anywhere i can find to put words

lotuses into the distance, stepping out into the water. seeker looks on from the water's edge, hands clasped, eyes finding no sure place to rest. today, seeker was intended to examine her wounds. today, seeker intended to have her wounds examined, but the day had another intention entirely so seeker looks out over the water from the water's edge, hands clasped, eyes glancing, anticipating, anticipating, anticipating: what?

on the water the pink blossoms seem to be moving, cluster to tangle, gathering and isolating, but she suspects this is a conspiracy of slight movements augmented by her expectations. the green mat of leaf, like where she'd exercise at the gym. the spiking center of louts, a woman's skirts obscenely upended, opening in upheaval, showing what was not necessarily intended to be seen.

instead of righting the matter, instead of making the scene submit to comfortable associations: a lotus's jewel, the meditator's courtyard, someplace to be for every place in being, seeker lights a flame at every flower's center and lofts skyward in offering toward the old white moon. stars and stars and stars and stars. a star field of lotuses, taking shapes and coding messages seeker hasn't yet learned to speak. from the edge of the water seeker guesses the ages of things. lotuses of the season, waters of eternity. ten thousand year stones in her pocket, smoothed to circles over the course of her lifetime.




there is seeker herself, at the water's edge, considering the ages of things. seeker is in her late thirties but she has also recently broke the seal of forty.

seeker is a hundred years old and she is not yet even nine.

seeker is a sixteen year old wander, barefoot and lost to a rhythm in her head.

seeker is twenty and alone in a strange new city, where the walking bridge brags a mortality rate and gas station owners ambition to be farms by virtue of a small lot of corn just off the pumps.

seeker hasn't even started to cultivate her life to such variables before she is twenty-two and needs to move back to her mother's house, where when last she resided things had arrived at a point where it became necessary to live among corn-farming gas stations.

seeker is ever an infant, gazing at the world as seeing it for the first time.

seeker is weary of the world, bent over herself and muttering, barely a scruff of white hair atop the shiny globe of her exposed scalp.

seeker is every age in one moment, because age does not matter to seeker so much, only those limitations her body and the law put on her activities.

seeker woke while it was still dark, her lover stirring as she climbed out of bed. he stirred then rolled on his back and fell back asleep with his mouth open, calling out to something unnameable and with a sigh, redacting it before that unnameable something got too close. seeker leans over him for a moment, pressing her lips to the damp considerations twitching through his brow even in sleep. seeker thinks. seeker seeks out other thinkers. she kisses her dear thinker’s forehead and holds until he turns away, quieting his breath and curling up on his side. we have such simple mechanisms in love, seeker thinks, and quietly leaves the room.

seeker goes out onto the balcony to look out over her latest strange city. here, no one is hiring and the awful hardness of strangers occasionally fills the sky with helicopters. here, a highway jaunt is to be expected in even a five minute commute and most of the time when she does drive, it's to the hospital. seeker is still seeker, though, eternally unaltered and worn smooth with daily tidal trauma; learning to walk and die in the same movement. in the distance a cluster of broadcast towers signal, blinking slow, pulsing long, casting small shadows even where seekers stands, miles away. there's something out there, she knows. there's something out there calling. there's something i need to find, she knows, the fire igniting her lotus.

she wonders what it could be.

alone on the shore, seeker gathers up shells. alone on the shore, seeker gathers shells together, shells and coral and ocean-tumbled stones, smoothed into simple shapes, smoothed into pale colors, into colors that are only just there. seeker seeks seashells on the shore: walking along the tidewater’s perpetually shifting boundary, a place where things wash up to wash back out. such a beautiful analogy for seeker’s unconscious and yet what does she find? things are different near the ocean. the ocean peaks and recedes. the ocean has its own shape to reveal.

