The Flying Remembers Her

This I wrote after seeing my grandmother, Ethel Plaisted, alive for the last time.





My grandmother lies in a hospital bed, looking like a bird taken out of the air. Her eyes, I try. Her eyes. I cannot look into them for too long, those pools of blue on three hospital pillows, or my heart will crack and I will fall to the floor. But I hold her hand and rub her skin and tell her that I will ask a Blessing for her from the Light of lights, so that she may fly again, in whatever form the Light is moved to move her. I know, no matter what, that she will no longer, then, be, strictly speaking, my grandmother; even my heart must let her go, so that she may fly. She must move on, in whatever shape or shapes or states, and I hold her hand and tell her that she must fight this disease, but that, when she feels with all her might that the fighting is done, she must relax into the process with full feeling and let go of everything. Even the lights in the room, all her people, me, all history and time, drop it like a hat on the floor of a temple, and fly, free of all wings and direction, to the breathing crest of Infinity, which holds you like a lamp, and there is no crying involved except as release, so I breathe it through, and out through her, and her into me and out again, like the being my grandmother was to me in life whom I loved with all my breath and heart, who did her part in the taking care of me and of all my people. We are all there with our grandmother, and aunt, and mother, and teller of stories and provider of afternoon snacks and blankets and Don’t jump on the furniture! and countless banana-split cakes and knitted things for our warmth and protection.

I look into her eyes. They are frightened, like the eyes of a bird who has been taken out of the air. I cannot look away, but I cannot see because of tears. Just a blurry shape, a blob of a head on pillows and leaking, hospitalized body, though she has said she is not in pain. But of course she would say that. I touch her shoulder, the top of her head. Her hair is thin. Her feet: alone together below the hospital blanket. She wiggles a toe, and smiles, but her eyes do not. But they do say “I love you” with more force than any bird of any air, the force of no knowing, even after such long life, what anything IS, what even a single thing IS, including this life, this process, this turning, this wonder of transformation, this small room with all the cards and flowers and loved-ones. I squeeze her hand and tell her I love her, though my voice barely makes it out of the sentence alive. Three words, which devastate the being by filling it with Light, and it’s all right, you know, I tell her. You fight it, I say, but then you must surrender from the heart when it’s done. You’ll know it when it’s done. And the love will never leave the room, because we are here, holding you, letting you go on your free way wherever.

My grandmother squeezes my hand on her hospital bed, the way a bird might lightly grasp a branch when it is just about to fly. Her face is warm. She looks up at me, the lone bird in the first tree ever grown by nature in its house among the Light, taken out of the air, and those pale blue eyes are no longer afraid. They have seen something. They are seeing everything, I feel, as they begin to close. Her grip on my hand suddenly relaxes, and I realize she need not worry about remembering how to fly: it is the flying who is remembering her. The flying remembers my grandmother, and me, and you, and all the people who do not know that they have wings, that we are already fire in the sky.

Questions

How many colors can you wear before your face is not seen? Does light inhabit you, or do you inhabit it? Does the shine that bites the brow of winter from the lower trenches reset all your desires at the chiming of the New-Year’s clock? Bastions of creamy white smooth delicious wet memories of sound? Seething, barking, little-friend-befouled and -squashed buckets of lame pipes all ratty with rust and hinges that open on nowhere but a door to a wall of an empty, dusty house in the middle of the remotest exiled land? Do you wear where you live on your sleeve? What color is your skin because of this? How can Angels be brighter than the decimals of earth’s resounding creations when all worlds exist simultaneously and forever, or forever even if they seem not to at the time?

Lingering Sherbets

Twist the lingering sherbets into downright shapes of cackle’s mourning before the summer can crack your drying eyes. List as many fans of broomdom as you can in the space of nine times the outer, willowing lengths of computer-trails in simmering, blank darkness outside the laziest eye. Who are your neutrons? Save the blighted whale from its counterparts above the stream, staple the last buffoon to the party’s roof, but never cry for the always-ahead, for they have done up their buttons to the nth degree of burning intensity. Flames should lick your hair for nearness.

