I have gone back to ground
back to the fine root hairs
that lie along your skin
gone back to ground I have
in hand the world’s blue cup
faint musk of you within
back to ground I have gone
into murk of natal flesh
thrust of the child-wish
gone to ground for you I yearn
bound to you ever make return Download the podcast
Jeneva Stone — poet, blogger, mother, federal employee, practical g/i nurse, interpreter of EOBs, queen of medical necessity letters, keeper of the family exchequer, unlicensed physical therapist, knowledgeable wheelchair mechanic — may also be found at Busily Seeking… Continual Change.
from A Field Guide to Psychotropical Rainforest Birds
January 15, 2007
It was the weekend, and my young students had received a solid week of English, so I caught a ride down the river to go see Joaquín at his hut. A visitor was there, Jim Timothy from California. In his early 40s, he was slim and in very good shape. He had a receding hairline and a pencil-thin moustache like John Waters. He boasted of his ability to dance as many hours as boyfriends half his age. He described himself as an urban shaman and an organizer of rave parties with a spiritual focus.
“We always have a chill-out room,” he told me, “where there are always people on ecstasy having mellow conversations and giving each other backrubs. It’s better than having them out on the street drinking and fighting.”
He told me a dream in which he was in a natural history museum. In a dimly-lit corridor in the Egyptian section, he saw a diorama with a sphinx in it. She was alive and looking out at him through the glass. As he looked in her eyes he found that he was simultaneously himself and her, but more her than himself, because he was an emanation of her.
One day when he was a kid in Catholic school, he asked the priest, “We’re supposed to love our enemies, right?”
“That’s right.”
“And the devil is our enemy, so we’re supposed to love the devil, right?”
In another story he tells, he’s way out in the desert on an Indian reservation in the southwestern United States after having eaten peyote. He’s alone, naked, and playing a drum. A cloud of dust appears in the distance, gets closer. It’s from an approaching car. The car keeps getting closer and closer. It’s one of the tribal police cars. It drives up to him and stops. A big Indian cop wearing mirrored sunglasses gets out. Walks slowly up to him and says:
“You know you can’t do this.”
Jim says, “Yes.”
The cop says, “All right,” turns around, gets back in his car and drives away.
“Myths are computer chips,” Jim remarked in another conversation, “concentrated intelligence, survival information for hard times.”
I said, “One of my creative writing professors gave me a book of poems by the Serbian poet Vasko Popa called Homage to the Lame Wolf, named after an old Serbian tribal god. I found these poems astonishing because Popa was really operating from a different frame of reference than the other poets I were reading. The poems really were praise poems to this pagan god. I went to my professor and said this. He leaned back in his chair and said, ‘Vasko Popa knows a lot about wolves.’ I said, ‘Like what?’ My professor said, ‘And his grandmother knew even more.’ I said, ‘Like what?’ My professor said, ‘How to make love to them.’”
Jim replied, “This is a story about someone I don’t know well personally. We have a friend in common. This man works at an aquarium. They released one of their male sea lions back into the ocean. This man drives his car to the beach every Friday and picks up the sea lion and takes him home. He keeps him in the bathtub and feeds him fish, and they make love. On Sunday he returns him to the ocean.”
Joaquín made a ceremony with Jim and me. He chanted over cups of yagé and we drank and settled into hammocks and relaxed. For a long time we were quiet, listening to insects chittering and tweeting, and frogs honking and groaning, a thrilling music of wierdness. My mind took off and crash-landed in a realm of fragrant, burnt language, where mumbo jumbo, gibberish, and gobbledygook reigned.
Yagé’s not a bug or a slug, it’s a drug, but it’s way more than that, it’s a bat like a cat. It’s the distillation of the echo of gunflower elves. It’s green water in white rivers of blue oceans in the veins of bamboo. It’s subcutaneous calico lichen, vibrating neon gum that chews itself against the teeth of your mind, it’s an apparition of the face of Pan on a flower tortilla, it’s yellow blades of sunlight magnified by the black earth, orange skeins of spunlight delighting us through the perfect planet, red dreams of the One Light shaking us gently in the midnight morning saying “Hey, old friend, wake up, it’s time to BE, buddy. Time to be.” (Be, be, be, be, be, the verb reverberates off my lips.)
In a memory from my junior year in college, I’m lying on my back beneath a maple tree in October, blue sky above, and the intermittent cold breeze is shaking down the fantastic yellow red orange leaves, spinning against the sky as they fall. And I was thinking, “The tree is a natural clock that tells the time of the season. Each leaf that falls is another season second.”
What are the ramifications of this?
I chant silently, many times, the name of Avalokitesvara, the bodhisattva of compassion.
