Sunday, February 22, 2009

I'm Still Hungry, The Smell Of Cold Rain

Shape shifting again. I ask about changes from yet another perspective. This changing stuff is big stuff, no? Really want to change? Well, probably not, since I go kicking and screaming into so many of them. Want to stay the same? Well, probably not, because I get bored if nothing changes. Hmmm. Restless, irritable, discontent, no matter what... I have had big changes in my life, some really life saving, some really life threatening. But I am still me in some real sense, some sense that I can't even conceive will not stay with me no matter what, even death. I even kind of believe the whole spiritual thing rises out of the inconceivability of death. Maybe. Or maybe I am built like this simply because it's true that something of me won't die, something that I would recognize as me. That's a very big starting point for all this stuff...as above so below. Reversed, as something in the heart of below, so above. There has to be that thread or nothing makes sense.

That, my friends is a statement of faith. The disciplines of science tend to use it too. They say it more like no matter how strange it gets, the universe remains intelligible. Something in our thinking and senses accords with what is really out there. That's really the same statement of faith about connections.

No matter how big the changes are that I have gone through, I will not experience the insectile experience of total metamorphosis. That is rebirth, being reborn in a way far more radical than any religious conversion. Or is it? I think so. How will I ever know?

I'm Still Hungry

If I crawl down here
Using all my legs, ambling
My way past your house,
Is it true I will find you
Spinning your cocoon
Like you tell me that I will?
I don't know about
Cocoons and if I have one
In my true future.
I have so many strange dreams
I don't know what's real.
If there is a change coming
Will my body itch?

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Here is a poem about practicing. What if I go blind? So I practice walking around my house in the dark, remembering and trying to sense where things are. I want to be a musician, so I practice being a musician. I want to be a poet, so I practice being one. I want to be a decent human being. There's a practice there too. I want to leave you? No. Not really. But I might have to. Here's a poem about leaving you.

The Smell Of Cold Rain

I look back at you
There beyond the tracks I left
On this wet hillside.

I didn't think I could leave,
Not like this, and not your life.

It's changed how I feel
About the smell of cold rain
Falling around me.

17 comments:

  1. I so love your poetry.

    Thanks for sharing :0)

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  2. Both poems speak to me, but it is the second one that haunts.

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  3. Christopher

    This poem has such a settling into the heart feeling for me. I appreciate your poetry on a level that can be hard to express...but this is one effort
    Linda

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  4. Michelle, thank you.

    Faith, me too. I actually don't understand where that one came from, how it happened. I play catch up with my own heart sometimes. Back in November when I wrote it I was leaving no one, but perhaps it was being so close to my wedding anniversary. I've been married once. 1975. Divorced, 1997. She died in October, 2001.

    Linda, I always welcome your visits.

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  5. Oh! I like this one - The Smell of Cold Rain - so understated and so potent! Good stuff!

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  6. Karen, I like your new icon.

    Ghost, Thanks. I hope all these pictures will tell a story someday. Glad you showed up.

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  7. Thanks, Christopher. I ditched the other when my son, who took the picture, told me she was Athena! I knew it was time to find something else! Plus, she was stone cold hard.

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  8. Karen,
    You don't want to be the Goddess of Wisdom?

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  9. Wannabe, yes. But claim to be? No way. I don't have that much hubris. ;)

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  10. But indeedy you know your Greek stuff enough to know that hubris is a problem. Humility is being right sized. You get to be a genius if you are a genius. You get to be a goddess if you really are a goddess. How about if your man considers you in part a goddess? Is that permitted? It could happen, the love of a good woman lets a man rise up. The love of a good man also lets a woman rise up. Humility is being right sized, and in the heat of the best love both become gods for a little while. It would be wrong to deny it.

    That's not even romantic, it is just true. The trouble is not with the transforming power of love but with the trust and courage and wisdom and skill of the lovers.

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  11. Now you've inspired a poem...I am no Athena.

    That's a great definition of humility -- being right sized. I think you're right, we are all gods and goddesses at times, poets and beggars at others. The transformative power of love can certainly let us rise above our day-to-day to reach the best and purest parts of self, as you say, dependent on the qualities of the lovers. There's a flipside, though, and that's there in all of us, too. God or demon? Maybe both.

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  12. Karen, it is my purpose to propogate poems :) Robin Starfish of Motel Zero once called me Johnny Applepoem.

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  13. Surprise! All the way back in the dark of the archives. Ever the enigmatic one...:)

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


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