Ritual consoles
through repetitions solace:
“I’ve been here before.”
(August 16, 2025)
-
Cycle
by
I’m tired of this life,
but not tired enough to die.
The sun rises, then falls.
(August 15, 2025)
-
Storyteller by Leslie Marmon Silko
by
“You should understand
the way it was
back then,
because it is the same
even now.”
from Storyteller by Leslie Marmon Silko
Today I finished (for RFB) Storyteller by Leslie Marmon Silko. It reminded me of Way to Rainy Mountain by N. Scott Momaday in the way it blended personal narratives, with native-American stories, and history. The three aspects being, in reality, inseparable. In the case of Storyteller, the stories, poetry, photographs orbit around each other to create the idea of “story” as what defines us in our lives: the past, present, mythic all combine to create the culture we live in as well as the individual person who lives inside of the culture. It is a fairly subtle nuanced book. Silko does not spell it all out in the way Thomas King does in “The Truth About Stories,” a book I finished a few weeks ago. King also blends personal narrative, with myth, and history. Instead, Silko, lays out the parts of her collection in a type of collage, where the various parts generate a collective power creating a larger whole from the smaller parts.
Here are just some lines I underlined as I read:
“But sometimes what we call “memory” and what we call “imagination” are not so easily distinguished.”
“The story was the important thing and little changes here and there were really part of the story. There were even stories about the different versions of stories and how they imagined these differing versions came to be.”
“We were all laughing now, and we felt good saying things like this. “Anybody can act violently—-there is nothing to it; but not every person is able to destroy his enemy with words.”
“even silence was alive in his stories”
“the memory
spilling out
into the world”
“So they pause and from their distance
outside of time
They wait.”
“laugh if you want to
but as I tell the story
it will begin to happen.”
-
Slow Talk
Overtime I’ve noticed
I prefer more stability
as I move through a room.
I enjoy a slow movement
across familiar territory.
Never having a dancer’s grace,
I stumble on the slightest shadow
like a drunk down a dark stair.
Although my words plod on
clumsily shod feet, and I have
little surprise in my speech,
I am content, in my way,
with my pedestrian pace
to take my leave home.
(August 12, 2025)
-
Too Much for the Ordinary to Bear
At the door
Someone
Something
Some time
Waits to enter
Waits to leave
Waits for you
To answer
To turn off the lights
To hide
To wait for them
To give up
Before the confrontation
Before the violence
With someone
With something
With some time
Which will happen
Despite the door
Being opened
Or closed
(July 30 2025)
-
All is Water Works Still
With a metaphor’s
soft fluidity,
one replaces
an other
granting grace
as a form
of explanation.
I breathe;trees breathe.
Air flows
between
shadow and light.
One to one—
not quite,
but enough.
I mistrust the soulas a concept
of consciousness.
Not as is said:
a soul with a body,
or a body with a soul,
but some sense
separate from sense,
a constant desireto set markers,
like a small asterisk
in a dense text
to divert the eye
along the bottom
of the page
like a river
we must cross
to finally arrive home.
Except, all is water;
and, there are no bridges.
(July 27, 2025)
-
Teleological
by
All day the sky lurks darkly:
low, grey, thick with rain.
Across the back garden,
a mourning dove’s arc
becomes itself wholly
in a violent flutter
of feathers and leaves
as it finally drops
deep within the oak’s
dark twisted branches.
I have so many taskswhich take little time;
yet, I do not move.
I’m already here.
(July 18, 2025)
-
Not Fall Away
I want to believe
magic exists,
that somewhere
the clicks and clacks
of reason drift
free of determined
divination to finally
fall away like leaves.
I want to believesome small gods
dance in scattered copse
and sing such songs
that might save us
from our future fall.
