You Are Here

Pan the camera over here, shoot me, because I want this on the record.

I have a feeling.  It juts, it struts.  Salient, a raised flag, a hair on end.

Points of fact are easily evacuated.  Jellied, pulverized, chased out of their meanings.  

The on-message men do their garrulous best with scoldings, threats and lullabies,

dismiss the facts of our world right out of their hands. But feelings are hard to destroy.  

You can chase them, but you can’t chase them away.

Perhaps that’s why this feeling leaps like a dolphin.

It leaps ahead of me, ahead of us.  I can hardly see it anymore, but I will follow.

I should tell you that I am influenced by photographs of whales.  Altered by films of tuna.

As leaden nets scoop their craters from the sea floor, I am prejudiced by the sight

of the young man with the air-compressor hose pinched between his teeth, 

breathing gas fumes to dive with his dozen coworkers, hoping not to die today.

Death is a reasonable expectation when you must go deeper every morning, because

the fish are fewer than they were, than they ever were, than they were yesterday.

I know the sea surface is a two-way mirror.  I seek entrance to the other side.

It’s like watching fish in a tank.  I know that when your eyes get past the reflections,

your breath might not catch for crabs and bivalves as it does for an otter, a beluga.  

Still, gaze into the prism.

The salmon confuse the heart, the way they bump their snouts on the glass.  

Looking for their work, their home, their useful struggle.  Locked down at the border.

Pan the camera over here.  I want you all to see me with my hand held out like this,

see where I stand, how it looks behind me. The shallow dish of harbour at my back.

Beyond it the grey line where the sea stirs itself up, hisses itself into humps.

This is how our ocean breathes and perhaps there is speech in its breath.

Here, take this barbed hook from my hand,

this will serve our purpose.  See how it curls like a listening ear?

Scratch and scratch with it.  We might yet pierce the veil of mirrored mirrors.

Scratch the worn sheet of our disregard - look, you can see right through it,

over here where we lie every night to dream.

I know in daytime it’s easy enough to tune to the drone of voices,

re-telling the fated deeds of The Economy.  At night it’s harder to forget the blue home.

At night when the eyes lower in reverence of sleep 

and the bodies rest and rub on their linens

we toss and turn and roll like waves trying to breathe.

The real world has barely a chance to reach us.

It can only creep in when the screens are powered down and the ringers are off,

and so the ocean comes in dark to pray behind your face, inside your globe of bone.

At night, when you are helpless against what is happening,

the herring merge and exert, pulsing through your saltwater mind.

Flashing fish coalesce into their ancient survival orb

turning their abject vulnerability to sharp eyes, beaks, and hooks

into a million briefer dangers that tickle the belly of your dreaming.

Their lost silver scales wend their shining, falling paths to the floor of you:

emergency flares descending to your depth, there to burn and abrade the film 

between our stupor - our insistence on what used to be - and what is now.

You know those places where you still patrol the walls

that keep out the flow of the world.  Yes, as we scratch they are waning, and thin.

Task

a task
descended with minimal sounds of feathers getting sorted out
settled on my skin in that place that is both shoulder and neck
the place where lovers’ fingers should always always be


the task
looked into my ear because
an ear, like an eye, is a window

however
have you ever tried to close an ear?
ears stay open
ears are un-defendable

right in my ear-cradle my task laid itself down
turned into a newborn child
limped its blossom fists
released its fiddlehead spine
dreamed itself to me

woman
stop complaining
even internally
about the shortness of the day

Advice From The Rain

Night robes the rain in black, and so

the drops must speak 

about their hidden inner silverness

to the golden-throat frogs

who are raising the sky roof tonight

Maybe rain drops can explain 

the colour of falling to me

and how to shine on the way down

That would be nice because

I've been looking for a way 

to tell you about this fall I'm taking

this fall I'm taking again because I can't stop

tripping on you

Spring Clean Me

I am making piles inside

I see I know I can decide

Yes to this

flashing rotating disco-ball yes

No to that

throaty echoing robin-song no

The maybes are like arctic summers

colorful, overflowing, and ruthless

The maybes are riotous, beautiful and cruel

but they’re over so fast

They don’t have much of a chance

when I practice kicking my ass so sweetly

in the way I've always always wanted

And it feels so much

cleaner

cleaner

cleaner, and not going away

And it feels like 

this is something I can rely on

Unleashed yesses and faithful nos

drum a steady dripping beat

of water

from the eyes

Eyes are only a bypass

off heart's roaring highway

Eyes know how to let them all pulse out,

so here they are and they're on a roll:

