HEAT

Does a leaf note change, sense acceleration, feel heat?
Before they fall. Aftermath?
To soak, bristle, crumble.
Homing on gravity.
Theory is easy for some.

2024: The hottest year on planet Earth in the last 125,000 years.

2024: The Universe is expanding faster than “previously” thought.
What were we thinking? The speed of light more or less?
Perhaps The Universe knows something we do not.

We the 8.2 Billion: Gesturing in an Abstract Reality.

In an hour-glass life-span how can one know?

8.2 Billion we humans, this blue-green tide-pool Earth.
Verbs run amok: Tackle, combat, battle. Nouns to fight abstract reality: Drought, Climate, Heat. Wildfire, Flood, Eruption.

Honing response to a savior edge.

Task: Image possibility within disjunction.
Between don't gaze ahead admonishment.
Among don't zero-in close astonishment.

While riding acceleration in don't look back obedience.

Task: Grasp tangentials. Occupy interstices. Qualify conclusions. Image when our wavering invention — the ancient soundings known as Words — betray.

Task: Image the global situation, temporal duration, a scale of immediate now-time. Then, how to imagine 8.2 Billion desiring humans in their each and every moment?

As gesture. As phantom. As fragment. As ambiguity. As absence. 

As leaf.

That's how.

 

A wider range of words exist to describe effects of cold than heat.

— Karen Solie from her poem Orion, London Review of Books, Dec2024

Life Is Enormous

Life is enormous, you only have
to drill a tunnel through one of the hemispheres
to discover freedom in the other.
But never forget - there's taiga all around.
    —Anzhelina Polonskaya

—Photos by DB, as encountered during walkabouts, Eugene OR 2024.  Outside of these isolated, framed moments, each person moved in their individual befores-and-afters with intent or by circumstance, with hope and longing. As did the photographer.  This "outside" ever larger than the picture.  Life is Enormous.

—Poem by Anzhelina Polonskaya, in To The Ashes (2019 trans Russian by Andrew Wachtel. Polonskaya was born near Moscow, lives in Germany, her poetry is banned in Russia.)

Taiga

The sea darkens outside

and gradually becomes the taiga,

irrational, trackless.

Having run the impassible gauntlet

you shrug your shoulders, like a prisoner,

holding your bundle to your chest with one hand,

still smiling innocently at the sun.

Life is enormous, you only have

to drill a tunnel through one of the hemispheres

to discover freedom in the other.

But never forget - there's taiga all around.

Free Xpression

All that we see could also be otherwise
All that we can describe could also be otherwise
The thing seen is the thing seen together with the whole space
—Myung Mi Kim, Commons

 

The other of Thought is precisely this altering. Then I have to act … I change, and I exchange. This is an aesthetics of turbulence whose corresponding ethics is not provided in advance. —Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation

PHOTOS. This collection, May-October 2024, of random and evolving artworks painted on, painted over, painted again, both sides of a small free-standing FREEWALL placed two years ago in a Eugene city park south of the Riverwalk and east of the I-105 bridge. LINK for a previous post, May 7 2024: Conspiracy of Visibilities

 

CODA
The transition from the stability and absoluteness of the world's contents to their dissolution into motions and relations.
—Myung Mi Kim, Excerpt from Commons (2004). “Avant-garde” poet and professor of creative writing, Myung Mi Kim, born in Seoul, Korea, immigrated with her family at the age of nine to the US.

In the Presence of Absence

You grow up at the edge of a world falling apart behind you, and yet to form before you, a world tossed like a stray stone in the game of fates. You ask yourself: Who am I? —Mahmoud Darwish


Now here we are, clinging to opposite shores,
Each reaching a hand out toward the river’s
tongue, thinking somehow our tongues
might save us this time, break
the spell if we could just name it.
—Meg Kearney


You had to choose the margin to know where you stand. The margin is a window looking out on the world. You are neither in it, nor outside it. The margin is a cell without walls. —Mahmoud Darwish


Words. Scattered shards of words.
Gestures of intent and accident.
Idiomatic fragments of yesterday
intimating possible futures.
Yearning for embrace. —DB


One word
—one stone
in a cold river.
One more stone—
I'll need many stones
if I'm going to get over.
—Olav H Hauge


You cannot see what lies ahead clearly. But a horizontal gravity thrusts you into the thick of tomorrow, to an enchanting unknown in an unfinished poem you are about to begin. —Mahmoud Darwish


When one letter is brought together with another, that is to say one absurdity with another, an obscure form reveals the clarity of a certain sound. This slow clarity opens a path for meaning to take the shape of an image. —Mahmoud Darwish


Letters of the alphabet go to war, clinging to one another, standing up, forming words no one wants to shout, sentences that are blown by the mines in the avenues... —Lesyk Panasiuk

NOTES
This, as with much of how we sense, is out-of-context and so very close…
— Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008), Palestine’s esteemed poet. Excerpts from his final book, In the Presence of Absence (trans Sinan Antoon), an extended mediation on life, an elegy. As such, a guide.
— Meg Kearney from Curse in An Unkindness of Ravens, 2001
— Olav H Hauge (Norwegian 1908-1994), trans Robert Bly
— Lesyk Panasiuk from the anthology In the Hour Of War:  Poetry from Ukraine, 2023)
— DB, this author, from the assemblage Salvage Poetry.

CODA
Words are waves. You learn to swim from the seduction of a wave that wraps you in foam. Words have the rhythm of the sea and the call of the obscure: Come to me in search of what you know not, the blue called out to you. —Mahmoud Darwish