Tag: poetry & writing

greater labor

MKAster

I need to tell you that many of you don’t have the charts for forging your own path, manifesting mantras, or making up bad food and wine pairings because you care more about highest price than art and labor. 

Many of you have charts for taking what this life will reveal on cue, and finding out how much water added to liquid soap turns it back into water.

Many of us are here to live the deepest abrasions with no prize at the bottom, to perfect how we appreciate our garden, or a bird’s plumage, or know who we are only when our hands are in the earth. Or, are so overcome with an image of finned, furred, and feathered energies in sleep, we have to wake to write it down in the middle of night.

We get to lick the eyes of collapse or insomnia and drive to water because if we are awake anyway, it might as well be with the slicked and terminal night creatures. Many of us take on the greater work of a precision soul craft, burying the seeds of agape, philia, and eros that will crack and push through sprawling, embarrassing buildings of industry and shade what’s so holy, and everything that’s left and well after, into the only after.

the tarnished end of the summer

MKAster

It’s the tarnished stretch of late summer when everything is angry. The light is metallic. In the garden, the crows are too close and screaming, yellow jackets war with bees at hive entrances; everything moaning late attempts for food & screeching on about their efforts for the season change. Outside, everything stings, or scrapes. For their earnestness, I love the crows most.

Yesterday was last day of summer term. I made my poetry students read a few pieces from their final portfolios. I began the reading with a delivery of much of the first section of CA Conrad’s, “The Book of Frank,” forgetting that the first page drops the word cunt at least five times, and the whole first section is pretty much about how one learns about sexuality inside of a family. All I remembered were the images, like: mysterious violets left on the laps of dinner party guests. Some of my poor students were probably scandalized. That said, they all kind of flocked around me at the end of class. There were many adieus and thanks exchanged.

I had a dream David Bowie came over for Pimm’s Cups but couldn’t stay, then Nick Cave came over for dinner. He helped me in the kitchen, making a salad, and listened to my creative worries and ‘what’s the use(s)?’. He gave me a magic hat with a tiny universe inside of it and told me I could come stay at his house in Sussex and use his jeweler’s bench.

I was trying to take a photo a day in August, but they all ended up being the dogs, or things I’m cooking. Although, a praying mantis appeared outside our door and stayed long enough for me to stare, though she was clearly irritated.

In the yard, the grass is beige straw, and the vining morning glorys are strangling the Ceanothus. Every seed that hit the ground, died. One of the cherries withered and was pulled out. The Linden can’t get enough water, the Hawthornes need to be cut away from everything, & the hornets have found a way in our house. The humidity is holding: 90%. As usual, I’m waiting for summer to pass and for it to be cool, a soft compress when I open the door and go out.

Reading:

Scores of film journals now available online… all of my time is now spoken for.: http://lantern.mediahist.org/