Emile Nolde

Sea with Violet Clouds and Three Yellow Sailboats

Emile Nolde - 1946

Naked in Cuba

"Naked, you are as blue as a night in Cuba; 

You have vines and stars in your hair; 

Naked, you are as spacious and yellow 

As summer in a golden church."

~ Pablo Neruda, "Sonnet XXVII”   

Palmer's Bar

Black and white

Drums, tattoos, guitars and neon 

Dive bars, Springsteen, ghost of Berryman in the gin 

"Born in The USA”  and "Dream Songs"

Smoke stench hanging on rusted wash boards

West Bank Palmer's Bar 

Lonely nights feeding desperate women

Bukowski bar flies burnng poetry

Lost tramps with forgotten friends

Behind red curtains broken promises 

When there's no place left to hide

Stories pushing through the crowd

To another chapter at the bar

Hot tall and red

Soothing intoxication

Sings into the microphone 

He says, "baby you have a nice face"

She says, "the night has eyes"

Walking through the broken door

Leaving naïveté to sink

She said, "everyone was spawned from a night of passion"

Lights and nights and gifts of inspiration 

Vodka and twists of lime

Departed spirits climb ladders 

Strangers lips kiss in mysterious ways

Patchouli suffocating 420

I listened even though I couldn't hear 

She whispered, "I love you for forgiving me"

He spoke with his eyes, "I love you for loving me"

At that moment he knew

A night can become morning 

Without the sunshine

Alive

Black and white

Connecting with nothing 

While breathing in everything

The night folding into itself

Closing time

Everyone moving home 

Time For Goodbye

He remembers a kiss

From long ago

"Racing in the street..."

Down Kingsway

In his car

Through the night

"Time for goodbye again," he said

She said, “no - time for hello again"

A kiss in the morning

Phone call the next day

A letter or two over years

Silence after 

Goodbye can last so long

As

Kisses fade 

Dark Water

"Like dark inside water 

some longing never leaves."

~ Carole Glasser Langille, from “The Sadness of Windows,” In Cannon Cave

Fragments

He pieced his life together

From moments he left behind

Out of fragments he forgot

(empty places)

Her death echoed in his heart

A little piece of hope

He wore around his neck

Dangles now 

Without her touch 

The Past

I wanted

the past to go away, I wanted

to leave it, like another country; I wanted

my life to close, and open

like a hinge, like a wing, like the part of the song

     where it falls

down over the rocks: an explosion, a discovery;

     I wanted

to hurry into the work of my life; I wanted to know

whoever I was, I was

alive

for a little while.

~ Mary Oliver, from “Dogfish” in Dream Work

Time

"Time passes through us, or we pass through it

as guests to god's wheat.

In a previous present,a subsequent present,

just like that, we are in need of myth

to bear the burden of the distance between two doors..."

~ Mahmoud Darwish

Everybody Worships

“Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship—be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles—is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.”

~ David Foster Wallace, This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life

Lover

your lover 

has a sneaky way 

of hiding her poems;

inside her mouth

behind her neck

between her thighs.

kiss those places

find it all.

~ Ijeoma Umebinyuo

The Way Back

Feeling faint breath

Invitation 

To enter the garden

Damp with morning dew

Kiss of the red rose

Tasting wine on velvet petals

Pricked by the thorn

Intoxicated by weightlessness 

Droplets of crimson life

Pressed between ivory pages

In a book without words

Bodies stained with exploration

Mapping a story

Following the morning star 

Whispering the way back 

Emptiness

Always the leaving

Shifting allegiances 

When I needed you

You disappeared 

When you needed me

I was absent 

Missing each other in the darkest night

Falling asleep alone 

Backs against the emptiness 

Days

"These days, days, days run away like wild horses over the hills..."
~ Charles Bukowski

Strange how days move 

In the wind with the leaves

Falling and weaving 

Till the ground 

Reaches the sky

Slipping away 

Retreating soldiers

Fatigued and broken from war

Tuscany

Tuscany

A lyric from a lost song

A melody I can’t forget

 

Buechner

Fusion

"In his (Wittgenstein) conception of philosophy — as a means of authentic existence equally concerned with logic as ethics — the spiritual, artistic, and metaphysical aspects of a calling are nearly fused."

~ Yahia Lababidi, Reverence for the Visible and Invisible Worlds

Could It Be

"It’s quite an undertaking to start loving somebody. You have to have energy, generosity, blindness. There is even a moment right at the start where you have to jump across an abyss: if you think about it you don’t do it."

~ Jean Paul Sartre, Nausea

The riddle unraveled

The storm subsided


The ship in the harbor

(could it be?)

In the blindness of hopelessness

Curled on the floor

Surrounded by impostors

With empty words

(could it be?)

All along

In every moment

In every place

The whispers

The touch in the night

You...

A soft spirit stirring

You...

Lightning striking a cold heart

Love exploding like rolling thunder

The Ache

(Bruce Springsteen, The Promise)

When a wave of emptiness sweeps over your soul there is little to do to assuage the ache of the void and little to do to regain the breath of life to revive your soul…

"He had discovered that grief did not dim with time; it was instead a volatile state of being."

