Thank you, John, again. Poetry when I needed it.

lighting
a candle

& blowing
it out

lighting
a candle

& blowing
it out

lighting
a candle

& blowing
it out

trying
to

under
stand

                      (thinking of robert lax)

Just when I'm about to get caught up again in the gnawing irritations of politics and people, & feeling more creative energies wasted on chimeras, a poet, and a poetry, suddenly comes my way & tries to set things right (or so it seemed). Today I received a gift of poetry from John Martone, in the form of a lovely 7.5" X 11.5" papier-mâché, delicately leaf-inlaid & stapled work entitled a lamp. The title's a little wisp of a label that, unless roughly handled, will just barely hang on. A work that oughtn't be read at a sitting but opened at random, as required, the eye always resting on the first piece it sees, the hand never to keep a page open longer than necessary. How else to see through to it?

here - there -
straw - caught
in ice -

Almost too entirely self-enclosed to be treated casually in this way yet that's just what it needs to work (for me anyways): a kind of restive sweep of the eye and hand. The drawings that outnumber the kanji lie scattered or they seem to mingle too quietly with the text. An eye that can stand to be jostled and halted in its search for patterns (of politics, art and argument, and of everything that's sorrowful) will stay here. Sometimes foreign script and hand-drawings, wishing to appear altogether unforeign, merge to create appropriately random meanings. I can be grateful for the way the imagination looking for release can move here into more than one language (as in a visual poem), more than one world. I do need an alternate world to step into at times.

legs wanting to walk - the late hour

I am thankful to John, too, for the gift of the scamp-guru who teaches not as he walks but by walking: a walking meditation. I'd like to try walking with him a few pages at a time. It's actually a quality of the text that appeals to my own current fidgetiness & yet one that also makes my nervous energies odious. Ed Baker's recently alerted me to Cid Corman's "The Tortoise" where we find: "Always//the feeling is of/terrible slowness/overtaking haste." Mine's the motion of one who can't sit still (of whom it cannot said that "rocking/his chair/doesnt"). If sitting is a problem, what about the rest? And the trailer parks, dumpsters, & sleeping bags, never good enough for my landscape, lie just as scattered over and between the pages as script and drawings do, & entice with their own connect-the-dots unfolding.

blizzard outside
   but even this
      glue is white

As I write and read this (& Geof Huth is right: writing is "a version of reading"), it is snowing outside, & its sorrowfulness is keenly felt. The poetry could not have been timed more perfectly! The storm outside (as I didn't understand til now) isn't really separable from the glue whiteness in which I'm really seeing it on the page. The interminable drudgery of snow, and icy stars and even the passing of another year: none of it could be tolerable were it not for the 'pure land' that's one moment "grass stems", the next "snow falling/quieter/than yr pulse." From "group homes" thru trailers to snow (as along so many other paths in John's remarkable text) is a type of interior journeying I've been too fidgety too long for.

And so I think many more incongruities between text & language, page and sky would've been lost on me but for John's gift, and the sage's ambling gait and the storm that's gathering outside my window, faintly visible through the darkness.

open
the blinds
squinting