SPORK 

Very grateful to Richard Siken and Jake Levine for featuring my poems "Falling is all edges," "A piece of string in the leaves," "After the parade," and "Sketch" at Spork Press.

DUSIE 13 (VOL 4 NO 1)

Damn glad to be included in this issue of Dusie dedicated to "The Radical Vernacular" with Michael Basinski, Danielle Vogel, Megan Burns, Sarah Vap, Gina Myers, Brenda Sieczkowksi, Megan Kaminski, Kirsten Jorgenson, Eric Baus, Robin Brox, Aaron Lowinger, Brenda Iijima, Jennifer Denrow, Shelly Taylor, Abraham Smith, Jen Tynes, and issue curator Michael Sikkema.

NO PLOT SO NARROW

Very grateful for an invitation to write a guest post for Lara Candland and Julie Turley's fantastic collaborative blog Girls in a Tight Place this week. It's a real honor to be in such warm company!

BETWEEN THE BLACK AND WHITE SPIDERS

No forms less/ than activity

—R Creeley

We live in a little apartment made out of the top of an old mill that was built before the Civil War. The green walls of our living room narrow into an expanse of exposed wood that leads into our bedroom (newly painted). Our floor is warped and most of our windows are crooked… An antique grinder that is too heavy to move has become a part of our furniture. I looked into the larger downstairs apartment once this summer before our neighbors moved in, jealous of their washer and dryer, and saw that they live among the industrial detritus of old mill machinery too. They even live with large gears, counter-weights, and a staircase that dead-ends into the ceiling. The mill’s water wheel is long gone, but there is still a trace of a dilapidated stone dam, that I imagine it must have been attached to, crumbling across the bank from the creek that runs beneath the back half of our apartment where I sit to read in the morning next to the portable heater with my feet up on the windowsill. We write poems here. We lay the pages of manuscripts out across the floor and our dog, Franklin, walks through them; then, we shuffle them up and start anew. Our pages are covered in dirt, dust, leaves, pine needles, and dog hair.

A place is a compost of time—a layered process that exposes space. It belongs to itself; it is isolated and resonant. A poem is, likewise, compost. I can think of no more graceful account of this than J Clare’s loving attention to the nightingale’s nest in his tremendously lush and gentle “The Nightingale’s Nest”:

How curious is the nest; no other bird

Uses such loose materials, or weaves

Their dwellings in such spots: dead oaken leaves

Are placed without, and velvet moss within,

And little scraps of grass, and, scant and spare,

Of what seems scarce materials, down and hair.

The first time I ever taught a creative writing class, I asked students to introduce themselves by deciding (as a class) what kind of “dirt” they wanted to know about each other. One of the first things that they, inevitably, wanted to do was identify themselves according to the genres that they imagined themselves to be writing in. I saw where this was going and I tried to shut it down right away because genre is a limit and an imposition. Writing with genre in mind degrades our circumstances because it forces us to think of our writing as a product (and, thus, to classify it accordingly). I tried to organize class (loosely) around the activity of compost journaling instead—an alternative that I hoped would allow us to focus on the rawness writing as it happens. In part, because this is the way I write, as D Levertov instruct me to in Some Notes On Organic Form: “Organic poetry…is a method of apperception, i.e., of recognizing what we perceive, and is based on an intuition of an order, a form beyond forms, in which forms partake, and of which man’s creative works are analogies, resemblances, natural allegories. Such poetry is exploratory.” Students kept lyric journals throughout the semester and we worked off from photocopies of handwritten pages from their journals. Approaching pages as fields, we scored energetic developments, weird dissonances (pivots), and tracked patterns. Class time gave way to some of the rarest writing I’ve seen—projects were edgy, expansive, daring, fine, and roughly textured. They were stunning. They are. Like C Olson says, “We do what we know before we know what we do.”

I think our imagination of poems often stunts our ability to take instruction from the occasions we find ourselves writing in. Wm Blake addresses the problem of projection when he recounts being lead down through a mill to his eternal lot by an Angel in The Marriage of Heaven & Hell

So he took me thro’ a stable & thro’ a church & down into the church vault, at the end of which was a mill: thro’ the mill we went, and came to a cave : down the winding cavern we groped our tedious way, till a void boundless as a nether sky appear’d beneath us, & we held by the roots of trees and hung over this immensity ; but I sad : ‘if you please, we will commit ourselves to this void, and see whether providence is here also : if you will not, I will ?’ but he answer’d : ‘do not presume, O young-man, but as we here remain, behold they lot which will soon appear when the darkness passes away.’