~ Americanah, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

The ache of a loss does not go away entirely. It merely diminishes, fades in and out of perceptibility. At times it is triggered by something; a memory, a scent, a song, a photograph. Then emotions and feelings and the gravitas of experiences rise to be known again bringing with them all you thought you had forgotten somewhere in the past. Sometimes, if you are stronger in a given moment you let the ache wash over you and move on with little damage to your soul. While at other times when you are weak, you let the ache weigh you down. In the weak hours you reach for a bottle or pills or a lover to distract and assuage the pain - to help you make it through the night. To know these things, to be these things, is to be human. And so it is human to live again, to dare again, to risk again, to love again.

It comes out of nowhere

An ache for epistemological mooring

The loneliness, ennui and isolation

Of the search

Solitary confinement of the soul

A longing for intellectual touch

To know and be known

Mingling minds in conversational intercourse

Ideas bared between sheets of thought

Vulnerable locutions in the night

Poetic memory wrapped in metaphor

Making the story with two endings

Searching the empirical forest of otherness

To encounter more than an abstraction

To touch, taste and feel the ineffable

If only for the briefest of moments

~~~~~~~

I will drink

To kill the ache

The only way

Not to feel pain

When numbed

I can bear to live

This will be the whimper

Rather than the bang

To end my world

 “‘Listen, Robert, going to another country doesn’t make any difference. I’ve tried all that. You can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another. There’s nothing to that.’”

~ Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

"The journey is the accumulation of stillness. Patience. Emptiness. The union that I seek is not of my creation. The self I have created impedes union. Stillness must be learned, and the endless time in which I learn it is filled with doubts and desolations. Stillness often feels like abandonment. Why isn't Spirit communicating with me? What have I done to deserve such a stony, cold silence? How do I avoid filling with new terrors the emptiness that terrifies me?"

~ T.S. Eliot

   At the place of the rock

I feel death (maybe I am dead)

Blowing with the wind over the water

The black worm has been burrowing into me

While I sit and stare into the horizon of defeat

Deep it is now

As deep as I have sunk within myself

Moving with me (maybe it is me)

It devours from the inside out

Years have past

I have tried to get it out (God have I tried)

With no avail

We are becoming one

The black worm and I

It will only depart with me now

Out this world together

As the poet has written, “…not with a bang but a whimper…”

To kill the ache

The noise in my head echoing the consumption of my organs

Not blood of lambs or prayers of the penitent

Will hinder the dark angel’s step over the threshold of my life

When

I and the black worm and the dark angel

Are one

Below the water and weight of the rock

The ache

 That follows me

 Entangles me

Surrounds me

It is me 

Grafted and grown into my bones

Deep in my heart it resides

Bidding me to darkness

~~~~~~~ 

Grief carves a wound in our being

With the turning of the years

A shard of glass cuts lines into forlorn faces

Either consumed or transformed by our wounds

With our final breath  “…rest between two notes…”

Until then…a prolonged pause of disequilibrium

Grace in the ” …here and there - the now and then...”

Love rains mingled with tears of pain and joy

“There is a moment before impact that is the last instant of things as they are. Then the visible world explodes.” 

~ Steven Galloway, The Cellist of Sarajevo

"Deep calls to deep..."

The grayness of the sky,

The coolness of the breaking waves

The hardness of the shoreline

The nothingness in the wind

"Deep calling to deep..."

The brokenness of my being

The desolation of my soul

The hunger and emptiness in my heart

The ache of longing

The pain in sighing

"Deep calls to deep..."

 ~~~~~~~

“You who live in heaven

Hear the prayers of those of us who live on earth

Who are afraid of being left by those we love

And who get hardened by the hurt

Do you remember when you lived down here where we all scrape

To find the faith to ask for daily bread

Did you forget about us after you had flown away

Well I memorized every word you said

Still I'm so scared, I'm holding my breath

While you're up there just playing hard to get

You who live in radiance

Hear the prayers of those of us who live in skin

We have a love that's not as patient as yours was

Still we do love now and then

Did you ever know loneliness?

Did you ever know need

Do you remember just how long a night can get?

When you were barely holding on

And your friends fall asleep

And don't see the blood that's running in your sweat

Will those who mourn be left uncomforted

While you're up there just playing hard to get?

And I know you bore our sorrows

And I know you feel our pain

And I know it would not hurt any less

Even if it could be explained

And I know that I am only lashing out

At the one who loves me most

And after I figured this, somehow

All I really need to know

Is if you who live in eternity

Hear the prayers of those of us who live in time

We can't see what's ahead

And we cannot get free of what we've left behind

I'm reeling from these voices that keep screaming in my ears

All the words of shame and doubt, blame and regret

I can't see how you're leading me unless you've led me here

Where I'm lost enough to let myself be led

And so you've been here all along I guess

It's just your ways and you are just plain hard to get”

~ Rich Mullins, Hard To Get

"May you dream you are dreaming, in a warm soft bed

And may the voices inside you that fill you with dread

Make the sound of thousands of angels instead

Tonight where you might be laying your head..."

- Patty Griffin

(Patty Griffin, Nobody's Crying)

“All shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well.” 

~ Julian of Norwich