Word Medicine

Take two poems and call me in the morning

[apoemaday]

The Arrowhead

by Mary Oliver

The arrowhead, which I found beside the river, was glittering and pointed. I picked it up, and said, “Now, it’s mine.” I thought of showing it to friends. I thought of putting it—such an imposing trinket— in a little box, on my desk. Halfway home, past the cut fields, the old ghost stood under the hickories. “I would rather drink the wind,” he said, “I would rather eat mud and die than steal as you steal, than lie as you lie.”

[word-medicine]

The Underworld

- by Sharon Bryan

When I lived in the foothills birds flocked to the feeder:

house finches, goldfinches, skyblue lazuli buntings,

impeccably dressed chickadees, sparrows in work clothes, even

hummingbirds fastforwarding through the trees. Some of them

disappeared after a week, headed north, I thought, with the sun.

But the first cool day they were back, then gone,

then back, more reliable than weathermen, and I realized

they hadn’t gone north at all, but up the mountain, as invisible

to me as if they had flown a thousand miles, yet in reality

just out of sight, out of reach— maybe at the end of our lives

the world lifts that slightly away from us, and returns once

or twice to see if we’ve refilled the feeder, if we still remember it,

or if we’ve taken leave of our senses altogether.

[word-medicine]

Like a snake, my heart has shed its skin. I hold it there in my hand, full of honey and wounds.

by Federico García Lorca

[word-medicine]

Marriage

- by Ellen Bass

When you finally, after deep illness, lay the length of your body on mine, isn’t it like the strata of the earth, the pressure of time on sand, mud, bits of shell, all the years, uncountable wakings, sleepings, sleepless nights, fights, ordinary mornings talking about nothing, and the brief fiery plummets, and the unselfconscious silences of animals grazing, the moving water, wind, ice that carries the minutes, leaves behind minerals that bind the sediment into rock. How to bear the weight, with every flake of bone pressed in. Then, how to bear when the weight is gone, the way a woman whose neck has been coiled with brass can no longer hold it up alone. Oh love, it is balm, but also a seal. It binds us tight as the fur of a rabbit to the rabbit. When you strip it, grasping the edge of the sliced skin, pulling the glossy membranes apart, the body is warm and limp. If you could, you’d climb inside that wet, slick skin and carry it on your back. This is not neat and white and lacy like a wedding, not the bright effervescence of champagne spilling over the throat of the bottle. This visceral bloody union that is love, but beyond love. Beyond charm and delight the way you to yourself are past charm and delight. This is the shucked meat of love, the alleys and broken glass of love, the petals torn off the branches of love, the dizzy hoarse cry, the stubborn hunger.

[word-medicine]

Sink Your Fingers into the Darkness of My Fur

- By Ellen Bass

Up until this sore minute, you could turn the key, pivot away. But mine is the only medicine now wherever you go or follow. The past is so far away, but it flickers, then cleaves the night. The bones of the past splinter between our teeth. This is our life, love. Why did I think it would be anything less than too much of everything? I know you remember that cheap motel on the coast where we drank red wine, the sea flashing its gold scales as sun soaked our skin. You said, This must be what people mean when they say I could die now. Now we’re so much closer to death than we were then. Who isn’t crushed, stubbed out beneath a clumsy heel? Who hasn’t stood at the open window, sleepless, for the solace of the damp air? I had to get old to carry both buckets yoked on my shoulders. Sweet and bitter waters I drink from. Let me know you, ox you. I want your scent in my hair. I want your jokes. Hang your kisses on all my branches, please. Sink your fingers into the darkness of my fur.

[word-medicine]

You have everything but one thing: madness. A man needs a little madness or else - he never dares cut the rope and be free.

 Nikos Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek

[word-medicine]

You can knock on a deaf man's door forever.

Nikos Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek

[apoemaday]

The Indigo Bunting

by Robert Bly

I go to the door often. Night and summer. Crickets lift their cries. I know you are out. You are driving late through the summer night.

I do not know what will happen. I have no claim on you. I am one star you have as guide; others love you, the night so dark over the Azores.

You have been working outdoors, gone all week. I feel you in this lamp lit so late. As I reach for it I feel myself driving through the night.

I love a firmness in you that disdains the trivial and regains the difficult. You become part then of the firmness of night, the granite holding up walls.

There were women in Egypt who supported with their firmness the stars as they revolved, hardly aware of the passage from night to day and back to night.

I love you where you go through the night, not swerving, clear as the indigo bunting in her flight, passing over two thousand miles of ocean.

[word-medicine]

Someday your middle finger will be a candle 
lit for anyone who tries to rinse 
the burning song out of your mouth.

by Andrea Gibson, from the poem ‘A Genderfull Pep-talk for My Younger Self’

[word-medicine]

New Rule

- by Anne Carson

A New Year’s white morning of hard new ice. High on the frozen branches I saw a squirrel jump and skid. Is this scary? he seemed to say and glanced

down at me, clutching his branch as it bobbed in stiff recoil – or is it just that everything sounds wrong today? The branches

clinked. He wiped his small cold lips with one hand. Do you fear the same things as

I fear? I countered, looking up. His empire of branches slid against the air. The night of hooks?

The man blade left open on the stair? Not enough spin on it, said my true love when he left in our fifth year.

The squirrel bounced down a branch and caught a peg of tears. The way to hold on is

afterwords so clear.

[word-medicine]

The Quality of Sprawl

- by Les Murray

Sprawl is the quality of the man who cut down his Rolls-Royce into a farm utility truck, and sprawl is what the company lacked when it made repeated efforts to buy the vehicle back and repair its image.

