Editor’s note: This is from Caroline Ross of Uncivil Savant. See my “after note” below for more.
Fragments from a sandstone cliff face in early winter light.1
1: I note the present impossibility of loving smoothly. The heart’s Archimedean screw, continually turning to bring up the flow. It must always be spiralling if you want there to be fresh water.
As though the heart’s turning is caused by some attachment to the gyring cosmos making it so.
Blessings never accrue enough to stop the need for them refilling.
I want the blackberries, so accept the thorns. They can be pulled out, replacing their amethyst juice with warm garnet blood. A fair exchange of liquid gems.
A faint anthelion lasted half an hour as I left the archipelago of Brigid2 in October. The promise of a wholeness that can only be glimpsed, not looked at directly. Pierced by a red kite so huge, I thought at first it was a heron.
2: Here sits, once again, the fully biodegradable holy fool with two fingers for letters and a thumb for the space bar, securing myself into the fabric of shared life with syntax and explanatory notes. Writing a path back to central earth. I can sit upright at a desk in the uneasy chair and momentarily over-reach, but in the re-reading, any precarious lean can be corrected. I stack my pineal above my thymus above my adrenals, and thereby rest my thoughts upon the nestled seat of my heart, supported by the knowing in my guts. Where rests a joyful emptiness, sometimes filled by a ballast of wordless presence I can only hint at.
3: We, the uncivil savants, the fully-foibled heilig fools, the regularly humbled, ridiculous, occasionally charismatic baby crones, like flint, numerous, constantly washing up on shores forever, tumbled and wet. That is just the manner of our arrival, perfectly innocuous, unless flung by a winter storm. We are the tiredness of mountains, on our long journey to being sand. But while we are large enough to heft in your palm we will render hails of spark when struck just right with iron. We are hearth-gifts. Keep your tinder dry if you wish to receive our warmth. We are not here to be wise, we are far more foolish than we appear, but we somehow learn everything we need to thrive, and all the tricks to best pass the knowledge on.3
4: Resembling the lip of a waterfall, ideas, energy, thoughts, feelings, constantly tumbling over a leading edge. By attrition, the edge retreats upstream, towards the source. Thus, destiny is twofold: an eventual, impermeable, retaining wall for life-force, and, simultaneously, tiny grains of sand deposit on the far beach of thought.
5: ‘How different it is,’ he says, sweeping his arm sideways to gesture at the bay window over the desk. Meaning, how stark and changed the light, now that it comes in through the bare ribs of trees, un-greened and un-fleshed by chestnut and lime.
I like the brief white light that falls on this table today, just as much as I enjoyed the long golden miraculous beams of September. Winter is here, and the hot-and-cold-blowing hyperbole boys have gone, having retreated to their lairs, perhaps, to gather up the scattered bones of their belated becomings. I wish them well and harbour no ill feelings, neither vengeful nor rageful, just intermittently sad. I am on the beach at sunrise sifting flints, the stones that hide a spark inside them, the treasure and trade of my ancestors, the true vocation of silicon, before the Machine enslaved that spark with electron chains.4
I bring one home, and set it down upon the table, giving it no work to do, other than to continue to be the ancient and holy coldharbour of infinite possibility.
6: A Blessing
May we find the peace we do not have yet, and when we do, may we learn how to spread it.
When one day we say that we have waited forty years for sex like that, and that they are the best person we ever met, may those gaily painted caravans which we set up, all bowed and arched and canvassed and decorated with roses, be tethered to the draft-horse of love. Rather than abandoned, less than carefully in a layby, for someone to climb into and sit there alone wondering who is going to make the tea.
May we have reason to say those things one day. And may the love that comes from that last us all our years.
May we think twice before we jump in with both feet.
May we meet our match.
May our flames be bright.
May we learn to remember to always compare two flames on any feasting table and trim one wick accordingly, lest the other seem to flare too bright.
May chestnuts and hazels fall at our feet.
May oak galls and old iron form the ink of our telling.
May our words be true.
May they be written down.
May they be sung in song. But not the songs of enchantment, which capture and cajole. But the chant, the chanson, the true song beneath enchantment. Which is an invitation, not a compulsion. Which lets the hearer be free. Which gives the listener license to come and to go or to sing the song their own way, to harmonise with us in ways we may not recognise at first.
May we know that to go, sometimes, is as good as to come. That doors should always be left unlocked, like the porches of old churches. Somewhere to rest our heads safely for a night.
Every cup is not a baptismal font, nor even the piscina. But a cup is a cup. And because mine overflows today, may its blessings fall to all who read this, too.
editor’s after note (JRM here):
I’m soon going to press the button that results in the republication of this, with the generous permission of the author, Caroline Ross. Next time I publish or republish something from Caroline, I’ll be sure to provide her with a proper byline. But today I’m being a bit lazy about the procedures to do that. So I put her name in the subtitle space. (Thanks, Caroline, for being the first poet other than myself to publish [or re-publish] poetry here!)
The boundary between poetry and prose is often vague, slippery, ambiguous or even fully non-existent. In this case, I believe it to be non-existent.
I have no idea if the footnotes will work in this case, so if it doesn’t, well, see the original here. You can also listen to Caroline reading at that link.
I think I've always loved poetry, per se, and as such have always loved prose which thumbed its nose at the formal formalities of poetry, like writing in "lines" of poetry. There are portions of the essays of, say, Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek which are pure poetry, but lack such a "lines". What's the difference? Once one has seen the tree with the lights in it, it cannot be unseen. Poetry emerges from a place where form meets formlessness and helps the listener and reader get lost -- as a kind of magic. This fits the bill.