AG2023_1034232a or out of this … enchantment

AG2023_1034232a

                                               out
                                               of
                                               this
                                               hole—
                                                 —
                                               slips
                                               moon   —

           out
           of
           this
                          cloudhole

Elsa Hildegard Baroness von Freytag-Loringhoven, Enchantment

AG2023_1140723ac

AG2023_1140723ac

“The gut of silence … was louder than sound itself” (P. Djèlí Clark, The Haunting of Tram Car 015)

“When I behold, upon the night’s starr’d face, 
  Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance, 
And think that I may never live to trace 
  Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;”

John Keats, When I Have Fears that I May Cease to Be


Popova on Eric Berne–self, game, spontaneity, intimacy, awareness.

AG2023_1077719a or your wind-tossed travels

AG2023_1077719a

“No handshakes. No goodbyes. But
separated in the crowd, and each with a little wave,”

Lloyd Schwartz, In Flight

“Strange black and princely pirates of the skies,
   Would that your wind-tossed travels I could know!
Would that my soul could see, and, seeing, rise
   To unrestricted life where ebb and flow
   Of Nature’s pulse would constitute a wider life below!

Could I but live just here in Freedom’s arms,
   A kingly life without a sovereign’s care!”

Emily Pauline Johnson, The Flight of the Crows


AG2023_1055634a or Infiltrate the Black movement

AG2023_1055634a

I will begin with braces
strung across a man’s teeth
as a downed kite might
string itself across four lanes
of a seven-lane highway
and bid a barefooted child
to wade into evening traffic
and slip. I will not focus
on the wasp at the window,
the cat’s white hair stretching
along this orange peel,
or even the train’s green breath,
its asthmatic clack
upon these arthritic tracks
that turn every head
into a cautious metronome. No,
I will not focus upon the spines
of the men walking these rails,
yelling cerveja, coca-cola, agua,
these men who bare no resemblance
to ghosts but even as they pass
disappear into motes and motes
of dust most of us are too busy
to notice falling
inside a sleeping child’s mouth.
I will focus all my attention,
now, on the man with braces,
asking me if I am a member of the CIA.
Have I come to infiltrate
the black movement.
This man whom I have peeled
two oranges for
since this train left Rio de Janeiro
and, because his hands were full,
placed each quartered wedge
in his mouth. What are you here for?
The children waiting for bottles
of water to be thrown from each car.
The bee above his head, the kites
drifting from the hills, the white puffs
of cloth, slew-footed, wading into the sky
like a wasp drunk on insecticide.
Those are suicide notes, he says, the kites.
Soon there will be gunfire,  
drugs, and dead children head-to-foot
along the paves and unpaved roads
leading in and out of this favela.
Do you have this in America?
This, meaning kites. This, meaning
children. This, meaning winter rain
unable to flow into the gutters
because of bodies lining the streets.
I think to tell him of Katrina,
but I say nothing of water-
melon vines growing around the dark
in graves from North Carolina to New Jersey,
the bomb, MOVE, the symphony
hall of atrocities in which every seat is full,
but is this the meaning of diaspora?
I come with the dead tucked in-
to my duffle, my genocides
folded into my wallet and you
come with yours and we shout
across the chasm of this train car
comparing whose dead sing louder
or more often or now.
Is this Africa: a slit trench
and a split lip, a photograph
of a police chief smoking a cigar
as the ear of a dead child catches his ash.
Why isn’t my hand
dropping these slices of orange
onto your tongue, Diaspora?
Why have I come to Brazil, Brother?
To infiltrate the black movement.

Roger Reeves, Brazil

AG2023_1055583a or in this realm

AG2023_1055583a

“Nothing felt more natural than directing his thoughts to an unseen realm” (ZS)


“… It occurs

when the divine realm manifests?—?or the word intrudes?—?

into our quotidian realm. The natural one, an untidy

fleshliness of the ordinary. Or the sacred and profane

is another way to say this.”

On Hierophany by Karen An-hwei Lee (From Ancient Greek ????? (hieros), “sacred, holy sign” + ????? (phainô), “show, appear”.)

AG2023_1066443a or shadow, imagination, and freedom

AG2023_1066443a

“There is a tree, by day,
That, at night,
Has a shadow,
A hand huge and black,
With fingers long and black.”

Angelina Weld Grimké, Tenebris



“To be free after all, is not to be undisciplined. I should say that the discipline of the imagination may in fact be the essential method or technique of both art and science.
[…]
To discipline something, in the proper sense of the word, does not mean to repress it, but to train it–to encourage it to grow, and act, and be fruitful, whether it is a peach tree or a human mind. “