Writing: On Not Being Able to Fit Into the Boxes

I have difficulty even seeing, much less respecting and obeying, what some writers and editors feel are hard-and-fast lines between poetry, prose, nonfiction, creative writing, and essay. To me those all blend together. The most interesting books I read tend to be like the Japanese ideal of zuihitsu, "following the brush," the great exemplars of which style are Essays In Idleness and The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon. The American writers who have given us journal-books that move easily between prose, poetry, poetic prose, prose-poetry, and creative nonfiction essay, are who really stay with me. Andrew Schimmel, Gary Snyder, Paul Blackburn's The Journals, which I have only recently discovered, to my great delight.

I love the form of haibun, which is the form Basho's travel journal books are written, with alternating prose and haiku sections, on some pages just a single poem, on other pages a formal haibun which is a prose description of a moment or subject followed by a haiku on the same moment or subject but from yet a different direction. In not irrelevant ways, the haibun is my ideal form for writing.

I see when literary publishers offer open reading periods, during which anyone can submit a manuscript or collection, that they often create fixed categories for acceptance. You have to submit through the Poetry gate, or the Fiction gate, or the Nonfiction gate. But what if your manuscript moves between all of these? What if there is no real distinction, or boundary between them, in your writings? Where do submit them? I often feel a kind of decision paralysis in the face of such categorical requirements, and end up not submitting anything anywhere. Because inevitably I'll place my manuscript in the wrong box, and be automatically rejected.

The fact is, my best writing is All-of-the-above. The writing of mine that I like best, perhaps I should more truthfully say. The stuff that I write that excites me doesn't live within the boxes of Prose or Poetry, but tend to be Prose-AND-Poetry. I readily grant that there are lots of editors who just don't know what to do with that. I'm sure I've caused more than one headache which led to rejection. (There is also the issue that when you read a certain genre, yo bring presuppositions—one hesitates to say prejudices—to one's reading, and things that don't go along the usual trails get rejected not because they're bad but because they are not comprehended.)

Well, I don't want to make editors' jobs harder, and I'm not trying to be difficult, AND it seems to me that the rigid categories between writing genres are in fact a barrier rather than an aide. They are illusory, and often arbitrary, and even occasionally rather dismissive.

Because the one genre I don't really write in, and have no real "feel" for writing in the genre that doesn't like to be called a genre, namely, mainstream literary linear-narrative prose fiction. I have written in that non-genre-genre, an have even been published in it. It is just that it seems like an artificial construct to me, like nothing real at all. Virginia Woolf was right: life is not lived as a neatly-arranged linear prose narrative, as consciousness is both more diffuse and more Brownian (nay, distractible) than the artificial construct of linear narrative pretends it is. And not just Woolf says this, but Albert Einstein, whose spacetime theories strongly imply that everything is always happening all at once, and time itself is a constructed fiction of consciousness that we make up to be able to cope with time.

It's very likely that I will only rarely ever get published. (And thank you ever so much to those sympathetic editors who have been willing to take risks on my behalf!) I just can't seem to stay in the boxes.

Writing: Gathering Stems and Branches

There's a writing project I want to start in on. I spent the first part of the morning going through and marking entries in my handwritten journal going back around six years. Marking things I'd written out, but never turned into anything. Some of those pages can be the partial seed of what I want to write now. Formally, zuihitsu, a compilation of things written following the brush. "Twenty-Four Views of Mt. Fuji by Hokusai." Modular. Fragmentary. Linked by mood, topic, tone. Memory books. Pillow Books.

Went into my library to pull out and re-read, or at least skim, some touchstones for what I want to do. Saikaku. The Great Mirror of Male Love. Kenko. Essays In Idleness. Other more modern examples of the form, which after all is an infinitely malleable form. Basho. Oku no hosomichi.

Writing this project will be partially rewriting bits and pieces scattered here and there, bringing them together, making a larger work out of them. Maybe chapbook sized. I'm a good prose writer, although I don't have much ear for fiction. Creative nonfiction is also storytelling, though. I can invent and write if I allow myself to fiction as storytelling, and not wedded to that boring No-Style Style that dominates so much fiction nowadays, the so-called "plain" style.

In reading a literary biography of Roger Zelazny, which I acquired recently, I realize how much he influenced me as a writer of prose. As the book points out, spending a whole chapter on the topic, Zelazny's prose style was always poetic, laced with poetry, frequently requiring a bit of work to get into, but one it revealed itself, sublime. His short "experimental" novel Creatures of Light and Darkness is astounding. It should be taught alongside Wallace Stevens.

