Sunday, December 31, 2017

New Year's Eve 2017: Eldorado, New Mexico



This morning Michaela and I were in Eldorado, a small town just south of Santa Fe. Although only a twenty-minute drive from where we live, Eldorado seems to always have a slightly different weather pattern. When its dry here, it's snowing there. When it's light here, it's dark there. Strange winds blow through Eldorado, winds we jokingly (and sometimes not so jokingly) call: "Bruja/Brujo winds." Witch wind…


 But that's not what I want to talk about…

From anywhere in town you get a shot of the Cerrillos Hills to the west. They look dusty and cragged, probably because black and gray shale is widely exposed across the hills. 

Standing in an empty parking lot this morning, studying them, I thought, because of how ancient they are - the sense that they have been keeping watch for so, so long

- how they could be related to something I sometimes feel inside my body when I am going through intense emotions (terror, joy, grief…from the death of a loved one, a life-threatening situation, love lost…) 

an eye that watches it all, extremely curious, thinking "oh, this is interesting…" 

I suppose I could put this down to detachment or dissociation from the emotion, but that doesn't really do the sensation justice - because while this "watching" is happening, I am still feeling the emotion burning through all my cells…


And so, the new year's eve poem:


Eldorado, New Mexico,
New Year's Eve Morning

Leaves scrape across an empty parking lot.

Purple, brown shades in the nearby brush. Faint tints of red.

A rabbit waits beneath the brush, imitating the dead.

Across the flats, silhouette of the Cerrillos hills, cragged
                      and dark with shale, ancestors
   of that part of us that keeps endless vigil; a curious eye,
                                                 through fire, grief, fear, loss…

The dead leaves move towards me.

Wind rustles the rabbit's fur, my hair.

Winter's colors deepen.


********

Happy New Year!





Thursday, December 21, 2017

Winter Solstice 2017: The Under Realm




Winter is the time when everything returns to the earth, when the energy burrows deep into stone, pools in tree roots. Down in the cold realms of the dead, everything begins to transform, change. 

The shadows from the realm of the dead like to walk among us in winter. They slip into this world through the seams in stone, cracks in old boards, old snake holes. It is easier for them to blend in during the long nights when even shadows possess shadows. 

They like to feel the cold stone beneath their exposed bones - but they always leave deer and bobcat prints behind, to fool us (sometimes a bobcat is a bobcat; sometimes a bobcat is a spirit from another realm).

I like to think that the dead take on the roles and masks of the creatures and people who fill our dreams. They play whatever part suits them: a man in a Stellar's Jay headdress and wings, a pedestrian in a busy asylum corridor, a teacher monitoring an endless exam, a woolly rhino thundering across the winter desert, a car that has no brakes, a potted plant in a dusty office…



When I think of the winter solstice, I think we have entered a long dream. Dream and reality merge. Which is which? Are we sure we knew the difference before?




Winter Solstice: The Under Realm 

(a work in progress)
1.

A rusted water tank on the side of a hill,
forgotten. Cold gathers beneath it.
                    I tap the side: emptiness taps back.

2.

Cartilage of a guitarfish inside a cloud,
cloud inside the Stellar Jay's eye, Stellar Jay
     inside last night's dream: echoes
                                               of the coming dark.  

3.

A woman slumps on a curb, counts her change,
     repeats the pattern of words in her head:
     conspicuous sedition, sorrowful mechanism,
     reason for the season, reason for the treason…

Someone has forgotten something,
                                                left something out.
She is making the connections that need to be made.

4.

What is silence? The sound of iron, traveling
sun to sun, feeding off pale light.

What is stillness? How black branches weave
the songs of the dead into a red horizon.

What is time? The loneliness of the dead rabbit,
roadside, waiting to step into its own shadow.

5.

Shadows settle on the stones,
       scattered among scrub juniper. They watch
a man with Stellar's Jay head and wings
           pick up a pebble, hold it to the sky.
They can see the fish cartilage folded inside.

