The Name of a Breeze


If forest is a tree then rain is a mirror
on the branches of that tree. Language is a gale
between the tree and stillness is the name

of a breeze which reflects alone. Our comrade,
a logger's blunder, is called Bridge:
his skin is made of silence and his slender fungus 

is slippery with potential. The quail who murmurs 
on the branches has her tail in the prism of rain
and her wings in the dullness of shadow. We

spend hours moving to and from the moist ground
below the tree. Sometimes we stay near the branches
and the quail sails toward us like a pause.

Sometimes we pummel pebbles in error
and watch rippled circles echo openly
from our hands. We are learning to breeze through 

thought; we are stepping closer to speak.

Both by a military upbringing and the run-drag-wanderlust that followed, I have some idea of what it is to be between. There is an entire discourse, of course, related to poetry as a rejected art form between parenthesis. Yet poetry reaches out. My hope is that my poetry is, as Wallace Stevens writes "a cry to occasions." Occasions in all colors, multiple languages, multiple grammars.

My poetry aims to hear similarity stalking, even as difference locks in words. Should we speak from "inside a vault?" We are by the river. We are by the sea. It's cold. Won't someone understand this infomercial by the cold river? If a reader understands, have I chanted a poetry evangelism? Maybe we expect a bird to chirp an answer, a simple song. And that is the "upper limit of music," nods Creeley. Simple poetry, or poetry that appeals to the rational, is inside and outside the parenthesis. Let's say the sun sets, and we still pound out something new of this poem sunset. Let's call it "a sensual infrastructure."

These are easier images. They are the river running by a camp site: all sparkle, babble, and turned--the way things are wet between. These images are the burning questions. They are the branches on a bough, a waxing gibbous, a rational necessity. You strip the moment. You strip your poem of the metaphorical. And your poem is a naked little animal. Is the poem now somewhat freed? "That which exists through itself is what is called meaning," Olsen nods. It is less taxing to strip, we must admit. And this nakedness is partly what readers need. So in my poems, sometimes, this nakedness and freedom. Because for those rational, not always infomercial bound, but needing the highway therapy of a concrete ground--I want to speak to her, to him. I want to speak simply the wanting.

But I want you too--like me--to swerve, to twist, and turn. I want you to feel the weight of the world, at least on one shoulder. A poem's relationship to the unknown is as necessary as its relationship to the rational. Aren't we always tug and swim? Behind me, with a flashlight, I hear the children. I hear the rush of the river. And I hear my fellow poet say, the mind is a building, dear. What is the mind by the rush of a river? The river says watch what you lose.  

Hélène Cixous writes "Because poetry involves gaining strength through the unconscious and because the unconscious, that other limitless country, is the place where the repressed manage to survive." Poetry's relationship then to the unknown is partly one of survival.

Words discover--even un-referentially, even un-known. Charles Simic also conjures writing as a space "to discover an authentic ground where poetry has its being and on that spot build a new ontology." A "parenthetical ontology?"

Poetry allows multiplicity. And in this multiplicity, it is not necessary to separate the rational from the unknown. Perhaps the relation of poetry to the unknown is actually an attempt to move away rather than towards narcissism. Poetry, its freedom of speech, digs in to color the word, to type/understand difference, an Other and to what is between.   As we reach our identities out, beyond the parenthesis, sometimes we scatter like sun, water-sparkled, entropy.