That's the only kind of prose fiction I can see myself actually writing: prose fiction that doesn't read like prose fiction. And his short stories, always poetic and sometimes heartbreakingly powerful. Poetic prose that is often oblique, rarely plain.

After reading through old journals this morning, I wrote some notes for what I want to do. Not an outline, never that, just the rule-set for this particular game. Once you write the melody, you improvise around it. Writing prose, for me, to be interesting at all has to be more like jazz, knowing sort of where I'm going but it's 32 bars ahead so take your time and explore the path meanwhile.

This writing project does fall in the category of being prompted, which I know is how I work best. I do well when someone asks me for a piece. Otherwise, I can be lazy, and never get around to it. I love having a deadline, and a goal, and a completion date. I actually work well under deadline pressure.

I also work well when I'm not trying to do anything. When I'm out on a roadtrip, for example, where on those long drives across the land, I do some of my best thinking, and write in my handwritten journal at night, and sometimes in the morning, about whatever I'm experiencing, or thinking about. That's how the elements of the longer haibun sequences of Basin and Range were written, compiled later at home. I scatter a lot of short bits off the back of the wagon, when I roam, and sometimes they add up later.

I'm still gathering. After weeks of thinking about it, at least there's a goal. Awareness of approaching deadlines is my goad. Meanwhile, just keep gathering these loose stems and branches, to build them, and fire them. Ashes and raku to emerge.

Brush Poem: B +

A spontaneous brush poem. Copyright 2012.

if you let that silence in

Feeling really inward this evening. One of those times when you just want to sit and watch the changing of the light, as the evening sky goes from afternoon to sunset to the indigo of night. Reading until it's too dark to see anymore. That sort of mood. Wanting everyone to just go away and leave you alone, even though it's not that you want to push people away, just that it's hard to be around people when you're in that mood. This is exactly how depression and PTSD alienate: you don't feel like you can connect with anyone, because you're in a different universe than they are. Nothing connects. E.M. Forster's epigram and key phrase from his novel Howard's End was "Only connect." But at the end of his greatest novel, A Passage to India, there's a scene between two of the main characters that raises the doubt that we ever can connect. That it might just not be possible. We try hard but there are always rocks and hills that get in between us, get in our way. I feel on the other side of the mountains from everyone, in these evening moods. This is the ceremony of the changing of the light. No light to see by, till the carriage lights turn on and the sky tries to fill with stars. Which it won't tonight, because of clouds and cold. I need to get out and go grocery shopping, just a few odds and ends, but I don't want to move at all. I wrote a poem some years ago in this mood, and it had some legs, even got published. "La Madonna." A young wife's interior monologue, as she sits in silence, in a quiet moment between the flurry of her usual day. "In a minute," she says, before the poem ends. She'll rejoin the world in a minute. Sometimes you just want some time to yourself, to be still and silent and by yourself. One thing that experience has proven is that extraverts never really understand introverts; they never comprehend why we need to be still and silent for part of our day, how it recharges. I also feel in no rush to be around people these days, as they tend to be noisy and clueless and overbearing. PTSD for me means I get easily overstimulated. It just gets too loud and overwhelming sometimes. I get the sense that lots of my friends really don't understand that. I doubt few of them have even read this far. How do you get a quiet message through the personal and cultural noise? The voice of the divine isn't loud, it's a still small voice, a voice you must listen for, and it's easy to miss. Too much noise, not enough signal, that's the state of the world. It's mostly noise, very little signal. I've had friends marvel at the fact that when they come to visit, I don't have the TV on, or the radio, or even the stereo, using background noise to cover over that silence, that void and gap in conversation and communion that most people seem to be deathly afraid of. Geese are passing over, there's only a thin line of light on the western horizon, everything else has gone blue and grey. People are afraid of silence. We've all gotten so used to the loud noise of cultural that people are afraid of even gaps in conversation. We're so used to fast editing in the entertainment, sharp cuts and jerky camera shots and editing for maximum adrenaline stimulation, that people don't know what to do with themselves if the moment is too quiet. I have friends who are incapable of sitting in silent companionship, saying nothing, just holding space, just sharing the silence. The minute there's a gap in the noise, they try to generate signal. But it always comes out wrong. They stumble. But I'm afraid of the silences and gaps in fellowship. I'm comfortable with silence. The void is a longtime companion that I have come to know very well. Whole worlds can drop into those silences. When I'm driving across the loneliest two-lane highway in the world, a hundred miles from anywhere, out in the desert in Utah or Nevada, or on the unpaved roads of the northern Great Lakes backcountry, I sometimes pull the truck over, turn off the motor, get out, lean against the hood, and just listen to the silence. An hour of the total silence of the desert is worth a month of talk therapy. Things settle in place. Life stops. There's nothing but the present moment, nowhere to be, nothing to do, and most importantly nothing that needs to be said. I know a lot of very smart people who are incapable of silence, who process everything in words, whose lives make no sense to them until they talk it out or think it in their minds in words, till they fill the void gap with their own words. I know writers and poets who never shut up, and don't know how to. But I also know musicians who know the value of a long rest, of the fermata, of the breath-pause in between phrases, that tiny moment of absolute stillness that an entire world can fall through, between the end of one phrase and the beginning of the next. No words there, and none needed. The words fail us at that point, and that's where the bard and shaman know that poetry begins. Purple and grey band of light under the soft lip of steel clouds behind forks of bare trees as the wind stills for long enough for you to hear something in that evening silence that can feel the world. If you let it.