So I remain’d with him, sitting in the twisted root of an oak ; he was suspended in a fungus, which hung the head downward into the deep.

By degrees we beheld the infinite Abyss, fiery as the smoke of a burning city ; beneath us, at an immense distance, was the sun, black but shining ; round it were fiery tracks on which revolv’d vast spiders, crawling after their prey, which flew, or rather swum, in the infinite deep, in the most terrific shapes of animals sprung from corruption ; & the air was full of them, & seemed composed of them : these are Devils, and are called Powers of the air. I now asked my companion which was my eternal lot ? he said : ‘between the black and white spiders.’

But now, from between the black and white spiders, a cloud and fire burst and rolled thro’ the deep, black’ning all beneath, so that the nether deep grew black as a sea, & rolled with a terrible noise ; beneath us was nothing now to be seen but a black tempest, till looking east between the clouds & the waves, we saw a cataract of blood mixed with fire, and not many stones’ throw from us appear’d and sunk again the scaly fold of a monstrous serpent ; at last, to the east, distant about three degrees, appear’d a fiery crest above the waves ; slowly it reared like a ridge of golden rocks, till we discover’d two globes of crimson fire, from which the sea fled away in clouds of smoke ; and now we saw it was the head of Leviathan ; his forehead was divided into streaks of green & purple like those on a tyger’s forehead : soon we saw his mouth & red gills hang just above the raging foam, tingling black deep with beams of blood, advancing toward us with al the fury of a spiritual existence.

My friend the Angel climb’d from his station into the mill ; I remain’d alone ; & then this appearance was no more, but I found myself sitting on a pleasant back beside a river by moonlight, hearing a harper, who sung to the harp ; & his theme was : ‘The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, & breeds reptiles of the mind.’

But I arose and sought for the mil, & there found my Angel, who, surprised, asked me how I escaped?

I answer’d : ‘All that we saw was owing to your metaphysics ; for when you ran away, I found myself on a bank in the moonlight hearing a harper’” (“A Memorable Fancy”)

Blake’s eternal lot is pleasure not a projection and he only knows because he has faith enough to wait to see what happens. Accepting projections of our eternal lot is dangerous because the exertion of agency hampers our ability to see things clearly. When Blake’s Angel flees, he finds himself alone listening to a harper at the edge of a river. His terrible vision of Leviathan gives way to music and peacefulness that is associated with the river’s current. Accepting other people’s projections about what is and is not a poem by making comparisons is just as dangerous. (Remember that it is the inscription THOU SHALT NOT that turns all the flowers in Blake’s “Garden of Love” into tombstones.) Our circumstances shine beyond comparison. Poetry shatters the rhetoric and authority that is predicated upon the empty rhetoric of tradition. The Norton Anthology is compost like any other and, as Thomas Paine asserts in Rights of Man, “It is the living, and not the dead, that are to be accommodated.” Jesus: “Let the dead bury their own dead” (Luke 9:60). Better to recognize the gifts we are given to accordingly. D Wordsworth: “Happily we cannot shape the huge hills, or carve out the valleys according to our fancy” (Journals).

Clare’s primary concern is attention; he knows that he is the one who doesn’t belong and he’s worried that he’ll frighten the nightingale

Sing on, sweet bird! may no worse hap befall

Thy visions, than the fear that now deceives.

We will not plunder music of its dower,

Nor turn this spot of happiness to thrall;

For melody seems hid in every flower,

That blossoms near thy home. (“The Nightingale’s Nest”)

We would learn well to heed the gentleness of Claire’s bird poems and the humility that allows him to participate in the compost he sees. Hearing is a process of externalization: Ear/ hear/ here (“The Fern Owl”). When Clare takes instruction from the nightingale’s “out-sobbing songs,” he steps out of agency to merge with the activity at hand until he is “lost in a wilderness of listening leaves” (“The Nightingale’s Nest”). Thus, he is drawn into an ecstasy of abandon where his is no concern at all. At one with his work at Walden, Thoreau knows this lesson well: “I had an old axe which nobody claimed” (Walden). Wildness sharpens an axe that will never rust and we’re welcome to swing it as long as we give ourselves over to the chopping.