That these things happen is the indication of the fearlessness of the universe. That you happen is the indication of the fearfulness of birth. What is done when trying to outstrap unlogged particles from out of their air-earth shapes? What is lost in the endless, palavering translation? Beeps and broinks, steps and nodes, flippers and tongues to the outside: these symptoms of unrelease stipple the mind with razor-wire and sluice the gloaming canvas from out of the Spanish mimes put on the flowerbed of all our forgotten mysteries.

And the soap has finally dried, and my skin. Your skin. Let out to sun-in-rain.

Eight Times Seventeen

Eight times seventeen puts out the lights;
Sixty burning bridges see the sky.
Laugh out loud for all the birds to see
And let your yards hang down from under high.

This last bend in seeming lasts to one,
And only wants to list the ways to lie;
Do the furtive timing till it’s done,
And let the earth breathe fire while we die.

Werewolves prowl the darkness underground.
Bats seek out the light from out of lives.
All the people look to out for prayers.
All that’s left is failure to survive.

Creatures crawl and dawdle over trash;
Let their hands lie burning under forks.
Whatever else the dying burden asks,
Replace his outward singing with your
Alabaster sighs.

To Love Beyond the Sea

Swear that this, the latest time of need,
Has swept you clean of all your need for clothes
And every other counted hassle-thing
That simplifies your life but for your breath
And breathing whiles. You do not match the sun.
Your feet are natural and like the sand,
The lasting foot-impressions done by weight
And serious, alive, bright roses smelled
Like after-life’s left-hand-beseeching smoke
Of laughing hollers echoing throughout
All pasts and futures and all norths and souths.

This is all the decoration done
By willful, unforgiving playwrights’ eyes
To all the ever-shining, endless light
That holds us all inside our soonest shells
Of broke-out time and sea-surveyor’s glass
That sees the things not thought about in time
But through all time let out and on to pass.
I break the waves upon my shoulderblades
And love and feel to love beyond the sea.

Fragile Gymnastics

There are hardly any cards left. The Liverpools of the world do not want them, and before their names can be spoken they are whisked off to the further rooms, the back hallways of everyone’s forgetting, done in time for all the celebrations made to honor singing for the sake of singing. Three times I’ve slept over, three times I’ve left the stove on but not running, three times past the last deterrent called by the Smithsonian this side of the river of stars. I cannot pedal backwards fast enough; the sand is beginning to thin, to disappear along stretched-out lines of walking back and forth, beyond every time a year ends and births another.

These fragile gymnastics are the play of rhyme and symmetry, stuck out and frozen like the lips of a private bat, one not made for parties or singing. All things say thank you; all things lie low, for now, while there never was a high. These are the garments used by news-media to dress up the bubonic plague before television could suck it away like squirrel-dust in the rafters. The spiders of the rainbow are coming, and they are battle-quick. They eat the faces out of cards and leave the numbers to dry up in the sun. The symbols are taken out and used to soften the minds of the next generation, those who wish to live abroad, perhaps on an island somewhere, where the sun hardly shines but for a few seconds of brief accent on the chalk-papery boards put up by mother’s schoolroom in the rind of antiquity.

They always come back; they always come back, yet the rooms are always empty; for the sake of singing, I always come back.

Infinite Flower Cooling

There was no breathing; there were no lights. Songs just kept coming from under the right vestments out of all the crackers there ever were in this native land of cracking weight and smelly shoes. We are America the beautiful and ugly at the same time. Those who push for independence swallow thought through a straw made of backward words. Those who follow the right make recipes for baking from out of the last colonels of corn found under the pantry of God the limited Creator.