Spontaneous Brush Poem

Not quite insomnia, just that you have difficulty falling back asleep after waking up in the very early morning hours. Read for a bit. Then without thinking about it too much, pull out the digital brush and start painting and writing.













Finish and save one panel, erase and being a new panel, rinse and repeat, till the poem tells you it has come to an end. As poems do. The energy changes when a poem has told you it's at an end, like the water going slack when the well stops pumping.

The title is arbitrary, just what comes into your head at that moment. The brush poem says it wants to be "no. 4" so you agree to it. Nothing more than that.

The back cover title page wants to be different, as if the poem were bound in a hand-stitched Japanese notebook. Small, pocket size, bound in papyrus or hatched brown paper. Maybe that's in fact just the way the poem wants to be bound. Poem in a sketchbook, bound for glory.

An artist is one who responds to experince by making art. Even if it's just not-quite-insomnia in the middle of the night.

Anentropic

I don't believe in apocalypse, which says that everything must finally grind down to its final end.

I do believe in apokatastasis, which says that there is nothing that cannot be redeemed.

When's the last time you went and sat next to a bed of flowers. Not to touch them, brush your hand through them, though that is good to do. Not to look at them, at their beauty, though that is also good.

Just to be with them. Just to be a companion to what lives.

I resist entropy. I refuse to succumb to that downward slide into black hole abyss without putting up enough of a fight to at least slow down that last end. Every time we do something that brings more light, more love, into the universe, we slow down entropy, we slow down the eventual heat-death of the universe, if only by a little bit. Every time we act to serve life, to be in the service of life's health and joy, we slow down death. It adds up. Every little thing helps.

There is nothing that cannot be redeemed.

Counting Down

Counting down, counting lines of crows on power lines
hung suspended under skies hazed with oncoming distant
storm, counting hawks perched in trees watching for field mice,
counting days till the day of the deadline, counting toes
and fingers, counting hairs on your belly, counting every breath
during long evenings meditating on hot days as the sun fades
into cloud haze and evening breezes turn down the atmospheric
thermostat, counting friends in rows of billboard stances
each hovering above the long road in line as though they could
say something to fix everything, counting seconds till you fall
asleep, counting slats in the frame of the new bed before you
drop heavy cotton futon mattress on solid and firm of surface,
counting the season's first fireflies pulsing in outer dusk,
counting to keep from thinking about what you don't want to
think about, counting obsession as surfeit and surcease, counting
down, counting down to the day and hour when everything is done.

You spend long sessions of placing your hands on your belly,
still unviolated, to feel what your skin is like now, to give nurture
or something like, in the same way young mothers hold their bellies
before birthing, before the new life begins, born in blood and shouting,
born in passion and sweat, pain and exaltation, holding your belly
as though about to give birth, as though the new self will be birthed
through the soon incision from groin to above navel where they will
take out the organ that has kept you from living a full life for years
or longer, looking back on undiagnosed episode sixteen years gone,
counting backwards, counting till the jaw aches from its clench,
till the calves and knees are sore in weather change that passes through
and goes out burning into new kinds of cold.

Those few days of early summer when the gods of late high summer
visited, when the air was thick with fragrant humid greening, air
temperatures hotter than the blood, in which merely walking exertion
was enough to shed a liter of sweat, in which on successive burning
afternoons you found a trail in the woods above a freshet and thicket,
where you were able to shed your clothes and walk naked in the heat,
catch every slight stir of air on your skin, antennae of hair responsive
to amplitude and direction and hiss of long conversations between trees.

