momentarily apropos – Zoëtrope in Words

Posted on May 27, 2026June 3, 2026 by debi louise

A Scent Almost Too Subtle To Detect

~
EARTH

1.
He stoppered the hemisphere, hemoglobin
or alluvial rhythms sank the soul —
blanked out the divine, until
resilience forced sight
(but threatened to miss the blindness
behind his eyes).
Without naming the poison
he risked losing the light.

But the light was already gone.
He was left with the factors of denial.
The truth left him, escaped
                               ragged.
Blood and soil still thrummed in his ears —
the misunderstood, the unwanted
                   in the dark,
                              in the day,
       in the light of recognition —
he became umbral instead.

2.
The dead wander through the living.
They don’t know they are gone.
If he or she now, instead of two,
glimpse their single image in the particles of air;
they see us too,
and mistake themselves as alive.
Colliding on the sleeves of petals,
maybe you and I are more reflection
than infinitesimal coils; returning,
we — they — fractals of silt, lie taciturn
in soft, uncomplicated feathered frills.
Press the ribs against the breaking,
against the need.
                    Silent.
               Adrift.
Flip the rain inside out —
instead of petrichor,
a brokenness remains.

SEA

           Of mineral and bone
                    we once were known,
stamped into the chaos
of endless dust and stompy air
where, more than wind or stone,
we quelled the burden of breath,
                alone.

In the eclipsed shades of early grey
as tides churn deep to belly up,
white-tipped crests, rumbling,
           foam & sink.—
This, too, embosses stars
beyond the schemes of benthic dreams,
beyond the troika:
           earth, sea, sky.

There is comfort in the ancient,
in the ambient swallow,
the yawn of the pink window
reflecting the numinous sun sinking on
the other side of the sea; —
the altered sea below with its indigo depths.
The open flow of dark water tipped with
pearl-foam,
ephemeral as loam,
rushes toes,
then folds our fingers, wrists, fists
in its ambiguous claws.

SKY

We are become nimble in liminal spaces.
Far from arbitrary, you and I defy articulation,
just as the separation dividing earth from stars
becomes something novel in its azure lightness.
Lightness of æther,
of essence
defining the separation, atmospheric; —
without it, earth and its denizens would crisp
or implode.
(Gravity is quirky in that way.)
Tenuous balance of sun to serendipity —
while offering what is essential, necessary…
           Thanatos of circumstance,
           Thanatos of defiance,
                               Thanatos at theatre,
                               at art,
                               at play.

•

Posted on May 5, 2026May 6, 2026 by debi louise

Seule

Disturbed, one writes…
so one can dispel the darkness
as it tickles the back of the throat;
to throw it down,
wrestle it until it splinters
into the dust of suns
[bien sûr]

Another writes to antagonize
the strange & sundry tales
we’ve come to [mis]believe.
Tales aren’t enough
Anymore;
tales of privilege & rebuke
whose gossip-tongues
[guerres du force]
hang like broken shutters
at the edge of windows
lisping
cracked
vacant

A third writes to liberate
that lonely history
collecting dust on a high shelf
behind forgotten jars of peaches…
Days of caliber;
Days of integrity — both of which
catalyze a myriad of many things…
Good, mal, aigre, doux
Avarice
equanimity
trahison

Still, the last writes to comprehend
even if comprehension
will never be tasted;
the obliterative E pluribus
unum
One writes
writes
[One]

•

Posted on June 27, 2022May 27, 2026 by debi louise

Undercurrents…

Love forms the undercurrents of our freedoms:

We are formed in darkness
but informed by Light.
When luster masquerades as Light, or Light itself is gone,
all we have is mastery of darkness and a misinformed idea of what we are.
But transformative perception speaks beyond the balance of Shadows and Light in echo of the thunder which rumbles worlds into being. [E = mc²]
Its timeless intuition presses into us through the practice of one ^{compassionate} act @ a time. [in recognition of Light]
Small acts consistently practiced echo a familiarity in us — the luminescence that weaves us again into the heartbeat of Life. [la Joie de vivre]

^{The Four Immeasurables}

Of language and nuance: about the words, the craft, the scent of details

•

Posted on February 11, 2020March 31, 2026 by debi louise

Ear to the Wind…

~PART 3: …to the woods

The forest is beguiled by a transitory lullaby —
a father, from the depths of loss, murmuring
subtle sounds in the heart of the woods.
The trees harness his voice and crack the sky,
crack the fading light so the night can
hold its echo hostage to a third or fourth degree.
Till the wilds run free, unassailed by reverence,
carried by the night-woods, they texturize his will.
He is crumbling from within…
their echo turns his dewy blood to dust.