My days start away from these, into the yellow blinding light of that which is before any time is taken, any breathings breathed, any noticings noted. The mind wants its time, but I want things to be vacuumed away from this unimagineable space, slept into a corner by the thugs of everyday’s watching and left to rot on the windowsill of all the Aunts and Grandmothers throughout time who have ever left a pie to cool where there could have been a tornado.

I love all my people, even the ones I have never met, for they are there, too. They are there even before place was found and will be there after place is gone. And even this place will go, and even these. Even yours and all of mine, but what’s now is now, and it is bright with Presence. It is bright with feeling, an opening flower to Infinity which smells like all the worlds smell like before time, and space, and pie, and aunts, and all my people.

The End of Safety

Clouds often hide above the earth. I’ve seen it. The air shields, the rain softens and disperses, but still, they keep their distance. My wavy skin feels it. Sometimes, while brewing a pot of tea with the front door open, I can feel the land reporting to me the conditions of the sky. This is not imaginary, but real as the little hairs on my arms, which often stand up at such intimate contact.

Some days, I open all my windows and sit on a front-porch chair, facing the mountains to the east and the huge sky above and all-around, and lift up my chin and eyes to this great wonder, and wonder why it should feel so much better to have my windows open even when I’m not inside my house. What kind of elements control the weather, even the inner weather, such that I could feel safe under such a circumstance? After all, a lone wolf could wander right in off the prairie with all the doors and windows open. That would be the end of safety.

But of course, there is no guarantee. Wolves gotta eat, like me. And they can probably feel the changes of season deeper than their skins, and their doors are open all the time, and they realize – though probably not in mind – that there is no guarantee, that safety could end at any moment. Do they live their lives more completely because of this? Look into their eyes sometime, if you get the chance: clear. Intense. Ready, but not waiting. Our eyes, very often, reflect the opposite. We should run with the wolves, but the problem is doing that and not becoming dinner. Bring a fork? A knife? Maybe.

But leave all the openings to the wind and sound, and let the growing, moving life be its own shape for as long as there is shape, and press into it like a retarded jelly who would wiggle to the very top and come out to the vertiginous drop of every life lived beyond the sunset.

The Day of Sunrise

Here we are on the last day
The day of sunrise
The last time of raining which has
Fallen asleep on all fours and
Bitten the Daniels’ Cocker Spaniel
Half to death in front of my eyes.

How many of these obscene things need to happen before
We get the point of living here,
The lengthening stars in their wide, willowy eyes
Spreading time down upon us like
Smeary glue,
Stepped-up precision of fan-making, filming
The breaks and the break-ups
All done this side of disaster,
This left-over storm from the time of waking
The time of forgetting,
The day of sunrise
When all the living clouds spoke
The counterclockwise sway of
Listing light that bags the every dream done in gold and glitter
And removes it onto shelves in the vastnesses above every
Shape
Mind
Hole
Bend
Being of a thousand features all undone in every
Moment of pleasure.
Smile your glory, and it
Never bends the winter.

Less Than a Carry-Away

These new doorways are always open. No more moss can cover oldest cracks, shined to brilliant blue by the darkening sun above the head of shoulders far away, further still. Paradise is a shifting vortex, sizing up and down to match illusions painted on it by the many minds of many more than ever danced within this room, or on the roofs outside, praying to the butter-god that all the wasted days of playland’s turkey-gravy ways be met by nonchalance, the I’m OK and It’s All Right that every sort-of-happy mouth renews with wringing underglances and beseeching hands upon awakening to different sleep, like baby birds who cannot see and wait for mother to supply the food to which they cannot fly. Turn on the TV: there’s your world. Do not bite the hands that feed you, even when they slowly feed you poison. You will be fed to death: in one direction, and not out, for it stays and stays around your rooms, like a foreign, wantless houseguest who pretends to sit all over everything, yet does not speak your language, cannot communicate even with gestures and body, except it does, but you are blind. Your money doesn’t even work here, but as wallpaper, perhaps; only wallpaper, on walls which stood before all doors and every way to out. These new doorways are always open.