There is not accounting of what cannot be counted, the long slow dark,
the drugged dreaming in which vast beasts move just behind the eyes,
the veil, the dark between worlds, where forgetting makes new home,
new journey, new sand in an old desert, no accounting of what silent dream
cannot be said, that words do not exist to describe, in a dream without words
where nothing is said but movement connection absence silence.

When the cold comes down it drops as a curtain over the woods,
over the long sea road, and you get back into your life like putting on
clothes, like resuming a patrol in which long staggering eggs shell into
white sands, a long knife counting, an unaccustomed coup, tall slivers
of old wood beaten by sun into varnished desperation.

Some new remnant of a memory ahead of the parting of skin, of flesh
into new lips, a new jaw, a steaming contrail of steam from viscera
exposed to the cold operating theatre air, a puff of inner wind, not the soul
escaping, which is trapped under tubes and long silver cords connecting
wrist to tube, heart to palpating screen, sleeve to sensitive trace of risen
blood escaping from the smiling wound, from the guts cut upon to breathe.

When you dream an anaesthesia dream it's full of sharp men fighting
each other beneath the peaks and slopes of spear edges mountain peaks
bundled with snow and salvage, of wrecked cedar cabin beams, roofs
stove in to let the bad air out after the old one died there.

There is a long counting of pulse and rhythm in flesh, a long scythe
of dots moving on a screen, counting each heartblood pulse, each breath,
each stimulated lost dream.

Then the core of you, the lost core, is counted on a chain of microscopes,
a long tube conveyor made of seamed cord and shiny rubbery tissue.

And when the blank stare achieves its zero-point, all eyes turn to white.

Night Trees

the burning sky
reddens treebark and branch—
city of nights



restless night walk
with camera and tripod,
passerby exclaims:

"Is that a camera?"
a favorite time for photos



My mood personally apocalyptic. The end of my rope coming on like a derailed train, sparks flying off the rails. Wander out for solace, for distraction, to make night photos as a way of making art, to get out of the house where I've been stewing too long in my own juices—but the sky too is full of the end of the world. Sodium vapor streetlights make the world seem yellow-orange, the clouds reflect red. Older mercury vapor lights made things green and blue. The tree-edges move in the breeze, blurring. My hands deep in my pockets, stiff with cold. Frost on the bridge rails. Thrum of tries against the cold road. Water flowing under cold black and at flood stage. The mind clear, for the moment, of everything not related to making images. The confocal nature of redemption. Circles of light under the streelights, against the traffic's tide. Murderous flash of light, sky streaked with unmarked helicopters eggbeatering by in a hurry. Time to walk home on cold feet, to go in, light the fireplace, try to sleep.

•

Restless, unable to sleep, a few nights ago I grabbed a camera and tripod and walked the quarter-mile down to the bridge over Turtle Creek. I took several time exposures, working for a long time in B&W, with the winds blurring the tree-edges and clouds on longer exposures. Then I switched to color near the end, using my flashlight and laser to paint the trees and path while making more photos.

This is a kind of night photography work which I first began to do almost 20 years ago. I've become expert enough in its techniques to have taught a class in night photography a few times. A tripod is required, and weights if it's a windy night. Your camera needs to have Manual settings capability, so you can control the exposure time and the aperture. Automatic cameras or settings are incapable of this kind of photography, with their ignorant insistence on using flash and short exposures: you'll get a lot of empty black frames.

The aperture, of f-stop, is the setting for how open the lens is to let light in: the higher the f-stop number, the smaller the opening, or aperture, and the smaller amount of light that gets in. This also controls, however, the sharpness of the image, and the depth of field. The smaller the aperture, the greater the depth of field; with a very small aperture, virtually everything in foreground, middle- and background will be in sharp focus.

Exposure times are inversely proportional to aperture size: If you have your camera stopped down to a high f-stop, or smaller aperture—effectively letting in less light—you will need a longer exposure time. As a general rule of thumb, the exposure time usually doubles for every f-stop you click down.

I almost always prefer to do night photography on an ASA rating, or film speed, of 100 ASA. This keeps the film (or in this case, digital CCD) from getting too grainy. Higher film speeds allow you to capture more light faster, being by definition more sensitive to light; but they also get grainer, or in the case of digital cameras, noisier. Most digital cameras will allow you to shoot up to ASA 1600, but you'll see a lot of pixel noise in your image. So to get a smooth image without grain or noise, you need to use the lowest ASA speed you can, even though that will mean very long exposures at night under some conditions.

