Jellyfish Dreams

Your problem’s unconventional, and seems multidimensional, but closely viewed, it is, in fact, a tempest in a tesseract. A substitution should be tried; it’s just a cube when simplified. Once it’s a cube you’re halfway there: project your problem to a square, and then your problem, rendered flat, can probably be left at that. Not satisfied? You could consign your problem to a finite line, reduce it to a single point, then prove its membership disjoint from all the sets belonging to the set of things that trouble you. Therefore, as you can plainly see, there is no problem. Q.E.D. My husband, as he often does, finds fault in all these algebras. “Don’t confuse,” he says to me, “the model with reality.” But problems, being what they are — of science, or of some crossed star — just never seem to be designed to fit a mathematician’s mind. 2017

Find a quiet room. You may find it wherever there is a quiet room.   In a house. In your mind. In an apartment.     Sit. In a chair. On the floor.     Try not to move with the room.      It will be imperceptible at first,     the impenetrable stillness.     Windows, if you have them, will distract you.     Outside, the motion of things –     it overlies a seeming. A vast, looming shadow.     Doors will tell you their lies.  Your heart will move through the doors and into the world.     The ground you imagine beneath you     is not the ground beneath you now.     Bring your heart back into the room.     You will feel the ground beneath you.      Try not to breathe with the room.     Remember where you are.     Find the room again. Find yourself in it.     Try not to move with the room.     It will be easy. It will take only a little effort.     What you know will not be what you feel.     What you feel will be what you feel.     Find something else in the room.     A lamp. A bookcase. A crumb.     Find yourself in relation.     Try now to move with the room,     outside the motion of things.     Windows will not distract you.     It will be imperceptible at first,     the force of acceleration.        You will not feel the ground beneath you.     Your heart will move through the door and out of the world.     The world you imagine beneath you     is not the world beneath you now.     Find a quiet place. You may find it     wherever there is a quiet place.     It will be imperceptible at first,     the impenetrable stillness.     Remember where you are,     outside the motion of things.     What you feel will be what you feel.     A vast, looming shadow.     Find yourself in relation.     It will be imperceptible at first,     the force of the realization.     Remember where you are.     Find the room again. A lamp. A bookcase. A crumb.     Find yourself in it.     Your heart will move through the door and into the room.     The ground you imagine beneath you     is the ground beneath you now.     Remember where you were.     You will feel the ground beneath you.     What you feel will be what you feel.     What you know will be what you know.     2019

In the window light I am reduced to another patron drinking such bitterness, and readily. 2005

   by Nikolai Karamzin    trans. by @andrewbroz What is our life? – A novel. Author? – Anonymous. We start, we laugh, we weep, And then we fall asleep... 1797

Nonsense is the only sense that happens in the present tense; and when I find some sense at last, I find the sense is in the past. 2019

You — you in the coat of gray,      the dappled gray, the threaded gray,            whose figure stops, who stops to sway      in the lavender haze of a winter day; you — you in that threaded coat,      the coat now dappled a lavender-gray,            your head arched back to look and see      the branches of a spreading tree; the crooked branches of a tree,      a spreading tree, the silhouette branches            crazed across a field of gray on a winter day,      across the clouds, the clouds a cool white-silver gray —            the silhouette branches, swaying in strokes of deep warm gray — the strings of the tree and the clouds and the evening      pull at your head to dance and sway            with the breeze that dances dappled branches      in a round, hypnotic way — and you, and I, and the winter sky      dance in a trance-like reverie,            as who are you and who am I      and where is the end of the winter sky            all blend with the gray and the gray in the gray,      in a deepening field of gray. 2018

    by Li Bai (李白)     trans. by @andrewbroz​ Moonlight glistens by my bed – I thought an autumn frost had come. I watch the bright moon overhead. Looking back, I think of home. 8th Century C.E.

who always seek    to speak last, by none surpassed, may they await     the fate of all last leaves that fall – and be the first     thinned by changing wind. Those below     nourish what will grow. 2019

I could have guessed, and haven't guessed wrong yet, that out in West the sun would set.   Stupid as that may seem to some of you, the ones who'd dream it wasn't true are few.   But even for all the certainty that guess would seem to have for me I must confess — it's still just a guess.  2018

I was a slave to nonsense once; nonsense made more sense to me. My images and sentences were independent, always free. Then changing did what changing does – and with the chain of life’s events, that wooed me by effect and cause, I chose to chain myself to sense. But I am under no illusion that the sentence and the sense, in constant whirlwinds of confusion, ever form experience. Experience, that always was a wildfire in the brain, kindles worlds that were the cause until the ash of words remain. In ice and order there is beauty, but disorder is desire. If my government is logic, still – my God is fire. 2019

When the world's shape    differs from my guess –            I hope I've found        a willingness                 to come around. 2019