Returning to the compost of journals across intervals of time we map space that requires us to learn to encounter ourselves as other(s). We see we are not where we were and we see that we are not the organizing principle. We are not birthing a constellation; we are being born. Composting is holistic as it makes way for a realization that presence is much more expansive than we often take it to be. Thoreau addresses the strangeness that accompanies this experience when he considers the layered bloom of presence in the “Solitude” chapter of Walden

With thinking we may be beside ourselves in a sane sense. By conscious effort of the mind we can stand aloof from actions and their consequences; and all things, good and bad, go by us like a torrent. We are not wholly involved in Nature. I may be either the driftwood in the stream, or Indra, in the sky looking down on it. I may be affected by an actual event which appears to concern me much more. I only know myself as a human entity; the scene, so to speak, of thoughts and affections; and am sensible of a certain doubleness by which I can stand as remote from myself as from another.

We are writer(s) and reader(s). “Reading” and “Sounds” are rightly separate chapters in Walden because they are separate activities. Ecstasy blurs them together. J Cage: “Opposites = parts of oneness” (Themes & Variations). Jesus: “Friend, how did you come in here without a wedding garment?” (Matthew 22:12).

........................

BOOK OF REVELATIONS:

Then I turned to see the voice that spoke with me. And having turned I saw seven golden lampstands, and in the midst of the seven lampstands One like the Son of Man, clothed with a garment down to the feet and girded about the chest with a golden band. His head and hair were white like wool, as white as snow, and His eyes like a flame of fire; in a furnace, and His voice as the sound of many waters; He had in His right hand seven stars, out of His mouth went a sharp two-edged sword, and His countenance was like the sun shining in its strength. And when I saw Him, I fell at His feet as dead. But He laid His right hand on my, saying to me, “Do not be afraid; I am the First and the Last. I am He who lives, and was dead, and behold, I am alive forevermore. Amen. And I have the keys of Hades and Death. “Write the things which you have seen and the things which are, and the things which will take place after this.” (Revelations 1:9-19).

D Levertov: “Form is never more than a revelation of content” (Some Notes on Organic Form). Poems are a revelation of activity underway, terrifying and lovely. A word is a “two-edged sword.” At the edge of this world, Jesus comes adorned with seven beautiful lampshades and seven stars because forms bring us to rest in the activity of the next place. Breakdowns are always, finally, a matter of perspective. The rain-soaked birches that we kicked through as children rot to feed the forest floor. Thoreau: “Some forms of disease, even, may prophesy forms of health” (“Walking”). Abandoning our words to the compost allows them to grow. F Gander’s “The Nymph Stick Insect” explores writing as compost by considering the fact that creation is a layered process full of hap and catastrophe: “The diagrams themselves [conceive] an intuition, the scribble suggests a word. A structure arises, but becomes useful only after its development. Evolutionary theorists call this exaptation. Our brains may have developed this way.” Rest assured, our place will be determined for us. Recognizing that the limits we would put on our poems are, in fact, our own is the beginning of our eternal lot. Jesus: “Let us cross over to the other side of the lake” (Luke 8.22).

I love R Creeley’s 1961 address to the Patterson Society because it asserts that language is a salvation deeply involved in the, inevitable, loosening of agency: “Again and again I find myself saved, in words—helped, allowed, returned to possibility and hope. In the dilemma of some literal context a way is found in the words which may speak it” (A Quick Graph). His account of writing forwards the “way” as something that is inexplicably “found”; it also underscores the fact that, in the end, it is not us at all but “the words which may speak it.” These words will keep speaking long after we’re gone because meaning continues to resonate. (Check out Eli Friedlander’s gorgeous book about JJ Rousseau’s Reveries of the Solitary Walker, JJ Rousseau: An Afterlife of Words…) R Creeley has been dead for almost seven years; his words continue to speak to me every day. This is the only thing that I know about the future: Other people will read our poems or not; they’ll see what happens there and know what to do or not. Other people will live in this mill; they’ll get their own glimpses of eternity here. A compost is never finished because particles keep moving. I found a piece of string in the grass last summer, good as any, and I put it into our dresser. An active nest is always underway, and as E Pound comes to realize at Pisa, “grass [is] nowhere out of place” (Pisan Cantos).