For example, in astrophotography, or photography of the night sky, such as the Milky Way, exposures longer than an hour are not uncommon. I have experience working with exposures up to about 30 minutes long. For night photography, with the f-stop set at f32, it's not uncommon for you to have to do a two-minute exposure at ASA 100.

It was cold out at night. I bundled up in my heavy fleece coat, and still got chilled by standing next to the tripod while the camera counted through 4- and 8-second exposures. It was cold enough that the camera started to flash its low-battery alert warning; batteries, when they're too cold, lose power, suddenly dropping to zero. Once or twice I took the camera off the tripod to warm it against my chest, under my jacket, before remounting it and continuing to make photos. A common winter problem when outdoors making photos.

•



This was an 8-second exposure, with the foreground tree splashed with the light emitted from my handheld flashlight laser. That's what makes the red streaks on the branches.

With longer exposure, a handheld flashlight, or flashgun, or a laser, as here, can be used to illuminate part of a composition, for special effect.



This is two separate exposures layered in Photoshop. One of them used a handheld flashlight to splash light on the tops of the trees in the background, while the other exposure used the laser to splash lines on the foreground tree.

Mendocino Sunset

A few miles north up the coast from Ft. Bragg in Mendocino County, CA, there is a beautiful sand beach at the mouth of a river canyon. This is one of my favorite sunset beaches in Mendocino. After a storm, the beach might be littered with beautiful driftwood. When the tide is moving, sheets of water float across the flat, wet sands, making pools that mirror the rocks and sky out to sea.



The sun falls relentlessly into the ocean, hissing red and orange. The wet sands echo the colors, reflecting in water waves and pools. For awhile, the cliffs are made gold in the amber light. Then the also blue and fade to black silhouettes under a pale sky.




At the top of the cliffs, there is a house standing behind wind-swept pines. Further out on the ledge, just over the edge of the water, stands a smaller guest house. The surf pounding the cliffs at high tide must make this guest house shudder. But what a wonderful little house it would be for a writer or an artist to have their studio in. So close to the ocean, with views of whales spouting offshore, the wind and the sky, seabirds floating by at eye-level. A small wood-burning stove to take off the chill. A writing desk in front of the large picture windows. A rocking chair before the long view. Every time you looked up from your work, the ocean's immensity would be revealed. For me, this would be a perfect studio, filled with constant inspiration, no matter the weather.





The fading light reflecting off the window glass of the cliff house. Sky going from pink and gold to deep indigo, still with edges of pink and rose. The rising wind, chill and wet, off the sea. The darkening sky. Eventually you have to go home, pack your gear away in the car, drive off into the dusk, headlights making bright tunnels under the eucalyptus stands lining the highway, where it curves down a vale, twists around, and emerges again into the dusk.

The Sorting

Those who once were kind to you
now avoid you and give you no succor
when most you need it:
these are not my friends.

Those who once claimed to care for you
and, when you needed that shoulder
that you so often offered, disappeared:
these are not my friends.

Those who once claimed you as part
of their foundation stone and tribe
who now ignore you when you're dying:
these are not my friends.

Those who once were grateful when
you entered the rooms of hospitality
who now do not turn their heads to greet:
these are not my friends.

Do those who know you now become
the places armed with refuge
and sit across the silent table:
make these your friends.

Those who answer on the first ring
at three in the morning of a winter night
when winds howl outside and in:
make these your friends.

Those who do not judge or condemn
you for who you are or what you've done
much less what you have survived:
make these your friends.

Those who empty out their beds
when cold rain nights bring you
to the doorstep forlorn and still:
make these your friends.

And, lastly, those who know you in and out
who do not care if you have failed or lost
who do not mind when you can't cope
who help you cope those nights you can't
who find a room in heart and hearth
when other shelters come to naught:
these are your friends.

Grateful be to true friends.
So mote it be.

•

Looking through old photographs and memories tonight, looking at the recent past, the shit I've been through this past year, having been sick unto death for a year now, almost dying from it, not yet well, not well for a long time to come, worried about what will happen next, not willing to trust, faith is an alien presence because I don't trust it, surrender I can do because surrender means unknowing, and not knowing, and I don't know any of it.