You can pass between, you see. It works. You can. Bodies made of sand can feel the first breeze on the slopes of all the oceans carved to life within these stars, within this life, carried by proximity of light-years. How your face does long for it. So try it out, but remember: you must trust that it will work, or else your last diminished feeling will be banished to the longest desert ever done by time, ever made by hands or wind or carcass-saws across the boned and bladed repetitions leading everywhere and here by all the unimaginable possibility of every speck of traveling light that moves along the beach above the forest out of Paradise.

Just follow the water, which finds its own depth at all times.
Just walk on the light, which levels the water and bursts all the tubers and rot from their foils and into daybreaking, night-lasting night, all-uncovered but truthful as masks never are, except when they cannot be seen. The Light, breaking the soles of their feet. Cracking their toes, your toes, breaking the masks into what they have always been: lighter than air, and unnecessary, less than a carry-away.

If feet are undone by the Joy of the Sun, who will look after the minds?

Who will look after you?

It
Does
Not
Matter,

Says the Light of Which all minds are made. Storms may come and go; beings rise and slow; as above, so below. But let the Heart to leading, and it

Will
Not
Matter

Any more than all the 1-2-3-4 thoughts that curl around your ankles, waiting for the sand to drop away. It has already dropped away, so

On
What
Are
You
Walking?

When You Wish...

Doorway’s never richer, Richard; sharks may bite out every time the tide turns into thunder in the east. Sweetly smelling every bird from out the forest in the sky, the clear air here – which turns, and bites, and measures – lifts the fragrances of something never listened to by all the feeling ears of those who sell their bromides by the sea.

Where is all the trust? Thrown away in paper napkins at the edge of thought’s untended, raining garden? This must be our exercisest muscle, juicy with the bits of plenty’s life among the rain, among the plates and forks and cutlery of waiting children’s always-appetite. Calamity ensues if we don’t bite the spark and keep it fresh from wind, away from paper and the trees and all the living things which may ignite as looking at the way of life of lambs.

Where are all the gentle creatures? Have they taken the back highway to Mrs. Esther’s little trinket-shop, set up the eve of world-war-one inside the rings of Saturn? We should go there, in that case, even though the space through which we’ll travel is quite cold. I will not be deterred.

There I meet the one who will return to here with objects made of love. Subjects made of love. All the parts of speech accounted for along the outer beach of every daytime’s wishing on the farthest-distance star.

That one has a flame that always burns, and is not farther than your hands away.

There are prayers that have been answered, feeling-prayers, sonnets made to God in all the hearted shape of breath of every one who dares to breathe.

The Light is brightest Bright, but I can see. The open-throated joy for which I came, which I name but cannot name. Which I feel, but which is living me in loving’s shape of paradox beyond the fields and sea of any naming-wishing-falling-Saturn-ringing-new-beginning-shining garden in the rain.

And the movement is Love’s Force, set down in time, wrecking all the plans you’ve made to wish upon a star.

The World-Making Sun

The day has gone by, my year has gone by, and still I am no longer because of it. I am in it, as ever, and always, and never, and who would have thought to turn out the light at the end of the day? The cycles of revolution and rotation make their own logic of my walls, and I am unasked for an opinion or consent. That is fine. We should stay with this bending light, anyway, and see where it leads - to back again, or to different skeins of moving light upon the shoulder’s map of moving through the room, my room, your space, my place, all time and intermission. This is all my target with the bow, and after no one sleeps I may bestow a record-time upon the thunderclap of ticking’s tock and under my last line, I sleep forever on the clasp of weather here. It is nice here. My skin feels cooled by all the air, rushed out to no one mentioning it now, or then, or any past at all. This is the new dimension of the minute when we speak, where we grow, up to all the footprints in the every snow upon the mountain of the world-making sun.

