Before it came inside
I had watched it from my kitchen window,
watched it swell like a new balloon,
watched it slump and then divide,
like something I know I know -
a broken pear or two halves of the moon,
or round white plates floating nowhere
or fat hands waving in the summer air
until they fold together like a fist or a knee.
After that it came to my door. Now it lives here.
And of course: it is a soft sound, soft as a seal's ear
that was caught between a shape and a shape and then returned to me.
You know how parents call
from sweet beaches anywhere, come in come in,
and how you sank under water to put out
the sound, or how one of them touched in the hall
at night: the rustle and the skin
you couldn't know, but heard, the stout
slap of tides and the dog snoring. It's here
now, caught back from time in my adult year -
the image we did forget: the cranking shells on our feet
or the swing of the spoon in soup. It is real
as splinters stuck in your ear. The noise we steal
is half a bell. And outside cars whisk by on the suburban street
and are there and are true.
What else is this, this intricate shape of air?
calling me, calling you.
May 7, 2024
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Jan 7, 2025
I buried- in silence -in the back yard -a thing in the night -deer trodding behind the tree line airplane light rolling down the cheek of the dome- it had to be done alone no matter how many times you asked what was growing here I couldn’t speak its name- and you couldn’t hold the reigns of a certainty that is not yours to keep -here is my mind, the living, the executor, the backdoor frightened child staring off wandering for the holder -here is the order of the sphinx, the cataloged diagnosis of the ordinary wheel -here is the lackadaisical assistances that you ordered: “bury the hatchet that dug the hole. take the sword of your desires and throw it at the heap. there is a lump forming that must be seared. the stitches to be unraveled are trying to leach into the skin from which they are formed. you must open the earth or be dissolved yourself”
Feb 25, 2025
Old man, you surface seldom.
Then you come in with the tide’s coming
When seas wash cold, foam-
Capped: white hair, white beard, far-flung,
A dragnet, rising, falling, as waves
Crest and trough. Miles long
Extend the radial sheaves
Of your spread hair, in which wrinkling skeins
Knotted, caught, survives
The old myth of origins
Unimaginable. You float near
As keeled ice-mountains
Of the north, to be steered clear
Of, not fathomed. All obscurity
Starts with a danger:
Your dangers are many. I
Cannot look much but your form suffers
Some strange injury
And seems to die: so vapors
Ravel to clearness on the dawn sea.
The muddy rumors
Of your burial move me
To half-believe: your reappearance
Proves rumors shallow,
For the archaic trenched lines
Of your grained face shed time in runnels:
Ages beat like rains
On the unbeaten channels
Of the ocean. Such sage humor and
Durance are whirlpools
To make away with the ground-
Work of the earth and the sky’s ridgepole.
Waist down, you may wind
One labyrinthine tangle
To root deep among knuckles, shin-
bones,
Skulls. Inscrutable,
Below shoulders not once
Seen by any man who kept his head,
You defy questions;
You defy godhood.
I walk dry on your kingdom’s border
Exiled to no good.
Your shelled bed I remember.
Father, this thick air is murderous.
I would breathe water.
Feb 11, 2025
Top Recs from @Shadowbeni
a study issued last month found that dancing is the most effective way of treating and mitigating depression. Walking, therapy, and yoga also outpaced SSRIs. and if you're saying 'oh this was probably funded by Big Dance', there's no evidence of that and if you're saying 'that's just what a Big Dance shill would say', well honey you're right
Mar 4, 2024
👔
Reminder that most of what we do is a performance
Feb 24, 2025
Oct 3, 2024