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This week's cat links:
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today it's the koi
catching the light
as they emerge from dark water
your family, my family
at the surface of dreams
so thin, that skin
between today, and then
I go back, again
and again, I reach
for you but grasp
nothing but fog, opaque
and elusive, I wonder
how they will ever get me up
on that horse, the ranch
dry, as it always was
snakes in the sagebrush
rattling their warning
the deep bell ringing
cows coming home
home, home -- one kiss
that's all I ask
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How long must I sit on your grave
to elicit a visitation? Must I fast?
Must I meditate on the vastness
of the universe of death? Must
I count my own? Must I arrive
at midnight to pull your ashes
back to some semblance of you?
If I wake, if I sleep, will you come
to me, shambling, silent, silhouetted
against the summer moon? Will you
speak? I closed your eyes with my own
hand. I sat at your side and waited.
Now I sit on your grave, and wait.
I wrap myself against the night,
I sit on the cold ground, where you
are not. And wait.
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Boo and Belle wish you a Happy Friday. Belle is nearly a year old now, and almost as big as Boo -- but she's not going to be the huge cat we expected when she was so oversized as a kitten. She is still a kitten.
This week's cat links:
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Animal Empathy
an animal antiphon
assimilated aborigines
we are Antaeus
earth our arboretum
it is not a matter of thinking
it begins here: we band
together, a braid
of betrothal and betrayal
the human biography
curators of creation
we cannot continue
to consume without consequence
sinking deep into demise
we must listen, we must hear
the descant of the Dervish
or die with the devils
of our own nature
this, our dilemma
discipline, or distress
feel the drumming
the ebb, the elapse
of human dynasty
we are the element
of our own extinction
or we embark on a voyage
of enlightened empathy
The Empathy Animal
we claim that empathy
emanates from the human brain
that elegant and enigmatic organ
that distinguishes us from our cousins
the ground of our disposition
or perhaps of our self-deception
we consecrate our deviation
in this dialectic with our kin
from the time we left our caves
we have blamed on them our carnal selves
we say the beast in us is base
a barb in the flesh of all that's best
but it's our apish arrogance
that divides us from the rest
read write prompt #84: fun with the dictionary
Totally Optional Prompt: Spontaneity/Planning
Again, the two prompts work together. Usually I think and/or write and then work with what comes. This time I followed the guidance in Matthea Harvey's essay “Don Dada On The Down Low Getting Godly In His Game: Between and Beyond Play and Prayer in the Abecedarius”, working through the dictionary from animal to empathy and back again.
This exercise seems to have elicited my expository self. Not a strong suit for me, I think.
[Thursday morning: a bit of slight editing]
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Sometimes when I experience a crisis of confidence, as I have lately (what am I doing? is it any good? what does it matter? & so on) I scroll back through this blog, just to see what I have been doing.
Late last night I came across this post, from January 2008, which I had completely forgotten about. I sound so ... confident.
Click through to the original and outside links to see the comment threads, which are of interest in themselves:
~
[UPDATED 8:00 PM 16 January: Wow. Andrew Sullivan just linked to the poem. My stats are booming!]
My poems seldom incite controversy, but I Have This To Say About That, regarding why the New Hampshire pollsters got it wrong, has done exactly that, here and elsewhere. Comments and emails on this poem have reminded me of questions regarding the role and responsibility of art, of poetry, in our contentious times; and of my own responsibilities, as a poet, a woman, a feminist, and a citizen.
First, let me mention that (like many, if not most poets) I often write in a voice not my own; that neither the speaker nor the subject of my poem is necessarily me. Like a novelist, I am attempting to say truth with fiction, true fiction, as it were. I have found, through the years, that adherence to fact can actually impede the expression of truth.
In writing workshops, when some aspect of a piece is critiqued, the novice writer will often protest: but that's what actually happened! and resist the suggestion that something that didn't really happen might express the mood or the point of the piece with more power and, paradoxically, authenticity.
I am not a reporter. I am a poet. I attempt to tell the truth, and sometimes to enlighten, to entertain, even to amuse while doing so. I am attempting to enlighten, entertain, and amuse myself as well as the reader. The truth is, I often don't know what my poem is about until years later, if ever.
But this time I did.
I chose to speak in a voice not my own, a cadence as true as I could make it to the twang of my western youth. My uncles' voices, perhaps; a certain Missouri syrup in there with a little Montana cowboy. But is this cowboy lying when he says:
... women
lie ...They lie mostly about
money and politics.
And sex. That, too.
... to which several have taken offense?
