Creation, etc.

Thinking about what art is, what power(s) we invest into the objects we create, how they become independent entities, about the ability of narration to create meaning, how experiences become real. About Nietzsche and Rushdie, significance and identity and language, about poetry, about the physical world, my physical body, the triumph of mind and community over physical weakness. About love, what it is, what it isn't, what it has been, what it should be. About gender, its irrelevance, its social construction, about the way life surprises me. About time, the sublime, and drinking wine.....

(Just threw that last one in because it rhymes, but it's also true.)

Let this suffice for an update: this is week 9, we got snow last Thursday in PA, I ran my half-marathon in Columbus on Sunday, I am busy, and I am happy in ways I never expected.

The waiting game begins

Today, after work, I mailed the very last piece of the very last grad school application. Throughout this process, I've spent $140 to take the GRE, $451 on application fees, roughly $20 in postage, almost $10 in printing (I did most of it for free at work), plus a package of manilla envelopes, some whiteout, a package of paperclips, and a ridiculous amount of time and energy. But now it is all out of my hands; my fate is out there in the hands of the universe and its infinite wisdom. I believe that it will give me the options I need to make a good decision.

And, because I haven't posted any poems recently, here is a very new first draft I scribbled out last night during the Open Mic. ETA: after reading this again a few times, I think it's really awful, and am deleting most of it. I'll leave the beginning and end, as a reminder to myself what it was about.

Hold On As Long As You Can (tentative title)

Ten years ago if my wishes had been granted
there would have been three: her,
California, grad school. I dreamed
last night that they’d all come true.

(removed stanzas)

... She was dying.
We both knew it. I walked outside

in the dream. It was snowing. Is this
still California, or have I gone back
in time to Ohio? I didn’t cry.
I’d gotten all I ever wanted and held
her all these years.

I wake and reach for her, who’s never been
in this apartment or this bed. Years have slipped
over me since the last time I thought of the life
we could have had. Tears fall suddenly as I grasp
the human truth. Even if I’d gotten everything
I wished for, I would still have lost her someday.

It's from a dream I had a week or so ago, which was truly creepy and sad and strange.

The Difference

Since Nathan mentioned the poem prompt I gave on his blog, I figured I'd go ahead and post what I wrote that night as well. The prompt was to write on either the difference between the purchase and the gift, or just on the idea of purchases or gifts. A nice wide-open prompt, but one which had a very specific point of origin for me.

Awhile back, in the summer of 2007 I think, I read a book of essays by Scott Russell Sanders called Hunting for Hope. It's a great book, about family relationships, and our relationship to the natural world, and ways of finding hope in a world that's so messed up. He writes at one point about the difference between the purchase and the gift, with the idea that nature is a gift to us: it is something we can not buy, can not write, can not choose, can not control. We must be passive and just listen. (okay, cutting this short cuz S. just walked in, and we need to work on the collaborative piece.) Go check out the book!

The Difference

Open windows in summer are a gift,
the breeze that comes unbidden,
uneven, on its own terms.
You must wait for it, not command

an on/off switch, set a comfortable
seventy degrees, low speed or high.
There is no purchase, no control,
no ceiling fan, no central air.

All weather is a gift, cold
or hot, dry or wet, kind
or cruel. Your smallness
is a gift, humbled in the wind.

You purchase the roof that shelters,
the umbrella, the fur-lined gloves.
I walk bare-headed in the rain, I wait
for sunshine, for calm, for love.

One of the paradoxes of existence

(This is not poetry, and doesn't even directly relate to poetry, but I wanted to post it here anyway....)

I am thinking right now of how happy I am, how lucky I feel to be where and who I am right now. It was the most amazing weekend here. The weather was perfect, sunny and so warm for this time of year. Halloween was Friday, and the event in the Short North was as fabulous as I'd hoped; I had a fantastic time with some of my best friends, a special new friend, and the community at large. Saturday was a very nice Gallery Hop. Today, Sunday, we walked downtown to the Obama rally. We stopped for coffee, ran into friends everywhere, the sun was out, the crowds were thrilling and thrilled, and it was just so exciting and inspiring to be there! Four of us grabbed some food afterward, then I came back here and talked with S for awhile.

