knowing the steps toward home (on poetry and place/audio)

The Universe is afoot and many are on the brink of, or in the midst of, profound change. To be sure, “home” carries numerous meanings — so be mindful of your attachment to that word.  I am grateful to whoever visited this older post from 2009, brought these words back to my awareness, and inspired me to record them.

This print illustrates a famous moment from the tenth century epic, Ise Monogatari (Tales of Ise). It is commonly held that the hero of this novel is the poet Ariwara Narihira Ason (828 – 880), an Emperor’s grandson, and one of the “Six Great Poets”. Legend states that he was exiled as the result of an affair with the empress. This scene shows him carrying his lover Nijō-no-tsubone across a grassy moor at night, pursued by a party of men with torches.

I can scarcely tell you where I’ve traveled
The maps have yet to be drawn
Terrain emerges from heights and depths in every moment,
Uncharted landscapes arise with the sun.

I know only that I wandered among the dunes
Weighed down by ancient sacks stuffed full of recrimination
Earthen pots brimmed with incomplete assumptions
Sacred oils nested deep within the skins of alabaster jars.

I turned down dusty highways ringed by sage and supposition
Met my own gaze behind bovine eyes and waving prairie grasses
Only to be jolted out of a creeping complacency
By the applause of thunder and hot-white lightning
Rumbling and riveting their way across an unsettled sky.

It is not words on paper that make the poet
But the way in which one creates the poetic life,
The deft melding of rhythm and meter
The juxtaposition of long, languid strokes of yearning
With staccato bursts of becoming,
The full and rich laid up against the dark and empty
Glorious containment coupled effortlessly with the unknowable everything
And a fractal patterning that presages cycles now run their course.

My poetry lives in my every step
Every in-breath and exhalation,
It unfolds from the deepest recesses of a heart
that will not clang shut the drawbridge,
From a soul whose Divine connection may sway
under the weight of human machinations
Yet will steadfastly refuse to exchange faith for fear,
or compassion for complicity.

These scratchings on the discarded bodies of trees
Are not byproduct but prima material
They rest in the marrow of every bone
Until they wrestle themselves free in the face of most formidable foes,
Stanzas irregular, ponderous executions of wordplay obsolescent
Rhyme schemes interwoven in a crazy-quilt of flash and introspection
Neither pen nor ink hastens the dredging.

I sat on the wall,
Flanked by the generous abundance of summer
And the passionate celebration that autumn brings,
The sun, the moon, the stars embrace me with flagrant arousal,
My poembody arcs in erogenous splendor.

Weary of the shifting sands
I have come down off the dunes
Lassoed my own roots and tilled my inner soil,
No longer do I offer entry to boulders of immeasurable size,
The tongue of the mesa licks clean my wounds
As Creation’s immensity comforts a chafed and weathered heart.

Let it be said
that my first gesture was to smile,
That I did not shirk when called to action
That I put down my knife, my sword,
Tempered the call of my drum,
And moved on with not a glance behind me.

If I carried doubts
Let it be said they remained unnoticed
That my fear receded quietly and without pause,
That hesitation made no appearance on the empty stage
And resistance slumbered on ‘neath a blanket softly tossed.

Let all who observe speak of a quiet glow surrounding my crown
An inexplicable flurry of wings
Echoing a muffled heartbeat cross twilight-kissed skies,
Let them remember that birdsong filled the trees
And made its way in all directions,
That a gentle peace descended o’er me
And that my footsteps carried me Home.