All the good books know that eternity leaves us behind. Creeley gives Pieces away: “I left the room to them,/ I felt, as though hearing/ laughter, my own heart lighten.// What do you do,/ what do you say,/ what do you think,/ what do you know.” He gives Pieces away in a way that calls to the compost: John 13:7, the end of W Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, and the end of WC Williams Spring and All. It’s mine now and tomorrow it will belong to you. Jesus: “Blessed are the eyes which see the things you see” (Luke 10:23). Even as I write this, Franklin yawns and lays his sweet face down across the keyboard to tell me that it’s time to go for a walk. Maybe I’ll want to see what I wrote here when we get home.

LORD, LET ME DIE WITH A HAMMER IN MY HAND

America has never been easy, and is not easy today.  Americans have always been at a certain tension.  Their liberty is a thing of sheer will, sheer tension: a liberty of THOU SHALT NOT.

            —DH Lawrence

This is a crime story in a large and violent place.  Too large for subject and object.

—Susan Howe

An American is a complex of occasions.

            —Charles Olson

A change in attention is a change in culture.

            —Guy Davenport

It’s fall time in NC.  The old mill that we just moved into in Sugar Grove (about six miles outside of Boone where we are teaching) is surrounded by fog most every morning…  I’m up early enough walking Franklin that I’ve already been wearing a winter jacket.  One of the first things that we hear after our slatted door creaks open is the sound of overripe apples hitting the asphalt.  I have been listening to Gillian Welch at night, driving in the dark on mountain roads and I have been thinking a lot about Welch’s meditative and radiantly frayed journey through the American underworld “I Dream A Highway” (Time, The Revelator)—a song that scrapes rock bottom (“an empty wagon/ full of rattling bones”) to inhabit and pay homage to the isolations, busted hopefulness, dangerous lures and shattered ecstasies of American experience “blind and blistered by the morning white.”  Patron saint: Jack of Diamonds.  Clocking in just shy of fifteen minutes, “I Dream A Highway” initiates a trance and a sacrifice of breath—a desperate prayer for occupation and renewal.

As the crumbling “silver vision” of America gives way to exhaustion, anxiety, and paranoia, Welch turns to embrace American audacity and American stubbornness: “John,/ he’s/ kicking out/ the footlights.// The Grande/ Old Opry’s/ got a/ brand new band.//  Lord,/ let me die/ with a hammer/ in my hand.”  Welch’s wrenching desire to die with a hammer in her hand like John Henry acknowledges America as a dangerous proposal and a call to wakefulness that often comes at great cost because wakefulness requires us to live with (to carry) the burden of American experience.  Calling to Lazarus to step out from the edge of the window shade, Welch attempts to provide the comfort of company, asking, “Let me/ see the marks/ that death/ has made”—a request for dark knowledge that will occupy and overtake her.  Lazarus’ timid reluctance also foretells a shaky experienced resurrection that is perforated by loss.  It marks an edge exhilarating and shot through with terror that reminds us how the end of HD Thoreau's Walden anticipates F O’Conner’s brutal conversion narratives: “The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us.  Only that day dawns to which we are awake.  There is more day to dawn.  The sun is but a morning star.”  The Misfit: “She would have been a good women if someone would have been there to shoot her every day of her life” (“A Good Man is Hard to Find”).

“I Dream A Highway” is dark prophecy.  Welch looks inward and finds that the most intense locality is a dark forest. DH Lawrence: “My soul is a dark forest” (Studies in Classic American Literature).  She responds generously, in kind, making way for the world-weary, poor and disenfranchised, the lost and left behind who can’t “get with it.”  She calls to country singers, killers, junkies, gamblers, and exhausted Hollywood waitresses eclipsed by their demons and the broken narratives of “progress” with the dignity and dogged force of John Henry.  And we need her.  (Especially now that Johnny Cash has set out for the next place.)  Ghosts come with the full weight of their experience and transgressions and we need them too.  Welch: “What will sustain us/ through the winter?”  How do we do better?  “Last year’s lessons” don’t hold.  Welch: “Walk me out into/ the rain and snow.”

Allowing ourselves to merge with the dissonance, joy and terrors that haunt the American landscape is to be turned over like the soil—it means we must learn to commune with the dead: “Give me/ some of/ what/ you’re having.//  I’ll/ take you as a viper/ into/ my head.//  A knife/ in my bed,/ arsenic/ when I’m fed.” Welch is willing to be occupied and the seductive rhythm and lull of her voice and guitar pulls us into the wake of the transformation with her (“You be/ Emmylou and/ I’ll be/ Gram”).  She’s willing to draw the short straw.