No, he is telling the truth. People lie when they must, or when they believe they must. In this country, many women have little power in these arenas, which are considered the territory of the husband -- so they lie. They lie to get along, or to get what they need or want, or -- in more cases than we want to acknowledge -- to avoid a beating.
But they tell the truth when they can:
when they pull that poll booth curtain
closed, who's to know?
One response to this poem was that it presents an ugly stereotype of men and women. This is true.
catnapping says: ... one of the things that kinda bothers me about absentee ballots is that so many women have abusive husbands watching over their shoulders as they fill them out ...
It has been suggested that merely writing -- or posting -- this poem is a betrayal of women. My first (gut) response to this was, gosh, women are betrayed in so many ways, this doesn't even register on the meter -- even if it were a betrayal, which I don't believe it is.
But the suggestion does raise the question -- are there things that must not be said? Isn't that how we got here to begin with, by being told that there are questions which must not be asked, things which must not be said? Isn't this, at least in part, what art is for: to say what is not allowed, to uncover what is buried?
gautami tripathy says: ... categorising as Woman or Black man is demeaning. We vote for a person, not to any gender or colour.
To which I say, this is the dream. But the dream has not been reached. In this country, it is unprecedented to have viable candidates for president who are women, who are black. As long as there are (many) citizens who will vote against a candidate on that basis, we must not pretend otherwise. To pretend otherwise is to accept things as they are, without hope or expectation of change.
And I do not.
And white women, well,
they'll vote for a woman
or a black man without flinching.
... which is, of course, the dream, that one might vote for someone like or unlike ourselves, without flinching. Or the nightmare, I suppose, depending on your point of view. If you think that only white men should be in positions of power, this is, truly, the nightmare.
Don't those pollsters know
that married women
lie ...
Is this really why the pollsters got it wrong? I don't know; it was just an thought, that grew into a voice, that grew into a poem, that became a question.
That became several questions: Are there thoughts, ideas, concepts, that a responsible artist must not share? Is poetry a political act? Do you restrict what you say in public, because of these concerns?
Is that lying?
[There is a piece in response to this one at Poetics Vs. Politics: I Just Have This To Say About That.]
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No, sweet & silly Belle has nothing to do with the subject of this post -- except that I made that image for a Facebook friend, and haven't done Friday Cat Blogging here for ages.
Watermark used to be the center of my online life (which is much of my Real Life.) Now, there is Twitter and Facebook and Identi.ca. Also Friendfeed, which I have but rarely use. Also many others which I have but rarely use. Oh, and Open Salon, another neglected site.
Watermark posts show up in some of those places, and comments happen away from the original post. The conversation gets scattered and fractured. The center is spread thin. Too thin? Sometimes I think so.
But the spread also brings more people in. People who don't come here, notice a post on Facebook and respond there, and vice versa. More and more I use Watermark to post my poems, and other places to play and converse and post links. Lately my energy has allowed for one or two poems a week, a bit of play on Facebook, and that's about it.
I've been particularly frustrated about links that interest or amuse me. I've been posting them to Facebook, but not here, since I don't want to overwhelm Watermark readers with too-frequent or irrelevant posts. So -- I made a widget. It's there on the sidebar, for those who are interested, and those who aren't can ignore it.
I might even start throwing in some cat links there.
So one frustration is solved; I feel better about providing links to Watermark readers as well as Facebook friends. But I still don't have a center, one place where conversations are gathered together. Maybe this doesn't matter. Maybe it bothers only me?
How do you handle this? Is it a problem for you, or just how things work these days?
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my past came to visit today
we sat together in the garden
both thicker, older, milder
each carries memory of the other
each carries memory for the other
we stretched out our legs
rested our shoulders back
watched the koi drift in the pond
& pulled in our nets of memory
each, for the other
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She keeps them in a jeweled box.
It turns itself inside out. She flies
into an infinite sky. A flaming bird
breaks the glass, its broken body lies,
martyred, on the gravel ground.
She walks with me on distant beaches.
I am lost in the phantasmagorical sea.
The shaman cuts the cord, the gypsy
grants me a future of fog. I loiter
amidst the whitened ribs of whales.
She dreams me a séance of strangers.
We seek the hearts of the dead, the once
blood-red, sanguine hearts of the now
bloodless dead. Each dream has its own
clarity, its own acuity, its own lucidity.
She brings me many-colored cats, and ponies.
Appaloosas and thick-furred island wildness.
The sagebrush mound slumps down to the sea,
the many-peopled, many-creatured sea. She
shows me, I am drowned, and I see.
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