I’m going to go on a journey here— hopefully, a journey that dissolves a bit of this notion that my I is somehow separate from your You, you a separate autonomous reader reading the object that is this text. This journey is both one of exploration and dissolution, and it begins with a film called Home.

vibration surrenders to vibration
cloistered living room of holy, holy- stiff, starch, white
pursed lips- halo O
prayer books pressed in palms obedient

“I’m here to disappear, “I’ve said… The writing confirms the fragility and unbearable beauty of our existence. Its purpose isn’t immortality. It’s more complex and interesting than that. It’s discovering life at the edge of death, all the time.”

Anne Waldman

On the Yin Frontier

Baby heads float above enlightened Buddha stem, neck the truncated conduit of terra cotta stability

The yin frontier is the interior, narrow road to, it’s home before the conquering tribe rolls in, and then it’s the union of flesh after the surge of yang when the Celts ate the hearts of their admired enemies

I was working on am essay/poem about the yin frontier, and I found myself writing this instead....

Adam like an atom ricochet-naming

Bird, shin, breath, bee
Brain, radio, invisible, electricity

Earth, air, man, beast, fire, cardinal, wing, beak,
flesh, skin, breath, breast, stomach, orchid, bee,
hope, box, lock, key, he, she, home, village,

Today, I’ve been living and breathing beside atom bomb dreams. I’ve been researching, writing emails, and even one proposal in an effort to begin to lay the groundwork for a creative project that I mentioned in my last post.

So last night I watched the documentary, "The Atomic Café." For those who haven’t seen it, it’s a loose documentary, a compilation of footage from American atom bomb propaganda, set to period songs of the time like “Atomic Cocktail.” The film has this upbeat, end of the war, jubilant swing juxtaposed beside the gross devastations leveled on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

I just stumbled across this passage in my search for poem cut-up material. Too amazing not to share...

Ursula K. Le Guin
The Wave in the Mind: Talks And Essays on The Writer, The Reader, And The Imagination
Shambhala: Boston, 2004

THE FRONTIER

A frontier has two sides. It is an interface, a threshold, a liminal site, with all the danger and promise of liminality.