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Everyone should read this. Again and again and again.


The Totality of Causes: Li-Young Lee and Tina Chang in Conversation


An excerpt from the conversation:

"I've been thinking about something for a long time, and I keep noticing that most human speech—if not all human speech—is made with the outgoing breath. This is the strange thing about presence and absence. When we breath in, our bodies are filled with nutrients and nourishment. Our blood is filled with oxygen, our skin gets flush; our bones get harder—they get compacted. Our muscles get toned and we feel very present when we're breathing in. The problem is, that when we're breathing in, we can't speak. So presence and silence have something to do with each other. 

 

The minute we start breathing out, we can talk; speech is made with the outgoing, exhaled breath. The problem that is poses, though, is that as we exhale, nutrients are leaving our bodies; our bones get softer, our muscles get flaccid, our skin starts to loosen. You could think of that as the dying breath. So as we breath out, we have less and less presence.

When we make verbal meaning, we use the dying breath. In fact, the more I say, the more my meaning is disclosed. Meaning grows in opposite ratio to presence or vitality. That's a weird thing. I don't know why God made us that way. 

It's a kind of paradigm for life, right? As we die, the meaning of our life gets disclosed. Maybe the paradigm for living is encoded or embedded in speech itself, and every time we speak we're enacting on a small-scale, microcosmic level the bigger scale of our lives. So that the less vitality we have, the more the meaning of our lives get disclosed."

Birds and Nests

I woke up this morning, my chest feeling heavy. It’s funny. I have carried this weight around for a while and though I have gotten quite used to it, sometimes I feel the weight as if it were new. As if, it were pressing down upon me to remind me in case I ever forget.

Let’s call this weight a bird. A big beautiful bird. A bird who meets other birds, squabbles with other birds, falls in love with other birds but you know, never quite sees me as a bird. I suppose I am this bird’s nest. Last night, this bird felt its own weight and seemed to be asking me why would I put up with this weight? Why don’t I shoo it away?

Why don’t I shoo this bird away?

I suppose it's because I am this bird’s nest. Where will it go if I shooed it away? 

It's weird how this started as a poem and then just wouldn't go anywhere I liked it to go. So I guess that's why it stays here instead of Tiny dancer. On an aside, I wonder if it's time to change the name of my poetry blog. Something like.. "Tiny Dances No More" or "Tiny Would Rather Sing" or "Tiny Would Like the World to Believe She Is Tiny Even Though She Is Not". I guess the last one is too long. Oh well. 

I suppose it's strange to have a randomly personal post come up in the middle. Not that I haven't posted my rants or allowed glimpses into my life in a more direct fashion, before. I haven't done it in a while. I guess I'm being obscure enough to satisfy myself and keep you wondering. Ha.

Li-Young Lee

Black Petal

I never claimed night fathered me.
that was my dead brother talking in his sleep. 
I keep him under my pillow, a dear wish

that colors my laughing and crying.

I never said the wind, remembering nothing,
leaves so many rooms unaccounted for, 
continual farewell must ransom
the unmistakable fragrance
our human days afford.

It was my brother, little candle in the pulpit,
reading out loud to all of earth
from the book of night.

He died too young to learn his name.
Now he answers to Vacant Boat,
Burning Wing, My Black Petal.


Ask him who his mother is. He'll declare the birds
have eaten the path home, but each of us
joins night's ongoing story
wherever night overtakes him,
the heart astonished to find belonging
and thanks answering thanks. 


Ask if he's hungry or thirsty,
he'll say he's the bread come to pass
and draw you a map
to the twelve secret hips of honey.

Does someone want to know the way to spring?
He'll remind you

the flower was never meant to survive
the fruit's triumph.

He says an apple's most secret cargo
is the enduring odor of a human childhood,
our mother's linen pressed and stored, our father's voice

walking through the rooms.

He says he's forgiven our sister
for playing dead and making him cry
those afternoons we were left alone in the house.

And when clocks frighten me with their long hair,

and when I spy the wind's numerous hands
in the orchard unfastening
first the petals from the buds,
then the perfume from the flesh,

my dead brother ministers to me. His voice
weighs nothing
but the far years between

stars in their massive dying,

and I grow quiet hearing
how many of both of our tomorrows
lie waiting inside it to be born.