The hunger, the hunger

 

The truth I found perhaps

wasn’t as beautiful and fulfilling

but the hunger for it was

 

From the Pierian spring

 
"A polymath is someone who is interested in everything, and nothing else."

Susan Sontag, writer, critic, polymath (1933-2004)

 

Wove and laid silhouettes

 

I am a ghost among
-----------------------

wove and laid silhouettes

------------------------------
hosts of see-through people
--------------------------------
drawn on Kozo paper
-------------------------
never really touching
-------------------------
like a raven’s silk wings
---------------------------
only ever brushing
----------------------
the obsidian night
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Eye in a sea of clouds

 

Tunnel

 

 
 

Where are we?

 

An invisible bird flies over,

but casts a quick shadow.

What is the body? That shadow of a shadow

of your love, that somehow contains
the entire universe.

A man sleeps heavily,
though something blazes in him like the sun,

like a magnificent fringe sewn up under the hem.

He turns under the covers.

Any image is a lie:

    A clear red stone tastes sweet.

    You kiss a beautiful mouth, and a key

    turns in the lock of your fear.

    A spoken sentence sharpens to a fine edge.
    

    A mother dove looks for her nest,

    asking where, ku? Where, ku?

Where the lion lies down.
Where any man or woman goes to cry.
Where the sick go when they hope to get well.

Where a wind lifts that helps with winnowing,

and, the same moment, sends a ship on its way.

Where anyone says Only God Is Real.

Ya Hu! Where beyond where.

A bright weaver's shuttle flashes back and forth,

east-west, Where-are-we? Ma ku? Maku.
like the sun saying Where are we?
as it weaves with the asking.

 

Rumi (1207-1273), in The Essential Rumi.

 

Aquaforte

Le Chemin par temps de pluie, ou Sous l'averse (between 1900 and 1910)

Henri Jourdain (1864-1931)

Cadmium sunset

 

Rue de village sous la neige au couchant, ou La neige en Norvège, circa 1904

Johannes Grimelund (1842-1917)

Albrecht Dürer, Petit Palais, Paris

 

A whorled story

 

***
Don’t know how long it’s been,
six months, maybe a year?
I was fine, mostly, really.
Mh? Yeah, mostly.

***
I know it’s been a year.
I’ve been doing ok.
ups and downs,
you know how it is,
maybe.

***
It felt longer at times
– longer than a year, I mean –
long days were bad days,
short days were good days,
as simple as that, really.
– so long in fact that time
felt like a volume, comprising
all axes, terms, signs, results.

***
This year has felt like a decade.
Some hours stirred tumult and tears,
and terrible truths, sometimes smaller
than a grain of sand, sometimes
larger than the Laniakea.
Other days brought silences and smiles,
great quietude filling the mind
– a Boötes of the soul, unperturbed –
the lucidity actual, irrefragable –
the mind palace like an anechoic chamber
memories seen for what they are:
starkly untinged, and evident.

***
Three hundred and thirty-eight days
sixteen hours and twelve minutes.
Every single one of those seconds
as long as a mercurial day.
March 2nd was the worst, for some reason.
I hadn’t thought about you in weeks
– well, more like afterthoughts,
caprices of a winding/storied memory –
you flashed before me
particle ignoring all matter
I relived the hours together
slowly, not savouring but observing,
your contours more defined
– like a coastline under a satellite
then as through a microscope –
in endless, excruciating precision
the acuteness of the scrutiny
which made me understand, finally
why it had been so hard to go over you.

So I sat there with that mental origami
pleating and creasing ever smaller folds,
each one revealing a finer trait,
and I knew once I would be watching
from the comfort of space
where we always fly for a reason
I would finally see the finest
tales of embroidered memories.

***