One of our great American prophets, C Olson, claims that “SPACE,” “the central fact” of American experience, “comes large, and without mercy” in Call Me Ishmael, his thrilling, innovative reading of H Melville’s Moby-Dick.  Olson frames Melville as a harbinger who forces us to read and, thus, confront the darkness that we nest and carry beneath our exuberance and optimism: “Whitman we have called our greatest voice because he gave us hope.  Melville is the truer man.  He lived intensely his people’s wrong, their guilt.  But he remembered the first dream.  The White Whale is more accurate than Leaves of Grass.  Because it is America, all of her space, the malice, the root.”  “I Dream A Highway” is harrowing because the weird energy and warped momentum of American life is harrowing.  It overtakes us.  It will.  Stepping out into the space manifest by “progress” is a means of acknowledging that there must be a change of attention.  It’s our way “back to you,” to step into the expansiveness of Whitman’s “you” on the open road (“I Dream A Highway”).  We simply cannot afford to proceed without being mindful of the fact that we are in momentum with (married to) the wreckage of our origins because American experience is “a winding ribbon/ with a/ band of/ gold” (“I Dream A Highway”).  Like Olson’s Ishmael, Welch brings our darkness to light:  “It was Ishmael who learned the secrets of Ahab’s blasphemies from the prophet of the fog, Elijah.  He recognized Pip’s God-sight, and moaned for him.  He cries forth the glory of the crew’s humanity.  Ishmael tells their story and their tragedy as well as Ahab’s, and thus creates the Moby-Dick universe in which the Ahab-world is, by the necessity of life—of the Declaration of Independence—included” (Call Me Ishmael).  Moby-Dick is a primary American parable.  Ahab is a captain of industry, locked in self-sight.  We live with his darkness (death drive) every day.  His cruelty, greed and ambition (idolatry) are a part of our experience.  “I Dream A Highway” traces wrenched echoes to remind us that this darkness extends to us, to real people.  (One way or another.)  Our humanity is complex; it’s full of strife and heartache.  We fall and find opportunities for grace and redemption.  (Or don’t.)  We find our way together.  

CODA

Being awake is T Carlyle’s prerequisite for voting.  (Sleepers don’t get a say.)  In America, the sweaty loudmouth, privileged enough to believe he speaks for everyone, who pounds on the table in Black Cat Burrito, our local burrito place, to assert that “lazy poor people” should “stop complaining and get a job” between mouthfuls of food gets a say.  We carry his ignorance and self-love/ loathing (as if our own wasn’t heavy enough…).  I come up the steps into the apartment, boil water for coffee, and watch newsreel of a Tea Party mob crying out for us to let the uninsured poor die: Yahoo News.

*Note: I’m assuming that the uninsured poor also stand in for any number of other scapegoats that the Tea Party mob might be able to point to. I’m fallen. I have fallen again and again... I’m sure that I’m on this list alongside my mother who is good enough to mail me her inhaler because, even though I have health insurance this year (for the first time in many years), I still can’t afford the medicine I need to treat my asthma. I’m sure that many of the people I love are on this list.  “Let [them] die.”  CHEERS.

In America, we are haunted by the emptiness of our own rhetoric and by a terrible misreading of our place in the grand scheme of things (unreadable to us).  We are haunted by the zeal of the Religious Right and by fanatics who write God on every brick that they throw through our living room windows.  We are haunted by our own ignorance and we continue to pay attention to (empower) people who want us to stay that way. We are haunted by a cheap and amazingly narrow reading of J Edwards’ terrifying Great Awakening sermon “Sinners at the Hand of an Angry God” (that I’m sure haunts many of our scapegoats too):

O sinner!  Consider the fearful danger you are in: ’tis a great furnace of wrath, a wide and bottomless pit, full of the fire of wrath, that you are held over in the hand of that God, whose wrath is provoked and incensed as much against you as against many of the damned in Hell: you hang by a slender thread, with the flames of divine wrath flashing about it, and ready every moment to singe it, and burn it asunder; and you have no interest in any mediator, and nothing to lay hold of to save yourself, nothing to keep off the flames of wrath, nothing of your own, nothing that you ever have done, nothing that you can do, to induce God to spare you one moment.

