The One-Legged

The one-legged who weren't born that way; it happens.

It wasn't until later, one leg solid enough for the earth, held by gravity; the other, swinging wildly or gangrenous or amputated.

It might not be noticeable, the one-legged dance. Balance is difficult. The stunted leg in ekapadasana pose: straight out in front, swinging it behind, holding steady. This strengthens the ankle, point of pivot.

It doesn't matter which leg is atrophied; they switch, changing strengths and weaknesses daily or hourly.

Tree pose is favoured. One strong leg straight; the other bent, with the foot tucked against the groin. Stand like a flamenco; balance as long as you can.

Hopping about on one foot is not easy and very tiresome. Artificial limbs don't replace what's missing, not in this realm of riddle and metaphor.

Is it possible to re-grow bones and tendons and muscle? To bring the spastic flap of limb back to life? Or it is all denial?

The hardest is padangustasana. Tree pose, but kneeling, and on one set of toes.

It's possible; practice perfect balance on one leg. Don't move or you'll falter. It was never stable.

Despite the red flame flowers and yellow suns and pink cornucopias and dragon powers and torch blue sky and trillions of stars and mantle of earth thick with soft insects and fur and spark-lit cities and roads like snakeskins and upholding trees and brimming populations and untold connections, it's all grounded, like I said
millions of times.

Sunday Afternoon at the Beach

The beach on the first day of Autumn, the Vernal Equinox, half-way between when the earth's tilt and the sun's position reach a zenith and shift. Reminds me of John Coltrane's quote this morning in The Writer's Almanac, "When asked to describe his style, he said, "I start in the middle of a sentence and move both directions at once.""

To write like that! I watch light glossing the water, overflow of foam as the whitecaps spill near the shore and lick the sand, placid on my beach towel, caressed by clear sun, cool breeze, a seamless oneness. And we're shifting one way, to the indoors, in the months ahead. Though the yachts, white sails leaning into or away from the wind, merging and parting, lyrical white paint brushing to a tip on the blue, seem possibly like the movement in a sentence of both directions at once. But then I am looking for images in the scene to act at metaphors for the concept, aren't I? Though when you find an image, and the evocation of the intended metaphor, the language finds a corollary, a grammar that allows it.

I find myself considering those who split their tongues, two-headed snakes and other Janus-faced phenomenon, Piscean fish who swim oppositely, paradox and ambiguity, how subjects and objects can interchange through the verb, Coltrane's chords and the way his music searches, running in veering directions, adding coils and back flips, trills and a highly charged sexy line, the serpentine one, even while it swings eccentrically, starting in the middle and playing in both directions at once, and I'm not sure it even matters, the day is gorgeous, and I've been teased by delightful men my age, one of whom asked if I'd like white wine or a martini, and he'd bring it by on a tray, and others who offered a canoe ride, or even to let me take it for a spin if I liked, my laughter rolling down the beach as I said, "Ha, those waves would push me back in even as I tried to paddle out!"

It was fun, though I moved to sunbathe by the distant rocks, and now I'm home listening to Blue Train, feeling the pink heat over my body from too many of the sun's kisses.

Post-It Notes

Kindness like an orchard that, with cultivation, bears sweet succulent fruit year after year, peaches with the sun in their hearts.

Quivering, gentle, strong, we are flames in the wind, precious, too easily extinguished.

Sensitivity, oh, complex, nuanced response to the world, and fragility, what I rest my being on. Moments of feeling vulnerable, and fragile, it's exquisite, open with gentle reverence for the self.

I am passionate about honesty, and believe the truth frees you.

Laughter, silliness, mutual respect, enjoying joy in each other.

Love cannot be an illusion.

Fire Drill

On the day of the fire drill. Not the end of all beginnings,
just a final moment.

Who could say in the jangling bells what could have been?

The business-suited stomping down stairwells in hoards.
How many of us are there? Clattering.

Only I stayed away, my late lunch tied to the fire drill;
I imagined it.

Nothing's severed yet, and perhaps never. The jangling
in the centre of the world like a prearranged
fire alarm, a practice session for when the planes fly
into the buildings or when the bombs ignite.

Oh not here, never here, where we are a peaceful country.

With the inability to schedule ourselves indefinitely, due to
the indecision of death looming; we will die, but who knows
when, living our private moments not listening to the
jangling.

Outside I saw the change from the arboreal splendour of
earlier: leaves no longer gleamed, trees let them
go. Flaming, browning.

Our over-riding thoughts determine our way through.

Like steering winds in the trophosphere, that drive swirling
volcanic dust, creating an "eye" of stillness.

The phototrophism of fire.

The drill that ended us.

The Sky

The sky, scrubbed this morning,
a dusting of bleach powder like clouds.

Is it possible to unravel
a counter-current of imagery?

The tightly-coiled poem,
bound and ready to spring.

Or perhaps excesses where
not everything matches?

It's harder to clean a busy sky
sunrises, sunsets, auroras, varying
storm clouds, tornadoes and hurricanes.

Poets do their best
what with the wild weather,
the scarf that wrapped their hair
lost and flying loose.

Then it clears.

One spectral colour,
polished around the shining sun,
still and fat as a blue porcelain basin.

Whistler's Nocturnes

Or Whistler's Nocturnes. I've been to The Tate, I studied art history, I'm familiar enough with American art, how did I miss these?

To say they are forerunners of abstract art is almost to do an injustice to them. As if they were just passports to. The grandiose Kantian sublime is gone in the Nocturnes; I do love Turner, but it's still there in his storms of light: the fabulous scene of such splendour or power you bow before it.

The Nocturnes, rather, are the stream of life; the Tao de Ching instead of a fire and brimstone Jehovah construction of the world. As viewers who encounter his art through these paintings, we are moved, not by our relation to the huge forces, but by the ordinary flow of events, the wash of simple paint across a canvas, the sound of a music of water that continually drifts past. It's not the dissolution of the self as the river sweeps into the ocean, but the current of everyday, swimming our way through.

Certainly Whistler had a fairly complex aesthetic regarding the autonomy of an art that is its own dynamic force driven by its own internal logic and momentum,¹ but these pieces, oh, lyrical, yes.



Nocturne: Blue and Silver - Chelsea
James McNeill Whistler
1871; Oil on wood, 50.2 x 60.8 cm; Tate Gallery, London

_
¹Craig Staff, in 1001 Paintings (Universe, 2006), p.450.

Ekstasis

"Carson is drawn to selves who desire immersion and disintegration into an absolute inhuman essence (in the case of Porete and Weil, the essence is God). What's intriguing about her portrayal of this sensibility is the utter absence of melancholy. She doesn't say whether loss of the self is something any of these women try to stem or evade; instead, she focuses on the paradox of someone seeking self-affirmation in an experience of dispossession and dissolution. " Decreation

I have Ann Carson's book, I'm reading it in the evenings. Hers is literary, the way she enters. Ariadne's thread, the scholar who is a poet. But ekstasis, Greek, 'going out of oneself,' 'standing beyond oneself,' it's affecting me. When I dispersed into stardust all about myself, I was losing my/self, it was fearful, this dissolution. It was like the universe pervaded my aura, the stardust in which stars are born, a sprinkling of lights throughout a faint purplish mist. And I was seeing from all points of the expandedness. Overlapping visions, a universe come inwards and the self who is the woman in this life, and some other anthropomorphic interlocution that I don't want to call god-like but was. Each dancing starpoint an eye of seeing. Seeing myself like this and seeing outwards from these vantage points. Disturbing, being shifted out of myself, and peaceful, profoundly so.