Myth of Arrival

Where will I go with such thin wrists? Often
I watch snails crawl through bogs. I'm unable
to find such narrow roads, compass. Drunken
in the devastated paddies, scornful
of dried beans and mulberry. Silly bean!
You do not taste of clouds or caramel
or rain. I'm drunk on rain. Salt, milk between
my teeth. O love, be my road, my little
dirt trail. I want to feel you everywhere
I go. In my mouth, on my skin, about
my feet. Like gross dust, do not rise above
me. Do not leave my behind. It's unfair
I am lost. Where am I going without
your well-worn path? without your tipsy love?

"Crying out loud and weeping are great resources.
A nursing mother, all she does
is wait to hear her child.

The hard rain and the wind
are ways the cloud has
to take care of us." — Jala al-Din Rumi (149)

We cry for so many different reason. This is a cry of joy. Omavi Mafuju Ndoto has posted a wonderful interview I did for Chaotic Dreams Online. It show cases a book I co-authored with several friends some years ago, 4 Against the Wall. I think the interview went off wonderfully (this time I hit spell-check before I sent it off)! Thanks everyone, this is a delight!

This sonnet here is a cry too, but of a different sort:

The stones have blown themselves dry. Fire of men
grows small. Look at me, now. This cannot do.
Let me grow small, too. Let me make my den
in the soft, green earth under a statue
grown wild with vine. Remember me. Will you
try to remember me? so you too might
come to my graveside; pray with a make-do
shrine, with red paper, with song, with moonlight.
I loved moonlight in the trees, the ocean,
the tall cliffs. Think of me grown small beneath
the soft, green earth. A fox in the greenest
of graves. I am a thing of corrosion
and lust. A pathetic ghost who put teeth
into your flame; the child who sleeps with dust.

Work Cited

Barks, Coleman. A Year with Rumi. San Francisco: Harper (2006)

I took this video down by the river that runs through the center of Grand Rapids, MI. Of course, in order to get me in the shot all you can see if a tree in the background … so I guess I could claim I was anywhere. Hmmm … ok, this is a video of me, on the moon, next to one of the few surviving moon trees. Notice how blue the moon's sky is? How lovely!

Color is for lovers. You have given
that up. Possession, self-will, surrender
are not used in here. Green is love, lemon
the vast sea, purple a ring of amber
and red all my worth. After a drawn-out
illness we sip poison, laugh away our
many weaknesses. Famine passes, drought
ends. Will passion return? We wait and your
body goes blind. The ash trees all knit you
a gown, the ghost of dead sand. What happened?
Your thirst was once unquenchable, now blue
is a myth, legend; as if blue poisoned
all this and more. As if blue was taunting
you, all that's left; bones wiped clean, flesh starving.

“friends part/ forever — wild geese/ lost in cloud” Basho.

Not all poems need explanations. Like this one. I recorded it outside the Children's Museum in Grand Rapids, MI. The two gentlemen in the very last shot walking behind me turned and began to heckle me a bit after I switched off the camera. Later I tried to re-record the poem but felt that this version was stronger, even if it was nearly ruined by jerks.

I'm not a velvet ant. Unlike the bee
my sting is smooth. It's as pointless to talk
about sin as it's to say “I'm sorry”
for all this pain. I am changing, I lock
myself up in prayer, I am in the air,
I am everywhere. There is a hive
outside my window. Wasps are a prayer
of sorts, they're as empty as me. We thrive
the way your gods and devils thrive. Devils
are our aftermath outside the window.
Look at what I am. These private evils
you speak of are trite. Watch me rise, hollow
inside; feel my rage-grown wings, my moan
debased, I am a blur, all sting and drone.

I am trying out a new experiment. As soon as I write a sonnet I also video tape myself reading it out loud so there is a visual to go along with the poem. The downside of this is that I am not actually familiar enough with the poem to read it right from memory, so I hold the paper it is written on just belong the camera. As a result it looks like I am reading from cue cards, which is exactly what I am doing.

It is another sweltering night. Some
thing is moving on this page. You who can
not be the sun's right hand or the left thumb
of the goat god Pan, the sun's blood goat Pan,
you must then be love. The bad love the stars
give, all glitter eyeliner. What began
as a sort of hunger, like the guitar's
riddle, ended here. A love that is ours
must be a myth. No love is too foreign
to trust. Think of Pan in the woods, singing
the earth alive; and his song is moonlight
and sun. Think of him now, the violent one,
the one you want to be, the one rising
out of this myth to become the hot night.

Pan is, for those who don't remember their Greek mythology, a goat-footed god, one of the lesser gods, who lived in the forests of Arcadia and spent his time fooling around with nymphs and making up songs on his pan-pipes (thus the name). Plutarch is said to have written that those aboard a sailing ship, passing near the islands of Echinades, suddenly heard a mysterious voice calling out from the distant shore. It cried three times, "when you reach Palodes proclaim that the great god Pan is dead."

One epoch after another and we find the ancient gods never die, they simply get footnoted in poetry.