momentarily apropos – Page 2 – Zoëtrope in Words

Posted on September 29, 2014February 16, 2022 by debi cimo

Wisdom of Wood

Forests undo me with their brilliance and depths of clarity. Every forest has its own flavor, but each one I’ve come across has altered me forever. And no matter the thousand and one journeys I’ve taken among the trees, I’m always, always itchy to return…

WISDOM OF WOOD

We are among the grains of wheat,
atomizing the vapors of earth,
giving breath to seed, to habits of growth.

Our faces, in childhood,
let every secret slip
until our voices were broken.

The temptation was always too strong.
Our fervor destroyed everything we touched.
Even ourselves.

Especially ourselves.
And the way we interpreted the world,
winding our minds inside its papier-mâché damp.

Our innocent tongues worshiped
the benign qualities of wood in summer,
in autumn, in rain.

Our senses, though, were shaken in prologue
to a forest of fusion and dignity
standing among the remains of unsettled things.

Hiding among the wheat that brought us here,
we chained ourselves to the wisdom of consequences
while the forest, alone, disassembled us.

Overwhelmed, in shreds of our former selves,
the temptation was now only to be
what we knew to be true. Better. Unbroken.

But maybe, sometimes broken is better.
We can see from eyes other than our own
and the forest, dark now, becomes palliative.

Maybe that is a form of wholeness,
when we own nothing except our hands;—
our eyes looking into the details of wood.

Wood that is no longer benign,
but significant. It offers ancient lullabies
that give history form and substance.

It is a growing relic, individual and whole
in a way we don’t see ourselves as being.
Carved into usable things,

it grows stronger somehow.
And we find we are not as unlike wood
as we once thought we were.

•

Posted on February 25, 2013February 16, 2022 by debi cimo

Dripping Fragments…embroidered with snails

~Purity.

The purity of words.
The purity of saying the very thing you need to say, reading the word apropos to the moment, seeing the familiar call of another soul in another place who speaks your thoughts — the rare taste of the divine in the common moment, calling the common moment out.

Whitman is tactile. Colette, vivacious. Both speak and the world quiets down.

Whitman prepares, Colette illustrates.

“Beautiful dripping fragments, the negligent list of one after
another as I happen to call them to me or think of them,
The real poems, (what we call poems being merely pictures,)
The poems of the privacy of the night,…
drooping shy and unseen that I always carry,…” — from “Spontaneous Me”, Walt Whitman

“Ask me…I could tell you…the dirge, the moaning in a minor key of the two pine trees that lulled my sleep, and the youthful voice, sweetly shrill, of my mother calling my name in the garden. I could open for you the books over which was bent my forehead…and in a puff I could blow away…the dark, wrinkled faces of the pansies,…which, innocent young pagan that I was, I pressed between the pages of a book. You will hear the hooting of my shy owl, and you will feel the warmth of the low wall, embroidered with snails, where I propped my elbow. You will warm your arms, folded one upon the other…” — from “Earthly Paradise”, Colette

The particular paragraph above echoes the piece that first introduced me to Colette. A chapter from “My Mother’s House” in which her mother, from the garden and from the aching spaces in her soul, called her children home — “Where, O, Where are the Children?”. I’d never read anything quite so unsettlingly pure. It was then I was riveted with writing.
Riveted with the purity of words.

•

Posted on January 22, 2013February 16, 2022 by debi cimo

A bit of Nin…

“The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery.” ― Anaïs Nin

“The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say.” ― Anaïs Nin

“If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don’t write, because our culture has no use for it.” ― Anaïs Nin

“We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.” ― Anaïs Nin

“Each friend represents a world in us, a world not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.” ― Anaïs Nin

•

Posted on March 15, 2012February 16, 2022 by debi cimo

Works of blood-and-beauty…

I was just reading about a poet, Jack Gilbert, who is (rightly) being celebrated all over the web today. His poetry is evocative and subtle, but direct and raw…it has the power to open old desires, reawaken some forgotten ache.

One site refers to his “Collected Poems” as “almost certainly among the two or three most important books of poetry that will be published this year.”

Even if it is (and the bits I’ve read really are enticing), I abscond from “important” works of poetry. Not that poetry isn’t important (it’s my life-blood), but, to me, poetry should be sumptuous–a feast for the senses, both felt and hinted at. When poetry is touted as “important”, it loses its self-respect (yes, I believe poetry has a sense of self-respect) and feeds into the pseudo-intellectuals who propagate its “importance”.

Read poetry for the beauty of the work, the heady sense of stepping headlong into another essence than the usual day-to-day. For instance…

“If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,
we lessen the importance of their deprivation.
We must risk delight…We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world…”
~from “A Brief for the Defense”

and:

“We find out the heart only by dismantling what
the heart knows. By redefining the morning,
we find a morning that comes just after darkness.
We can break through marriage into marriage.
By insisting on love we spoil it, get beyond
affection and wade mouth-deep into love.
We must unlearn the constellations to see the stars…”
~from “Tear it Down”

Jack Gilbert takes you, holds you captive for a moment in his works of blood-and-beauty, and will keep you enticed. As all incredible poetry should.

•

Posted on April 26, 2011February 16, 2022 by debi cimo

Music of Silence

Today is a Muriel Rukeyser day.

Out of all her bigger poetry, the one small piece that sticks with me is this:

THEN

“When I am dead, even then,
I will still love you, I will wait in these poems.
When I am dead, even then,
I am still listening to you.
I will still be making poems for you
Out of silence;
Silence will be falling into that silence,
It is building music.”

Simon and Garfunkel tinkered with the music of silence first when I was a small child, and it swirled in me till, when I finally stumbled over Muriel’s ‘Then’, I was absorbed in the simplicity of quietness — where Music, again and again, begins.

•