How did you write that poem? How did you paint that painting? How did you find that friend? How did you know to be in that place at that particular time? How did you know how to escape that situation or choose that deal?

Unrepeatable and beyond explanation. Nor can you properly impart the sense of wonder you felt at what happened.

The series of apparently random coincidences that occurred to get you from point A to C were actually specific. A specific sequence. Intuition got you there.

It's a trustworthy navigator.

But requires 'letting go.'

In this way, it is akin to religious belief.

Living your prayer; living your wishes.

Putting aside your tiny maps and trusting that you know the way.

Let go. And find what you are looking for.

Bought a new sweater today, have a new job, may be moving into a new apartment, a whole lot of new things, I guess. Not great photos, but what the heck...

What position doesn't fluctuate? If the real is what returns to itself, can I? How can I stop the constant shifting, my heart, my muse?

Monsieur, I cannot flow in one direction. Despite effort, a contradictoriness. Potent feelings flow in opposite directions, collide, aren't neat, contained, tidy or even explicable. While I would like to not be confused, unsure, and have only my own fears to battle, I am a storm of paradoxes.

Always departing, never arriving.

Can writing write this impossibility? Such honour of the heart.

I curve and sway with your rhythms in a dance of intimacy. We are a single flower, padma lotus, spectral whiteness of prisms, following an inner light, its lightning, even as the moon's tides surge in us.

It happened suddenly, in the quietness of the moment.

Afterwards, enwrapped, arms of peace, and a peace that lasts for many days. And then the breaking, chaos swirls over.

There is a way through. A way through the resisting what we are approaching, pulling away, succumbing, falling back. Even with the red and white blossoms that perhaps notice us or don't, roses of love with baby's breath in the pale blue art deco vase on the table beside the nightlight. Even in the cramped place with roots behind the walls that we can't see, on the soft pale cream sheets. In reciprocity.

My boyfriend is away. Did I say I had a boyfriend? How very unusual for me to admit to such a thing! I never have 'boyfriends,' I only have connections that may or may not be called relationships, and yet towards whom I remain utterly faithful until he abandons me. Or I him. It always happens. And things somehow continue to continue after a respite too. I don't think I live in a world of normal intimate relationships, whatever those may be. To say, I have a 'boyfriend,' balks on my tongue. It feels like ownership. Like settling into someone else's definition. Like something people can make judgments about. Like an incredibly weird sort of dalliance of sex and fun with a little angst thrown in that is so strange that I'd almost rather not. So I make mysterious references to whatever might or might not be going on in my life at any given time. Men I love, and who love me. Yes, always that. Honoured. Of course. Treated with respect, kindness, generosity. Always. But never with full openness. There are secrets. Things that are hidden. Other relationships, other heartbreaks behind the facade of our dalliance. There is a hint that we might possibly make it to some semblance of a kind of connection I might mention to my children to warn them. I never bring my men home, though. Even with delicious sensualities, things usually never get that far. Though I never lose them either. We somehow all continue on together, closer in some ways, more tenuous in others. We never fully lose touch. Mostly it all exists in some fantasy arena, and afterall I do have a penchant for brilliant, independent, single men. The love life of a middle-aged creative woman is far more complex than it looks on the surface.


________________
Class this under humour. Really I am only talking about a very few men spread over years... :giggles:

Memory is a coordinating system. When you start losing your memory, you lose the coordinates of your mapping system, the one inside your mind that helps you negotiate all the terrains from the past to the present to the expectancies of the future. A coordinating system that is multi-dimensional, composed of inner and outer landscapes. Whose latitudes and longtidues are strands of narratives composed of interpretations of memories. Memory: what repeats itself. If a coordinate is touched, awakens, it opens out that area of the map and all the strands of narratives connected to it. Until it falls apart, senility, dementia, Alzeimer's, stroke, aneurysm, until the memories slip off the narratives like beads tumbling off a broken necklace.

She's lost the narrative of the streets. She can't remember where she lives, or the directions home. She thinks buildings long gone are still there. She can't remember what she said five minutes ago. What was a finely woven grid of electro-chemical impulses is sagging in places, torn, drifting, unable to complete its circuitry. Memory is unravelling and so is identity. But in a fog of forgetfulness that releases her.

