THE WOMAN WHO WOULD DANCE
The woman who would dance on treetops;
who would walk with trees,
Tell me:
What is the shape and form and extent of the tree?
What is its roots, and what its height?
How can its girth be encompassed?
How can its wisdom be translated?
There is, you see, no merit in finding answers.
Answers are not how this, or any other, universe functions.
Multiply the questions.
Each a branch, each a root.
Questions. Spreading, holding,
Illuminating, transducing.
The word for tree
Is the word for truth,
And it is not one thing
Nor many.
To wrap it around an ankle,
A web around a bone, around skin
Around a scent, around a movement.
To wear a tree. To be worn,
Within and without.
Smiled upon, an ocean waved and rippled.
To be cast out upon a twig,
Without a name,
In a bag with no name,
In a basket with no name.
To forget one name, a touch of light,
A trembling on starlight,
A passage between attractors.
Begin and continue:
That is a tree.
An umbrella to worlds
A clamour of tongues
Green and cymbal-sharp,
Their little edges are questions.
To find an image
One must not seek an image,
(we need no other backwards mirror things),
To scribble and allow the dust
To coagulate, drip and remember
That all the waters of the world
Are one river.
The slightest, remotest puddle,
Slowly drawn upward, freedom
Within gravity to become cloud,
The tiniest thing, the thing most free,
Falling with accumulation,
Flowing with urgent weight,
Becoming all else by need.
A fountain of water held upright
By the will of the sun.
An urge to delve darkness,
To send out messengers,
To converse with all the syllables of scent.
This becomes another tree, so you see.
A one, a self, a many, a one.
Passionately, she wishes to become inscribed,
Pictured, illuminated, to become aligned,
Limned, re-limbed.
Chosen, loosed, re-booted,
A future unveiled, woven around.
The past taken up, enthroned
And unfolded. Truth made real
In arching bough, the only dance there is,
A bounce up and out from ground
And a certain, graceful, impossibly slow
Decline.
simonhlilly 
Words Nest
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, boundaries, commentary, cosmologies, creation, edges, endings, existence, identity, Poetry, psychology, reply, words, writing on February 21, 2016| Leave a Comment »
But ‘we’ is not circled.
We have no edge ( though we think otherwise)
(though we think we think).
We think beginnings and endings,
we think words, breath, silence, breath,
intake the other, exhale the other.
cannot remember any moment beyond
a circumscribed horizon, cannot, even, the dreams,
nor the memories, for sure (was it, was, was it so, was it not?)
There are, of course, clues.
Vagrants, with a certain mildewed smell,
mutter slewed directions, their demon-bright eyes.
(but those we shun, as shadows,
as churchyards at night, as the insisting amoral voices in the mist,
peripheral, shuffled, ambiguous).
The long halls, the rooms, the chambers.
My dear Giordano, such equations, such equators.
So few and tired are the moronic habitual paths,
so broad the primrose paths
to Hell untrod, unstudied.
A rumour of damnation, like a roll of distant thunder,
a storm coming. Well, certainly, there is a storm coming.
From the edges to the centre, from the centre to the edges..
An ending ( of sorts).
And then it echoes around another’s skull.
Seed syllables.
The end of worlds.
The beginning of worlds.
—
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