That’s one awful sentence.  We puppet a terrifying Old Testament God of wrath that the first generation Puritans drafted to scare us into submission by rattling the chain and holding ourselves over the pit.   God is waiting, displeased.  His patience is wearing.  He’s going to drop us into the lake of fire if the crowd doesn’t devour us first.  Best to serve someone else up instead.  (Melville’s Bartleby: “I would prefer not to.”)  Edwards’ sermon makes us crawl down the aisles on our hands and knees begging for forgiveness.  Sound familiar?  America sings for the rich and for the God who holds us over the pit.

Here’s the problem: Edwards’ “Sinners at the Hands of an Angry God” sermon isn’t a continuation of the old Puritan rhetoric.  It’s not really a sermon about incorporation.  On the contrary, it actually marks the beginning of a splintering departure from the power structure of his day that still undercuts the entire Right Wing Conservative “Gospel of Wealth [Self]” narrative because it recasts God in the mysterious fire of original Calvinism.  Breaking the safety of the contract (“Covenant of Grace”) that the first generation Puritans imagined bound God to behave in ways justified to human conduct, Edwards caused pandemonium for milk toast third generation Puritans by restoring God to incomprehensible, overwhelming activity (P Miller Errand into the Wilderness).  The upheaval of Edwards’ teachings posed an immediate threat to the church because they called the privilege and necessity of church leadership into question by offering parishioners a jarring reminder that their relationship God was fraught and dynamic—an unmediated psychological experience that is always, finally, a matter of individual conscience (“Tyger, tyger, burning bright”). God was (is) a mechanism of control.  Wake up.  God is not a mob.  (Never was.)  God is a visionary proposal.  We go there alone.  And, in America, we are alone together.  Each is responsible for their soul.  This is exactly the realization that allows the loathsome Sherburn to diffuse the mob that wants to lynch him to satisfy their own bloodlust in Twain’s Huck Finn: “The pitifulest thing out is a mob…they don’t fight with courage that’s born in them, but courage that’s borrowed from their mass…a mob without any man at the head of it, is beneath pitifulness.” Disgusted by the town folk’s cruelty, Huck goes to the circus instead.

Calling for “sleepers” (a term he draws from Carlyle) to wake up in Walden and elsewhere, Thoreau attempts to rewrite Manifest Destiny as a spiritual endeavor into wilderness that out speeds empire.  He calls us to a wider perspective that costs the same uncertainly.  (Read Cape Cod if you don’t believe me…)  We risk everything.  We risk stability, contamination, disintegration and assimilation.  We risk being trampled by the crowd en masse.  We risk being responsible for ourselves.  DH Lawrence: “My soul is a dark forest.”  We risk Young Goodman Brown’s spiritual collapse: “My Faith is gone!” We go there alone.

Translating Confucius in a guerilla cage at Pisa at wit’s end, E Pound turns inward to face a dark forest: “like an arrow, and under bad government/ like an arrow/ Missing the bull’s eye seeks the cause in himself.”

Thoreau: “In Wildness is the Preservation of the World.”  (Read: the world; not ours.)  Wildness destabilizes our agency.  It destabilizes our institutions and our rhetoric and allows them to evolve.

All else is delusion (sleeper). 

Just yesterday, my dear friend Ely texted me that he had a dream that we were all living in the same neighborhood again.  Our houses were unfinished.  Our dogs were playing in the grass.

G Welch: “I dream a highway back to you.”

THE STORY IS CURRENT

(Music is) instantaneous and unpredictable.

—J Cage, Themes & Variations

The story is current.

—HD Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers

The unwritten music of Boursier-Mougenot’s drifting chimes is haunting and resonant while I drive in to W Jefferson to the dump, for gas, to the ABC and grocery store through mountain farmland, dumbstruck by the grace of animals afield—by their casual explorations, by their music, by their delight in each others’ company and in eating, by their beautiful unmade patterns, by the way they huddle together for warmth on cold days in front of dirty white factories and by the way they draft off from each other in the wind.

