Why do we write?
Please note that today's blog is punctuated by the illustrations of Dan Funderburgh.
To be fully alive. "A human being has so many skins inside, covering the depths of the heart. We know so many things, but we don't know ourselves! Why, thirty or forty skins or hides, as thick and hard as an ox's or bear's, cover the soul. Go into your own ground and learn to know yourself there."--Meister Eckhart |
from the Falling Bodies series
by Cheryl Hicks
Ours is a natural history;
if shattered,
our spectacular reactions
would glow.
My body knows instinctively
how you love me.
Every stone knows your hands,
how they think
about my waist.
Every wash knows the taste
of our kissopen mouthed,
and the heat sweetly channeled
when your thumbs
trace the twin indentations
at the base of my spine.
One more time,
try to say
our love is a loose tooth,
hesitation a pale dream.
Out of time,
we are a hollow song
grinding ourselves
against perfect rhyme.
Today is Sunday
and the sun has just set.
I say you can’t hide
when a colorless moon
paints a hole in the sky.
I’ve known moisture,
I’ve known heat,
I’ve known radiating truth.
Break me open.
I’ll break you.
We are all filled with crystals.
from the Conversations with the Virgin series
by Cheryl Hicks
the first line of this poem
was stolen from a memory
but I was born with this syntax
prior to the work, straight from the brain,
adopting a voice and a shadow,
and wanting very much
to talk with you like this forever
My life is filled with interference,
thoughts and images,
often incoherence,
and some days
colors shift
going Doppler like sounds,
until I, living six inches in front of my body,
become all senses and no sense.
Then red-yellow, green and blue,
I am a perfect ellipse, reduced,
and too dense for miracles or cures
Such awareness
demands a loss of blood,
so I, translucent and buoyed by dizziness,
am earthbound by invisible wounds.
Without the filters
of our co-mingled confusion,
we would all fall after each tentative step,
but we continue
taking off and landing
using engine thrusts alone,
trying to see without light
and at night choosing to forget
that retrieving ordnance
becomes more difficult
once the shells have corroded.
Planting teeth, growing soldiers, and
all the while struggling against gravity,
Lady of Logic, I implore you:
take this torment, mend this song
Dough-woman who has been torn into pieces,
yours is still a broken-spokes-beautiful-kind-smile,
but you, you were given to the people to eat!”
from the Conversations with the Virgin series
by Cheryl Hicks
Lady of Limitless Illumination,
I have slept at the seam of the sea,
marking chances
swept ashore by the curl
and wondering at the break
where swirling inconsistencies
have hissed and crossed themselves
twist over twist
since the ocean first turned.
I have counted waves against my hips,
held in place by surface tension,
often hearing moaning spirits
seep an oil spilled from the deep.
I have ached to feel the motion,
to be hurled to the sand and back
into sun-sparked union,
ambiguity diffusing into foam.
Focused on the breathing earth,
I have imagined
far below her wavering surface,
a layer-less passage, descending
in counterpoint to silver round air
into a lair where oxygen holds no sway
and the past is painted
in shades of former tightness.
Down and down,
blue-gray against black shadow,
headless statues dance without illumination.
Without arms, they reach for me
and advance in slow motion, rising
whole-bodied toward the ceiling.
All my points have broken off.
I am left unweathered yet indistinct.
Around the edges in this deep,
blood escapes in feathered streams,
smoky black, and winds its way
toward the rhythmic shore.
There I dance with the sun,
till the movement brings sleep.
& THE SUBSEQUENT MELTDOWN
from the Conversations with the Virgin series
by Cheryl Hicks
Lady of Longing,
I have learned something
about the way days fall into place,
like ideas,
preordained packets,
not cube-like by necessity,
but often illuminated & interconnected.
To allow life to fall away
gracefully, must be
the greatest gift.
And if there was not enough touching?
I fear there were never enough days.
Anyway, the key remains.
The pieces will fall.
And when they’ve all dropped,
the falling will stop.
Then perhaps there will be lightning
with no rain
and no thunder.
Hardly fodder for the tabloids,
yet off the scale
in unexpectedness.