I’m in a sub-aquatic realm of blue and green… there’s something fierce about it… and it has many lizard eyes peering around. What I’m looking at is the fabric of lizard skins, and some gnomes in a workshop are cutting into it with instruments like cookie cutters, taking out lizard-shaped skins and sewing them onto lizard bodies. Of course lizards come into being through biological reproduction, I know that, but the natural process is mirrored by this supernatural one. This is simply how they fabricate lizards. The scene winks out and I’m in darkness again listening to the insect songs. Joaquín is snoring quietly.
I want to get rich selling fake wisdom, now that I know everything is fake. But then even my wealth will be fake, like Monopoly money. Sun, moon, and stars, all artificial—constructed like a stage set by elves attempting to convince us that this so-called reality is real. It’s built by the elves of Maya, by Maya’s elves, by My’selves—…. In this me-istic miasma of cells and selves, this self-same magnetic magma that is the body on yagé again. I’m in one of those places where everything one thinks of is true. So totally, undeniably accurate, and yet elsewhere it could be false. Truths have physical boundaries as much as countries have. I hold still, listening. Here the shamanic universe is infinitely vast and real. Elsewhere, it is not real, and other rules apply. And always, here, the crickets are singing, and my lungs are drinking this rich, clean air like a distillation of life itself.
More than yagé, I’m intoxicated by this divine, fragrant language of nature that keeps breathing within me and without me; I’m drunk on this plant animal language of squawks and whistles and humming and singing. An immense wave of nausea hits me, immediately followed by self-pity as I remember I will die someday, and then compassion as I remember everyone else will die someday too. With tears in my eyes I resign myself to pain, foreshadower of death.
And the crickets play their wordless songs with more intensity now, and I’m not sure whether the music is inside me or outside me, a language that reverberates through me until it’s all that I am…. And I stretch and shift, relieving a pressure in my back, and float once again in the delicate black water of the forest night, my head clear, resigned to nausea and to the lightness of my limbs as if I were the captain of a boat sailing through a calm sky of smoke high above a burning city. I’m cold, and I pull the light blanket up around my shoulders. What are Jim and Joaquín doing? Go slow, my soul. My stomach hurts; I listen. Joaquín is again snoring quietly.
I recall a line from an early explorer’s description of yagé customs: “Transported by the drink, the Indians dreamed a thousand absurdities and believed them as if they were true.” Yes, how compelling these absurdities are! It’s so easy to be transported by them! It’s like you never knew you were a sailboat, and then the wind comes, and off you go! We drink a thousand truths and believe them as if they were dreams. We dream of the myths of man and the dreams we learn to believe in when we’re dreamed into this world—night and day, something and nothing, here and there, now and then. We’re all tiny shoots of the human plant, reified and pulsating.
Dozens of gnomes march past me in the darkness carrying strange tools. Fireworks explode behind them. Transported by the drink, I’m borne into a 4th of July memory from when I was a kid. It’s 1974, I’m six years old, my mom and stepfather take me to the fireworks display at Veterans Park. They greet an aquaintance, Stacy, then move to an open space and spread out the secondhand quilt on which old automobiles are printed. My mom remarks about Stacy, “She’s high as a kite.” The display begins. I love the huge firecrackers booming in the drunken velvety summer sky, the whistling-screaming yellowy-white fireworks that corkscrew as they fall, the huge green plantlike ones that hold still in the high air with their smoke lit up by their fire, and the blue starlike ones that seem like love messages from outer space, while the spectators lie on blankets underneath, saying Oooooo! Ahhhhh! In 1996, I breathe deeply, living in two times, appreciating the old familiar glorious beauty.
Nausea.
Eagles and stars whirl around my vision, arrows and olive branches, stars and stripes, red, white and blue. This is part of my design. We’re woven into each other. This is part of my totem pole. America the beautiful.
Nausea, increasing the beauty of the visions. My eyes run with tears, red, white and blue.
Nearby, in his hammock, my fellow American Jim Timothy clears his throat and sings, his voice ringing out like a bell in the darkness:
The creator is our savior,
Hey ney yo wey,
The creator is our savior,
Hey ney yo wey.
Take care of us, take care of us,
Hey ney yo wey,
Take care of us, take care of us,
Hey ney yo wey.
The creator is our savior,
Hey ney yo wey,
The creator is our savior,
Hey ney yo wey.
Take pity on us, take pity on us,
Hey ney yo wey,
Take pity on us, take pity on us,
Hey ney yo wey.
The creator is our savior,
Hey ney yo wey,
The creator is our savior,
Hey ney yo wey.
Nathan Horowitz has three bright blue noses, six bright yellow tongues, 45 small, perfectly-shaped jet black ears, 95 hands, most of which are sleeping, and a long, long, long yellow and black stripy tail that wraps twice around the earth.
I own the word
like you own your name,
let it roll off my tongue
and grate you like cheese.
Faggot.
