Part 1 of 2 in the Thorough Water: Sheathed Reality sequence. Prelude to Oceanic Triptych. All recorded in 2019. Features video from Manzanita, Oregon. Video production, text, and vocals by Greg Bem.
Hearing
Throw water in the streets
And devouring hearts
And devour
And heart dissection
De-sect-di-late
Trance
Here is the text from the video Thorough Water: Here and There.
Thorough Water: There and Here
“Water is part of a pattern I’ve watched unfold throughout my career. I document landscapes that, whether you think of them as beautiful or monstrous, or as some strange combination of the two, are clearly not vistas of an inexhaustible, sustainable world.”
– Edward Burtynsky (Walrus, October 2013)
1: Quinault
“Human presence, once a factor less important to than elk or fungi, was then transformed into an agent of disruption as great as the ice ages themselves.”
– The Olympic Rain Forest: An Ecological Web, by Ruth Kirk (114)
Reasonable. The water still flowing in front of me, I remember sitting in place, stone monument, effigy of towers of wood and slashes of fern through millions of shades of green. While the creeks chugged along. The falls felled vision and circumstance. The tides were our breaths and the blood pushing against the walls of our muscles, skin, our frames.
Nestled. Nested. We can sit and watch the echoing of the scrapes against the land as that apparent infinity continues. I feel it now. The rumble. The roar. The press. And yet I know: what I saw was a marvel and could always move to the finite. To the nevermore. To the last stretch and the longing, so deep within, so trusted, this longing, this beautiful, fantastic emptiness. Quinault in daylight: where we go to think of loss.
2: Phipps
“The bubbles formed a sweet-smelling bell.”
– from “The Bath” by Elizabeth Cooperman (in Make it True meets Medusario, page 140)
They demand our attention, and we enter, and we wait. A factory of water that sprouts awareness. Education. And the pure bliss of a splashing corridor. I could watch humans pass by this vision towards conservation over and over. I could watch them move along, cascade like droplets into some basin of rejection. Or perhaps they stop by: admire as a tarn, as a cache of the leftover, and move along. The conservatory: a museum of the living. More trust. More love. More responses indicative of demand, imperative, resolve.
The most startling quality: what we place over the core. The core identity, the core message: we cover ourselves and our lives and the truth up with decoration faster than the beat of the tongue on the roof of the mouth: faster than a single word, covered in moonlight or the fatigue of the sun as another day passes, and we must reinvigorate our experience. Calmly. Splash. Shatter of liquid. Present enough to touch. Present enough to coat the body, the camera, the phone, glasses, purses, the paths to our collective futures of transience. Of an abyss worth living through to grind surplus into the dust of departure.
3: Royal Basin
the quick water
the slow water
and the same bank
– from “Remembrance of Water” by John Taylor (26)
Before the marmot screamed me into electricity, I watched the flow of blue through an underwater lens. The capture of light in the process of refraction: muddy and undeniably instant. The present moment, at least as far as water goes, is a shockingly muted experience. But this was the case in the upper meadow-filled basin of Royal. I have memories as a child on the Atlantic Coast, Southern Maine specifically, where the waves would throw me around like a bundle of rags, and I would see black and green and white and silver as my crushed body struggled to make sense of tumult and torment. To give form to the instant, an instant so extreme that form was its opposite.
Royal Basin, though, where Amy meditated and I imagined more bears and the edge of the peaks looked down like wizards burying their rituals into my shoulders, my back, the upper tip of my spine, energy slowly spreading through, like snowmelt pushing down mountainside steadily, methodically. That is: of stead and method, and me, the onlooker, in awe. I think of the source and urge myself to remain cordial. Past days I would jump into those glacial waters emulating sage or celebration. Now I stare and grow fond of the chance to be amazed at a stillness created by the infinity. The water that can remain the ideal while we still have time.
4: North Cascades
“I feel increasingly content simply being here, present, not doing anything in particular.”
– Chasing Clayoquot: A Wilderness Almanac by David Pitt-brook (112)
Dams made of brittle, exacting concrete and metal. The resort that houses a semblance of menial organization amidst a system of ecstatic beauty. The towering giants with names I’ll never remember, and shapes that change in my dreams. The listless ripples that etch into the topography like scales on the limbs of a myth. It is in the North Cascades that love breaks apart into reality, and vice versa. It is in the North Cascades that the slices of nature afford us with breath and breeze, and there is just as much ordinary as exceptional. Ross Lake holds the footprint together. It is the instrument we have earned through preservation and attentiveness. And it is shrinking.
Seeing 10-20 feet less of a lake for the first time after many visits provides a hollowing sense of fear and an indignation so human it feels unique, untrue, questionable. There are many causes for less water, and the ecology is difficult to pair with witness. But there are moments that trigger an awareness of spectrum, and that spectrum is the development of the relationship with the many possibilities. Staring down at the lake, several years ago, I imagined swallowing the entire thing in a single gulp. It might be that that gulp is ongoing, now, and into the future, and the swallowing involves savoring the benefits through to exhaustion amidst awe. 10-20 feet lower, and my breath still wavers, my mind still feathery and bracing for tragic circumstances. And regardless, there is readiness. To be able to receive, and to do it gently. That might be what is owed, before the ends and the retributions.
Script
Illuminates the sails
These certainties
Leading and fleeing
Forgetting a presence
Aquam I: Mucous
the way
yellow color
justly slits
across the lips
a body
of newness
My latest collection of poetry is “Green Axis,” and the book as a whole sits at 98 pages. This poetry features Cascadia and beyond. It was written over the course of the last 6 months. It is openly-licensed and can be rehosted/republished with the same license.
May 25, 2019
Wait for darkness to fill.