Thinking through the list of people who I once counted as friends, and watching that list diminish to near null, partly by attrition, partly by people leaving because of their own lives, their own crises they must deal with, all everybody ever lives through is their own drama, and wondering when it will ever be my turn. I'm always putting out and taking care of them. Where are they when I need it in return?

And the two or three friends who I can call at 3am, when the darkest part of the night steps up, I can't sleep for being unable to stop worrying or thinking or just fidgeting, and everything seems like just another night of endurance with no end ever in sight, those two or three I can call still do answer. Somehow. I try not to call too often. I also try to call when I'm feeling good, not just when I need a shoulder.

Going down and down, auguring in, for so long, it's impossible to believe anymore that that could ever turn around. Even the tiniest setback brings out the worst of fears, the worst of worry. Hard to find much gratitude for what you have, when you're certain it's all going to be lost.

Try letting go, try emptying out, tonglen, breath in and down, settle, move the one-point hara to the center of the earth, ground, come to center and extent. Every trick and formulation you know, and none of it works anymore well enough to end the evidence of ending. What do you expect?

Today I just gave up. I can't figure it out. I'm not in control. Very much I have no idea what's next, which person I care about is going to suffer or die next, it probably won't be me, I seem to be wyrded to outlive everyone I've ever loved, and end up sick and alone.

So what? Who cares? No one, really. Don't tell anyone. Keep it to yourself. No one really gives a shit, and even if they could they disappear on you because they feel helpless to do anything to help you.

So you end up staring at the inky waters again, in the middle of the night, near freezing, the moon shattered on restless wavelets as you look down. If you say you've never been here before, feet toeing the abyss, you lie.

You lie. You lie and lie. You pretend all's well that isn't. All's well that won't end well. Who cares why. Who cares if it's the curse of karma, you must have been a motherfucking asshole in a previous life to have to up with so much of the opposite of peace and success this time around. What frakking sacred contract did you sign to make up this sordid narrative? You lie and never tell anyone the inside of this truth. It's too much honesty. They'll all flee. They'll all want to believe the lie that it's okay.

The exit of the ice. Your father's gun in the dresser drawer. The longing for it to stop. Just stop. The alien cousin of the isolated boy who lonely wept into his pillow because they killed his lover and his friend. Now watch him die. On the doorstep in front of you. Now watch him die. Dragging the body of the boy out of the lake right in front of you at the end of the afternoon, silent except for the yelling of the lifeguards and the wheeling gulls. His little sister standing looking like her world just ended. Now watch him die. Old man just stopping breathing, in the hospital bed in the living room after a week home after a month in the hospital, just stopped breathing, you hear the silence on the other end of the baby monitor next to your bedroll downstairs, you were sleeping underneath him on the floor, an hour ago coming out of the background there was the sound of buffeting wings around you, a joyous boy in a sunny place yelling at you how wonderful it all is and how he understands everything now, go upstairs and sit at his bedside for an hour in the middle of the night till the funeral people finally come, and you get back to your bedroll in the blue hour of predawn, the blue hour which is that eternal moment when the world pauses in its breath, and the night birds stop singing and there is silence for a long moment before the morning chorus of other birds starts up their greeting to the dawn.

And you can't run away anymore. You can't run away from it anymore. It just explodes again and again in front of you, continuous, impoverishing, the angel stepping into the air from a hole in the light a continuous explosion of silent white fire. It just explodes in you again and again. Till you just want it to stop. And you find yourself by the ink dark water again, in the middle of the night. When no one will answer the phone when you call, when you need them most. When you need them most, they're never there. And no one cares. And if they say they do care if you ask them then you can't believe them because they weren't spontaneous with it, you had to prompt them to it, and if you had to prompt them to it you can never be sure if they really mean it or they're just doing it out of guilt because they think they should. Should, the most habitual and heartless word in the world, should.

Prairie Thunderstorm

You can see them coming, building, rising like a wall of air, long before they arrive. The open sky a backdrop for time.



Storms roll ponderously across the sky, darkening and lightening. Seem to move slowly only because still in the distance. Then suddenly on top of you, a flash and shudder, and all the waters of heaven blind you to the road. Now slow, now frighteningly quickened.



Storm season on the open prairie. The glacial-outwash utterly flat area just north of town, where the flood washed into a lake made by the terminal moraine to the south. So flat you can see forever. Low hills surround. The long view of heaven and earth. Dragons in the clouds, phoenix rising from lightning-struck groves.