6.

Breath hangs in the air: water and salt.
Breath hangs in the air: earth and unwanted thoughts.
Breath hangs in the air: fire and a raven's feather, lost.
Breath hangs in the air, then dissolves.

7.

Last light disappears into the water tank.
All shadows merge.




Light in the Dark.
Dark in the Light.

Have a Strange and Beautiful  
Solstice.



(Solstice blogs from the past, along with poems,
can be found by hitting the "Series" tab above)


Monday, December 18, 2017

Thinking about Li Po during the Geminid Meteor Shower




I live in a place where I can see the stars- there are no streetlight obstructions. It is the first time in my life I've been so lucky. Stepping out my door at night, I look up into the milky way, the star river. So, it was easy to stand on the stone wall right outside the door and watch the flashes and streaks of the geminid meteor shower last Thursday night.

Over the last few weeks, I've been re-reading the Selected Poems of Li Po   
(also known as Li Bai and Li Taibai), translated by David Hinton. I've had the book since it first came out in 1996. It is one of the few books, along with Hinton's translations of the selected poems of Tu Fu (Du Fu), that I have managed to hang onto in all my travels and moves. 

Li Po and Tu Fu are among the best  Chinese poets. They both lived during the High T'ang Dynasty period (712-760), a period that was marked, at the beginning, by a flourishing world of art; and ended in a rebellion (the An-Lushan rebellion) that plunged Chinese civilization into incalculable destruction, widespread famine, and death. The fall in census figures from a population of 53 million to 17 million after the rebellion's end, tells the tale of the incredible catastrophe.  


Li Po was a skilled swordsman, lived in a cave as a Taoist recluse, spent time in the emperor's court as a translator (being perpetually drunk and refusing to follow the usual protocols, he  gained the nickname "Banished Immortal" - one who has been banished from Heaven, or as Hinton puts it in his introduction to the selected poems: "an exiled spirit moving through this world with an unearthly ease and freedom from attachment."). 

During the rebellion, he was adviser to a prince who replaced the emperor for a brief period. The prince eventually lost the throne to his brother and Li Po was tried for treason and sentenced to death. He was granted clemency by the aid of a general he had once saved from court-martial, and was eventually exiled. He spent his last years wandering. 

The legend of his death says that he died, drunk, while trying to embrace the reflection of the moon on the Yangtze river. At least one third of his poems mention the moon. "In a universe animated by the interaction between yin (female) and yang (male) energies, the moon was literally yin visible." (Hinton, Introduction to the Selected Poems). 


Song of the Merchant

On heaven's wind, a sea traveler
wanders by boat through distances.

It's like a bird among the clouds:
once gone, gone without a trace.


(Li Po, trans. David Hinton)



I have always been drawn to the spontaneous aspect of Li Po's poetry. He was friends with the masters who developed "wild-grass" calligraphy, those who would get drunk and, at the right moment, plunge brush into ink and scrawl indecipherable characters across silk. It seems as if he created his poems in much the same way. With Li Po, act and poem merge. Another aspect that draws me in, is that everything is placed in the context of larger natural patterns - there is always "the wild" - stars, waterfalls, gibbons, the moon...


Thought in Night Quiet

Seeing moonlight here at my bed,
and thinking it's frost on the ground,

I look up, gaze at the mountain moon,
then back, dreaming of my old home.

(Li Po, trans. David Hinton) 


Because I am a creature of the 21st Century, my own experience of the wild, of natural patterns, extends to the why light flashes across the sky, and how the wildness of the natural world is also within us, our bodies, our nervous systems. Shooting star, thought-flash - same thing.


At Fang-Ch'eng Monastery, Discussing Ch'an with Yuan Tan-Ch'iu 

Alone, in the vast midst of boundless
dream, we begin to sense something:

wind and fire stir, come whorling
life into earth and water, giving us

this shape. Erasing dark confusion,
we penetrate to the essential points,

reach Nirvana-illumination, seeing
this body clearly, without any fears,

and waking beyond past and future,
we soon know the Buddha-mystery.