Yes, I said it.
You’re not deaf.
I don’t stutter.
It’s the word you want
to use against me,
pour over my body
like boiling water.
Baby, I can stand the heat.
It’s a word
I once used.
Anthony. Faggot.
Brian. Faggot.
Lamar. Faggot.
It even tried to haunt:
Dustin. Faggot.
But I,
I deal the word
like a shark in Vegas. Download the podcast
Dustin Brookshire is a poet and activist. He’s the founder of Project Verse, Quarrel, and Poetry Swap. Visit him at dbrookshire.blogspot.com.
that i began learning
the atheist’s art
of prayer.
having no-one to speak to,
I don’t. —no pleas, no bargians (my good behavior for her life) and no hope that I might be heard—
just the bright burning in my heart,
my hands clasped tight to contain it,
—while across the world she speaks in tongues and loses weight steadily, rapidly, until in her photos I can see only her skeleton peering through the face I used to know—
just my legs, buckled beneath me
and knees bruised
at the weight of it,
—no favors, no reasoning, and no hope that I might be heard—
just the insensate laws of cause
and effect, of motion and time and chance,
just the desperate,
helpless, and involuntary feeling
of please.
These images are of calligraphic inscriptions on the walls and pillars of the Eski Cami (“Old Mosque”), a fifteenth-century Ottoman mosque in Edirne, Turkey. They consist of Qur’anic passages and of particular individual words freighted with religious force — Islamic calligraphy is both a devotional art form and a locus of apotropaic power. (Click on the photos to see larger versions.)
1. The word wahid (“one”) is superimposed over Allah (in outline only), so that together the composition can be read as “God is one.” 2. Hu, or “He,” meaning God. 3. Negative-space calligraphy (detail). 4. A doubled waw. The word wa means “and,” and in this context signifies union. 5. Mirror calligraphy on a pillar. 6. A large Allah (with praying man as punctuation mark).
Stasis in winter is your belief in a window. From it you see the black maple spackles a hospital’s brick wall into aubergine. The glass of the window carries the yellow glaze of traffic, the whorl of crimson wing tips, the slop of salt-water. Up high in the elms, light disappears, the bark of a bird dips among the red thrash of leaves.
The voice of three ships circle the harbor. Where a small house on the shore is made real by the sun. That you would bury your song. That you would go keyless into the sound of locks. That you were not human. That there would be no one to ask. But that you needed to ask in order to live.
Trucks excite grasses over the field. The skulls of unnamed birds lay scattered through mulberry. Ravens nest in the plum blossom. There is a ticking in the mind that thorns and unfurls into thistle. You still struggle but do not see what’s gone. Capturing no hand you pray in fear you don’t want to tell of your god-approximate to whom nothing is spoken… You invite the rain bear scat egg peel of nut hatch. Once you ask yourself why stumble. Ask yourself gentle why laugh. You’re not special. You’re not not special. A worn thing. Falls here all around you. There is no comfort in language. Real words are soundless. But you gather no words.
Sometimes you believe you still hear him. But when you speak of his voice you close the window to the ocean for the last time.
Hydromancy
She will not hear snowflakes wild splatter into the strewn patches of cord grass. Winter’s muck along the pond’s edge, a mix of fawn tracks and duck droppings, freezes under the long white lines of her legs. There will be a twinge in her upper spine. There will be wet black flames drying in her braids. She moves through this air that is stunned by her heat. She regrets the passing of light, her Coppertone lathered face gleams like gold leaf. Her grandmother’s wedding ring, now a spiral of seeds, pinwheels her marrow. Fractured spindles know no other cheek to kiss. Weathered witness, have courage. The coffee on the nightstand remains a clammy taste of seawater. She has spliced the last of her father’s voice on the phone, three nights before his death, with the first bloom of yarrow. Her dusk phrases have buried all the songbirds. But the brine white hills will not blind. She opens each unfamiliar door between offerings. And lets there be no after thought.
Geomancy
Tonight an artist disemboweled a 100 year old Milton Piano. He thinks he is of the ‘Pianist’ tribe; a Native American tribe name given not to themselves, but designated men who smashed their pianos into dust as they headed west. I listened to the last songs of the yellow notes float, not into the sound of weeping, but into a room where branches of linden oaks covered the walls. A boat overturns into the ironweed thicket. A dock lies buried under mustard rows. A horse stumbles in inches of water brown as beer bottle. Unnamed blood lily. At dawn I wish my neighbor’s window unto an eastern lake. Accordingly, the sun thins the afternoon into silent declaration.