The Round Office

Sharing a flight at 5:30 is no more or less illuminating than sticking a sock in a bucket of water. Both arrive at nearly the same time, with or without the mind, so whatever intuition fills that vessel will have to be filled to filling’s fullness by the time we don’t care about anything like that or how it happened. Back when there is feeling, more listening, less scope and other mouthwashes and more time to do things - or less, depending on how you look at technology. Glitters less than expectantly is the rose-shine to Infinity, the trellis up which I climb which goes in both directions but so do I, or I don’t, depending on the weather.

The following is true of me: I can never make a flight-plan without knowing the sky and the way the rings of Saturn look from the window of the treehouse I used to have when I was twelve. The sky looks from there all the time. I can find it. But the plane is in tatters around me whenever I ignore this tramping track, this biting bothersome illusion done to the back of time in a runner’s pace of not finding anything at all, whether or not it is now or then or never in a million years.

Smart-bombs rip at the fabric of the holes I’ve made in my house, because they’re designed by very smart people with no wisdom whatsoever to do just the opposite, so that’s what they do, they take down the houses built in time. They remove the lampshades and cry for silhouettes which can be provided only by the thumbs of button-pushers in the round office which seats millions and has room for only one. This reflecting surface often drives people mad, especially when they see it from the outside and do not understand how deep it goes, how deep it sinks to up-and-out-of-here through the tiny piles of my imagination of anyone at all, into the glitter and dust of ages before we even thought of creating history on the walls of caves, on rocks, on the inner slides of minerals and isotopes, with magic markers which spread the legs of invention until she is fucked to a hair’s breadth of life by all the invaders from out of the land of I Want I Want. She can barely stand up, now, and moves to the window of the house made of holes to try to see a sky which holds the occasional rings of Saturn.

Velvet Button Muse

How sweltering these days can be. I’m not used to this kind of weather. The last summer I felt was not lived in this skin, but by two-ton fragmentations of mind done up in a toy-shop somewhere to the north of Fucking Kill Me. I lived there for four eternities, one for each of the faculties of body, emotion, mind, and breath.

What kind of story would have this as a beginning? Only the most incredible kind. You couldn’t believe it. You couldn’t try. You could only watch, wait and see, tell those eyes what they should see or have seen. These words fall out of a space I cannot fathom, a space I’m not even sure is space. It feels like a velvet button up abovy my left will, staring into a third space which is so unfathomable as to make the other one I was talking about seem like the lunch you just had.

I can’t even press the button; something else, or more – but not necessarily different – does that from time to time. Sometimes what comes out shines like a polished penny, and sometimes it glistens like a turd catching the noonday sun, but either way, its principal value is lost on most. Even I do not shine it up to much. It is what it is, but...what is that?

The same as this, the same as your head and hands, the same as that anything which trails away into space and brightens around the corners and edges, which you can just hear to be singing from out of the distance of your eye, such that you don’t quite believe it, but you really hope it keeps doing it, for whatever reason it does it. Sing, you say, and it seems to be, so you are content. It rises and falls along whatever invisible, silent path it follows, making everything up as it goes along, just like that true running which is your daily fuel.

Drink deep and piss it away in equal measure, because the band comes marching in, and there’s no time for keeps. Just the open hand to show the sky before we pass beyond it.

Find the Sun

Fractures. Staples. Pistons. Lime. What works with the machinery of taking? Connecting? Who am I to measure the fragility of the total process? It forages beyond me, for sure. Yet I can’t shake it home. The days toil in the work of hours, running down those things which you’d run up, although, at day’s end, the path is level, but not necessarily slanted toward the sun. You must find the sun, and build that bridge, and walk that steep road winding through the planets and not around them. Andromeda cannot live the relationship between Earth and Sun. Only revolutions change the color of the sky.

