Anonymous

Hello. Someone died last week. He is a former partner. He was a deeply abusive and chronically abusive Canadian musician. He will not be celebrated publically, I think. I worry he will haunt me. Perhaps he is finally at peace. I feel a mixture of anger, frustration, numbness, and sadness. Perhaps a poem can help. I will share it with the other ex-partners, my lifelines, with whom I am in touch continuously. Thank you for receiving this.

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The chickadee grows her hippocampus to cache up to 80,000 or so seeds in individual sequesters,
scattering her larder; strewing her many nourishments. As such, when one store is gutted and scraped bare of all her best offerings, or buried under baggages not her own, or entombed by some dense heaviness she cannot move alone, she has other places she can go.

You too have likely been sowing and stowing, even if you couldn’t know. [Even if it felt like isolation in one harmful fermenting silo]. Some burrs clung, then fell from your coat. Some serotinous pinecone was tousled loose when you passed under its branch, and wafted down to plant in the print of your boot. Some flame took it up, and it opened and sung.
Also all this,
but with people.

You are the genesis of so much.
So much generative broadcast.
You endured what you shouldn’t have had to, and survived, and still do.
Thank you for all the work of continue.

And see how all these stores—all these beautiful repositories of potential!—are now yours to explore?

It is my experience that what we land with one person, with one rough entity, is not warehoused. The chickadee knows the seed finds a way. If she doesn’t reap it this year, it will sprout and feed her the next. What wants to grow undertakes. Who can learns that to sway in the breeze is to make ready and flexible the stalk.
To bend/have been bent is not to have been weak. 

You are maybe wavering (lurching, hesitating) the unknown now—the death of someone who hurt you.
I’m sorry. Their harm was so much. Tho gently: you needn’t add more. What moves you now teaches you only that there are many axises in the universal sway.
The buffer of the new is not to fold you!
It is a teaching of how to rise up.

Heliotrope this. Face to sun. What is done in the bud
is done.
Will not grow anymore beyond what was.
Will not nourish you.

Maybe avoid that old staid table of fraught servings. Push back those hard conscript grief plates. Those thoughts/cold lumps. Those congealments and stale dishes. Those consumptives that might eat you as much as you partake of them. Push back that trad funereal chair.
You know that meal. It sucks.

Take briskly to the literal fields, and wayward. Strike desire paths. Hedge tributaries. Listen. Breathe. [Scream; weep. Evade; deke. All things, as needed].

The chickadee stores in joy, and with retrievability as intention. With sustenance as impetus. With bright future in bright mind. The small bird strives to make flush her pantries. Grows. Does not hoard; is not reticent. Shares resources. Allows convivial [meaning: with life!] borrow; the stores are communal. The information too—helpful news. Is not mean of word; is not greedy, nor cruel.
The banditry is where you’ll find your beautiful supportive flock, and truth.

Sometimes I think of energy, and sinks. 

Of the state of being stoppered, and of stagnancy. Of being suspended in the medium of another’s awful wake. 

Try?:
Mourning the good that didn’t manifest. All the paths you saw shimmer with possibility that you couldn’t journey then. Mourn the tailgates slamming up and the portcullis storming down. Do not mourn the slamming and storming. Grieve not what was in that heavy fucking sack, but that the sack was heavy. Mourn not what saddled you, but that you were burdened.

Now lay that heavy down. It wasn’t a penance. It wasn’t a payment of dues. It wasn’t a teaching or a clue. It’s a bad pack anyway for the new things you have to do, for the coming bright feriations.
Too many emergency kits, too few lanterns. [Also, no air: it’s a vacuum]. 

Gently: no container will fit your new moves. They’re too ramose; too beautiful. You will find you must remake the whole bag anew for the whole invention of the whole new you.

Relish the ajar. Peep the bloom.

See these gentle sedges? Speak into their blades some soft new wend.. Tamp at gentle will; double back.

It gets dense ahead, but I have confidence in you. Your foot is sure and your heart is true. That person is in some other form now, but oh!—so are you.

No need for the constructs of cut flowers.
Just wildly seed, and cast, and rejuve.

You are not haunted.
No spectre rues your new bloom.

Take up your good strong heart (remember: you loved someone difficult! yours are strong (howsoever involuntary) organs!). Take up your understandably fluxing mind, and go now to your repositories; to your piths of love and wisdom.
These have been other people all along.
These have been your creative practices.
These are the true fruits, and I’ll bring some now too to this improvised, spread-out blanket between us. 

[The fruits are the poems: they follow].

painting roses—
the flowers are easy,
the leaves difficult

-Shiki

altar shelf
dew and tears both
oil for the lamps

-Ransetsu [1654-1707]

ill from journeying
but my dreams circle
over withered fields

-Basho, last poem 1694

still walking into
still walking into
green mountains

-Santoka

alone, silently
the bamboo shoot
becomes a bamboo

-Santoka

The Underworld

Let’s try to go
to the underworld
that melts us
into one yes
yes – love  the mystery
that is there yes
yes – love the network
that is trying to connect
us yes yes – love
the most pleasing
network that grows
there yes yes – please
try to become the lovely
thoughts that are born
there yes yes – please
try to become the great
great great life that grows
from there yes yes – please
try to kiss the smelly
sweetness that is
there yes yes – please
please please grow
into the sweetness
that the universe wants
you to be be be be be
yes yes yes – please
try to understand that
you must grow down
to grow up yes yes

-Hannah Emerson [a non-speaking autistic poet from NY] 

Landscape

You tall poplars—people of this earth!
You black ponds of bliss—you mirror them to death!

I saw you, sister, standing in this brilliance.

-Paul Celan

WEEDS

The danger
of memory is going
to it for respite. Respite risks
entrapment, which is never
good. Don’t debauch
yourself by living
in some former versions of yourself
that was more or less naked.
Maybe it felt better then, but you were
not better. You were smaller, as the rain
gauge must fill to the brim
with its full portion of suffering.

What can memory be in these terrible times?
Only instruction. Not a dwelling.

Or if you must dwell:
The sweet smell of warm weeds then.
The sweet smell of warm weeds now.
An endurance. A standoff. A rest.

-Diane Seuss

Infinite Number

An infinite number of straight lines cross in your heart;
these lines have neither beginning nor end

-Ryszard Krynicki

#175

     Coming from the woods,
A bull has a lilac sprig
     Dangling from a horn.

-Richard Wright