K and I have lived adrift for most of the past year. We have been uneasy and lonely. We have been poor, despairing, disappointed by job opportunities and unstable living situations, hungry for contact. We struggle with insecurities and anxiety that stem from bruised egos and a lack of faith, tethered to hopes and expectations that hamper our ability to be present, despite the fact that we are surrounded by cows, horses, goats, and bison that all instinctually know how to be organized by the fields that they step into. Boursier-Mougenot’s “Variations” continues to serve as a startlingly reminder that we waste precious time worrying as music (always), finally, composes itself. In this sense, it refreshes our attention to something we already know—namely, that relinquishing authorial agency is a central, spiritual, prerequisite to our daily poetic practices. C Olson: “from the moment he ventures into FIELD COMPOSITION—put himself in the open—he can go by no track other than the one the poem under hand declares, for itself. Thus he has to behave, and be, instant by instant, aware of some several forces just now beginning to be examined” (“Projective Verse”). Boursier-Mougenot’s attention to water as a medium also awakens us to the fact that all music is essentially stray (to our ears) and improvisational—the result of all of the energy that is present in a given field: currents, collision, jets, drift, textures and patterns, etc.

We have been reading P Chodron’s When Things Fall Apart back and forth before bed at night, in attempt to be mindful of this dissonance we feel between what we know (instinct) and the nagging doubts that plague us. Chodron believes that suffering is born of our addiction to our “narrow perspective[s]”: “All anxiety, all dissatisfaction, all the reasons for hoping that our experience could be different are rooted in our fear of death.” Like Olson, she also locates relinquishment as the root of process: “we practice to liberate ourselves from a burden—the burden of a narrow perspective caused by craving, aggression, ignorance, and fear. We’re burdened by the people with whom we live, by ongoing daily situations, and most of all by our own personalities” (120). Thank god that the indeterminacy of writing and daily experience teach us to die (gracefully or ungracefully) by carrying us across the threshold into activity. Susan Howe says all of this with exhilarating clarity and force in My Emily Dickinson: “Liberated from agency, each lyric ‘I’ dies into action.” A mottled white bull and two black cows quietly eat in the shade of maples at the edge of Carter Miller Road and another black cow begins to cross the field towards them—chimes. What happens next is something else. Ever a man of action, HD Thoureau sees the constellation emerging: “Music is the sound of the circulation in nature’s veins” (Journals).

In Todd, NC, where we live, people still celebrate a rich culture that associates wakefulness with being immersed in the activity of a current; they swim, float with coolers of beer buoyed to their rafts, kayak, canoe, fly fish, and put their lawn chairs out into the river to cool off all summer—they are occasionally still baptized (“born again”) in the river (better still, the New River, the second oldest river in the world).

I feel a real connection with the pulse of river-life. As Thoreau asserts in A Week, roads make impositions on the landscape, they reflect our intentions (“narrow perspective”); they carry us to places of business. River-life is a humbling, collaborative process that honors “higher laws” because it requires us to move through the landscape with the current. When we see the blurred reflection of catalpas and arrowhead in current, we see them as they truly are: dynamic. When we see the blurred reflection of our own faces, we see ourselves as we truly are.

The hope (faith) of river-life is that we find we are organized by a much wider realization of presence. Thoreau: “These motions everywhere in nature must surely [be] the circulations of God” (Journals). In the expansiveness of summer, on the other side of a harrowing year, we are learning to be at home in the possibilities of new circumstances. Plenty is underway. A pitchy melody begins to surface through static, crickets, and rhododendron near the compost while a hornet sews violets through the deck rail. My father cuts the engine and we drift under the bridge a hundred times. We are immersed in music that’s like no music I’ve ever heard before. (J Cage in Themes & Variations: “Music = no music.)

Cage’s talk on “Silence”:

Health (“sanity”) is a process of cultivating attention to life and sounds that are already underway. Radio static, commercials, and stray music drift up through the moans of cows in the morning when I walk Franklin along the unfinished road. Listening to these sounds is a process of externalization that is a restoration: ear/ hear/ here. There’s nowhere else to be. Last weekend in the bakery, I watched a tired father trying to teach his antsy five-year-old daughter how to play chess: “See that piece that looks like a horse?” Daughter: “It’s a horse.”

Excerpt of Cage performing “4:33”:

Like Thoreau says in his Journals, “Nothing in nature makes noise.”