Infinite Flower Cooling

There was no breathing; there were no lights. Songs just kept coming from under the right vestments out of all the crackers there ever were in this native land of cracking weight and smelly shoes. We are America the beautiful and ugly at the same time. Those who push for independence swallow thought through a straw made of backward words. Those who follow the right make recipes for baking from out of the last colonels of corn found under the pantry of God the limited Creator.

My days start away from these, into the yellow blinding light of that which is before any time is taken, any breathings breathed, any noticings noted. The mind wants its time, but I want things to be vacuumed away from this unimagineable space, slept into a corner by the thugs of everyday’s watching and left to rot on the windowsill of all the Aunts and Grandmothers throughout time who have ever left a pie to cool where there could have been a tornado.

I love all my people, even the ones I have never met, for they are there, too. They are there even before place was found and will be there after place is gone. And even this place will go, and even these. Even yours and all of mine, but what’s now is now, and it is bright with presence. It is bright with feeling, an opening flower to Infinity which smells like all the worlds smell like before time, and space, and pie, and aunts, and all my people.

This Is Word-Processing

This is word-processing.
Flash
Flash
Flash
Through the mind
Out of the eye
Into the I
Don’t
Know
What
Any
Thing
Is
Ha
!
Feel the burn,
Which is the goodness of this
Before your mind can catch it and
Strangle it on the rocks.
Lift
Lift
Flash
Flash
And more than even
Wonder knows,
Said He.
Fragility depends on knowing
Where
You
Are.

Splash!
Jump to the
Thousand
Infinite waters
To love the
Round we dance
In love with dancing.

Never to the Gardener

After all this while,
I miss you,
Even outside.
No paths are delinquent to the sun.
These are the eight hundred
Learnings,
Teaching ways to see the light from
Out of loss and time.
They snap up the neck.
They lose the throat.
The same voice says
Go ahead
That says
Take me away from here,
And never to the gardener again.
He cuts too short, and
I cannot grow.

There Have Been Wars

There have been wars. There have been statements made. The time for these is never now, but always then, always when you last left your mouth to dry outside the sky. I cannot reach the sound, even though its words hurtle toward me through vast spaces within the realm of cowardice. These streaks up my back put an end to no shame. These yellow tire-tracks speak of pain, plain-old, and nothing else but what you can see in every dimestore window in the land of dollars.

These lands are the remains of time. Floods crackle through here beyond the touch of water, singing above the rain that happens whenever any day decides to cry to out of earth. The ground cracks, splinters, bleeds, lingers into a thousand open spaces where my whithering mind cannot go without ways to hold to back, ways to hold things I do not even want back, but only want to go forward, up, out, days lighting up the spires of engulfed terminals at the portals of diminished yesterdays that have not seen the light of day for many thousands of any measurements done by mankind.

How many shades of purple can be accomplished by waiting within any drawn shape? How many deceased cartons of reckless fuel can be made to unflower in this vicious night? We trade our secrets here; we leave things alone here. They smell the way they smell with even no interference whatsoever, and so cannot be imagined by any tackling doors done up in the braids of fancy’s listless days.

I will fly to out-of-bounds, where I shall wait until the last picture has been made on all the walls put up by finished men. These will count as projects done and done, completed under the way the sky looked at any time.

Flowers grow in space, like everything else.

All the Lighted Friends

There is never anything new except right now.
I have not tasted this listing breeze,
Coming to me from over the countertops of deceased mountains
In the fires of forging the new ones from the old ones,
And that seems ungainly to me, like a prayer of playing without the fine-angle zoom of Last year's history to set straight the right and the
Net of leaving everything you've begun since learning to sing.

Trouble pokes over the horizon, lending every air the spectrum of incredible holiness it deserves. Whosoever edits my life will have to deal with time.
I will already be through it and out,
Out, I say,
Wishing nothing but the brightest pearls for all the lighted friends of this form's
Adventure in visibility.
We who can know and disappear
Shall
And who will be the wiser but the air?