Ship of State

~ ps pirro ~ Leave a comment

Who knew it was all so fragile?
The ship of state a houseboat of cards
pontoon shantytown heaving
in the hot humid bluster of a grown
man’s tantrum. Sad!

Pretend I’m crazy.
It’s how we get things done.

In school they taught us how a bill
becomes law, powers held separate,
checks against power to keep it all
in balance yet here we are, keeling and
aroil and taking on water.

Pretend I’m the king.
Tell me that you love me.

We vacuum the oceans for treasures
to sell at auction, fake fortunes, fever heat
from a spray-on sun, peeling gilt,
lower the lifeboats, our iceberg cometh,
and lo! The devil cannot row.

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Love Sleeps

~ ps pirro ~ 2 Comments

I closed the door on you.
This is not a metaphor. You were snoring.  I couldn’t abide.

I need a quiet house. That’s not your fault.

You disorder me. You are a distraction,
a leaking faucet: dripping, dripping.

Reminding me
(I do not need your reminder)
of all I’ve left undone.

Maintenance foregone. Weatherstripping. Yard work.
The front porch needs painting.

Winter will be here before we know it.

The Breakup Poems

~ ps pirro

I don’t know how other writers proceed, but my own process is a circuitous one that winds along rivers and wanders through woodland and ends up in back yards, usually my own. I seldom know where I’m going until I get there, and even then it takes time to realize this is the place.

My new collection of poems is available now. Wander with me, if you like.

Breakup Poems

Sometimes Ashes, Sometimes Dust

~ ps pirro

I’m reading Timothy Egan’s stark and unsettling story of the Dust Bowl years, The Worst Hard Time, an uneasy feeling keeping me company as I go. “A powerful cautionary tale,” reads the back cover of my paperback edition, and it is, though one has to wonder if any caution is ever heeded when there is still profit to be made by clinging to willful ignorance.

If nothing else, the history of the dust storms of the High Plains throughout the 1930s provides ample evidence — as if we needed more — of the capacity of human activity to radically alter weather cycles. And the basic difference between weather and climate is time. But time is measured differently in Washington, D.C., where nobody reads, and the only cycle that matters is electoral in nature, while taking risks on rising sea levels and drawn-down aquifers is part and parcel of our casino economy, to which we all must pay tribute, sometimes in ashes, sometimes in dust.

So it goes.

 

All of the Past is Present

~ ps pirro

A couple years ago I carried a big bin of my journals out to a friend’s farm. We built a bonfire of fallen limbs in a wide dirt pit, and one by one I tore the pages from my journals and threw them in the fire.

A dozen years of journals, burnt to lovely motes and pale grey ash. I came home with a bin of tangled spiral bindings that I thought I might put to some artful use.

I still might. There’s no rush.

I expected to feel some kind of release in the aftermath, a liberation, a new lightness of being. I didn’t feel any of those things. Tho later, when I read Marie Kondo, I smiled at the notion of sparking joy, at the memory of burning pages to embers and tiny sparks. I know it’s not what she meant. But maybe it is.

Meditating with the Body

~ ps pirro

One of the somatic meditations I recently introduced into my practice makes me weep uncontrollably, and because of this I don’t often attempt it, even though it’s so cathartic and leaves me feeling weightless and liberated. It also exhausts me, and that’s something to consider when going into a session, since afterward there is still the day to be lived. Chores to do, and obligations to attend to, a body to be moved through space, energy required for all of this.

Sometimes I have to choose a path less fraught.

The other day I spoke with my facilitator and described how frantic I sometimes feel, how hard it is to not know what it is I’m moving through, moving toward, moving from, how panicked I sometimes get in the midst of all this not-knowing.

I am not a person prone to panic. And yet.

“Let’s just sit for thirty minutes,” he said. “How does that sound?”

It sounded hard, and I wanted to say so, but I didn’t want to be disagreeable, especially after he’d been kind enough to listen to me rant, so I arranged myself on my cushion, and we sat. Five minutes. Ten minutes.

The point beneath my left shoulder blade began to ache.

The body remembers everything.

The body is the subconscious. This is what I’m learning.

It’s painful to come back into the body, to awaken sleeping limbs gone numb with disuse, painful to stand, painful to walk. But what is the alternative? To remain asleep. Quiescent. Unfeeling. Unmoving. Unmoved.

I don’t want to be any of those things.

Fifteen minutes. Twenty.

To come back into the body, to listen to the body, is a radical act. The body as clear-cut, the body as strip mine. The body as resource, utility. The body as rock and dirt and sand and soil and veins of copper and veins of gold.

The body as womb, the body as nutrient, the body as home.

There’s a Crack in Everything

~ ps pirro

Must the world always break our hearts?

Maybe it must.

Maybe it is the function of the world to break our hearts. To break us open, again and again. To expose us and keep us exposed.

We are so adept at forming scar tissue, so eager to heal. Perhaps the function of the world is to keep us from healing too quickly, to hold us in a state of receptivity for as long as we can bear it.

Brokenness may be less a wound from which we must recover than an invitation to be with our pain, our confusion, our not-knowing, to feel it all without the overlay of narrative and story, without explanation or assignment of agency. Without closure.

It’s hard to do. We want the narrative.

I want the narrative.

I told my meditation teacher that I began my practice with the thought that it would help me deal with my shit so I could get on with my life.

I’m beginning to suspect that dealing with my shit is my life, insofar as dealing with my shit means staying in that state of receptivity.

It’s a vast space. There is room for so much.

The world breaks my heart on a daily basis. That’s how the light gets in.