haibun

Clarity

Twice each year the absence digs a deeper hole.  The day of your birth.  The day of your death.  What I should have said.  What I should have done, but did not.

But time has other sides.  Ends also have beginnings, middles.  I remember seasons that soared so high they grew wings.  And what remains from the center still holds my hand.

downy woodpecker
on the tree trunk beside me–
spirals, holding on

For dVerse, where Frank has given us the subject of memory.

Soundscape

Of course I always notice the birds.

I’m waiting for the robins to begin my morning–the cardinal, the flicker, the mockingbird.  Then I will be certain spring has arrived.  But the crows are back, as opinionated as always, and the crowds of blue jays and sparrows never left.  A mourning dove croons from a nearby roof outside my kitchen window as the sun rises.

I habitually tune out the sirens, garbage trucks, helicopters, low-flying planes, motorcycles, cars and buses, construction—all the normal background noise of city living.

But the air itself has gotten louder lately.  Sometimes when I wake up in the middle of the night I can barely hear myself think over its whisper-hum.  My head is completely emptied of dreams; I am conscious only of my body in bed, surrounded by a constant movement murmuring in my ears.

Daylight does not mute the stormy sounds that show up suddenly and randomly, demanding attention, interrupting thought.  The nonstop intersection of voices, layered in a language I don’t understand, drowns out all other discourse.

It reminds me of the ocean–unbroken, all-encompassing, alive.  A presence much larger than my own.  To be inside of it is perhaps all the translation, the guidance, that is necessary.

on the street dogs bark–
the sky darkens—lights turn on–
I breathe in, then out

I’m a little late with Sherry’s prompt from last week at earthweal of Soundscapes–I’m squeezing it in at the last minute for the weekend open link. I’ve also used some of this week’s random word generator oracle words, which you can find here.

All art is from the archives.

Mezza Luna

I pause on the edge of dark, on the edge of light, my direction halted by uncertainty.  Between is a narrow ledge, a threshold balanced on an abyss.  Am I coming or going?  The end is also the beginning and all my questions are merely maps without roads.

I have become abstracted by an imagined journey in which seeking transforms into finding.  In which the visions that ripple my consciousness turn out to be real.  But what if matter is as transient as thought?

half-awake, spirit
splits, expands—crescent-mirrored
into cosmic tides

Frank at dVerse asks us to write a haibun referring to the Mezza Luna, the half or crescent moon. When I was looking for art for the post, I came across the collage at the top, which I used for another of Frank’s moon prompts a year ago.

I am always photographing the moon, so I had plenty of photos to choose from as well. The mirror effect in the first photo is caused by the window through which I shot the photo.

Careful

I don’t think anyone ever told me it was wrong, exactly, to spend my wishes on myself.  I could want things, ask for them, covet them, even.  But wishes were in another dimension.

The earliest thing I actually remember wishing for consistently was along the lines of “peace love and understanding”.  That was adolescence, the 60s—wasn’t every sane person wishing for the same thing? Aren’t they still?

Even now I am cautious of wishing.  But I can’t help wishing humans would consider the consequences of what we say and do, and take responsibility for what happens as a result.  And I wish fervently that we would be better caretakers of the earth and all of its inhabitants. 

And for myself, today?  I pour another cup of coffee–

watch birds
open wings, touch the sky–
all I need

For Colleen’s Tanka Tuesday where the theme chosen by Anita Dawes is what you wish for. I’m also linking to dVerse OLN, hosted by Linda.

When I was searching for this song I found more different versions of it on YouTube than any other song I’ve ever looked for. It obviously strikes a chord.

and of course, the original…

Marinating

I am aged, but still raw, uncooked, unfinished.  I steep myself in cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, preparing for winter.  But still I fail to render more than a rough uncertain embodiment of what will satiate my continued thirst.  For what?  With what mural of flavor do I wish to paint the days, the seasons, the years?

I never expected to find the perfect recipe—only to be somewhat clarified.  Not cured, but blended into the essences of a Tuscan sunset, infused with the richness of the bouquet of approaching night.

waiting for the moon–
new, it opens the cosmos–
full, it whispers “time”

A haibun for Merril’s dVerse prompt of spices. The grids are from a 100-day project I did in 2015 combining colors and grids. In my final post for the project, I included some quotes from poet Sara C. Harwell. This one seems eerily prescient of what I wrote today.

It looks like a painting by someone I can’t remember.  How have I reached the point, is it age?
When the sky resembles a painting more than the sky?

–Sarah C. Harwell, “Cloud Cover”

Bearings

What exactly do we mean when we say the heart is heavy?  Is it our jumbled emotions that are enlarged into enormity, too complicated to lift, to bear?  How do we understand the shape, the density, of sorrow?

And what about the light heart?  How do we measure the change?–a heart that is nearly full enough to overflow—what space does it occupy, what is its texture?

It’s the heavy heart that is hollow.  Brimming with emptiness.  Weighed down by absence.  The light heart grows gardens, wings.

the heart cleaves, wanders,
signifies inverse desires–
spring arrives, snowbound

I’ve accumulated quite a bit of Kick-About artwork that I haven’t given a proper post to. This heart drawing was my response to the drumming of Sandy Nelson. I also wanted to use Jane’s Oracle 2 words for the week, and the combination resulted in the accompanying haibun.