gathering shells in the hem of her gown, seeker looks out into the ocean and sees: how the nature of the water’s surface changes in the distance. how the sound of water changes with its volume. the ocean churns and rushes. the ocean is always on the move. seeker clacks and rattles her shells, herself an altar, herself an altered matter. herself the point where water, wind, stone, and flame conspire to manifest experience. but then again: and then what’s more: and then: and how:

ribbons and scarves. something about seeker is always trailing along. answers and questions: seeker often can’t be bothered to experience them in an examined variety of sequence. what do you know, what do you expect, what are you looking for?



seeker wants everything you would expect seeker to want. she wants to be beautiful. she wants to feel beautiful. she wants to share beauty. she wants to remember almost as much as she wants to be remembered. seeker wants to walk at the endlessly shifting tide line and believe there’s a reason she is there: a reason she is here: a matter being communicated: information that needs to be conveyed to her and needs to be conveyed to her in a meaningful way. her shells are colors of flesh. her shells are colors of teeth. her shells are the color of bone, of things stripped to their core essence, of things stripped to the elements of form: the elements of form, exposed to the elements: water and gravity, water and salt, the moon’s pull, the sun’s fade, tiny waters splashed and gathered in a clam shell’s flipped dish. gathering water and sand. gathering microbes and salt.

the ocean trails on about it like the ocean does. scarves and ribbons. always another inhale, always another expanding sigh, always another seeker looking out over the water wondering what it would be like: to look back over the water, to look back towards shore. to rise above, looking down into the sloshing shallows, the sandbar’s steady rise. sea creatures click and moan. sea creatures shimmy and undulate. seeker leaves the sea creatures their shells or the shells that could be theirs:

seeker only takes what is partial, what no longer constitutes shelter, what she can bring together incomplete to make into a new sort of whole. this is seeker’s purpose: bringing together what does not satisfy in a satisfying way. seeker finds the farthest flung pieces. seeker brings together what is broken and lost. broken and lost until seeker pieces it together in seeker’s distinct manner: what seeker is most often looking for is a new way of looking at something lost to our understanding of it: a new context, a new arrangement. a new use, a new way of thinking. seeker wants to show me there’s a place for everything and everything has its place: the snail shell broken and tossed over itself over and again over until every broken place slides smooth beneath the thumb, smooth beneath the thumb in spirals and twists: twisting into a kind of portal. a new break in reality. a place you did not know you could go. a place you did not know you could find yourself in. a place with no coordinates, no address, no zoning code: where you are when you are not really, or the place you’ve always been.

seeker wants to bring what is broken together. not to piece it together as it was. not even to remember it as it was: seeker sees her own reflection in what is broken and worn smooth, what is bleached lifeless and riddled with holes, what constitutes mystery, obstruction, revelation, and release.

the pleasures of what cannot be completed, the pleasures of what has already begun to break down: the pleasures of halfway lost, strange and scattering, already broken, already breaking down. seeker knows these things are not the only gift the ocean has to offer her but in this moment she is sustained by the gathering process. finding and gathering, observing and remembering. how observing calls memory. how memory calls. how memory calls.

time to write words around me in a circle. time to circle myself with words. time to embody the process of memory in this deeply flawed process. time to map out my intangibles. scan the intangible tissue. maybe we’ll find something. maybe. do we want to find something? do we want, at least, to know whatever the hell it is that’s going on? maybe we do. or i don’t know. damn that subtext! what’s going on down there? i don’t know what this thing is or why i keep doing it, but i do it nonetheless.

at least, i hope to.

that swarming, shivering nausea of wanting to create something but no spark. no concept, low or high or sober. worse still, no investment. nothing that draws me in. nothing that energizes me in the creative process. just: i should want to do this. i should feel energized by some aspect of this process. why don’t i want to do what i want to do? it’s tiresome. what’s more: it hurts. it feels like another way i’ve failed myself, my loved ones, my audience (which might only be four people on livejournal but that’s a lot better than i was doing before i was on livejournal, do not doubt), the ghost of my friend, the ghosts of several friendships, the ghost of my little gray cat. the world at large. and god, i’m so sick of feeling like this. why can’t i stop feeling like this?

i want to take pleasure in a craft again. i want to write something that stirs my passion, that makes me feel like there is a reason i, specifically, have taken up the call to write: i want to feel mystery and magic in making art, drawing together elements, invoking that power i only understand in using it creatively: i know it cannot be all there is to the creative process: refinement, editing toward (if not into) perfection, scrutiny and

all of that shit i think i’m so good at. but what good is editing when i’m starved for a spark?