What luck to find a Ch'an recluse
offering emerald wine. We seem lost

together here - no different than
mountains and clouds. A clear wind

opens pure emptiness, bright moon
gazing on the laughter and easy talk,

blue-lotus roofs. Timeless longing
breaks free in a wandering glance.

(Li Po, trans. David Hinton)


The meteors flashed and I thought of Li Po, standing a little further off, among the trees in the dark, both of us staring up at the same stars...


Heaven & Earth:
Thinking of Li Po While Watching a Geminid Meteor Shower

(a work in progress)

Meteors whip flammable gas into flame -
        brief streaks of light
                  between seemingly immortal stars.
Li Po, last poet to hunt immortality,
                wandered city to cave to monastery,
followed the moon across the surface
       of dark water, desperate
                                  to drink that light down.
           
A brilliant white line scars the night
                  beneath Orion's belt, across Eridanus,
river of souls,
                 pierces the mind, mirrors the flash
         across a synapse. Messages sent from before
the earth was formed:
              What is a thought? What is a dream?

The afterimage haunts the eye: eerie black
                                                light. There, not there;
   same as the poet's legend, illusion as history:
         Li Po dove into the moon and drowned.
But the poetry was real, spontaneous, shadows
                         thrown onto cave walls by torchlight.
Undaunted, (probably drunk), he questioned
        the tigers and dragons that emerged from stone:
              What is a thought? What is a dream?
    What is this strange longing I have for the moon?

I stand on a stone wall, shivering, feet cold,
 watch stone after stone burn the night sky
                            alive. Anchored to earth, the mind
rides the brief light (…a thought, a dream…).
                   Spontaneous whoops and sighs erupt 
from my mouth at each flash:
                        the nervous system recognizing itself…

Li Po was the last poet to hunt down immortality,
             knew the search was futile - and yet
found that a life, a full life, can be made in pursuit
            of the joke:


                                Li Po dove into the moon… 





Another great translator of Li Po is J. P. Seaton, editor and translator of the Shambhala Anthology of Chinese Poetry

A recent book of his Li Po translations: Bright Moon, White Clouds.






Thursday, December 14, 2017

First Day of Snow




More Beauty & Terror



It snowed last Thursday, December 7, and that was the first snow of the year. I woke up, looked out the bedroom window, saw a white void. The entire canyon where I live was enshrouded inside a snow cloud. It was so thick I couldn't see the apple trees lining the coyote fence that are only about ten paces from the window. 

At first, the snow flying around was small, tiny particles, but then became large flakes, flakes stuck to flakes, and the ground was eventually covered. Around noon, the cloud began to thin and clear.

By December, it usually has snowed here in Santa Fe at least twice - more up in the foothills and mountains. Because it hasn't snowed at all this fall, the snow brought up that dread and anxiety I feel when thinking or reading about Climate Change (the summers here are starting to become viciously hot; and most winters are now mild...and Santa Fe is at 7000 feet!).  

Ah, yes, Climate Change: 
the great horror in the mind that we've so desperately tried to make invisible, to erase from every day view. The US is probably the only place left on earth where news outlets still allow crank scientists - paid by oil companies - to talk and babble and keep refluxing their tired ideas that have no basis in fact. 

I have always thought that the desperate urge to believe these cranks is because the horror of Climate Change (the destruction of something so essential and unprecedented as the cycles of nature) is too vast for many to absorb. It's easier to look away, call it all a hoax - like those who keep claiming that all the gun massacres are hoaxes, desperate to cling to their vision of how the world should be - not how it is.

(Believe me, I know how hard it is to see the world as it actually is, but the only way to peace - internal, external - is to see what is right there in front of you...however painful...).


And so thoughts of Climate Change got me to ruminating about those things in this culture that are right out there in plain sight and yet remain invisible, something we see at the corner of the eye, and continually dismiss. 

