died
before I got there. But I climbed it anyway,
scraped my forearm on its
many days. The insects and birds
remembered that they continued to live
there. The tree’s occupation followed it
into death, therefore , the scientists
came to study it. Told me to get down.
*
Logic, like days, desires order and receives itself
with slight overlaps.
The way death and life are not discrete categories.
The way in which the tree seemed to be dead while it hosted
so much life.
Sadness is a form of logic, par excellence. An extended
and intricate syllogism that rounds back on itself, just as
a root system that circulates through the organism is
also a form of memory. Also.
Also.
Someone may tell you to get down, and you recollect
the way you climbed up. Also refusal demonstrates
the excellence of memory.
Replacement Clouds
“how commitment to repetition is default construction”
—Randy Prunty
Clouds.
Once
I was an agent of recognition.
I looked up:
sharks,
goats,
balloon dogs,
collapsing roofs.
Then I was an agent of cognition.
Collapsing roofs.
A hand, potentially mine, pulls a tuft
of fur from the dog and it lofts up to the clouds.
Cloud as weather while insubordinate to weather..
Cloudy vector of resemblance, of gesture:
“Looks like:”
Cloud steeped in unreality
like a tea bag in hot water.
Resemblance begins to look like
its own cycle. Possessive.
The steam rising from the cup
to the cloud. Repeating its own
construction. Because cliché
looks like resemblance
until the weather shifts. The excess
squeezed
from the cloud, tea spilling
in drops that commit themselves
to something other than repetition,
the relief that breaks through resemblance.
Discarded wad of fur matted with it.