Sprawl is doing your farming by aeroplane, roughly, or driving a hitchhiker that extra hundred miles home. It is the rococo of being your own still centre. It is never lighting cigars with ten-dollar notes: that’s idiot ostentation and murder of starving people. Nor can it be bought with the ash of million-dollar deeds.

Sprawl lengthens the legs; it trains greyhounds on liver and beer. Sprawl almost never says Why not? with palms comically raised nor can it be dressed for, not even in running shoes worn with mink and a nose ring. THat is Society. That’s Style. Sprawl is more like the thirteenth banana in a dozen or anyway the fourteenth.

Sprawl is Hank Stamper in Never Give an Inch bisecting an obstructive official’s desk with a chainsaw. Not harming the official. Sprawl is never brutal though it’s often intransigent. Sprawl is never Simon de Montfort at a town-storming: Kill them all! God will know his own. Knowing the man’s name this was said to might be sprawl.

Sprawl occurs in art. THe fifteenth to twenty-first lines in a sonnet, for example. And in certain paintings; I have sprawl enough to have forgotten which paintings. Turner’s glorious Burning of the Houses of Parliament comes to mind, a doubling bannered triumph of sprawl – except, he didn’t fire them.

Sprawl gets up the nose of many kinds of people (every kind that comes in kinds) whose futures don’t include it. Some decry it as criminal presumption, silken-robed Pope Alexander dividing the new world between Spain and Portugal. If he smiled in petto afterwards, perhaps the thing did have sprawl.

Sprawl is really classless, though. It’s John Christopher Frederick Murray asleep in his neighbours’ best bed in spurs and oilskins but not having thrown up; sprawl is never Calum who, drunk, along the hallways of our house, reinvented the Festoon. Rather it’s Beatrice Miles going twelve hundred ditto in a taxi, No Lewd Advances, No Hitting Animals, No Speeding, on the proceeds of her two-bob-a-sonnet Shakespeare readings. An image of my country. And would that it were more so.

No, sprawl is full-gloss murals on a council-house wall. Sprawl leans on things. It is loose-limbed in its mind. Reprimanded and dismissed it listens with a grin and one boot up on the rail of possibility. It may have to leave the Earth. Being roughly Christian, it scratches the other cheek and thinks it unlikely. Though people have been shot for sprawl.

[word-medicine]

Underbelly

- By Nicole Homer 

Wouldbelove, do not think of me as a whetstone until you hear the whole story:

In it, I’m not the hero, but I’m not the villain either so let’s say, in the story, I was human

and made of human-things: fear and hands, underbelly and blade. Let me

say it plain: I loved someone

and I failed at it. Let me say it another way: I like to call myself wound

but I will answer to knife. Sometimes I think we have the same name, Notquitelove. I want

to be soft, to say here is my underbelly and I want you to hold the knife, but I don’t know what I want you to do:

plunge or mercy. I deserve both. I want to hold and be held.  

Let me say it again, Possiblelove: I’m not sure you should. The truth is: If you don’t, I won’t

die of want or lonely, just time. And not now, not even soon. But that’s how every story ends eventually.

Here is how one might start: Before. The truth? I’m not a liar but I close my eyes a lot, Couldbelove.

Before, I let a blade slide itself sharp against me. Look at where I once bloomed red and pulsing. A keloid

history. I have not forgotten the knife or that I loved it or what it was like before: my unscarred body

visits me in dreams and photographs. Maybelove, I barely recognize it without the armor of its scars.

I am trying to tell the truth: the dreams are how I haunt myself. Maybe I’m not telling the whole story:

I loved someone and now I don’t. I can’t promise to leave you unscarred. The truth: I am a map

of every blade I ever held. This is not a dream. Look at us now: all grit and density. What, Wouldbelove

do you know of knives? Do you think you are a soft thing? I don’t. Maybe the truth is: Both. Blade and guard.

My truth is: blade. My hands

on the blade; my hands, the blade; my hands carving and re-carving every overzealous fibrous

memory. The truth is: I want to hold your hands because they are like mine. Holding a knife

by the blade and sharpening it. In your dreams, how much invitation to pierce are you? Perhapslove, the truth is: I am afraid

we are both knives, both stones, both scarred. Or we will be.

The truth is: I have made fire before: stone against stone. Mightbelove, I have sharpened

this knife before: blade against blade. I have hurt and hungered before: flesh

against flesh. I won’t make a dull promise.

[apoemaday]

Sheep in Fog

by Sylvia Plath

The hills step off into whiteness. People or stars Regard me sadly, I disappoint them.

The train leaves a line of breath. O slow Horse the colour of rust,

Hooves, dolorous bells– All morning the Morning has been blackening,

A flower left out. My bones hold a stillness, the far Fields melt my heart.

They threaten To let me through to a heaven Starless and fatherless, a dark water.

[word-medicine]

Jabulani Dhlamini

Ezisalayo, 2018, Goodman Gallery 

Pigment inks on fibre silk cotton rag 

[dichosyvida]

As a writer you are free. You are about the freest person that ever was. Your freedom is what you have bought with your solitude, your loneliness.

Ursula Le Guin (via dichosyvida)

[anthropologist-on-the-loose]

The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by scholars and philosophers, as considering happiness as a something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil is interesting. This is the sin of the artist: a refusal to admit that evil is dull and pain is boring.

Ursula Le Guin, The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas (via anthropologist-on-the-loose)

[word-medicine]

Mountain Seclusion

By Dōgen

I won’t even stop at the valley’s brook for fear that my shadow may flow into the world.