I offered up my overflowing cup,
He drank but was not satisfied.
Breasts, pouting stomach,
Elastic thighs, toes and fingers, each
Electric hair. The ritual dismembering;
One eye begins, Oh Lover,
The other finishes, Don’t I satisfy you?
I am as dumb as a twig. Even Sparrow mothers
Know when it is time to bump the young ones:
We cannot hold on to anyone in this life –
(Am I not enough? Drink more.)
I offered him my cup but he was not satisfied,
We want to fill fully the other, forever –
(That conniving mistress,
That basket of death wishes festooned in hope,
Treacherous and fallacious word)
I wish I was a worm.
“I will call the one mode of artistic creation psychological, and the other visionary. The psychological mode deals with the materials drawn from the realm of human consciousness – for instance, with the lessons of life, with emotional shocks, the experience of passion and the crises of human destiny in general – all of which go to make up the conscious life of man, and his feeling life in particular. This material is psychically assimilated by the poet, raised from the commonplace to the level of poetic experience, and given an expression which forces the reader to greater clarity and depth of human insight by bringing fully into his consciousness what he ordinarily evades and overlooks or senses only with a feeling of dull discomfort. The poet’s work is an interpretation and illumination of the contents of consciousness, of the ineluctable experiences of human life with its eternally recurrent sorrow and joy.” C.G. Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul
Psychology and Literature
Who does not share with me the song.
The one in his heart after prayers,
The thoughts of his heart after Mozart,
After aria. Father, who stoops and sighs, but
Does not speak much of the song
Of his wife.
Everything was the same, mostly
Except back then the deck did not sag by their sliding door
Where I caught him crying for her in the middle of the day.
Under blankets. I was a child, but I heard the pang
And I’ve known of the song in his heart ever since.
Father, your life has been long and reverent;
This is for all that I do not know of your sadness,
Pressed into the brown leather tabernacle, feet up.
And for that which makes you happy, as if it is some great secret
(I know about your lake and your mountains,
And your children the Resistant Ones, and the woman
Who grows old with you).
For all the silences between us,
For all the tender we have withheld from the other,
For all the moments that could have been mercies but were daggers,
For all the things I will never know about you,
Father I only sense the music because, like mine,
It kneels at the floor of the heart: one timorous, single line
Call for love
For the day you release and let it sting the air
Like pine against granite against sky.
“The argument of the first manifesto goes like this: Imagination is in “a state of slavery” because “Our brains are dulled by the incurable mania of wanting to make the unknown known.” Logic is at the center of the problem: “Experience itself has found itself increasingly circumscribed” through dependence upon logic and memory, which conspire to limit possibility through a habituated sense of confined consequence. Experience of the new is impossible; every grape broken against the roof of the mouth with the tongue is merely a sensation echoing the past, a figment of some previous, original grape. Much of Surrealism seeks to put us in a state Breton calls in a love poem “always for the first time.” The debasement of the imagination brought about by the perpetual deferral of experience backward results in increasing alienation, the sense that one is befuddled and constantly wrong in one’s life, a sense of impending doom, guilt, the impossibility of not making further mistakes and finally the inability to love. The imagination restores us to the faith in rashness, the conviction of the immediacy of our own possibility, the magical reactants every moment and encounter presents us, the genius of not knowing what we’re doing. ” – Dean Young, The Art of Recklessness
On Surrealism
We have companions
So that on the trail of life,
Those creatures in the bushes,
The unseen rustlings,
Become less likely Sasquatch or
Lurking psychopaths; less threatening
Of failure, powerlessness or evidence of
Our loneliness
And more like what they actually are:
Not an excuse to divert our path
But a reason to look closer
At what it is that scares us –
(A surrender to everything being
Out of our control) – or
Just birds squirreling around for bugs
In the dead leaves and cracking twigs.
We have companions
So we can turn over our absurdities
To a sympathetic, accepting other
Together, making relief or laughter
Out of them.
Day breaks on the spellbrow –
Remain, dream –
On his brown, downy chest – just so
The past can roll around behind
Where light cracks at the lashes.
Beloved by his gaze –
I was fat on his eyes those butter pecans,
Chamomile kisses, in the Days of Plenty.
Hunger burns in me like a furnace,
Hoarfrost on the pillow; it is a
Winter season of silence and this is the
Song of my socks that I stitch in the morning
Word by word I darn it whole.
Now I am too needy to throw out my dreams –
Solitude has made me resourceful.
“Tears are good but they are always archival, they pull us back and down, they mourn, they seek to repeat, but laughter throws us forward, levity raises us, the body opens. Laughter is always unruly. The goofy is the body’s blooming in the mind. Let us laugh so hard we disrupt the tragedy! It’s hard to think when we laugh and that is one reason, once it was invented, we could not live without it. It is a way of sleeping while feeling intensely awake. The body is jostling itself into rejuvenation. It’s like having sex!” – Dean Young, The Art of Recklessness
Laughter
One morning you awaken
And like an apple
That missed the harvest
You hang on the branch
With ample time to reflect
On what the fruiting was for — this one dear life.
Now it is mid-January,
Your skin is tough,
But even softer on the inside.
The old farmhouse knows,
Moonlight on the floorboards where the roof went unrepaired,
Crumbled in by weight and mold and the shifting earth.
It knows that a bucket needs dirt, a beer
Needs the eager hand, and a bed needs a blanket that needs the bodies
Who need the Other.
Cold, abandoned farmhouse by the creek –
That bed has stopped rocking, the can is tawny and bent inward,
The bucket is lost; the stream keeps rushing.
Finally, the walls surrender, for the unoccupied room is a space with no purpose and so much potential.
Children collect for a scrap project, and families will stock up for winter.
Staggering farmhouse by the stream,
Prospective buyers test the makeshift bridge.
Abandonment is only the graceful passage of impermanence.
It is the difference between
The stale, settled smell of the vacation cabin
Of the inanimate, waiting
The hanging china answering with a gentle clatter
To the tremble of homecoming,
We are also just here, until someone moves us, too.
Like the ratty throw, exactly where it was last winter
We are doors, meant to be knocked at
And homes to be lived in.
Our life’s work is loving. Inside our vocation cabin
It is the difference between lifeless and
That ghost of a scent of habitation:
The heart that goes to bed
With a small fire burning.
petals and bees 