Alan Botsford
Who has not seen the darkening shadow moving across the face of our days, or heard the snarl and growl of the age resounding in our ears, the beast rearing up out of our forgetfulness and growing insatiable by our blindness, and the stories we tell ourselves but the innumerable, subtle variations of what we are capable of forgetting, that flies in the face of the present–whose simple grace of the mundane, like home, hardly knows where it is from? For the bad news is all there is sometimes–the collapse of this state, the death of that heart–that one wonders how to turn the page or to stop reading altogether and make for the stillness, the centering silence where a music reigns, clear and crystalline, a reed belt tied round the waist of the spirit that lifts it past the old pains, the present agonies, towards the deep blue waters of tears shed and gathered into a living stream, past all moaning and weeping, past all cursing and quarreling, past all human dilemmas, towards the latent and possible, the play of style, neither slow and calm nor quick and violent, merely simple, homelike, common in an artless, expressioned and textured turn, intending neither to arouse and provoke, nor put nature’s manifest booty on display per se, merely remaining, continuing (for a long time?) as psyche continues, fluttering into roles, particular and private, influential and public, oscillating in a circuit of you (“Farewell”?) and me (“Welcome!”) (“Peace!”) in accord with our natures interchanging, weak to strong and back again, aviating and slipping separately through the air of our animal breath, divinely possessed of the smallest and the least, the last and the lost who do not look back nor sniff downwind for future portents, just excluding less and less and drawing deeper the draught of air taken into the lungs, and exhaling to where all is left undone, a blank account, a hidden surplus, an unspent inheritance, an unrecorded history, an uninhabited estate, yet all coming together and flowing out as a tendency, an interval, a trace, sleepy and languid, yet bright and lively, the lyric voice noting its concession to whatﾕs next and ever so…
To hunt for traces of places and faces, then, storied deep down under the bed of thunder between whose lightning-ed sheets–crack!–we once to the sacred journey awoke, faith and doubt our companions ever since, read daily and throughout each night where we hear spoken to us the I that is essentially the you you thought you left behind but remains a gift to the we we are –O unbelievably still– as the days wheeling the words back into mystic chords where begin acts of culture as facts in nature, out of words worlding us towards and away from each other, heavenly bodies orbiting in space, stars, planets, suns, galaxies spinning, wheeling fast holding motions in the depths of the earth, soil and magma and lava swirling underneath as molten masses hurling up these sounds, these words ample, impartial, spoken and heard in the heartbeat and bloodlines coursing through veins and arteries that keep us connected, dazzled, and in the wheel of time.
To remain at the surface of discourse telling us what we already know, however, is one thing. To go down and then come back up again telling us what we don’t know is another thing entirely. If tears flow sometimes, go with it. If fears glow at other times, walk beside them. Show your compassion and forgiveness, say how much you understand that your undoing is not their doing when, undone, you’re merely a shadow of yourself on the trail to a new body, loved into words, embraced as a phrase and stage at which we, from this intercourse, find we have everything in common, even our deaths, save one thing. Which is why, to be honest, the real in you tries to reel otherness in, that catch it’s time now to let go of, to throw back into the deeps before the swells, looming large as stories, swallow you whole.
Yes, being seen through is family work, is how we fulfill ourselves in distributing resources and energy that takes us roaring back to where we started, fresh –though the expanding union of yesterday (proud & defiant), today (important as ever), and tomorrow (just around the corner, hanging on a promise) is still far from over.
But to be safe, let’s eye together (for now), those open spaces we can spy up ahead that no photo will capture, no sentence will enclose, that prime location resistant way way way down to a depth, dreams and all, of a lifetime.
CONTENTS
Kurahara Shinjiro
Ayukawa Nobuo
Kisaka Ryo
Alicia Ostriker
J.P. Dancing Bear
Katherine Riegel
Bill Wolak
Ginger Murchison
Temple Cone
Judy Halebsky
Yoko Danno
