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When what is inside comes out
the order of the world
finds form
that looks like you
I've added a photo of a morel mushroom to the ones of lilacs, after some of the comments.
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Magpie poem: Birds
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I'm trying my first Magpie, Tess Kincaid's (of the grand Life at Willow Manor) writing prompt from her blog Magpie Tales. It's so nice to be part of a community of writers around here, isn't it? I just love you all. This is Magpie 65, and if you click on that, you will be able to link to lots of other writers' responses to this image of a lovely St. Francis statue offered by Tess.
BirdsWere they the center
of your being?
Their
bones impossibly light
like straw
blown from the barn floor
out the door
spiraling
a shadow on the air
with no darkness
at all
like this stir stick
and cream
swirling
infinite questions
that dissolve
in the well
of my morning coffee
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Hejira Spring
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Hejira ~
a journey . . .
. . . the flight of Muhammad from Mecca to Medina in 622 which marked the beginning of the Muslim era; the Muslim calendar begins in that year
. . . a cross country trip from Maine to Los Angeles by Joni Mitchell
. . . her album of that name written on that journey in 1976
. . . the title track of the album
Albert Camus wrote: "What gives value to travel is fear. It is the fact that, at a certain moment, when we are so far from our own country... we are seized by a vague fear, and the instinctive desire to go back to the protection of old habits. This is the most obvious benefit of travel. At that moment we are feverish but also porous, so that the slightest touch makes us quiver to the depths of our being... There is no pleasure in traveling, and I look upon it as an occasion for spiritual testing... Travel, which is like a greater and graver science, brings us back to ourselves."~ Albert Camus, Notebooks, 1935-1942
I love to travel, but I agree with Camus in this note. When visiting places away from home, it is as if I wake up with new, more expectant skin. Especially in the somewhat familiar strangeness of Paris, more than anywhere I have been, every sense is alert, intense, as if I am a china cup full and ready either to spill, or crack in the quake of each encounter.
Joni Mitchell is a traveler, always in some vehicle. She loves the wind from Africa blowing through a village on Crete under the moon, but soon gets back to missing her familiar white linens and California scenery. To, and fro, she goes. I don't know how many times I've listened to this song in the last couple of weeks on my drive to and from work on straight Meridian Road, farms opening like wings on either side. Countless times. It embodies just at this moment of the world how everything is everything, while everything is also nothing, and I think very importantly, how nothing is also everything, in the cycle of our life . . . between the forceps and the stone. Her melancholy minor melody, the dark tones, the strings touched in variance like the fragrance of parfum et fromage, her love of Paris that is always there even if unspoken, her freedom, her longing for the road — sometimes in strength and vulnerability as a hitchhiker, her concert tours where she is not always comfortable in her astonishing success, that clear voice sparked, like a car's red-eyed tail light at dusk on the Champs Élysées, or the lit end of a cigarette.
In Paris in May, the wind blows up the Seine, tearing horse chestnut blossoms from trees like snow, and our eyes fill with allergic tears, blinding every walker heading toward the setting sun. We weep in our human weakness, unable even to look upon the light, blinking, trying to wipe our eyes clean. Maybe it is necessary to filter that radiance from too much visibility. Maybe that much light would take us too early to the stone.
It's nice to listen to her sing in the YouTube below while reading her witnessing words. Or, just load it and close your eyes.