Patches of heaven break through to the darkened lands. Promising. The air so clear now, wiped clean, you can feel it sparkle. Fresh grass smell, bruised flower smell. Little roadside buddhas sit and wait for refreshment.

deer, woods, dusk

deer, woods, dusk

In the indigoed light, it’s snowing again, thick mists fogging the distant treetops. Flakes begin to stick to the wet ground, which was covered with water and sleet, and will soon, in the chill evening, be covered with ice and snow.

deer move in the woods,
stepping high, noses down—
snow falling hard, now

The watershed deer herd were mincing through the woods to the south of the house, exposed by the lack of leaves on the trees, the air dark blue with evening. One doe started to move into the yard. I picked up my laser pointer, and put the red dot on the crumbled snow at the her feet, and much to my pleased surprise, she nosed at it, the way a cat or dog will do. I moved the dot around a few times, and the doe followed closely, then I moved the dot off into the woods, and the deer bounded away. Who knew? I guess I’ve discovered a new way to herd winter deer.

ruminant hooves pace
silent among fallen oak:
winter tree-spirits

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Start with a poem. Then we make iterations of the poem, gradually working towards words-as-art, or visual poetry. At what point does the poem's linguistic information stop being comprehensible? At what point do we reach the frontier between (verbal) meaning and (visual) meaning. At what point does the art cease being an illustration, and become integral? When do the words become an integral element of the art? One element among others, which can be parsed for verbal meaning, in gestalt, but is also part of the greater gestalt (in which the verbal meaning might be nested) of visual/poetry.







At some point all the elements must synergize into something archetypal, symbolic, mythopoetic: the goal and result of much of my creative work. At some point the elements must become more than what they individually are, to take on a numinous, liminal life of their own; to become shamanic; to become an experience of threshold. This has long been known to me, as the artist, as the goal of much of my art-making: to depict and recreate, visually, aurally, even verbally, experiences of the threshold and the liminal, that I have myself experienced, and which I have no better way to re-create for others to witness.

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In the past, I've treated words this same, as an element of composition, in experimental musical settings. I've made several text-sound pieces on tape (and later digitally) using layered readings of my poetry, and cyclic loops of texts that are a form of gradual-process music. For example: Light, in which the words finally become part of a multi-layered texture that has musical shape and form: the words as elements of composed music, rather than purely linguistic conveyors. At what point does the (verbal) meaning go away, and the sound of the speaking voice become a musical texture?

Using word-clouds as an element in a visual composition is equivalent, I think, to using spoken words as an element of musical composition. There is still (verbal) meaning to be found on the small, fractal scale: individual words and phrases come to the foreground of attention. But, hopefully, the overall effect is gestalt and non-linear, rather like non-verbal cinema. The (verbal) meaning of the words is not as important as the textures created with them; although there are meanings to be found (assembled, perceived, created) therein, the meanings are additive; right-brain-perceived as a gestalt, rather than left-brain linear-logical. A lot of this is about liberating poetry from the straight-jacket of fixed meaning—not of meaning itself, since the idea of "liberating" words from meaning entirely is absurd, as words will always be signifiers for memory, experience, and conception; but rather, of liberating words from assumed fixed positions of meaning. To soften the edges of hard linear logical, rational discourse. To make poetry from language that all-too-often is wielded as a blunt instrument of deterministic meaning, and by softening that bluntness, to allow a bit of Mystery to creep in. Which is what poetry is all about: making words do more with less; making words invest themselves with meaning beyond the ordinary; with opening the doors and windows for Mystery to seep in, if it will.

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And all of this because deer have been continuously and forcefully coming into my perception, in various recurrent and forceful ways, for the past several weeks. When ghost-deer walk into your mind, sit down in the grass and listen to what they have to say. When you find a perfect antler discarded on the lawn right under the window where you do most of your writing, pay attention. When deer emerge from the fog and blowing snow and darkness, every dusk of every day for a long week of driving, listen to what they're pointing you towards.

And then respond by making art about the encounters. Because poetry and art and music are praise: are celebration, and commemoration: are the journal and notes made from encounters with the liminal, on the threshold, and you had best pay attention, or ignore them at your peril.

Coastal Maine

A seafaring land, a place where boats are just as important as cars, where the weather and the land meet at sea's edge, merge, and find ways to hide. In early spring, still clouded, cold, misted, and rainy. A last land before the long water. Smell of sea salt, kelp iodine, also smell of clean rain of wet granite, wet brightly painted wood.