                                         something!

                                                    anything!



okay, not “anything.” i’ve gotten quite a few unnerving glimpses into that gift horse’s infected-to-the-point-of-abscess mouth. but: there really is a wide range of plausible options before you get to camp anything. i hope.

what it was like to write those novels before i was even out of braces. up so late with the last pages, sky gone navy in the front room couch, shivering, my small body rattled with its first experience of genuine creative power. my first fix: baby’s first addiction. was i self medicating with fiction? i guess i was: it’s served that purpose for me, though it’s a lot more complicated than that. so i run the numbers: maybe a project. probably a project. something large. something larger than me. that’ll put things in perspective. right? right?!

just: what’s a project? haven’t things gotten a little too post-modern for projects? isn’t it more: work this fragment, bait that red herring, lead that white elephant out of the storage locker for a good strut around the study. because all these beautiful little pieces, they ought to assemble somehow. just keep retrying the orientation, press it in a little bit harder, maybe use the hammer, sometimes something will snap into place, sometimes you’ll find a good fit: but where does it end up? instead of four tiny word-bobbles, i’ve got two tiny word-bobbles and a third, slightly larger, slightly less manageable, bobble of words.

or 900+ megabytes of television show dialog and directives that just sit there, gradually becoming dated. i need something. i need something. i’ve got things but they might not be the right things. i’ve got things but who even knows what they are? i’ve got things: who am i to receive such things with other than unambiguous gratitude, what am i selfish? what am i stupid? what am i some kind of middle-life vortex of insatiable hungers directed at nothing in particular?

except, wrong: there is a particular. of sorts. of a fashion. i mean, not really, but then again, isn't there always? and sometimes i think i must rid myself of the mechanisms around it before it eats me alive. but i’m stupid, or self-destructive, and both, so i continue: to wallow hopelessly in that which is surely killing me. for the record, i feel that there has been far too much unintended rhyming in this non-metered text.

so: i could make it a game.

manifest younger self. arrange a little playdate. play some good music, set candles to “teenager,” write love letters to goddesses with whom i should never presume to be so familiar. play dress up: with my clothes! with ben’s clothes! except not ben's work clothes! with that one sparkly scarf i ended up by accident whoops sorry sarah! anoint myself with consecrated oils. map out the heavens on the inside cover of my favorite kierkegaard book. drink pink sparkle tea. only ever wear blue on tuesday. mark out a fairy circle with acorns and starfish, stick peacock feathers in my hair, march around with a drum and a mirror. kiss the limitless! do naughty things with the limitless! i won’t write. i won’t feel very good about the whole affair in a few hours time, either. but i could make it a game.

fill a glass-jar with single-word chits. develop a(nother) universal power deck. devise a way to reliably ink out one hundred word pieces longhand and glue trigger words in the upper margins. keep a sentence-a-day journal. a journal of objects. a journal of anxieties. a journal of bumps and feels. just keep messing around with define. start a journal in which i only write sideways. a haiku a day! a question a day! i should definitely be doing at least one once-a-day thing. what happens is i get a lot of interesting but unnecessary detritus about winter, because the thing-a-day practices might make it as far as the second week of march, if i am disciplined. oh, mercy. lordy do.


30.
uncarved block:
the brook, the wind,
the fresh burnt field.

40.
rain on my windshield
heavy cloud sky
moving east


and then at the same time, it’s not as dire as all that.

it never is.

might that be the problem?