ideoglossia

[karenfrances]

snow apples

~

this is Eden under erasure:

every apple has kept its blush,

a secret it refuses to give the cold

ice hushes the tree

like a hand over a mouth,

mid-confession

words unsaid —

notations of ripeness

written in frost

this is what it is to still be alive

when all around you

are dressing for death

– kfe

[karenfrances]

face averted safe, lost this is how I inhabit the world observant in an unfamiliar place before possibility knows itself each gesture is pure: running toward reaching for standing drift

you think you can see me but you can’t see into me

behind this veil everything is new — I  inhabit every cell of my body  detached, free to wander

it is now and I give myself wholly to the forest the earth the water the air —

– kfe

[karenfrances]

[karenfrances]

Sunday Morning Moonset at sunrise, the mind dividing between them. The teeth of the young sun sink through the breast of the cloud. And a great white pelican rests in the bay, on his way from Great Slave Lake to Guatemala. The mind is made out of the animals it has attended. In all the unspoken languages, it is their names.

To know is to have no opinions: to know meaning thinks, thinking means. The mind is the place not already taken. The mind is not-yet-gathered beads of water in the teeth of certain leaves— Saxifraga punctata, close by the stream under the ridge leading south to Mount Hozameen, for example—and the changing answers of the moon. The mind is light rain gathered on the ice-scarred rock, a crumpled mirror.

To be is to speak with the bristlecone pines and the whitebarks, glaciers and rivers, grasses and schists, and if it is permitted, once also with pelicans. Being is what there is room for in that conversation. The loved is what stays in the mind; that is, it has meaning, and meaning keeps going. This is the definition of meaning.

What is is not speech. What is is the line between the unspeakable and the already spoken.

– Robert Bringhurst

[karenfrances]

We are makers. Those of us who are fortunate enough to be able to handle the daily living business and still find time to learn ornate crafts become what the world calls artists. Some of us go straight to being artists without learning how to handle the simple daily tasks. But the happiest men and women in the world are those of us who find that if we don't, actively, make the chores of the day too difficult, there'll be lots of time left for the play we call art. And that if we do that we have the added joy of friends and strangers who love to see or hear or feel what we do, and we have the even greater pleasure of being able to meet, as peers, the other maniacs who live the way we live, and make the way we make. If it were still possible to be a romantic, I would say I have lived my life as if I thought I were a hero, and I know for a fact that all of my dearest friends are heroes and heroines to their toes. The worst Persian voluptuary could not have dreamed my most ordinary day. – Lew Welch

[karenfrances]

To the New Year

With what stillness at last you appear in the valley your first sunlight reaching down to touch the tips of a few high leaves that do not stir as though they had not noticed and did not know you at all then the voice of a dove calls from far away in itself to the hush of the morning

so this is the sound of you here and now whether or not anyone hears it this is where we have come with our age our knowledge such as it is and our hopes such as they are invisible before us untouched and still possible

– WS Merwin

[karenfrances]

These poems, these poems, these poems, she said, are poems with no love in them. These are the poems of a man who would leave his wife and child because they made noise in his study. These are the poems of a man who would murder his mother to claim the inheritance. These are the poems of a man like Plato, she said, meaning something I did not comprehend but which nevertheless offended me. These are the poems of a man who would rather sleep with himself than with women, she said. These are the poems of a man with eyes like a drawknife, with hands like a pickpocket’s hands, woven of water and logic and hunger, with no strand of love in them. These poems are as heartless as birdsong, as unmeant as elm leaves, which if they love love only the wide blue sky and the air and the idea of elm leaves. Self-love is an ending, she said, and not a beginning. Love means love of the thing sung, not of the song or the singing. These poems, she said.... You are, he said, beautiful. That is not love, she said rightly.

– Robert Bringhurst

[karenfrances]

love everyone. tell the truth.

"... [If you keep things in to protect others...] all you're doing is creating your own ulcer, your own early death and also destroying the living truth that exists between people and you're cutting off the person from real human contact, and you just did it again. It takes a little bit longer and it's a little more painful and it's kind of volatile to deal with the truth. The thing is that you can't deal with truth with other people who don't want to deal with truth. That's the problem. The distinction isn't that you have to tell everybody everything. The important thing is that you have to be able to tell everybody everything. OK? And that's the key one: you may meet other people with whom you've entered into a contract where you're willing to share everything because it's a living marriage, a living truth, a living relationship. Then you share everything. But otherwise you merely have to have the capacity to be able to share. You've got to listen to hear who other people are... If someone wants to stay in their prison, you have the moral obligation to leave them in their prison. You have no right to force somebody out of their prison. And truth destroys prison walls."