Chiromancy
Someone spills water over your hand. Tonight the bridge will be sawed in half. Under the guise of raw wood, your immaculate room shines. Under no sun. Gilt stones fill the thorax. Under the beams grow weeds, grow fever. Rainwater errata Under the problem of phones, because mostly there are none. Under the planks of the splintered dock your car keys swim the harbor. Under your keel shaped sternum. Piles of medallions and crosses bloat the thrift shop. The clovers repeat a swell of bees. Under the press of a wet nightshirt’s gauze. Under the red palm. Lady, your gold threads are slashes. Under the touch of an old lover. Under the sparrows stain. Under the memory of the message that filled an entire tape on your answering machine. Geranium florets blossom your breasts. The deep white seams of you, space between lanterns.
Thumomancy
Soul, most recent of animals, your lost papers fill the closet. I would not notice your soft intrusion. But for the vignette edge of the landscape, where your face is an accident without origin. I see you have been here all along. Let me tell you, things can happen in the years. Last winter a squirrel died in the cabin chimney. There is no single script. Only the last of three orders of breath made before silence. Night has given me my wide addiction. Under uncertain laws, in the sleep of no choice, I follow motivations downward into the sweep of your pen. Scrawled lights of a new city wink between rows of tamarisk. The center of the book is a catastrophe, but with love there is a lack of distance. You have led me into the first threshold of your vision. Jupiter glows through a ragweed thicket. There is no body. No sound. You go on without calculation for the beginning. You go on under the lowering of gravity. Tonight the oncoming boxcar whistles your unfolding music.
Maureen Alsop is the author of Apparition Wren (Main Street Rag), The Diction of Moths (Ghost Road Press, pending) and several chapbooks, most recently Luminal Equation in the collection Narwhal (Cannibal Press, 2009) and the dream and the dream you spoke (Spire Press). She is the winner of Harpur Palate’s Milton Kessler Memorial Prize for Poetry and The Bitter Oleander’s Frances Locke Memorial Poetry Award. Her recent poems have appeared various journals including Blackbird, Front Porch Journal, AGNI, Tampa Review, and New Delta Review.
What are you gonna do for the black artist,
the one whose voice dwindles in the storm?
We are not silent by any means, just black.
Black get back, your talk is too big and loud,
but not cheap like the shoes I wear, so bear
the brunt of my sass, the persistent itching
of my tongue on the back of your mind,
let what you think is the devil’s wayward word
turn and club some sense, yes sense.
Black, up in your face not with guns, words.
I’m nigger with a book not a poptheweasle gun.
Suck this; chew the black lip truth,
Remnants of storms, hardcore, steadfast words,
fast and furious, quick in effect, deadly in assault,
funky, but still wanting peace. Believe!
Brethren, let me hear you say, ‘well.’ Word for the fearless.
Maroula Blades is an Afro-British writer living in Berlin. Verbrecher Verlag and Cornelsen Verlag have published her short stories. She has received awards for poetry. Poems have been published in Germany and abroad. She read at the Berlin Poetry Festival 2008.
May the Lord put you in a witness protection program where the Devil can’t find you.
May you always find yourself in the flow of traffic, and may the slower drivers stay
the hell out of your way. May your hair remain red enough to refract harmful UV rays.
May your appetite be hearty and the waistband of your trousers slack. May there be
no household project to ever get the better of you. May you shit out the colon cancer
if it starts to grow back, and then may the doctors go broke trying to find anything else
wrong with you. May the church parishioners listen in rapt attention to your readings
and your grandchildren hear your stories without any fidgeting. May you grow just
absent-minded enough to forget cross words. May your buddies from Korea stay out
of the obituaries. May your partner be there to chide you if you start to become morbid.
May you find samples at every supermarket and long-lost treasures at every yard sale.
May your coffin be constructed of toothpicks from fine dinners you haven’t yet eaten.
May winter cold melt in your breath. May the road ahead be soft enough for slippers,
and may the Good Lord reserve for you a fine pair of size thirteens.
M.V. Montgomery’s first collection of poems, Strange Conveyances, will be published by the Plain View Press. A second book, a pamphlet of historical poems titled Joshu Holds a Press Conference, will be published in 2010 by the Conversation Paperpress.
A freak storm that dumped up to six inches of wet snow, depending on elevation, on the Pennsylvania part of qarrtsiluni headquarters has left Dave without internet at home, making the production of the podcast impossible. We hope to resume service by Wednesday at the latest. Please stay tuned… and please support meaningful efforts to combat climate change.
Qarrtsiluni offers electronic delivery of original poetry, prose, and art, organized into regular, themed issues, with a new post every weekday. You can find us wherever you go: email and IM, iTunes, feed readers, sometimes even print. Read more...
Yesterday the last post in our Worship issue; today we begin the Imitation issue. Follow by email & never miss a post. http://t.co/SUwVwMqZ · 21 hours ago
"Odds and Ends," a poem by Joseph Harker from our current Worship issue, has been made into a terrific short film: http://t.co/hu7rXcls · 1 month ago
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