• • •

Sometimes the rain is silent.
Sometimes it bears witness to violence
without losing its luster.
He wears his bones now like ash
beneath the poisoned grove where roots and
their underpinnings slash their pin-prick tails; —
he is worrying the broken soil in his broken fists
like a mouthless prayer unadorned by beauty,
for there are no voices here within the lyric of the dead.
It fades — the percussive intricacies of wind invade.

•

Posted on May 23, 2019March 31, 2026 by debi louise

O, Babies…

These plump little loves — tiny doves that hatched almost two weeks ago — are on the verge of fledging. They live in a rabbit’s foot fern that hangs in my back garden. Their busy mother was away gathering munchies for the noisy little beasties, but for this moment, they were quiet and I was able to soft-softly snap this photo…🤫
…gorgeous babies.

•

Posted on November 10, 2018March 31, 2026 by debi louise

Honing mercy…

~ “In the noise of hundreds of people, no one understood anything… Oh, how one wants sometimes to go from such…cheerless human wordiness into the seeming silence of nature,…into the wordlessness…of true music, and of a quiet, heartfelt touch grown mute from fullness of soul!” — from Boris Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago

If Life be anything, be it tumbled out poetry — or S.T. Coleridge’s “low voice of quiet Change…doing its work by little & little” — versus dropping into the madding crowd, clamorous as inauspicious residue.

There is delight in living away from the public eye. Charm and dignity when one can hone mercy and kindness without broadcasting goodness when it’s accomplished. Better to learn the rhythms of the “…billion unseen wonders of everyday life”, that Matt Haig — who has a keen eye for the tragedy, humor, and empathy of the human heart — writes about in his Notes on a Nervous Planet, when “…there is just love and kindness and trying, amid the chaos, to make things better where we can…”

Perhaps holding onto simplicity in the “the now that forever is made of,” will grant us the breath of grace-endowed mercy to overshadow the need to be heard, if being heard slip-slides into obsequious salivations for fame. Rather err on the side of solace and joy and practice the art of Mercy in its varied forms:

“The quality of mercy is not strained.
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest:
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.
‘Tis mightiest in the mightiest; it becomes
The thronèd monarch better than his crown.
His scepter shows the force of temporal power,
The attribute to awe and majesty
Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings;
But mercy is above this sceptered sway.
It is enthronèd in the hearts of kings;
It is an attribute to God Himself;
And earthly power doth then show likest God’s
When mercy seasons justice. Therefore,…
Though justice be thy plea, consider this:
That in the course of justice none of us
Should see salvation. We do pray for mercy,
And that same prayer doth teach us all to render
The deeds of mercy….”

— Portia, from Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice”: Act 4, Scene 1

♫ ♪”…be still with me…”♫ ♪

•

Posted on October 24, 2016March 31, 2026 by debi louise

Of rain, tool shops, and Pablo Neruda

The resonance of the rain today tumbled out remembrances of childhood days spent with my dad visiting tool shops, boggled with awe, while outside the rain pelted its timbre on the pavement. Now I am older and the mechanical scent of tool shops, like the intangible relics of rain, hold me captive to nostalgia. Nostalgia and Neruda — who voices many of my favorite flavors…

THE CITIZEN¹
by Pablo Neruda

“I went into the tool shops
in all innocence
to buy a simple hammer
or some vague scissors.
I should never have done it.
Since then and restlessly
I devote my time to steel,
to the most shadowy tools:
hoes bring me to my knees,
horseshoes enslave me.

I am troubled all week,
chasing aluminum clouds,
elaborate screws,
bars of silent nickel,
unnecessary door-knockers,
and now the tool shops
are aware of my addiction –
they see me come into the cave
with my wild madman’s eyes
and see that I pine for
curious smoky things
which no one would want to buy
and which I only goggle at.

For in the addict’s dream
sprout stainless steel flowers,
endless iron blades,
eye-droppers of oil,
water-dippers of zinc,
saws of marine cut.
It’s like the inside of a star,
the light in these tool shops –
there in their own splendour
are the essential nails,
the invincible latchkeys,
the bubbles in spirit levels
and the tangles of wire.

They have a whale’s heart,
these tool shops of the port –
they’ve swallowed all the seas,
all the bones of ships,
waves and ancient tides
come together there
and leave behind in that stomach
barrels which rumble about,
ropes like gold arteries,
anchors as heavy as planets,
long and intricate chains
like intestines of the whale itself
and harpoons it swallowed, swimming
east from the Gulf of Penas.

Once I entered, I never left
and never stopped going back;
and I’ve never got away from
the aura of tool shops.
It’s like my home ground,
it teaches me useless things,
it drowns me like nostalgia.

What can I do? There are single men
in hotels, in bachelor rooms;
there are patriots with drums
and inexhaustible fliers
who rise and fall in the air.

I am not in your world.
I’m a dedicated citizen,
I belong to the tool shops.”

