Thursday, September 26, 2019

Computerized Tension

Computers connect us and divide us. 
A spam email threatening to divide you from friends and family--blackmail lies. 
A email connecting us--poetry. 
Tension of connection and division. 
Tension. 
Tension that can send us 

over the edge.




About this Poem

This poem is part of my Solstice solar year poem cycle, where I write a poem a day from June 22, 2019 to June 21, 2020. The poem a day may get posted on a different day than it was written, or several poems might get posted on the same day. And if I choose to submit a poem to a literary journal, I delete it from this blog before doing so. That's my project. I hope it touches your soul and makes you think.


And maybe inspires you to write more poems of your own.

Collective Song of Mourning

Today on the bus. Sitting ahead of me on the
sideways handicapped seat, a sunburned bearded
square-jawed youngish white man sang and wept.
His tears cascading from his closed eyes unchecked,
to drip off the tip of his nose. My chest relaxed, my
heart felt tender, as if he were crying my grief,
everyone’s grief, releasing our collective song of
mourning these record days of climate crisis.

About this poem

This poem is part of my Solstice solar year poem cycle, where I write a poem a day from June 22, 2019 to June 21, 2020. The poem a day may get posted on a different day than it was written, or several poems might get posted on the same day. And if I choose to submit a poem to a literary journal, I delete it from this blog before doing so. That's my project. I hope it touches your soul and makes you think.

And maybe inspires you to write more poems of your own.

Tuesday, September 24, 2019

Eiko at TBA, Saturday night



Reading the text of trees, Eiko strokes the burnt ancient wood sculpted by time and flames, yet still rooted in the earth into which it will rot.

Eiko runs to greet her projected image flying red on a hillside. Fusing into a double-story Eiko bow strung with red fibers of woman’s lives. Landscape, live Eiko, video Eiko, one, while sound of rushing river rapids echoes in the vast warehouse hall. We are carried on, submerged in, the sound of water, of our mother’s womb water rushing blood pulsing eternally, as Eiko completes the woman bow of white and red and sky and hill that launches us ever onward in the tumbling life/death continuum eternal.

Eiko climbs the feet, legs, torso, chest of a man, her feet walk his height while her head and shoulders remain planted on solid flat floor. 

Eiko drapes over strong man’s back as he belly down slides on the floor, reminiscent of Eiko & Koma in a scene of LAND.

Eiko talks to us. Stands and speaks. The microphone invisible. Eventually I notice it—hung small at the end of a cord disguised by its proximity to a pillar. Eiko’s stories of loss, of recent death of choreographer friend, of death of mother, her words and full frontal presence confront my own layers of mourning. We are separate yet one, one with our deceased, one with our mourning.

Silence. Percussive rhythm of running feet in hightop sneakers on warehouse floor. Round and round the young man runs, circumambulating the interior walls, orbiting around us audience on the platform benches. Are we the sacred object whom he circumambulates? Eiko runs, her sandaled feet a different tone, a different rhythm, to the running young man. Eiko runs all out. Her 67 years of whatever pains our bodies endure over the years, her years ignored as she runs. Runs with the drive of our animal selves running. Fight or flight. This running, this fleeing is also a power. It is the soundtrack. It is the beating pulse, the heartbeat. Heartbeat of running feet. Heartbeat sound as human aerobic hearts beat ever faster, unheard by us, the seated audience, our hearts beating with the beating of shod feet on concrete. Feet shod not in cushy running shoes, but shod for other ways of moving, slower ways of moving. Yet the feet run and run and run beating rhythms with our very hearts enthralled.

Eiko runs to the exit door, flings it open and is out in the cold wet night, dark industrial asphalt. She screams, wails in mourning. The sound, the mourning, the emotion, was too big to be contained in the industrial warehouse. It needed the great outdoors as its stage.

Flowers. Huge bouquet of hydrangeas and other branches of flowers blooming in autumnal Portland gardens. Wrapped in huge newsprint wrapper, clasped in Eiko’s arms like a dead child she’s unwilling to let go of. Grasping the flowers as the paper falls. The bouquet rearranges in chaos, clutched to her heart in loss. Grief is not tidy. It is not floral wreaths on tripod stands around a polished box. Mourning grows wild from the earth, no matter how we tend it to our desires, mourning scatters even as it gathers.

All goes black.

Lights come back up. Eiko and her two collaborators stand evenly spaced, facing audience, who bursts into sustained applause. 

Eiko walks to center microphone and speaks energetic voice of appreciation, so different than her mournful voice of grief telling the stories of death and loss. Now she is thanking us all for coming to the festival; she hopes we have been enjoying ourselves. My mournful self is shocked with the sudden emotional shift, like being a passenger in a car driven by an expert racecar driver shifting emotional gears to skillfully maneuver a sharp steep curve and take a new direction.

Bravo! Bravo! Bravo!

About this poem

This poem is part of my Solstice solar year poem cycle, where I write a poem a day from June 22, 2019 to June 21, 2020. The poem a day may get posted on a different day than it was written, or several poems might get posted on the same day. And if I choose to submit a poem to a literary journal, I delete it from this blog before doing so. That's my project. I hope it touches your soul and makes you think.

And maybe inspires you to write more poems of your own.