Declaração de amor
A number of years ago I prepared to leave the country for the first time. Later, I prepared again… and again. Each time I departed the shell was thinner; and each time I returned, the distance between those I loved at home and those I loved abroad was shorter. I held and was held by wonderful people of all races and all religions and all economic levels – those who were easiest to love often possessed (or were possessed by) the least material wealth.
Spin the world forward in its orbit several times: I find myself member of a Formalist poetry group in Massachusetts. I love forms, and enjoy the structure of thought and the music of language that our long heritage of English Language poets has produced. While the spark of inspiration burns up through the body, as it does in all of the arts, a plume of fire from some deep center-of-the-earth rift, Formalism filters that raw material through several layers of Reason, takes most of the grit away, sands down the rough edges, and polishes anything that might have been mud-colored or blood-colored to a mirror-like surface… one in which you could imagine you see yourself, were the reflection similar to your self-conception.
Since to greater or lesser degree (depending on the prowess of the poet) that artisanry takes place in the mind – perhaps less so as interpersonal issues usurp religious or philosophical ones, alas – what you see in that mirror may be Mind more than the sway of your hips (should they sway) or the burning of your heart (should it burn).
The poem below doesn’t offer much to the Formalists. It says, “I would prefer, for the next few minutes, that you relax…” At the reading where I presented this, I hadn’t properly addressed the crowd, hadn’t asked them to take a deep breath, to close their eyes. I hadn’t said: listen to the sounds and allow the words themselves to find one another – in the same nuanced, connotative, magical way that people find one another – instead of trying to brain your way through this. Your body might love it, your brain (if it is clenched) will be upset.
So I had a few people upset with me. I suppose that the poem could be, as they said, narcissistic. And I could be as well. Though I would argue that folks who dip down into whatever creative pool nourishes their work, allowing that water to pour through their hands, might not be self-involved so much as servants at the well. Simple waterboys and watergirls doing what they do, over and over again: if you wish to drink, there it is. That’s not so deviant, is it?
And, if I were to get into an argument about the qualities of self-love, and blindness to others, I guess I would have to claim that rigid spirit and rigid intellect, unable to see the music in everything because they are squinting too hard, may well be more susceptible to narcissism than a mongrel heart that likes to graze.
So here is a poem about love. It is an ecstatic poem, which means the emotions come up and pour out pretty much uncooked. If you are inclined to enjoy jungle wandering, please please dive in. Go slow. Read out loud (so many people read with their mind, instead of with their bodies – sound is song, and needs lips and bellies and breath to bring the notes to life), and allow the multitude of meanings string together a pattern which isn’t obvious, on a fabric that is probably invisible.
Declaração de amor
There are borders seen and borders out of sight yet I know the world connected below the waters is round as the marker in my unfurling fist the coin of departure which disavows our strangeness and my tongue would drink from another spring loose a music my mother would not understand but dance to nonetheless to see it soften me taste the wisdom of unclarity, taste the salt and wine that floods the fences between your land and mine
if all the water in me were dried and poured out like sand upon the street if I were to walk barefoot in this, my life and answer yes to all questions posed whatever was asked, the fortune of me generous for the sudden birth of a sun thought lost if a gust should lift that dry life overhead the day could light it, like a paper lantern and bear it shining above the road that carries us from one day to the next
where hovering on wings gilded by that daybreak dipped from the diamond-laced waters of last night our bodies drive until we decide no longer are traces turned away in search of wonder and names are flowers which bloom and seed and blow away to feed another season of the field which leaps up a painted green ovation whose applause is all for the new-born sun and all for us, I would also say
such praise I had not heard before carried by the wind from parting lips so swiftly only a kiss could hear: the fruit of some tree of the tongue which never mastered common cadence speech though it could taste no sweeter and spills desire in rills of sugar that close our eyes and make the body shiver and remember there is no land beyond our travel
this language is outside the cube of space depends upon no instrument to carry it deep into the quarry of the blood but through a touch or thought of touch or rising through each limb and breath until the slightest gesture, the smallest step shouts everything I am and all of you
we may go where we shall go there is no channel unripe for words but a thousand ears which will not lose our meaning and flocks whose wings will fly behind our most delicate and thundering progress chasing this spring dance of our entwined agility.
"Saint Spring", by Anmoku @ DeviantArt.com