¹(as published in The Paris Review No. 57, Spring 1974 issue)

•

Posted on August 10, 2016March 31, 2026 by debi louise

Sylvan Storm, or…

~ SYLVAN STORM
or, ‘Birth’

Where the meadow meets the earth, vagrant shades
spark nature’s indigo gasp of the soil-drowned
world that plays at the feet of the woods.
Wind-lashed, blood-red peonies coil their ragged
tongues — tongues that steal joy and mimic laughter.
Peonies dishevel the humus. They sing their
sanguine selves an embellished tune.

To oblivion.

Where the earth meets the sea it molts its moss
towering over rock-bruised bones.
It alone knows the night the divine rolled
its wheels out of nature’s dross.
It alone witnessed the grind of stone
on bone and temple-staked massacres —
a seduction intended to kill.

Where the sea met the storm, it wept
(as seas are inclined to do).
The storm shuddered in its red-buttoned boots —
(it wasn’t the crying kind).
Then Sibyl stepped in.
She was more hazel than
sun or sand.
A cat-eyed fugitive, she took her roots with
her when she wandered.

(“Easier this way,” she’d say.)

Her womb is heavy with her extravagances,
her catkins low and ready to drop.
Sibyl, next to Sophia
(her Gemini complement),
takes decay by the reins.
While Sophia, a lingering ash, dusty and ancient,
weaves knowledge into life, Sibyl’s leaves strain
against their inevitable disarticulation.

Where the storm cracks the earth,
it knows nothing of this until it whitens
the loam into birch and aspen —
a truer Gemini than Sibyl’s hazel to Sophia’s ash.
The birch, the aspen are young yet,
Innocence quivers their roots
like the great frost giant it is.

Thirsty. Redolent.

But their branches, like hands, grow black with the blood
of a thousand suns. The thrill-boys, killjoys of deafening
roars slice like lightning through the rain.
The boys thundered a thousand strains of defiance
when the sea swallowed them.
They soldered the horizon to the undertow in hope of
turning the tide against the night.

But it turned itself, tired of their riot.
Eyeless, it slipped back unannounced beneath the clouded
gibbous moon, leaving the hazel and ash,
birch and aspen on the unsheltered cliffs above,
lock-jawed, while dark-needled rain crumbled
the night-sky in thunders of pale punctures, turning the
trees servant to the underbellies of ancient bones.

Fossils. Stones.
. . .

Once upon a time before the rain, before we knew
what walls and ceilings and defamations were,
we wandered the hills in search
of something elusive.
Did we know what it was?
A pale shadow, a rhizome trailing the outskirts
of a cumbersome womb.

We woke, screaming.

•

Posted on July 3, 2015March 31, 2026 by debi louise

from “Sentient Entropy”…

~Part 2:
REBEL

What was it that imprinted the cosmos into
the beats of our hearts?
The melancholy?
The convalescence?
The inhale?
Its nemesis?
Almost as if Love becomes its own dimension
like time, or a force akin to entropy, but
unlike the spintop-whip of entropy observed,
it carves back into itself instead of out.

The bold one holds a whisper to my ear,
is it you?
A hurricane in the palm of your hand,—
the bishop’s refrain, “What we have,
we have to share,”— it’s everywhere.
Like chaos complete,
Christ in a riddle,
eternity in a the eyes of a dog,
the loyal grow old but their hearts never do.

You curdled the lyrics of a ditty
so incomplete I had yet to mouth the words.
A sharp tug in the throat
like a burden of souls
washed down with spiced rum or a
snifter of something drier; —
you never were the sage, the mystic,
the one who wrinkled water like
it was a costume for a masquerade.
No. More like silk, or thyme soaked in
fragments of rage.

Yet you lingered over words in your
own language, sweetened in the
nectar of desire for things
you could never own.

And we ran.
Ran into the trees, into the breeze,
the tease of a madman at our heels
in obtuse degrees.
The asylum forgets our sanity,
buries our reason, our honor, our minds
in hubris, where bold men make
mockery of our strange desires,
the fires of bold denials of lies.

The cliff-jumpers catch their death.
They’d rather dare than dread
the outcome. We are not so different.
But history
is more profound than
the tales we’ve been fed.
Silence, the adulteration of reality.
If we don’t speak,
it may yet get the best of us.
O, holy riot of the mind.

Yet, rebels will never hold
their tongues
or actions.
The rebels know better than man’s
inhumanity to man, or beast;—
they know, as do we (for we are their echo),
that silence must be broken
if men are to be made whole again.

•

Posted on December 6, 2014March 31, 2026 by debi louise

Friendly Milk

For anyone who loves language, nuance, and intellectual play, listen for the sentence that no one has ever said before…

A Bit of Fry and Laurie:

•