Time in the Rocky Places

Time passes strangely when you're on the road. I swear that earlier in this road trip, I lost an hour that I can't account for. I don't know what happened, or where it went. The past few days, under continuously grey gloomy rainy skies, I've lost my sense of direction, and of time. Your subjective sense of time either rushes too fast or slows to a crawl so slow you feel like you have an eon between noticing what is happening and when you need to react to it. Stretching and compressing, time moves strangely.

move time to move time to strange move strange action early to bed strange to rise fast or slow to bed to rise and rain everywhere falling everywhere equally on all the living and the dead

a thousand eyes from the cliffs of the stone people
a hundred kelp strands walking between mafic dikes
intruding into pink granite batholith black aisles of lines
gulls sleeping by the ledges

Time passes without being noticed or noticing. I know that I've lost time, swearing for an hour in unaccountable frustrations, to unanswered questions of why or where. I've lost my sense of continuously grey time lost under a halo of pink sunset behind clouds watching planes land between raindrops on the windshield at the local airport sitting in a raincovered car on a hill under the southern runway approach. Your sense of place rushes to leave, to walk away on stalk legs filled with lichen and strewn with redbud leaves in full glory. You hold quietly with what was lost, or never was yours to lose. Stretching and compressing those spaces between where fingers touch, where tiniest hairs on the backs of your hand stand on end with electricity and regret. Moving strangely.

Emergence, longing, a grass bow

The church of the redwing blackbird. Those first signs of spring, suddenly there, singing from vertical perches at the ends of dried cattail reeds. Some robins never go south, now, hovering at the ends of open water where the warm creek flows into the iced-over lake. Once I startled a tree full of robins in a blizzard in January, by that lake-meeting point. Suddenly brown leaves stuck to winter branches exploded into a cloud of whirring. When the redwings are suddenly back, singing, that's the first true sign of spring. Everything else was presumptuous. Now the greening emerges from the dark, cramped soil under the dead oaks by the river. Now the dessicants revive. Now every psruce awake with cardinals, becomes shelter for signs. Last year's nests revealed at the top of the crabapple, before the tree leafs out, before its tenants return. I look at the scattered remnants of an old life underfoot, gathering memories and music like fuel for a bright, cool fire. The world seems so fragile, and I wander through it, not daring to touch. What's been broken might be mended now, but will it break again, and how. You hold back from daring to hope, from collapsing into assumptions, even easterly assumptions, not quite able to believe in resurrection. You bend your shoulders to miss the ice-crystal branches, afraid to break their brittle edges. You must go forward nonetheless. And the church of the black-eyed waterbirds, singing cousins of crows, takes light behind trees filled with tapestries of thread and age. I don't want to thorn the roses anymore. I want that echo between tense shoulderblades to escape, buddha-like escape, to shape wind, billow spears of light, break the molds that cling to treeshadows and lichen themselves to the slow air of granite forks under sun dreaming amber pink dry feldspar snows. And fly home, bright-shouldered birds with scars of ancestry on their wingtip shoulders, like mine blooming with aspiration. And dare to trust.



Redwing Blackbirds    

Rumors of Spring

The farms in the area are starting to get in gear. I drove the backroads a couple of days ago, the air heavy with the smells of fresh-turned earth, manure, and fertilizer. Today was the second-warmest sunny day so far this spring. I brought out the garden hose, swept out the garage, and planted another rose bush. Tomorrow will be for planting lavender and wildflowers in the beds on the sides of the house, then waiting till they emerge.



Rows tilled and plowed in the black earth. Ridges of earth. Nothing yet emerged. Soon the corn and soy and wheat and other crops will green the fields. Earth still wet from heavy spring storms.



Clouds till the sky, making rows that dissolve, reform, and fly on. Now heavy with more rain, now light and airy, nothing to touch but evaporating mists.



Sky turns in on itself, becoming memory and expectation. We wait and watch, desire for gentle winds rooting us by the budding trees.





Pretend it's all ceiling. All you have to do is reach up to dip into it, long fingers trailing wakes in a fast stream. The willow have turned golden raking the sunset from their hair.



And then come the days of wheat and sorrow. Feathers blow from wind-socks in the long-grass scarecrows. Soon, another storm will rise, and fall again.



It's time for more plantings. I'll air out the house, once the days turn predictably clear and warm. One day soon, roses shall bloom and perfume the evening's peace. Meanwhile we still huddle under the eaves, tend the fires of waiting, and harp our melancholy songs into the dark.