(July 9, 2025)
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Quick Response to “The Truth about Stories: a Native Narrative” by Thomas King.
by
This is the second, maybe third, time I have read this book. It is that good. Oscar Wilde wrote that a book that isn’t worth reading twice is not worth reading once. The Truth about stories is worth reading once, maybe even three times. “The truth about stories is that is all that we are.” King repeats throughout the book as he tells stories within stories, mixing personal narrative with native “myth” and historical facts to illustrate, expand and deepen each section/chapter of his book. His themes are identity, how we become who we think we are, how we can change who we think we are; How others come to define us through the stories they tell about ourselves and themselves; and that we can change our world by changing the stories we tell each other. King is an indigenous Canadian. He focuses early on in the book about how one is an Indian, and how a large part of that definition is provided by the non-indigenous, from how one is supposed to dress to be seen as authentic, to convoluted arcane laws developed by the government in their attempts to control and eventually eliminate the Indian. He has a wonderful light touch in his writing style that makes an otherwise grim tale less horrific without sounding paternalistic. King begins each chapter with the story of the world carried on the back of a turtle, which is carried on another turtle ad infinitum. I assume to point out that there is never a sole basis for the story we live within. He ends each chapter in a similar way connecting the end to one of the stories from that chapter. Here is one of them: “Take it. It’s yours. Do with it what you will. Tell it to your children. Turn it into a play. Forget it. But don’t say in the years to come that you would have lived your life differently if only you had heard this story. You’ve heard it now.” -
Ritual Cleanse
by
“We must ask grace from ourselves.
Our memories.
Let them
release us from the past.”
—Diane Wakoski
I call them forth
to excuse the present:
the responsibility lies
somewhere else,
in someone else
no longer me.
I don’t want to bethat, so I change,
take a step to the side,
and feel them slip past,
like ghosts, or smoke,
unmolested by time.
Then finally, so much,which does not matter,
falls away quietly
like a cicada’s
dry carapace
at summer’s end.
(July 4, 2025)
-
Quick Response to Diane Wakoski’s Virtuoso Literature for Two and Four Hands
by
I read Diane Wakoski’s Virtuoso Literature for Two and Four Hands over the last few days for the first time. I have had several of her books for several decades now, mostly unread. I would find volumes of hers at used book stores, pull them off the shelf, read a few of the poems, and think: I should read more of her. But then not read them once I had them home. I saw her read at the old Undergraduate Library at UT my senior year there back in the early 80’s. I don’t remember much about the night except she said something mildly disparaging about Gary Sanders earring. No big deal, but it is all I took away from the night. Oddly illustrating the importance of what one says out loud. Anyway, back to the response: She is very chatty, which fits her association with the Beats. Most of the themes are about family, identity, growing to be like your parents (mother in her case), missed opportunities, or rather regret for lost opportunity. She is highly accessible, which is not a bad thing, for the accessibility leads to a deeper text. For the most part I enjoyed reading the book, although she does tend to be a tad overly self-deprecating, which I find annoying as it occurs so often as to feel like false modesty. -
We are All Broken Mirrors
by
Nothing is complicated.
Everything is simple,
if not simplistic.
Caught in worry, we
trouble our troubles
which are nothing really.
I read a poem todayon the internet: the poet,
obviously under the influence
of Bukowski, judges the bartender
for her intertwined tattoos
and for her storied fucking.
He ignores that what we writeoften says more of the writer
than the subject of the poem.
We are the pen and the paper.
While in the slow dusk of life,
we see only with myopic eyes.
I’ve winnowed enough truthfrom any number of lies to know
there is little difference, and
I’m not sure I trust anyone
anymore, especially myself
when it finally comes to that.
(June 30, 2025)
-
There
I should go pick up some milk,
but I don’t want to go outside.
I feel like I should feel guilty;
and, I do, but don’t know why.
I write sentences starting with there.
There has to be a better way to begin.
The chihuahua sleeps on my lap.
There’s the excuse I need not to move.
Memory raises dead regrets and trauma
until these mundane tasks of my day
can no longer breathe with ease,
and any agency strangles itself
in the detritus left in the tidal sand
of past indecision and hesitation.
(June 25, 2025)
subtext 