I just keep thinking how happy I am. How perfect this weekend was. How I feel so lucky to be here and now and involved and present in this city, this community, my group of friends, etc. The thought of not being here in a year makes me want to cry. The thought of losing the community here, of losing the family I've created with my friends, breaks my heart.

And yet.... And yet I still look forward to applying to graduate school. I hope to get in. I hope to be living somewhere else in a year, surrounded by new faces and new poems and new inspiration.

I am living fully present in my life right now, enjoying every moment, trying to pin down the nuances of beauty in the everyday as well as the high points and holidays, so happy and so aware of the impermanence of everything, present now and happy, yet hoping to be elsewhere soon, aware of what I'll lose but gambling that what I gain will be worth it, knowing that what I've learned here will come with me.

Why He Still Matters When I've Been a Lesbian for Five Years

remember, kids, this is fiction! or, at least, not literal truth.......

Why He Still Matters When I've Been a Lesbian for Five Years

I never loved him,
it's not that. It's just
that the meaning
and the beauty
of the universe
came clearly to me
for the first time
with his body
in mine, our eyes
in the mirror, the world
in his mouth. I was
too young to know
it's always like that -
devoured, restored,
the rise and the fall,
the cycle of life.

Prime

I'm thinking this might be more than one poem mushed together, or maybe it's a longer poem that isn't filled out yet. I like that it kind of builds rhythm, like the running it describes. Not sure what else I think. It's a thought that came into my mind on my short, fast, incredibly sweaty run on Tuesday.

Prime

After the third mile I know
if I stop running my eyes
will sting, salt trail
down my face, one drop
then another, then a flood
that would take more
than these dirty hands to stop.

They are not here when I run
those ghosts, those worries, obligations, disappointments.

So I don’t stop at three
or even four miles – four
is too easy, two out, two back.

I divide myself with each step.
I am not my apartment, door closed behind me,
its view, its books, the rent I pay.
I am this heart, pumping blood,
its rhythm, unconscious wisdom.

I turn a corner, sidewalks and trees, sun and shade.
I am not my cheap sunglasses
not my parents’ disappointment.
I am these muscles, legs and arms,
lungs and breath. I am this sweat
that drips like tears from my hair into my eyes.

I am not my past, not your future.
Each footfall takes me farther, each breath in and out
expels more that isn’t me till I am shining
and simplified, my physical self,
the body I was born with, nothing more.

I am completing a circle, or more like a square,
returning back to where I started.
It will be seven miles, indivisible
by anything but itself.

just a bit about the weekend

we were walking around comfest yesterday and someone commented that it smelled like the zoo - it was a combination of mud and straw, mixed with sweat and dirty people and dogs and greasy food. that's all this is, a description of that.

We move barefoot
over straw-strewn mud -
not quite naked animals
cavorting under the hot sun
for the amusement of others.

Sweat sheens our skins,
mud and grass and straw
decorate our feet and legs,
we dance or pose or sleep
as you watch from the other side.

The Desire

I want to be bruised by God.
I want to be strung up in a strong light and singled out.
I want to be stretched, like music wrung from a dropped seed.
I want to be entered and picked clean.

from "Clear Night" by Charles Wright

I must have read this for the first time at least ten, if not eleven, years ago, but it just sticks with me!

I read it then as a desire for greatness, at least in part: to be touched by god, or by power, to be so close to it that it bruises; to be recognized, admired, unique; to be tested, challenged, and expanded; to be overwhelmed by something larger than the self, something so big or so strong or so real that all the junk inside is culled away.

There's the acknowledgement of pain, that it's part of the process, the desire for it if it leads to greatness, the willingness to be transformed no matter the cost. I always come back to the word "overwhelmed" when I think of these lines, that desire for a transformative experience.

/End of random thoughts. Comments?