_______________
At some point I stopped writing inspirational posts and let the deeper images emerge. My writing continues to deepen, at least I feel as if I'm diving into my undercurrents as I explore difficult terrain without covering it over with glossy patinas. Or perhaps I still do. Who knows? I let the images emerge whole and just polish them a bit in the grammar and in the ways that the metaphors are constructed. This piece is about my mother. It's a very difficult situation.

Should I stay, or move on?

This question central in many facets of my life presently. Yet even the new vistas we explore become continuations of the old issues from which we cannot escape. The larger ones, that are like the song we continually sing of our lives. I am always ready to move on; staying becomes a challenge that really is the musical score I dance. Leaving is easy, staying is hard, and knowing this doesn't make it any easier. There is nowhere to go anyhow. All new scenarios become reflections of all the old scenarios until you understand that you cannot escape yourself. If you cannot escape from yourself you might as well relinquish resistance to whatever it is in the present circumstance that you want to leave. Life certainly has its own logic but it is most irrational in its insistence on keeping you on your path of challenges no matter whether you stay or move on!

Touch

In the steam, you disappear. Monsieur, I feel your presence only by knowing. You sit before me until you vanish; hot clouds dissolve us into vapour. Your strong sensuality, like Zeus, yet you become a phantom. Until I am alone. When the hot breath of air presses in on me your hands rest on mine, our knees touch. Two figures of naked skin streaming as the steam subsides. It was in the room you built, this womb of steam from which we emerge wet and hot into the cold air of the welcoming night.

Rapture

How deeply
the unfolding
through the water
of the blessings of
our bodies of rapture.

We are clothed in the streaming truth of
the night sky, its melting snow.

An offering
to fire and transparency.

In the hot springs as the clouds uncover
the full moon of the New Year
you plunge into me
while I dance in the water,
surging, volcanic.

Waves of heat
absorb us

Into an immensity that has no name.

In the creative presence of sensuality
our union effaces the conditions of union.

The essence of passionate love
is mystical union.

We become
a writing of love.

Transfigured.

Rupture

Do we imagine the depths of each other
differently?

Were we Shiva and Shakti dancing?
Our own Lucía Y El Sexo
under the moon in the water?
You kiss my breasts as I float
before you, I massage your floating
rapture,
and how many times do we
undulate?
How continuously
do we hum ecstasy
in the silence of the Winter's night?
Your final surge
rising, fertile, flowing
light, filling the lucid
darkness,
honey of
delirium.

We offer each other such
pleasure.

Afterwards, the next day,
driving me home, you said
you wanted to be clear,
that you love me
but weren't in love
the magic of transformation
absent.

You want your life to change,
that's what love does.

Your New Age
speaking
cliches
clashed
with your
strong loving
and a year later
I received a letter
from your other lover
about your nights with her
filling the hours
around ours, as well as
the others you had
slipped into bed with.

It was never
a question of love.

Portal of Breath

There are words I must speak, though surely never will. You call me across the expanse. I kiss your closed eyelids. I lie over you softly, breathing with you. With each wave of breath, like sea foam, I cover you with a silent resounding mantra, I love you. Even while you call me to you, you do not hear the rippling of my heart. It is when you are asleep and I lie with you that I hear the fullness of the silence between your breaths. You are the full intoxicating sea-garden in repose and I am calmly delirious in the scent of the night. In the morning you have forgotten everything; even the savouring. How do we "translate the silence of the real encounter between the two of us?"¹

Relation of

Monsieur, you can't be possessed.

One can only come into a relation of openess with you.

You leave, and yet always return. What you dismiss, you affirm.
Yesterday was no; today is yes. The horizon floods like continuous
Kabbalistic light.

______
¹Clarice Lispector, The Stream of Life, trans. by Elizabeth Lowe and Earl Fitz (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), p.43.
_____
for Kaj Devai, from the manuscript, EnTrapped WOR|l|DS, 2006, in which he is listed as a reader of this book in my Google Docs, and in 2007 he accessed and printed on his printer and read apparently a few times, and then had me read this poem to him over the phone in 2008, and agreed that in this writing I should tell the truth.

After dancing for hours to the beat of 30 or 40 ecstatic drummers on African drums, walking home past groups of revellers and noisy happy nightclubs, near dawn, I took this to celebrate the New Year with you...

During this festive time of the birth of the light, of the New Year, wishing you pure magic and joy, prosperity and success.

That the dance of impermanence flows with agility, grace, openess, love.