Mind 4

"What makes form adventurous is its unpredictable appetite for particulars. The truly creative mind is always ready for the operations of chance. It wants to sweep into the constellation of the artwork as much as it can of the loose, floating matter that it encounters. How much accident can the work incorporate? How much of the unconscious life can the mind dredge up from its depths?" ~Stanley Kunitz

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"Your eyes are on your side, for you cannot see your eyes, and your eyes cannot see themselves. Eyes only see things outside, objective things. If you reflect on yourself, that self is not your true self any more. You cannot project yourself as some objective thing to think about. The mind which is always on your side is not just your mind, it is the universal mind, always the same, not different from another’s mind. It is Zen mind. It is big, big mind. The mind is whatever you see. Your true mind is always with whatever you see. Although you do not know your own mind, it is there—at the very moment you see something, it is there. This is very interesting. You mind is always with the things you observe. So you see, this mind is at the same time everything." ~Shunryu Suzuki, Zen’s Mind, Beginner’s Mind, p. 134

*********************************

208. If you change your mind, you are free. Or you were.

From Vectors: Aphorisms & Ten-Second Essays by James Richardson

*********************************

The Woman Who Is Early        Nin Andrews

The Woman Who Is Early is always at least one step ahead of
time. She is always rushing and rushing. Where-ever she goes,
she is already there long before she arrives. Whatever she is
saying, she has already said it before the words leave her lips.
Whatever song she is singing she is already so sick of it, and she
wishes she could get it out of her mind. Whatever meal she is
preparing, she has eaten it before taking the first bite. Whatever
man she desires, she had made love to him a thousand times
before he ever undresses her. A man can never make love to her
the way he did once upon a time, before he made love to her. Of
course therapists tell her she should slow down and rest a spell.
Relax. She has heard those words long before she ever sees
therapists. Does she have to explain it to them again? How a
great wave is chasing her? It is rising above her head even as she
thinks of it. If she looks back, just once, it will wash over her.
She will instantly drown. Of course, she is right. That's why she
has already drowned. 

*********************************

The Storm                                                                                Jennifer Moss

Where one mind stops,
another begins.

Where cutlery shines on plates,
a voice lowers.

One length of forgiveness,
round and round like a child's game
in the dust.

Outside, the rain formalizing.

When we leave we are replaced.

Shaky clouds in lightning,
my shadow alive on the floor.

Then the small passage for sleep.

How green and spidery the sky.


In its net, the dead bees of memory. 


*********************************

"The mind wants to live forever, or to learn a very good reason why not. The mind wants the world to return its love, or its awareness; the mind wants to know all the world, and all eternity, and God. The mind’s sidekick, however, will settle for two eggs over easy.

The dear, stupid body is as easily satisfied as a spaniel. And, incredibly, the simple spaniel can lure the brawling mind to its dish. It is everlastingly funny that the proud, metaphysically ambitious, clamoring mind will hush if you give it an egg.

Further: while the mind reels in deep space, while the mind grieves or fears or exults, the workaday senses, in ignorance or idiocy, like so many computer terminals printing out market prices while the world blows, up, still transcribe their little data and transmit them to the warehouse in the skull."

~Annie Dillard, in Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters, p. 99

Eye Eye

"Into the Tunnel"     Chad Sweeney

Beyond the shipyard the pounded metal
of bay water, a helical structure of gulls,
and one great arm

sweeps the clouds over the edge.
I’ve wanted to be that decisive
as during the first moments in a new room

I look to find the windows
then go and stand beside them.
Factories stir fire into sky,

an airplane skids across
wrapped defensively in its sound
as a man is shouting into a tunnel —

a man with a name tag on his suit
and two drill-holes in place of eyes 

is shouting, Hurry son, the pipes have burst!

He is right to be afraid.
Water churns around the boy.
Excruciating to see this happen

and to not embrace them both.
What will you shout into the tunnel
given this one opportunity

when we all promise to listen?