Hejiraby Joni MitchellI'm traveling in some vehicle
I'm sitting in some café
A defector from the petty wars
That shell shock love away
There's comfort in melancholy
When there's no need to explain
It's just as natural as the weather
In this moody sky today
In our possessive coupling
So much could not be expressed
So now I'm returning to myself
These things that you and I suppressed
I see something of myself in everyone
Just at this moment of the world
As snow gathers like bolts of lace
Waltzing on a ballroom girl
You know it never has been easy
Whether you do or you do not resign
Whether you travel the breadth of extremities
Or stick to some straighter line
Now here's a man and a woman sitting on a rock
They're either going to thaw out or freeze
Listen
Strains of Benny Goodman
Coming through the snow and the pinewood trees
I'm porous with travel fever
But you know I'm so glad to be on my own
Still somehow the slightest touch of a stranger
Can set up trembling in my bones
I know no one's going to show me everything
We all come and go unknown
Each so deep and superficial
Between the forceps and the stone
Well I looked at the granite markers
Those tributes to finality to eternity
And then I looked at myself here
Chicken scratching for my immortality
In the church they light the candles
And the wax rolls down like tears
There's the hope and the hopelessness
I've witnessed thirty years
We're only particles of change I know I know
Orbiting around the sun
But how can I have that point of view
When I'm always bound and tied to someone
White flags of winter chimneys
Waving truce against the moon
In the mirrors of a modern bank
From the window of a hotel room
I'm traveling in some vehicle
I'm sitting in some café
A defector from the petty wars
Until love sucks me back that way
© 1976; Crazy Crow Music
Rue St-Louis-en-l’île, Paris, spring 2003
Musicians on Pont St Louis, Paris, spring 1997
Champs Élysées, Paris, spring 1997
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Poem: Endless
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my mom
Listen to a podcast of this poem here.EndlessFingering the past and its memories
like beads of stone
or bone, like the ivory necklace
of your mother’s you wore,
its carved spheres, milky with river
filigrees, soapy soft,
lotioned almost
like your face skin before bed
oh pressing mine, kissing me good night on my
adolescent pillow
where I was growing, thrumming into myself
drawing pictures of women’s bodies
the way I wanted mine to be
under
forbidden bone, outlawed tusk
engraved for a beautiful woman
to wear upon her neck
hanging down on her bosom
circling, rotating, revolving
in the endless orbit of a life
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-My response to the killing of Osama bin Laden
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What color is prayer?
In December we saw an installation by visual artist Jitish Kallat at The Art Institute of Chicago called Public Notice 3. (The Art Institute's page about it is here.)
In thousands of LED lights, Kallat spells out words on the risers of the stairs in the Woman's Board Grand Staircase — an open, radiant space. The brightly lit words were intentionally designed in the five colors of the United States Department of Homeland Security alert system. At first, seeing the neon-like letters mounted on the Beaux-Arts stairs felt jarring. The Art Institute is my favorite museum, and the multi-directional staircase under a skylight has always been a magnetic center of the million-square-foot building where I love to sit and watch people, listening to the echo of voices and footsteps. Once I learned the content of the words illuminating the risers, I read up and down and watched people climb, descend, sit, stand, and snap pictures. We were surrounded by words like stock exchange tickers (though not in motion, and not driven by commerce).
Kallat said, "Treating the museum’s Grand Staircase almost like a notepad, the 118 step-risers receive the refracted text of the speech. I see Public Notice 3 as an experiential and contemplative transit space; the text of the speech is doubled at the two entry points on the lower levels of the staircase and quadrupled at the four exit points at the top, multiplying like a visual echo."
This photo from the Art Institute of Chicago web site;
more photos here
What speech? The words Kallat mounted on the stairs were spoken by Hindu monk Swami Vivekananda to 7,000 delegates more than 100 years ago, in the first attempt to address religious tolerance worldwide: the First World Parliament of Religions, held in conjunction with the 1893 Chicago World's Fair. (Detailed synopsis of the Parliament at Boston University's Encyclopedia of Western Theology's site here.) This art installation was opened last year on the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attack, September 11, 2010. Part of what captured Jitish Kallat's imagination was the fact that the gathering of delegates of different faiths in 1893 in the museum's Fullerton Hall happened also to be on September 11 that year. Below is Vivekananda's speech, words that light the steps of the grand staircase like prayers rising and falling, adjacent to the hall where he addressed the hopeful delegates. (The building of the Art Institute was built for the 1893 Chicago World's Fair — officially the World's Fair: Columbian Exposition — with the agreement that it would house the Art Institute thereafter).
When you get to the last sentence of his speech, what do you feel?