The drumming of Sandy Nelson reminded me of heartbeats which can careen wildly under different circumstances.  When I looked online for images of hearts, I was attracted to the somewhat psychedelic MRI images.  I wanted to work large, but even with 18 x 24 paper, I was unable to do justice to all the different elements of the heart.  I made no layout, but just started drawing in the upper center with my colored pencils, a small section each day.  So both the line quality and the proportions changed as I went on.  Whole sections were expanded, compressed, and left out.  Just like the trajectory of the drumming in my mind.

And just like our perceptions as filtered through our hearts.

Crow on the Cradle

They had collapsed into an empty cave of nowness, replacing a past of empyrean wonder with the unceasing presence of burning flesh, condemning the contagious and aliferous joy of birds to smoke-filled air hanging heavy over stone landscapes that had lost all green.  What they called life, the promise of continuity, was at an impasse.

They had forgotten to build an ark.

They had forgotten to build an ark, and so they were left standing between a raging wall of flame and an infestation of endlessly rising waters.  A fierce susurrus rose from the spirits of the ancestors–an oddly wordless murmur riding on the howling wind, carrying the silent but distinct rattle of bones.

what happens when where
we were going is gone?–crows
seize the winter sky

For earthweal, where Brendan asked us to fill your poem’s sails with a blast of something akin to the hurl of atmospheric plumes, and dVerse, where Mish has given us a list of uncommon words to incorporate in our poem. I’ve also taken inspiration from Jane’s Oracle 2 wordlist.

The River Knows Your Name (reprise)

The river has songs to fill every season.  I turn with the circles, swimming the wind that chases the water, bending around the curves, following the changes in tempo and depth, bound to the ripples that radiate from every slight disturbance of the surface.  Looking for the most efficient path.

I construct imaginary boats and then dismantle them, leaving the remains dashed and forgotten on the farthest shores.  The river continues, reflecting the sky’s transformations, a window opening into the changing light.

Stilled, I try to capture the current as it passes by, to fill my pockets with the riddles it holds inside its voice, all the wisdom gathered from its ancient repeated journeys.  I want to be cleansed of all the outside forces that try to bind me, to find again the center hidden somewhere inside that keeps escaping my grasp.  But I am too far, too long, too hindered by my own noise.  I have lost the lines and the point of the contents of my brain.

Let it go the river sings.

Not anything.  But.
And this too.  What seems.
To be.  There.  You are.

Brendan’s challenge prompt of rivers at earthweal brought to mind another recent post, consecration, that featured John Haitt’s title song as it’s coda. It, too, included the weekly words from Jane’s Oracle 2 generator.

And of course I can never have too much of John Haitt’s song.

Darkness Darkness

The Fashion Institute of Technology had only one dorm, reserved for out-of-town students, so I felt lucky to have been granted a room, even if I knew it was only for the first year of my two-year program.  My roommate had sisters in the city, but had grown up upstate, in a Catholic group home, really an orphanage with all its attendant horrors.  Nothing has changed about that since the time of Dickens.

Her mother died when she was very young.  A family friend wanted to adopt her, but the Catholic Church refused to separated her from her two older sisters—the friend could not manage three more children.  Her sisters married as soon as they aged out of the system, and now lived again in the city where they had been born.  My roommate was a talented artist, and her high school art teacher encouraged her to prepare a portfolio and apply to FIT.  She wanted to be a textile designer.

Her father had abandoned the family when her mother became pregnant with a fourth child.  Unable to imagine being able to support three children, let alone four, on her own, the mother sought an abortion.  It killed her.

Her daughters had no choice but to accept the fact that both parents were permanently lost to them.  But there was a simmering anger in my roommate, a wound of loss and grief, that remained. 

I lost touch with her—we both moved around a lot after getting our associate degrees, and the internet was not even a blip on our consciousness in 1973—but I thought of her again when the decision overturning Roe v Wade was leaked to the press.

Now, as then in the 1950s, our government blames the poor for their poverty, penalizing most of all the living mothers and their living children, abandoned by fathers, or forced to flee abusive husbands and partners, condemning them to hunger and homelessness as a punishment for not being born lucky, for not having friends and family who have enough wealth and stability to pick up the pieces when they need a helping hand.

another grey sky–
spring comes late this year—crow calls
inside the graveyard

For dVerse, where Lisa asks us to consider the topic of grief.

How can we learn to sing when we have no voice?

The shifting mirrors contain contradictory and ethereal messages, as if hidden in the center of a missing source of light.  Where are the currents located?  The rays seems to come from an absolute stillness embedded in the fraying edges of circles that no longer move.

Once we were seekers, following the contours of the channels that held rivers and oceans, sailing the shorelines, harvesting in abundance the rewards of departure followed by return.

Now we have only illusions sinking into the periphery of fading dreams, scattered like the ancient remnants of empyrean spirals, the movements of mythical stars, the mysteries of a consciousness that once made its home inside a biological form.

bare silence–
human remains lost,
fossilized

Off prompt for NaPoWriMo Day 29. I wanted to do something for this Redon collage.

The world remains heavy.

Yea, we all could use a little mercy now
I know we don’t deserve it
But we need it anyhow
We hang in the balance
Dangle ‘tween hell and hallowed ground
Every single one of us could use some mercy now
–Mary Gauthier

Also linking to dVerse OLN, hosted by Grace.