Teeth

Most artists are flawed; but they probably ought to make the effort not to be. But how do you teach people to enlarge themselves in order to enlarge their writing? You enlarge yourself because that is the kind of person you are. You grow because you are not content not to. You are like a beaver that chews constantly because if it doesn't, its teeth grow long and lock.

~Wallace Stegner 

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Flesh                                                               C. McAllister Williams

I apologize to anyone. Ask me to buckle & I will
eat the moon. My teeth override my capacities.
All of them.

I'm sorry I'm not otherwise engaged—I don't
believe in harmony. & I'm sorry I'm not
sorry I'm not a more guttural member.
When we all sing, we wake a newborn.
There are complications—there are insides

that are softer than expected. I'm sorry expectation
polishes itself inside its temple. Ask me to repent
the future zealots & I'll repel any invader. When I'm
born, the whole world is born with me.

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A solitude of the ear buoys the breath's answer     Joshua Corey
       

A solitude of the ear buoys the breath's answer
to smoke from autumnal fires. Gathered up,
gathered out, paper hearts and iron stoves.

Put on your hat and gloves, it's poignant out.
Carry your own chill separate from the air's.

Cradle fuel, stand stamping on the corner
ten years too late waiting for a blank beloved.
She comes in a furl of branches to cover

your eyes with mittened hands. Guess who?
But that's not how it happened, you never turned

to feast your eyes on vacancy. Instead
I'm still stamping snail-mail letters to the editor
and picking pomegranate seeds from my teeth.

Dwelling yet in dear ears deaf to my storms, my doing. 

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You Are Not Christ                          Rickey Laurentiis

For the drowning, yes, there is always panic.
Or peace. Your body behaving finally by instinct
alone. Crossing out wonder. Crossing out
a need to know. You only feel you need to live.
That you deserve it. Even here. Even as your chest
fills with a strange new air, you will not ask
what this means. Like prey caught in the wolf’s teeth,
but you are not the lamb. You are what’s in the lamb
that keeps it kicking. Let it.

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This is a mammal paleontologist’s nightmare, the dreaded “harmonica,” or a jaw without teeth. Without teeth, it’s often impossible to determine precisely what the creature is. 

~Interpretative Display, Minnesota Science Museum, St. Paul

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...you cannot compare this present experience with a past experience. You can only compare it with a memory of the past, which is a part of the present experience. When you see clearly that memory is a form of present experience, it will be obvious that trying to separate yourself from this experience is as impossible as trying to make your teeth bite themselves.

~Alan Watts

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Peach                                            Catie Rosemurgy

The head, the mouth, the fruit, the eating.

The pit, the teeth, the branch, the fall.

The wet, the swollen, the light, the seeing.

The picking, the washing, the cutting, the quartering.

The sweet, the having.

The juice. The holding it in your hands

beautiful and then ruined. The forms of devouring. The remaining empty.

What’s inside.

The excitement of the definite article. What’s inside

one thing is analogous to what’s inside another.

The ceremonial names

of what is done to them. What is unknown requires a new way of cutting.

What we’re left with.

How we make an object ours, make it disappear.

How we become the object and are food.

How we are delicious and dead at the center in so many ways.

How that is wrong and it is stillness, moon-like at the core.

How what we are is what reflects off it. How we are light produced earlier

by other things.

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Center

In Praise of Coldness                        Jane Hirshfield

“If you want to move your reader,”
Chekhov wrote, “you must write more coldly.”

Herakleitos recommended, “A dry soul is best.”

And so at the center of many great works
is found a preserving dispassion,
like the vanishing point of quattrocento perspective,
or the tiny packets of desiccant enclosed
in a box of new shoes or seeds.

But still the vanishing point
is not the painting,
the silica is not the blossoming plant.

Chekhov, dying, read the timetables of trains.
To what more earthly thing could he have been faithful?–
Scent of rocking distances,
smoke of blue trees out the window,
hampers of bread, pickled cabbage, boiled meat.

Scent of the knowable journey.

Neither a person entirely broken
nor one entirely whole can speak.

In sorrow, pretend to be fearless. In happiness, tremble.

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"Act so that there is no use in a center." Gertrude Stein

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Peach                                            Catie Rosemurgy

The head, the mouth, the fruit, the eating.

The pit, the teeth, the branch, the fall.

The wet, the swollen, the light, the seeing.

The picking, the washing, the cutting, the quartering.

The sweet, the having.