heart's heat

heart’s blood

and heart’s knowing

making new, steaming tracks

down a face turned to the fire within

Four-Hearted

My face is standard-issue

and out of it my two typical eyes stare at you 

And I only have two arms

and they hold things

like dirty dishes small stones

small hands and lists of rivers to cross

There are other signs of normalcy

too laborious to name -

anyway you see them all,

so I don’t need to

I’m not sure you can see the heart-cave, though

I don’t know if the crimson drawings on its walls are ordinary or not

and I don’t know if its tenancy will interest you

Still, I will tell you

Hearts have passed through me

leaving their efforts and their ash

I regrow them when I absolutely must

like a starfish who lost a ray to a violent crab

My first heart was a nub like a spring crocus

It just melted away and the heart-puddle it left

evaporated and came out of my mouth 

like a breath on a late-frost day

It hurt more than you’d think

They say your heart is always the size of your fist

How big could it have been?  I was only five

My second heart crumbled

detonated inward

a dangerous building

old already

so bleached and beautiful

haunted by failed attempts to make a go of it

The efficiency experts got it

They knew how to deal with it

a targeted operation

the dust rolled through my veins

making way for militarist moves

of feral teenagers

My third heart was a fist

and of course it was holding on

and of course it lost its grip

you know the drill

My fourth heart

well, my fourth heart took

As it stretched and moaned and yawned its way into existence

my fourth heart reached out its red tongues 

licked the insides of my ribs

decided to take root

to take some knocks

Fourth heart chose to take whatever it was handed

Fourth heart knows to always take the shape that is needed

Yesterday its anemone face

all green and waving and soft

was open to the current and 

dancing in the waves

Today its wits have fled

and so it moves down into its liquid habit

of squeeze release squeeze release

and waits

To A Friend In Longing

You will meet

the earthen queen

whose feet walk in spirals toward your garden gate

Perhaps she knows this,

perhaps she does not

Her hands even now feel empty

without your core to hold

A tattered, silken scrap of the Goddess’ apron you will meet

and you -

you will go up in flames

A small ember of you will stay in her hand

a burning promise of your company along her roads

and of your eventual full-circle return

The rest of your parts will fly like startled grey doves

and perch in the clouds

There to mix with the breath of earth,

in wide blue lungs of earth

There to collect in droplets of finest you

And when you are heavy enough

with the strength of having burned completely away

you will rain yourself down in greatness of long love

You will fling yourself out of the sky, as you are able

As each part of you finds itself mirrored

in she who waited for you and burned you up,

that part of you shall surrender

It shall seek to fall

without help

without any desire to escape from tangled-ness with her,

with no notion of pride either wounded or protected

And so you will descend drop by drop

to the ice

to the snow

to the river’s source

And so you will slip into clear sweetwater lakes 

of her quenching peace

of her renewing fires

You will press yourself hard to clogged unyielding dams of struggle

with other and with self

Because you fall willingly, you will follow well

the course, the run and rapids

of a whole life’s journey 

back to sea

back to she

who will hold up her palms to catch your fresh drops of life

Back you will come to the self

first retrieved in her territories

and freed in her fire

Your reconciled self

will gratefully tumble and crash down the path

of cultivated humility

before the beloved other

Sea of Hearts

Using only my hand I mix the sea

I mix it -

until just combined -

with my ulterior motives

Rolling out my mixed messages 

my subtexts my blind graspings

one by one

I drop the wet palmfuls

into the dark blue horizon that blankets our rock

Our beautiful orb-of-rock home

all swaddled in buckets and buckets

of salty salty blue sorrowing

Oh planet of tears

Oh womb of hearts that can still be bothered to beat

Oh stubborn hearts making the effort to beat 

so they may live to break another time

Think of it, your tears float in the sea I want to call mine

your tears mix shamelessly with mine 

Also -

just think of it -

they are stirred with the tears of our enemies

And finally they must blend

with even the tears of those who -

according to us -

are worse than our enemies

Oh you know who I mean

the ones who ended up with our salty hearts

but somehow they don’t notice this -

still-beating hearts loosely in their fingers or tucked in the back pocket of their jeans

Oh they leave our hearts here and there like sets of keys

What is more unseen unloved and lost

than a set of keys?

Maybe they do notice sometimes

but if they do

they notice the way they’d notice

that it’s raining again

It is raining again 

into the sea

and we can pace the shore where it’s rocky or the sand is silk

waiting at the stream mouths 

for our hearts to wash down with the flood of what we are

What we are falls into us 

and it can only fall out as tears from the centre 

of the maze of the heart

We are

secret questions never asked

not even once

uncharted urges

messy desire

and blundering, endearing hope

and we fall down together 

whether we like it 
or not