********************************

Your eyes are on your side, for you cannot see your eyes, and your eyes cannot see themselves. Eyes only see things outside, objective things. If you reflect on yourself, that self is not your true self any more. You cannot project yourself as some objective thing to think about. The mind which is always on your side is not just your mind, it is the universal mind, always the same, not different from another’s mind. It is Zen mind. It is big, big mind. The mind is whatever you see. Your true mind is always with whatever you see. Although you do not know your own mind, it is there—at the very moment you see something, it is there. This is very interesting. You mind is always with the things you observe. So you see, this mind is at the same time everything. Shunryu Suzuki, Zen’s Mind, Beginner’s Mind, p. 134

********************************

Romanticism              Ashley Elizabeth Hudson

Held the telescope to your eye
late into the snowless night
and squinted into the cataract moon.

Oh it's that distant, as the boy who hung
the dingy white sheets and proposed
to the girl who wanted snow.

After the daylight peeled the label
off its clear blue glass and neurotically
became the night. Outside the body,

the disease was a heliotropic iris
offering its hope, as long as you stared
into the microscope.

The boy spent all day draping old linens,
and I suppose a trailer park is a kind

of snow globe, sex a sort of diamond. 

********************************

Taper, or Mary Tells All She Knows              Jeanne Marie Beaumont

A string to me says spine. I am patient
in long labors. In taking pains.
Dip, drip. Let them hang.
Repeat the steps.

I adore the odor of beeswax each day.
Authentic & pure as I suppose a
martyr would be. I'm none.
At dusk,

I light the tallest all along the stone mantle.
It is true I am a wisp of a woman,
smoke comes out my mouth,
my head heats up,

and sometimes if I hear a word that's especially apt
my eyes bounce like breezed flames.
But you shouldn't confuse
me with them.

These were born in the clean shrine of tedium
to accumulate evenly, cane straight.
Burning, they fly the flags
of thin victors.

And when they disappear—as is written—
leaving behind them no trace,
this is no miracle but ex-
pertise. 

********************************

Gloucester                                                             Ann Snodgrass

This seascape's now more cataract
of tired eyes—swept as it was by
too many winds, too many clouds
that are no longer.
Sails rise, fail.
It's time, then, for the children
to take over. Strange how they
just can't lie.
We, on the other hand, who came
here to forget, watch nameless
seabirds dive—soar—
dive, finding nothing.
Sails rise once again, fail.
It's certain then: anyone
could see that a child
would draw me—

even my own—as an outline. 

********************************

Obey Gravity      Cynthia Arrieu-King & Ariana-Sophia Kartsonis

A turnip puts a leg down in the earth
swift fingers of wind in her hair, crying
pebbles but not for reasons.

One star holds the sky pinched into place
the next keeps the beach from floating
another: a sea in satiny motion

colliding with shredded moon, salt
resisting large-bodied intentions to
  drag it down. Anything with lungs

can float there. Tripping forward,
anything with legs can hold its breath
for two summers or drop a penny. Anyone

out there? Anyone afloat in the snow globe
of someone else's memory: obey gravity.
Don't tip the turnip, the world up. Top-down,

shift your golden flags to indicate direction,
hold up your ounce breath invisible as a
hand pulling the blood through the tunnel

of artery of muscles, telling the eye beware,
the dawn the good-bye dreams, minute
the pillow's last kiss. The body, heavied


storehouse for gazes, pressed tight with
embraces, loaded with water, bugs, burlap—
thing to be stacked against floods. 

Control

Ring               by Melissa Stein

Control was all
I wanted: a handle
on the day, the night
when it curved,
when it swayed,
when I could sense
the teeming stars
in light, in dark
the sun's bare wire.
Some switch
to turn it off:
each shadow
pinned to each tree
like a radius
of some infant's
milk it spilled.
And the leaves,
their gossip
of claw and beak
and wind and heat
and wing. Tether
lake to bank and
cloud to peak.
And weather it.
Weather it. All this
to say I've
taken off my ring.

 

 

******

Kiki Smith: "Just do your work. And if the world needs your work it will come and get you. And if it doesn't, do your work anyway. You can have fantasies about ...having control over the world, but I know I can barely control my kitchen sink. That is the grace I'm given. Because when one can control things, one is limited to one's own vision."