The juice. The holding it in your hands

beautiful and then ruined. The forms of devouring. The remaining empty.

What’s inside.

The excitement of the definite article. What’s inside

one thing is analogous to what’s inside another.

The ceremonial names

of what is done to them. What is unknown requires a new way of cutting.

What we’re left with.

How we make an object ours, make it disappear.

How we become the object and are food.

How we are delicious and dead at the center in so many ways.

How that is wrong and it is stillness, moon-like at the core.

How what we are is what reflects off it. How we are light produced earlier

by other things.

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Tempest                                                       Emma Howell

It's storming, pounding out there.
Rain breaks and falls like the mismatched
halves of haloes.
Luminescent drops arc above the wind's dips and joints.
This is the division of virtues through their centers.
Whole waters submit, are split and capped,
sectioned like tangerines into mouth-shaped crescents
and then auctioned into thunder.

The rain marks its weight in deep

forgiving streaks.

The storm is tight around all things

and in rope fingers of light

water cracks into marbled, complex structures,

less like a chandelier, hanging vows above our heads,

than like the mezuzah we kiss when we step outside.

It shelters a scrolled blessing against leaving God

at home.

We break Him into pieces and carry Him along.

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"To Forget Its Creator Is One of the Functions of a Creation"
—E. M. Forster

(Poem by Gilbert Allen)

So memory is the absent
center:
letting things slip
out of mind and sight
to make discovery
possible.

And God is no
story:
which is the why
of these strange, awful creatures
whose creator would envy
their lost footprints, if He could.

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Empty II

Poetry isn’t a profession, it’s a way of life. It’s an empty basket; you put your life into it and make something out of that.

Mary Oliver

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Love Song: The Reproduction of Mothering (1)

from The Making of the Mother: Portraits        Marcia Aldrich

This is a mother who still holds her daughter's hand when they're walking down the street. Her daughter is 18 years old. This is a mother who wants her daughter to look and act and be just like her. This is a daughter who does not resist what her mother wants. As the years pass this is a daughter who is becoming her mother. This is a mother who is always receding into the background. This is a mother who is always refilling platters, emptying trash, washing dishes. This is a daughter who with each passing year is receding into the background, watching her brother from the wings doing his tricks, clapping along with her mother and others. This is a mother who wears little Sunday school white gloves to bed to keep her hands innocent. This is a daughter who in time will too.


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Peach                                            Catie Rosemurgy

The head, the mouth, the fruit, the eating.

The pit, the teeth, the branch, the fall.
The wet, the swollen, the light, the seeing.
The picking, the washing, the cutting, the quartering.
The sweet, the having.

The juice. The holding it in your hands

beautiful and then ruined. The forms of devouring. The remaining empty.
What’s inside.

The excitement of the definite article. What’s inside

one thing is analogous to what’s inside another.
The ceremonial names

of what is done to them. What is unknown requires a new way of cutting.

What we’re left with.

How we make an object ours, make it disappear.

How we become the object and are food.
How we are delicious and dead at the center in so many ways.
How that is wrong and it is stillness, moon-like at the core.
How what we are is what reflects off it. How we are light produced earlier
by other things.

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A poem is an empty suitcase that you can never quit emptying. Kay Ryan

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"For What Binds Us"                                  Jane Hirschfield

There are names for what binds us:
strong forces, weak forces.
Look around, you can see them:
the skin that forms in a half-empty cup,
nails rusting into the places they join,
joints dovetailed on their own weight.
The way things stay so solidly
wherever they've been set down --
and gravity, scientists say, is weak.

And see how the flesh grows back
across a wound, with a great vehemence,
more strong
than the simple, untested surface before.
There's a name for it on horses,
when it comes back darker and raised: proud flesh,

as all flesh,
is proud of its wounds, wears them
as honors given out after battle,
small triumphs pinned to the chest --

And when two people have loved each other
see how it is like a
scar between their bodies,
stronger, darker, and proud;
how the black cord makes of them a single fabric
that nothing can tear or mend.

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The true contemplative is not the one who prepares his mind for a particular message that he wants or expects to hear, but who remains empty because he knows that he can never expect or anticipate the word that will transform his darkness into light. He does not even anticipate a special kind of transformation. He does not demand light instead of darkness. He waits on the Word of God in silence, and when is “answered,” it is not so much by a word that bursts into his silence. It is by his silence itself suddenly, inexplicably revealing itself to him as a word of great power, full of the voice of God.

Thomas Merton, Contemplative Prayer, p. 112-3