Tuesday, July 20, 2010

Songs Arrive In The Air

Sometimes it seems like the stories, the poems, the songs are all around, in the air, waiting for us to manifest them for and with each other. They are not created. They are born, but like one of the children of the gods, full grown and graceful.

I am a caretaker only.

Songs Arrive In The Air

When I listen your
stories take me up and I
fly south to season's
end, to the green sea
found there, to the low sandy
hills of the old shore.
When I listen songs
arrive in the air above
and I remember.

June 16, 2009 12:29 PM

5 comments:

  1. Sometimes this is true. I'm glad it happens for you.

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  2. Yes, sometimes this is true. I am grateful it is mostly true for me any more. Form follows function. I write short poems because these are the ones that arrive fully formed. I just have to follow the spidersilk and pick the words off the web, stick them on the screen.
    With lines never more than seven syllables long, it is usually whole lines that come untangled.

    I am not much interested in crafting a poem.

    However, I write these introductions and these comments also and crafting is quite essential in these other forms. My comments and my intros are edited, often quite heavily before I am done.

    ReplyDelete
  3. mmmmm, yes
    I love it when it happens that way.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Yes! Whether goodly or badly - I don't like to claim either - voices pass through. A conduit only. It is like they lay in wait breathing hard in the tall grasses for a chance to be heard.

    I wonder what it means? On the one hand I throw down design and on the other it is all around me. I throw it all down, the seemingly impossible, unseeable, and then here it is in my own word.

    xo
    erin

    ReplyDelete
  5. Yes, Erin. And from Anthony's comment, it is not everyone's fate that we share. Not everyone has an experience of being hunted by the wild word. You have to reach a certain relationship with words and spelling and composition before it can happen. This is like in music, not everyone favors jazz improvisation either.

    What we are trying to reveal is a mystery that goes on in the dark, what happens unconsciously with words and it leads to the nature of that unconscious as well. The way we experience our words, there is more than us in that unconscious and we can often honestly claim the words are not ours.

    I have to accept this experience is just not so for other people nearby. They do not ever have our experience. I am doubly blessed because I have this experience in two frames of fluency, with words in poesy and in notes, chords and rhythms in the key of Eb. Sometimes at the end of one or another especially remarkable session, I will fall down in prayers of thanksgiving. I did not earn this. I scramble to measure up to it.

    ReplyDelete

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


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