– Ram Dass

[karenfrances]

Awakening from the sky of dream, where every star shines forth at once –

Like the stars I've come wrapped in a blanket to find grace with, swinging weightless from the branch of this tree.

Stand strongly for me. Lights scream across the sky, each star dives for its only rightful place, pinpoint

In the black. But when my eyes open tonight, dark sweeps the spirit. No stars. Certainty of your absence.

So I prefer the dream. Juice of cherries stings the night-dry throat. I sleep and thirst, constellations coming only in sleep.

When you come to gaze the stars you come flashing with wonder –

– kfe

October 1991

[karenfrances]

Many poets are not poets for the same reason that many religious men are not saints: they never succeed in being themselves. They never get around to being the particular poet or the particular monk they are intended to be by God. They never become the man or the artist who is called for by all the circumstances of their individual lives. They waste their years in vain efforts to be some other poet, some other saint...They wear out their minds and bodies in a hopeless endeavor to have somebody else's experiences or write somebody else's poems. – Thomas Merton

[karenfrances]

Love's not the way to treat a friend. I wouldn't wish that on you. I don't want to see your eyes forgotten on a rainy day, lost in the endless purse of those who can remember nothing.

Love's not the way to treat a friend. I don't want to see you end up that way with your body being poured like wounded marble into the architecture of those who make bridges out of crippled birds.

Love's not the way to treat a friend. There are so many better things for you than to see your feelings sold as magic lanterns to somebody whose body casts no light. – Richard Brautigan

[karenfrances]

Jazzface // music by @giantpurplerabbits

[karenfrances]

windy today

[karenfrances]

I shall say that I want it all. If you ask me how much I want, I shall tell you that I want it all. You and I and everyone are flowing this morning Into the marvelous stream of oneness. Small pieces of imagination we are, We have come a long way to find ourselves, And for ourselves in the dark, The illusion of emancipation.

This morning my brother is back from his long adventure. He kneels before the altar and his eyes are filled with tears. His soul is looking for a shore to put an anchor, My own image of long ago. Let him kneel there and weep, Let him cry his heart out. Let him have his refuge for a thousand years. Enough to dry all his tears.

Because one of these nights I shall come. I have to come and set fire to this small cottage of his on a hill. His last shelter. My fire will destroy, Destroy everything. Taking away from him the only life raft he has, after a shipwreck.

In the utmost anguish of his soul, The shell will break. The light of the burning hut will witness, gloriously, his deliverance. I will wait for him beside the burning cottage, Tears will run down my cheeks. I shall be there to contemplate his new existence, And hold his hands in mine, And ask him how much he would want. He will smile at me and say that he wants it all. Just as I did. – Thich Nhat Hanh

[karenfrances]

We tell beginnings: for the flesh and the answer, or the look, the lake in the eye that knows, for the despair that flows down in widest rivers, cloud of home; and also the green tree of grace, all in the leaf, in the love that gives us ourselves.

The word of nourishment passes through the women, soldiers and orchards rooted in constellations, white towers, eyes of children: saying in time of war What shall we feed? I cannot say the end. Nourish beginnings, let us nourish beginnings. Not all things are blest, but the seeds of all things are blest. The blessing is in the seed. This moment, this seed, this wave of the sea, this look, this instant of love. Years over wars and an imagining of peace.  Or the expiation journey toward peace which is many wishes flaming together, fierce pure life, the many-living home. Love that gives us ourselves, in the world known to all new techniques for the healing of the wound, and the unknown world.  One life, or the faring stars.

– Muriel Rukeyser

[karenfrances]

When I am lain, am lain in earth, May my wrongs create no trouble, No trouble in my breast.

Music: Nick Hudson Video: Karen Frances Eng

[karenfrances]

From blossoms comes this brown paper bag of peaches we bought from the boy at the bend in the road where we turned toward    signs painted Peaches. 

From laden boughs, from hands, from sweet fellowship in the bins, comes nectar at the roadside, succulent peaches we devour, dusty skin and all, comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat. O, to take what we love inside, to carry within us an orchard, to eat not only the skin, but the shade, not only the sugar, but the days, to hold the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into the round jubilance of peach. There are days we live as if death were nowhere in the background; from joy to joy to joy, from wing to wing, from blossom to blossom to impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom. – Li Young-Lee