Swami Vivekananda's speech to the First World Parliament of Religions, September 11, 1893 in the Art Institute of Chicago's Fullerton Hall:
Sisters and Brothers of America,It fills my heart with joy unspeakable to rise in response to the warm and cordial welcome which you have given us. I thank you in the name of the most ancient order of monks in the world; I thank you in the name of the mother of religions, and I thank you in the name of millions and millions of Hindu people of all classes and sects.My thanks, also, to some of the speakers on this platform who, referring to the delegates from the Orient, have told you that these men from far-off nations may well claim the honor of bearing to different lands the idea of toleration. I am proud to belong to a religion which has taught the world both tolerance and universal acceptance. We believe not only in universal toleration, but we accept all religions as true. I am proud to belong to a nation which has sheltered the persecuted and the refugees of all religions and all nations of the earth. I am proud to tell you that we have gathered in our bosom the purest remnant of the Israelites, who came to Southern India and took refuge with us in the very year in which their holy temple was shattered to pieces by Roman tyranny. I am proud to belong to the religion which has sheltered and is still fostering the remnant of the grand Zoroastrian nation. I will quote to you, brethren, a few lines from a hymn which I remember to have repeated from my earliest boyhood, which is every day repeated by millions of human beings: "As the different streams having their sources in different paths which men take through different tendencies, various though they appear, crooked or straight, all lead to Thee."The present convention, which is one of the most august assemblies ever held, is in itself a vindication, a declaration to the world of the wonderful doctrine preached in the Gita: "Whosoever comes to Me, through whatsoever form, I reach him; all men are struggling through paths which in the end lead to me." Sectarianism, bigotry, and its horrible descendant, fanaticism, have long possessed this beautiful earth. They have filled the earth with violence, drenched it often and often with human blood, destroyed civilization and sent whole nations to despair. Had it not been for these horrible demons, human society would be far more advanced than it is now. But their time is come; and I fervently hope that the bell that tolled this morning in honor of this convention may be the death-knell of all fanaticism, of all persecutions with the sword or with the pen, and of all uncharitable feelings between persons wending their way to the same goal.
After reading this speech, I feel as I did when I woke up early Monday morning, before Don, to his hand written note from the night before after he'd heard the news and I was in bed. I feel: empty. Not joyful. Not sad exactly. Not hopeful, not hopeless. I'm somewhere floating in a noxious ether of mystery. How have we come to this? How did we get even further away from Vivekananda's closing wishes in these decades since he spoke them?
To watch and listen to an 8-minute video of artist Jitish Kallat's interview with the museum curator about his installation, go here.
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A new mothering poem & a national radio show
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Under the open skyYou are a constant bridge
between mother
and child.
I walk from this side
a sprout
to the other shore’s
bones
and back again
and again
through your unfolding
womb
— your opening mouth
where I go inside
and listen
to our unwrinkling
skin.
My blog friend Susan of Everyday People invited me to share three poem podcasts on her nationally aired public radio program 51% The Women's Perspective for this week of Mother's Day. Susan's excellent program focuses on issues that are relevant and resonant for all of us, not only women. The poems are ones I have previously posted at this blog and are "A world, and you in it," "Aubade" and "Little One." I'm pretty excited. (Did I say "nationally" enough times? Eeeeeeee.) The poems are on the topic of mothering, which seems to be where I live these days in my heart. The 30 minute show airs live Wednesday, May 4 at 3 PM EST on her station out of Woodstock, NY, WAMC. The program will be archived Thursday, May 5, show #1138 here. You'll be able to download an mp3 of the program at NPR here. (Yeah, well I'll probably be the only one doing that, ha.) To find a station that airs 51% The Women's Perspective, go here. Thank you, Susan, for liking my poems enough to broadcast them on your show!
UPDATE: Listen to the archive of Susan Barnett's very interesting 51% The Women's Perspective show from yesterday (archive #1138 here), a special Mother's Day edition in which Carla Goldstein explains the feminist origins of Mother's Day, and the intent of its founders to end all war. Then listen to a young woman from Ireland talk about her heartbreaking last days with her mother, who had dementia (a story I understand personally). The 30-minute program is well worth listening to. My poem "A world, and you in it" is at the end of the program. Thanks again, Susan, for hosting an important program and for airing my poem in such fine company.
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Nouvelle 55: The Storm
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Metropolitan Museum of Art
HE: “What do you mean, love: ‘Hold on to me, we’re going to fly!'?"
SHE: “I mean that if we stay, my father will banish you.
I would rather sail up together into the storm of the sky
rushing toward us now, than live out hell on earth
—without you. The old Duke wants to marry meeee-eeee-- ~ - ~ - ~!”
*Nouvelle 55 (nouvelle cinquante-cinq - I love how it sounds in French, humor me) is a form of flash fiction, in exactly 55 words, based on a work of art.
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