Loose Leaf Notes

1. Monarch rhymes with hierarch, the high authority of sacred matters.

2.Treed-In: I once loved an apple tree / filled with red fruit / in a hidden orchard in Eden / But now the maple trees / have grown large / They block out the sun / There’s no room to stretch / Now the wind has downed limbs / I’ve gone porous and gray / Now the land around me / is not the same

3. New golden flowers / have bloomed and taken over / They’re pretty to look at / but have crowded out the rest / Only one monarch butterfly / came to the orchard this year / I took its picture / to prove it was there

4. “Words are events, they do things, change things. They transform both speaker and hearer; they feed energy back and forth and amplify it. They feed understanding or emotion back and forth and amplify it.” Ursula K. Le Guin on the magic of real human conversation

5.  Candle flame and songs for my brother John’s passing HERE.

6. On watching the documentary See Me in the Good Light (Sundance’s Festival Favorite Award) for the first time without (recently passed poet) Andrea Gibson by Megan Falley:    “Last week’s screening in NYC was the first time I saw the film without Andrea in the world. In the first few minutes, I could hardly
pick my head up. The scenes hadn’t changed, but I had—every moment refracted through the jagged lens of grief. My heart broke like a bowl thrown at a wall. I cried the whole way through. Like a widow who tries to dive into her lover’s casket, I wanted to plunge myself into the screen, into the past, into a version of our home where Andrea still wandered, still sat at our desk to type out some casual brilliance. My hand felt operated by a delusional marionette. For an hour and a half I suppressed what felt like the most natural urge: to reach toward the film and pluck Andrea out of it, back into this tangible reality, into the red velvet seat beside me…”

7. “…Sitting there with the projector’s soft whirr in the distance, the faint stick of soda beneath my shoes, my lap a receptacle for tattered Kleenex—I was reminded of the first movie that ever undid me in the dark: Titanic. It was the winter of 1997. I was nine. The movie was three hours and fifteen minutes long, but my attention never wavered. I wonder if I even blinked. What’s been classified as “an epic romantic disaster film” was an instant classic in my fourth-grade heart. At that age, I hadn’t yet loved. I hadn’t yet lost. But something in me needed those swells of human emotion, as if my body understood before my mind that they’d be important one day. (Maybe that’s what all storytelling is for. To let us practice being human before life requires it. We don’t just watch movies and plays, we don’t just read books; we try them on. And when reality finally arrives, we recognize the shape of it. Our hearts have already
practiced.)”

8. Ecstatic or erotic?

9. I’m preparing for a guest poetry reading at a friend’s Poetry with Rumi  (mystic estatic poet) event, and it occurred to me while looking for a couple of my poems to read that Rumi’s poetry is love poetry, whether about the beloved in the divine or the divine in the beloved.

10. Ecstasy itself originated in the phrase “ekhistanai”, which meant “to place, to make stand out”, or to determine. In Ancient Greek it had come to mean being apart from one’s Self. By the seventeenth century in Christian mysticism it had come to mean the erotic rapture experienced in contemplation of the divine.

11. I’m in love with…

12. Legend holds that Prince William of Orange (later King William III) was so adored by some early European settlers to North America that they bequeathed the name “Monarch” to our very orange and regal butterfly in his honor.

13: The butterfly effect: The idea that a small change, action, or event can cause much larger one elsewhere or in the future through a chain reaction. An allusion to chaos theory, popularized by the notion that a butterfly flapping its wings in one part of the world might cause a tornado many miles away.

__________Thirteen Thursday