******

 

To give your sheep or cow a large, spacious meadow is the way to control him. So it is with people: first, let them do what they want, and watch them. This is the best policy. To ignore them is not good; that is the worst policy. The second worst is trying to control them. The best one is to watch them, just to watch them, without trying to control them. Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, p. 32

*******

Ars Poetica               Henrietta Goodman

Why do we think we have any control
at all? My breasts are soggy cartons.
The baby is greedy. He grabs
my skin in his fists, twists my hair.
He seems to know everything
already, the checkbook, balanced wrong,
the ignorance I'm not supposed
to confess—my friend says Giotto
and I hear Choteau, tiny town not far
from here. Clearly, I can imagine
no farther. The valley's a funnel,

skyline blurred by charcoal clouds,
the valley's a tornado and I'm
the eye—doodlebug, doodlebug
your house is on fire—
the room spins and spins
until the floor drops away
and I'm dizzy, frescoed to the wall,
Madonna Defying Gravity.
You can't tell it yet,
but I'm slipping, scratching the days
in my skin with a dull blade,
too afraid to just cut clean
and deep. This is how prisoners do it,

one scratch for each day
on the wall that holds them in,
one for each day I've lost
in half-sleep, the baby curled
like a snail on my chest, my hand patting,
patting, stomach bulging
over the top of my pants—

what is restrained in one place
escapes in another—

 

******

"I cannot seem to feel alive unless I am alert," Charles Bowden writes in his recent book, "Some of the Dead Are Still Breathing", "and I cannot feel alert unless I push past the point where I have control."

******

To Mirah: In Utero: On Being Named                                Jennifer Perrine

I lost control of my car one summer, blacked out
on the way to work: when I woke, I’d lost
a random taxonomy: paper, sieve, sand dollar:
stuck in some synapse between mind and tongue:
others lost in their fumble of letters: I found
driftwood on the river and called it derby:
my doctor gave me a name: aphasia: like Adam
knowing he’d gotten it right when he found
gecko or ant lion under a dead leaf: no doubt
there’s a purgatory for lost language: the dark
burning-off before ascension: a lexicon
shaken loose from etymology: uprooted
rhizomes shucking their dirt: and you: swathed
in the hum of your name: all the world your alias.

******

Did We Betray the River                                                      Dionisio D. Martínez

Did we betray the river or did the river betray us? You've noticed, I'm
sure, how, under certain conditions, a ladder leaning on a wall is a draw-

bridge waiting for a sailboat that keeps delaying its journey, calling
the man who operates the bridge, layering elaborate excuses so neatly

that the man only hears one excuse: the boat's coming, just not yet, not
while the water's in control of the situation. The man waits—drawbridge

up, traffic on hold. Sometimes the world is all patience and silence
and there is nothing you can do to stir up trouble. The driver who keeps

a knife beneath the seat is tapping on the dashboard a song coming from
another car. This is an exception. Others are praying to their private

rivers, as if the one just ahead were not there: seeing is too easy: one
acquires increasingly complex needs, like the taste of earth just

turned by oxen who know the plow as well as a man knows his river. We
know this blue's an illusion: the things that shelter us are colorless and

hover just so, not quite halos and not quite hats, and they can all be named
even if the names are arbitrary, even if they're not quite words. Our boat

waits for the water to go from blue to brown to ocher, as in a Turner
vision—a realism so crude it borders on beauty, the way beauty

was meant to touch us: with its repulsive allure, its unwashed mirrors of
heavy morning fog. We have to look head-on, and learn to forget again.

******

Equilibrium Update                                                                    J. Allyn Rosser

      Look there, a man caught smack in the middle of his life
and almost aware of it; not quite yet resigned
            but past most of the old impatiences, having
developed a consciously casual walk, not quite
      the swagger of yore, nor the dignified limp
to come; rather like a man carrying a long heavy plank,
            glad of his hard-won, admittedly modest momentum;
calmly dreading several varieties of misstep
            such as tipping the future a little too far forward or
letting the past plunk down heedless behind; or merely
            looking down; or turning so quickly to look back as to
whack the one just now bending to pick her own burden;
      still staunchly bearing it onward in splinterless grip
            across the rooftop lifescape—bicep, trapezius and
thigh muscles in play, also those of the spine, the upper lip,
      he is at last in control, yes, in his element, in his heart
            of hearts wondering how long he will bear it, where to
and, as ever, what for.

