Thursday, June 18, 2009

The Ring Of Light, Walking On Clouds

Jan 17 was an eight poem day. I was exhausted by the end of it. I don't know if I will publish all eight because ocasionally I have what I consider a clunker. I have a "not posted" folder. Perhaps some day (probably not) I will go in there and try to salvage them.

This third poem of the day was incantatory. The vision in it is true magic. The real thing.

The Ring Of Light

There's a ring of light
I found, placed on my finger
As a charm that calls
You from your labor
In the fields of confusion.

You seek a house free
Of darkness, descent,
Burial beneath the sand.

But more sand arrives
As you look, begins
To bury you as you age
And your burden too.

There's a ring of light.
I will place it in your hand.
Light will circle you.

January 17, 2009 9:57 AM

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What would we write about if relationships were easy?

Walking On Clouds

I look from above
To the clouds that cover you,
Keep you from my sight.

The clouds seem to say
I could float, even walk there
In mid-sky out past
The place you still live,
Home that I left, leaving you.

The sun's rays reach me
In horizontal
Lines that slice me right to left
Like you asking me.

January 17, 2009 2:06 PM

I think this might actually be a poem about being someone leaving me, what I hope that experience would be like for them :P Looking at it that way troubles me, a little.

10 comments:

  1. If relationships were easy....even the ones with ourselves....maybe we could laugh and play all day and ride white horses down main street with Lady Godiva.

    Beautiful poem Christopher. I am still learning to write..poetry in particular. For me, you are a complex writer that always bears reading
    Linda

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  2. A ring of light...I like that :)

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  3. Linda, what an image of easy in relationships!

    I wish I felt as complex as people tell me I am. I would feel more connected. I am not saying that quite right. I guess that I am no more complex than you or most others I know, but for some reason my communication goes to places where many people don't seem to easily follow. I have a lifetime of feedback of that nature, including my parents.

    There is a minority who track me fine. There is a larger minority who will feed me back that in the beginning they had no idea what I was talking about but now after time they do. In other words people can learn to understand me. And then there is a sizable majority who seem to not care at all one way or another.

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  4. Michelle, then I offer you this ring of light to wear on a fine wrought silver chain around your neck.

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  5. "The sun's rays reach me
    In horizontal
    Lines that slice me right to left
    Like you asking me."

    That bit of imagery is so powerful. I imagine it like one of those cheese slicers with the metal mechanism. Disturbing for sure.

    What a gift The Ring of Light is. A gift to hold and that holds.

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  6. Erin, I wish I was master of my imagination instead of the other way around. I could then perhaps arrange steady two or three poem days instead of occasional eight poem days and several days where I am lucky to get even two. My promise to myself of at least two poems a day has broken in the face of my current work and energy load. I am not happy about that. It seems my need for money trumps my art. Again.

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  7. If relationships were easy, maybe leaving them would be easy, too.

    I've noticed that nice men, the ones with big hearts, typically don't leave. He will put up with all kinds of nonsense from a lover or partner, maybe mental health or addictions issues, or maybe she is just obsessive and cranky sometimes; then she gets more and more irritated by how easy-going he is. :-P Sooner or later, she leaves, he is sad, then he eventually gets on with his life. She feels validated because he hasn't been too torn up by her leaving; he hasn't tried to kill himself or anything equally devastating. Am I over-generalizing?

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  8. I think perhaps a little too much overgeneralizing, but not really far from the truth. There are no really nice men under certain pressure, but there are still those who are principled. I would not leave my wife because I had vowed "til death". I had something in me that revulsed at the thought of leaving, and I felt trapped as much as anything about that. I went to Alanon quite literally to avoid "killing the bitch" under the lash of my loss of her to the drink and depression, because she was so completely gone but refused to leave, this ravaged ghost of a woman. But if I left, then my abandonment would be a major contribution to her death and I knew that as surely as my name.

    So while I would not leave and I am just as surely one of the so-called nice men (I have never been chased by the female worshippers of bad boys), this business of not leaving in the end of a relationship gone bad is not easily characterized as anything but a complex mix of reality and promises, hopes that refuse to die and despair, love and meanness and terror and pain ever circulating with every beat of the heart.

    Who could leave without exploding?

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  9. I suppose every theory is an overgeneralization. Sometimes, though, I think a person has to leave to avoid exploding. Or to avoid stagnating, at least. To invite change.

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  10. Yes, Rachel, I understand. The difference is whether or not mortality is literally factored in. I saved Ann's life by calling 911 several times. She was literally in peril for most of the eight years it took her to die. After she left, about four years into that, other people wound up with the responsibility of saving her life. We all did that til one time we couldn't. She would get to where she was going to die and then do something to get noticed and then someone would do something. The first four years that someone was me.

    I knew I had that responsibility as her husband. That is what I would not leave. Years earlier when she got so sick, I wouldn't leave then because she was so sick. There was a moment a decade before that. That was the time I should have left. That was the time that leaving would have been the responsible thing. But at that time I was a drunk.

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The chicken crossed the road. That's poultry in motion.


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