It is in the periods of in-between
……..when the numb finger pervades and prevails and presupposes stoppage,
……..a malingering fiend in a museum of untouchable parts,
……..the fattest of hollow souls you will ever have seen.
……..He is it is we are all in the wearisome in-between.
And this is when no more writing comes,
……..the interminable exhaustion of a ruptured stomach
……..and a hollow head. I’ve forgotten everything
……..except my memory was called spotless
……..once, at the blackboard (or was it green?) in the writing of entomology,
……..but in another tongue.
……..He has it has we have sung
Already of our woes and our remembrances
……..in hexametered prose.
……..But we wrongly pretended to balance,
……..the height, the consummate star
……..of a lovely symmetry
……..that would shatter in our H-shaped houses
……..of walls and lights and words and shush.
……..He will it will we will flush
Uncommonly at the specter of embarrassment
……..that encircles our beggared and holy thoughts,
……..the hauntress of a meeker temperament
……..that never meant to step an inch, or four,
……..out of line. The turpentine
……..corrupted us all at an early age,
……..solving or dissolving in nursery rhythms
……..while we knew nothing of them.
……..And still I know but little.
……..He shall it shall we shall whittle
Our introductions and our arguments
……..to the very essence until they are ossified
……..and water-white, the epitome of filtration
……..in an Erlenmeyer flask. And how I long
……..for the sureness now of physics and reactions and numbers,
……..even of planetary bodies in umbrella galaxies,
……..when faced – I, a fragile soul – with the inevitability
……..that your poems, these poems are not-a-thing.
Old Poem: Narcissus
In the night I fell from bed
and my stomach had grown
voracious in the hour since
the neighbor’s eye had gone too blind
to cast an appraising stare
this way. I made a waking prayer
and took a loaf of bread.
The bread in the icebox
was hard like a stone,
but there was bread enough for
one thousand hungry mouths
if mine were not the biggest
mouth of the lot.
I tossed the crustier ends by
the window to a quiet street,
a tin-can alley grown old
too young by virtue of its graying parts.
The wind was chilly so
I shut the window on the breeze.
In my room I shut the cupboard doors
and shut the cupboard mirror,
for I had no ribs to see or count.
I dirtied the floor with pieces of bread
and reasoned that I would not be immaculate
then and felt more tired than before.
I was tired so I took a book
of love poems from the shelf
and read until I did not forget
that I was awake in the night
after falling from bed
and my eye was too blind to see
even the most salient thing
and the bread sat like a rock
in the salt of my stomach
and I ungenerously slept on it all.
Old Poem: Hair
You were ascetic
in the cradle of your life,
yielding to the blood
when it explained to you
that yours was a weak fiber
still, and you kept a quiet life,
the keeper of the vigil underground,
with one hundred thousand consorts
equally unborn and equally destined
to a long and hanging fate, as yours.
Then, on the threshold of being forgotten,
you broke through the cavity in a burst of desire,
but you were small and green and did not realize
that you were one of many of the same.
Yet the ones who look up to you
look up because they see that, in fact,
in dying you are living and polished,
and they think it is strange, and they want to know,
how does one grow so popular in death?
And you, meanwhile, keep mouthless,
for you never knew such vanities,
and what is the occasion,
when there are so many of the same,
growing and falling everyday?
After all, your course was charted for you
by gravity and when the time for parting
has come, you drop to the torn fabric
of a subway chair and get caught on the thread
and no one gives you a passing look.
Brief Thoughts and an Old Poem
I like simplicity more and more. I know I could be a simple person, but the layers of complication and craziness make things more chaotic than they need to be. There’s a simpleness of heart at the quiet center of things. It’s the mind that keeps on chattering and making things spin out of control and into a world of illusion. Yes, dear mind, you are a nice companion, but you do make a girl nuts sometimes.
—
What does it mean to be happy in life?
So many people spend their days and nights chasing after such a thing but then they end up with ulcers or breathing troubles or pains in the lower back. They work long hours and bring home money and the outside world wonders over the glamour of their résumé, but at the end of the day they are fatigued and feeling a little dull. What are they missing?
—
what a little nonsense
grows thick in this girl’s brain!
the tulips are not blooming
the weather is half-fine
the rain is striking windowpanes
in time in time in time
Two Lullabies and a Prayer
Little child—little child,
Are you sleeping now?
Little child—little child,
As the lights go down.
Lovely child—lovely child,
It will be all right.
Lovely child—lovely child,
With this lullaby.
–
The moon is waking from her sleep
And singing in the light.
She picked your nightgown from the heap
…….Pulled it o’er your head
…….Tucked you into bed
And looking at your pretty face,
Whispered you “Good night!”
–
Wonderful Lady,
Please hear my plea:
I am a wretch
Long waiting on thee.
These are my flowers,
Given to bless;
These are my sorrows,
Please put them to rest.
General Principles
Some general principles I try to keep in mind as I go through each day.
—
1. God is love and God is always with you and in you.
2. One thing at a time.
3. Take a deep breath to slow down worries.
4. Make a daily plan.
5. When uncertain or overwhelmed, look inside of yourself and try to find the answer before (frantically) looking elsewhere. (More answers are inside of you than you think!)
6. When upset, pray.
7. When about to purchase, ask: “do I need this?”
8. Let go of judgment, unhealthy habits, and all that keeps you farther from God (like fear).
9. Finish and clean up what you’ve begun before moving to the next thing.
10. Speak simply. “Let your ‘yes’ be yes and your ‘no’ be no.”
Additional thoughts:
– Choose faith and love over fear as often as you can remember to.
– Positive thoughts create health.
– Don’t be afraid of good things, or of seeing good.
– Be gentle, be kind.
Advice to a Doubtful Girl
First, the girl needs to see that she is too worried. Worried about getting everything right. The truth is, there isn’t such a strict picture of what is “right” and what is not–that’s making the world too narrow. There is more truth in just doing than in sitting around, hem-hawing and mulling indefinitely over speculative things.
Second, the girl has to see how much she is worth. She won’t believe she’s worth trusting if she can’t see how much good has been built into her very being. The solution to this quandary is to develop her gifts in ways that make her happy and fulfilled.
Third, she can’t trust herself if she doesn’t finally learn that she is loved. Loved in a deeply satisfying way that makes her happy and alive. She misunderstands and thinks that the “love” she is being shown–the “love” she tries to accept and make herself aware of–is something she needs to learn to like, something dim and hard and not immediately palatable. She must understand that things are simpler and better than this, and that she is loved in a way that promotes her happiness and her being fully alive in every possible way. When she sees–and accepts–that God loves her in this really good, wholesome, exciting, perfect way–when she understands that He really wants her to be happy and fully alive–then the doubt will fade into the background, because she will no longer be split in two, trying to balance what she thinks is true but doesn’t really like with what (at a deeper level) she knows to be true and what, in fact, lights up her soul. The struggle to reconcile incompatible beliefs will be gone; her soul will no longer have to resist her mind to protect the truth of what it really desires. False thinking dies away, and she is free to see that the things she really wants are good and don’t need to be denied. She won’t have to try to convince herself to want things she doesn’t really want anymore.
(Illustration credit: Angela Barrett.)