The Comfort of Cannot

The other day blogger John Biesnecker posted about "The Joys of Having a Forever Project," a project that he describes as one that "despite its audacity and seeming impossibility, simply will not put itself to bed. . . . that is hard to imagine actually embarking on, but whose mental cost of abandonment is far too high to even consider."

The next day he wrote another blog post about "Why the Forever Project Hit a Nerve," as it had--getting over 45,000 hits in 18 hours and becoming a focus on Hacker News and Reddit.

When I (finally) found out about Biesnecker's forever project, I was immediately reminded of the quote by Henry Moore: "The secret of life is to have a task, something you devote your entire life to, something you bring everything to, every minute of the day for the rest of your life. And the most important thing is, it must be something you cannot possibly do.”

I have loved this Henry Moore quote for years, have turned to it when I have wondered why I spend so much of my life writing poems, never getting written what I really want to write. And I turn to this quote when I wonder if I have wasted my life, which I wonder quite a bit...

There is something that cheers me to work on what I know is impossible but what I know I will never stop trying to do.

And then I started thinking about the beauty in all the things that cannot be:
 
"I cannot seem to feel alive unless I am alert," Charles Bowden writes in his recent book, Some of the Dead Are Still Breathing (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), "and I cannot feel alert unless I push past the point where I have control."

". . . The aim is to become / something broken / that cannot be broken further . . "
from Jorie Graham’s Overlord

"Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature because we ourselves are part of nature and therefore part of the mystery we are trying to solve. " Max Planck

The Pieces That Fall To Earth                           Kay Ryan

 

One could

almost wish

they wouldn't;

they are so

far apart,

so random.

One cannot

wait, cannot
abandon waiting.
The three or
four occasions
of their landing
never fade.
Should there
be more, there
will never be
enough to make
a pattern
that can equal
the commanding way they matter.

Your eyes are on your side, for you cannot see your eyes, and your eyes cannot see themselves. Eyes only see things outside, objective things. If you reflect on yourself, that self is not your true self any more. You cannot project yourself as some objective thing to think about. The mind which is always on your side is not just your mind, it is the universal mind, always the same, not different from another’s mind. It is Zen mind. It is big, big mind. The mind is whatever you see. Your true mind is always with whatever you see. Although you do not know your own mind, it is there—at the very moment you see something, it is there. This is very interesting. You mind is always with the things you observe. So you see, this mind is at the same time everything. Shunryu Suzuki, Zen’s Mind, Beginner’s Mind

Iris Murdoch once wrote, “The bereaved cannot communicate with the unbereaved.”

 

…you cannot always be happy, but you can almost always be focused, which is the next best thing.  Winifred Gallagher, Rapt

40. Wind cannot blow the wind away, nor water wash away the water. From James Richardson's Vectors: Aphorisms & Ten-Second Essays

 

207. Sometimes I hate beauty because I don’t have a choice about loving it. I must be wrong in this, but whether because I take freedom too seriously, or love, I cannot tell. From James Richardson's Vectors: Aphorisms & Ten-Second Essays

 

 

The prose poem is the result of two contradictory impulses, prose and poetry, and therefore cannot exist, but it does. This is the sole instance we have of squaring the circle. Charles Simic, The Monster Loves His Labyrinth

Contemporary poets have for the most part forgotten about symbolism, especially its one great insight that Being cannot be stated but only hinted at.  Charles Simic, The Monster Loves His Labyrinth

Girder                                                 Nan Cohen

The simplest of bridges, a promise
that you will go forward,

that you can come back.
So you cross over.

It says you can come back.
So you go forward,

But even if you come back
then you must go forward.

I am always either going back
or coming forward. There is always

something I have to carry,
something I leave behind.

I am a figure in a logic problem,
standing on one shore

with the things I cannot leave,
looking across at what I cannot have.