FAST IN THY PARADISE, WHERE NO FLOWER CAN WITHER

At an edge where winter is perforated by rhododendron and wild apple blossoms, my grandmother, Catherine Marion Hauke, is ashes. We went back to MI to visit my family for spring break at the beginning of March and ended up spending most of our vacation at my grandmother’s bedside, saying goodbye. We were with her in the hospital late Thursday night and she died in the middle of a snowstorm early Friday morning while my Aunt Lorel was sitting with her. I touched her hair to say that I loved her before we left on Thursday and again Friday morning before the coroner came while my grandfather sat in shock, holding her hand under the blanket.

My grandmother was eighty-nine years old. She spent most of her last week in the hospital. The obituary that my Aunt Wendy wrote for her said that she died surrounded by friends and family. (She did.) It said that she loved to play cards. (She did.) She also had dementia and a bad knee. She picked out her own urn at Pier One Imports for twenty dollars (“a deal”) and she saw her dead brothers waiting for her outside the window of her room. When my father was looking through files for my grandmother’s birth certificate, he found that she had three different social security cards. We also realized that my grandmother “officially” reversed her first and middle names when she married my grandfather: Marion Catherine became Catherine Marion.

What I want to say is that we live at edges. And, as WC Williams asserts in Spring and All, “Love waits at the edge of the petal.” Edges are sources of tremendous transformative potential. Edges are where we give way to Carlyle and Emerson’s “Not Me.” Writers and readers meet at edges where writing gives way to reading. We come to rest in the activity of the Beloved at edges. R Blaser says this better than anyone else I know when he says, “Companions are/ horizons” (The Holy Forest). My great uncles, who I remember shooting skeets at a farm in Stockbridge, MI, twenty years ago are at the window in a snowstorm. (Memory feels like an old television sliding between channels…)

A little more than a month later, it’s flowers outside. I’m reading C Darwin with students this week because I want to end our poetry class by talking about poems as fossils. Darwin’s writings unsettle the possibility of closure because they posit that fossils provide a record of nature underway

The crust of the earth with its embedded remains must not be looked at as a well-filled museum by, but as a poor collection made at hazard and at rare intervals. The accumulation of each great fossiliferous formation will be recognized as having depended on an unusual concurrence of favourable circumstances, and the blank intervals between successive stages as having been of vast duration. (The Origin of the Species)

Fossils show us that our circumstances are unstable and evolving. They evidence a deconstruction that collapses oppositions (the distance between here and there) by calling to what HD Thoreau refers to as our “savage names” in “Walking.” Darwin: “Would any two workmen ever hit on so beautiful, so simple and yet so artificial a contrivance? It cannot be thought so—the one hand has surely worked throughout the universe” (The Voyage of The Beagle). Fossils make way for a vision of nature that is harrowing and incomprehensibly beautiful.

Loss shatters us and our language fails because, like Donald Revell says in Invisible Green, “The outside is unprecedented, and poetry has no word for it.” Our fossils are “a poor collection” and this is a promise because the edges that lay us to waste are, finally, restorations that give witness to the next place. (Blaser elsewhere in The Holy Forest: “God moves to the end of our sentences.”) The morning my grandmother died, my mother, a devout Baptist, cried and tried to reassure everyone, saying, “She’s not here anymore.” Even though years of conversation lead me to imagine that my mother and I register her statement in very different ways, it’s actually true. She’s gone. (It doesn’t escape me that I’m writing this at Easter. I know the tomb is empty.) Standing in my grandmother’s hospital room, I also felt how important it was to acknowledge her body (form) as a fossil before it went to the crematorium. I love the life that had been there. And, even though, I would have been glad for more time together, I’m also glad to let her go because I know that being is dispersal—a process of becoming. Elegy and ecstasy destabilize each other. Nature overtakes us and, doing so, it restores us to primary process. GM Hopkins: “The world is filled with the grandeur of God/ it will flame out” [my emphasis] (“God’s Grandeur”).

We heat our house with a woodstove and burned drafts of old poems this winter to stay warm. We used them to start the fire and keep it going. Yesterday, I scattered the ashes from our woodstove in the garden where K is planting kale, chard, lettuce(s), onions, and bok choy. Do you know JC Moore’s hymn “Never Grow Old”? We used to sing it in church when I was a kid and now I’ve got a gorgeous Johnny Cash recording of it: Never grow old, never grow old,/In a land where we’ll never grow old. When I open my eyes, our house is surrounded by fog. I open my eyes again and it’s green leaves; spring already feels like summer.