There are so many of these things that I can't go into the list here...except one:

The wars, so many wars, that the US military is engaged in around the world...

...the war in Afghanistan (in its sixteenth year),the war in Iraq (in its fourteenth year), Libya, Somalia, the skirmishes and black ops all over Africa (as the recent deaths of soldiers in Niger have made clear), in the Philippines...


The carnage and bodies (civilians, children) has increased exponentially in the last ten years.



And so the snow fell through the morning, until about noon. It was beautiful. I have always been entranced by snow. Even when I have to shovel it. Even when it makes the roads treacherous. It calms me. It buries the noise of the world for a little while. It buries the noise in my head for a little while. It illuminates the tracks of animals that normally slink and pad through the night undetected.

In the face of such beauty, the fear, sorrow, and anger continued. Once again, beauty and terror. The beauty and terror moved through me throughout the weekend. The snow has melted, but the thoughts continued. Last night I wrote this (still a work in progress):


First Snow of the Year

1.

The topmost pear branch is a deer femur.

Magpie claw-prints are visible for a few seconds,
then fold into stone.

A perfect sphere of snow gathers on top
of the last standing post of a fallen fence.

Old borders, buried.

2.

Things that were invisible before - fallen
branches and dead stalks, a gopher's hole - 
become visible as snow settles.

A hollow sunflower stalk, head bent down,
bearing the weight of the entire snow cloud,
scans the trees ahead, then begins to move -
stiff, limping - carrying his dead daughter's
possessions on his back. It is all he has. All
that lies between himself and death.

3.

The wars go on and on. Many years ago, they
became invisible, faded into the background.
No war news anymore. When did that happen?

We go to work, come home, eat dinner, talk, 
remark how the moon makes the shadows of things -
     trees, stones, parked cars, houses, walls -
                more real than the things themselves...

4.

Bright moon, clear sky: bone-light on blue snow.

Beyond the bedroom window, something moves.
                        I turn slowly, want it to be a face,
a stranger's face, asking for something,
                                                                a sacrifice -

                        a finger bone, an eye, the part
                 of me that lives inside a cholla thorn
                        lit orange by the setting sun -

but there is nothing there. There is never anything there.




Organizations:






Articles:




"Every country destroyed or destabilized by U.S. military action is now a breeding ground for terrorism." 





Thursday, December 7, 2017

Poems in Hamilton Stone Review: The Close Dark



Two more sections from the long poem
"The Close Dark"
are in the current issue of


The cover includes a triptych,
Virgens de Guadalupe
by Lynda Schor

Lynda Schor 


Kali
"The Close Dark"
is a personal journey
to find a balance between
the alluring and familiar darkness 
of the Hindu goddess 
Kali
and aspects of the Christian Mary. 

Chauvet cave


"The Close Dark" begins in a stone hut in the Cevennes mountains, moves to Philadelphia, then Rocamadour, France, eventually passing through a dream-like motel that resembles Chauvet cave…

La Cieneguilla Petroglyph Site, Santa Fe


The two sections in Hamilton Stone Review take place on a cliff-side full of petroglyphs on the south side of Santa Fe.






Other sections of 
"The Close Dark"
can be found in
Peacock Journal 

The final section of the poem 
can be found in the current issue 
of 
The Bitter Oleander.

Issue 37 of the Hamilton Stone Review includes work by:


Tony Beyer, Don Brandis, Kevin Casey, Patrick Connelly, Tesa Blue Flores, Jack Freeman, Stephen Gibson, J.M. Hall, stone hedra, Lynn Strongin, John Stupp, Aden Thomas, Richard Weaver, and Mark Young, Nick Bertelson, Garrison Botts, Jonathan Ferrini, Moriah Hampton, Mike Koenig, Patricia Leonard, Sara Cahill Marrom, Eliza Segiet, and Yermiyahu Ahron Taub.


Lynda Schor

Meanwhile, 
it's snowing here!