The Sun’s a constant sphere of constant laws, and I know that I’m a child of the Sun. I rise and fall with the arc its circle draws, then rise again at the point where I begun. The Sun and I both make our journeys here among the stars – our stuff is of a kind – and, like the Sun, a little worldly sphere was born with me too, and spins around my mind. But squeeze the life of the Sun into the span of years a person walks the Earth, and run the clock: it shares the fate of every man. I know that I’m a child of that Sun — I rage in light, spending steadily as seconds burn to cold eternity.  2017

The future’s present surfeit of direction forgets the present’s perfect imperfection. 2019

We use such simple words to weave   the tapestry of light into our language. Red. Yellow.   Green. Blue. Black. White.   But what is blue? Did Homer know   when sailing on a wine-dark sea? Why did he paint the sky with bronze   and layer green with honey?   The ancient brain is not the new;   when, with modern eyes, I view the ocean and the midday sky   they look, unquestionably, blue.   With other simple words, we paint   the colors that we feel. Sadness, joy, fear, hate,   love: all these signs reveal   some inner state. But what is love?   How can we call that one emotion longing, ecstasy, respect,   infatuation, and devotion?   I grasp with these imperfect pigments,   try to catch the palette of experience — and fail. What tint   can be, unquestionably, love?   My blue is not a simple sine,   nor is my love Euclidean: no matter how I flatten it,   my love’s oblique meridian   will not lie on a paper map,   nor nanometers ever be Pacific waves, a robin’s egg,   or what a person meant to me.   Just as the different shades of blue   have secondary colors there, so love can be tinged green with lust   or dyed in indigo despair   and still be love. Love’s many things,   and though its boundaries aren’t defined its subtle thread is intricately   laced throughout the tender mind,   intertwining feelings that,   at first, might seem quite different within a tapestry of sense   that weaves around love’s referent.   In that tapestry, love cries   while flying on blue swallow’s wings; it flowers pink in fruiting trees   and runs with umber wild things.   You’re in it, too, in faded fields   of tangled thread, a knotted part (the untrained work of younger hands)   whose weft still binds my heart.   Our love may not have been for years,   been made, at best, imperfectly, even at our hyperbolic   orbits' heated perigee,   and cast us both on fast and far   trajectories to where we are: you, caught in the gravity   of some bright northern star,   and me to where I settled, bound   with two firm feet on loving ground. But, sometimes — when I look on high —   I see your color in the sky. 2017

1 On this, the planet of my choosing I am a boy, a man without his inhibitions; And here, the trees stand unfelled by me; And here, the angels sing unconducted; And here, it is a glory unconducted. The sky, a thicket of wood and light - The ground, my heavenly body, planet of my choosing, It draws the leaves to itself. We bend and flex, cycles out of phase, my feet, her feet beating; Natural, synthetic, in a consequent pulse most real, resisting much, obeying little. And with a run I hug the ground, and with a fall; And with my buried hands. Dream to me sphere! Break upon my body vastness and desire, curves that defy the far call. I observe the inwardness, and it is a moist plain where the stars, my souls, are waiting in the cold; My planet, my reflection, a graven image its own unshaken commandment. And I quit it all at once; And it resumes a silent pulse; And it is I and another body alone. My warm hands are removed and moving, wandering and wanting unconducted. 2 Loudly and joyously I set forth, The gift drawn, the truck started, the axe thrust to the stump; With passing identity and waxing identity I go unto the city. I was one to dare and break the law of dependence; Escaping mind, yet I hope you shall be free without me, Dependence a plague wiped from your flesh. 3 There they lie dead, the silences and inhibition; Gyrating along lines I knew not of, and vibrating along strings I knew not of; On echelons undreamed and unremembered do these desires sing. I wished to wake them and they have awoken, yet it is wakefulness beyond my wakefulness – They bring to me sensations as a caravan that brims with spices, My long outfurled and wandering desires that are hands more than these I have grown, That are feeling far to the others and far from the others; Unfinished until the wild's depths are prodded and a wild heart is calmed again. 4 That force which set this sphere in motion, that commands the waves With one decision I arrest from its high pedestal, a scientist of my making, That I should know better than any other the nature of my universe, to which I all along have held the key; That I should render it, that I should unrender it. My planet, spinning quick upon its axis, fire blazing against a different fire. When it is extinguished, then should my planet break free of its logic, And it is my body that shall be loosed to the farthest reaches – Are they then departed from my will, desire from desire, An ego flammable, to flare and trace the currents of the air, Rising fast unto the thicket of fuel above, Sinking fast across the bodies; That body fixed against a stilling cold, The liquid blinking quick to free the image sinking quickly into itself; And up again, my newborn senses rejoice, unshackled by former desires Replaced by these, new and stronger set desires. 2005