Dream the songs of coyote.
Pack, collective, constellation.
Now night’s arrival reflected
in mirrors and sickness.
People have been here 1000s of years.
I can stand to live another day.
Fears brace me: crutch of reservation.
The thin white-gray memory of playa.
Sinking truth like a sinking smile
and a yearning heart. In Spanish.
Meanwhile there is “while” here.
It is a full space, vast with each step.
The steppe climate unpredictable.
The insects in red light like freckles.
The dust in red light: scratched film.
Daniel Canty wrote of wind, while
I wait for the wind to return
and my courage to grow like a flood.
Pray for no rain this absence of light
and human voices, my own, taking space.
When I step outside, reason will return
just as the landscape of beating hearts
will beat once more.
In 7 hours, day will fill
and I will chatter with wide eyes.
May 27, 2019
Like the tongue slashed sideways in death pose
Pyramid Lake sloshes fervently nearby.
It is an otherwise astounding glare
thousands of miles in the praxis of center.
Resolution: to arrive at the cover of space
and be provided for by cushions of cloud.
I step out, breathe in the smell of frozen sage.
The Steppe is Massacre Rim on a good day.
Wingfield Park figures standing staring straight.
And later: a man prepares to fish.
And earlier: two women search the grass.
What I would do to be as fixed
as the stature of our public
as statues bleeding and sweating.
The horror of stumbling upon a corpse
captured in full daylight
with no one nearby to hear a gasp.
Empty are its eye sockets.
As empty as the street.
Eagleville is the place time won’t forget.
I dream of a banner of American propaganda.
I dream of nowhere to flee toward.
In it the corpses smile in mirth.
In it the corpses smell of new grass.
Unstilled by the awe of life,
she carries white bread across the kitchen,
smears a thickness of pale, yellow butter,
and places, mouth ajar, the bread on the pan.
I stare, hands in my pockets,
and there is the subtle, dehumanizing swelter.
Sliding across dozens of miles of mud,
I question existence before a single pair
of antelope (pronghorn) deapproach.
The floor mats will need to be washed
of more than the dried clay.
The visiting woman overheard at the mechanic’s:
“And then it hailed, and it was real hail.”
The male mechanic nodded. Very Nevada. Clear sky overhead.
Playa beyond. Is it nonsense to the locals?
Or is it all sense, ignorance and everything else?
I’d been encouraged to visit Bruno’s in any event.
Especially the unforeseen weather.
I visited first, before the weather.
The next day, 36 hours later, I drove by.
Passing, I could hear the buzz of subduction
through the antique walls.
It was here in Reno I discovered Harjo’s quote:
“Some world travelers learn nothing.”
What is to be gained from arriving,
and immediately turning around?
Disambiguation on Wikipedia.
The situation of a place barely inhabited
for 1000s of years: its strength
in the silence of a few
for a few.
Fortifications are not completely designed.
They are not meant to be scaled.
What is the meaning that haunts in full daylight
and entirely horrifying when beyond full view?
Donnelly has as much a name as a voice.
It courses beyond space its chorus vibrating
and choking in inquiry and dying life.
The order of a stabilization.
The incredible order.
Headache and bastardization.
Reality is cold-hearted.
Otherhood is principle. Warmth.
Entrancing. Alive. An earning.
Just to be alive to say hello to
act to participate.
It exists. As do we. As we meet
and part and destabilize across
High Canyon’s shadowy periphery.
Enter the twinkling last stance.
We will meet again.
The weather may be warmer,
may be boiling heartbeats.
Black Rock Coyote
Under the assumption of familial fealty,
under the assumption of cordial chaos.
Song start breathes life as interrogation.
Or celebration: placement is lone and true.
It hurts less in the meantime.
I don’t know what you mean.
Baby’s breath crown to a walk in the clouds.
Meanwhile: tone death and tone waiting.
Meanwhile: tone as a crucial behemoth.
And back to realism, adigital, tonal:
the champions are the ones that exit to exist.
Never the opposite until a calcifying of tears.
The first visit I felt nothing. I’d been as.
I’d seen through. I’d evicted from.
The second visit I tripped upon more nothing.
More exquisite and more erroneous the truth.
Forgot to apologize for the judgment.
Returned to the mites with doubtful numbers.
Massacre Lake returns to me.
Petroglyphic and a rising sputter.
Breathless and altogether amesmer.
What massacre this derailing sky?
Back home the sun plasters beauty
and Jason steps forward strongly through time.
Thousands of moments across hundreds of miles.
The red and green and brown and gray
smear into their eternity of perception.
A crucial dream is the fervor of wake.
A wake is green and crucial.
The green of the smile comes rightly.
Pressure tightly in this shadow presence.
Surrounded there’s the black of the counter,
black of the walls, of the leather seats,
and whatever else is performative and clear.
Greetings, eyes that shoot out like daggers.
Reservations before the noon’s silence.
One becomes infinite of black and purple,
a translucence equal parts obedience and rebellion.
The auditory inquiry is as situational as precious.
I wonder of nearby cravings and graves.
A new manuscript with the title Green Axis is forthcoming. Stay-tuned and enjoy the Ax.
Poems written in Myanmar in March 2019.
stumbling from one periphery to the next
I slipped and spread meat
it was meat and it was me across the floor
the light buzzed
the noises flushed into
the familiar haze flashed
it was the challenge of morning
sweet with dearth of life and of death
it continued with fragility
across rooms and halls
a dampening effect
dampening quintessential
collapse
stumbling from one peripheral to the next
I slipped and spread meat across the floor
the light buzzed
the noises flushed into the familiar haze
it was the challenge of the morning
sweet with dearth or scatter of life and of death
and it continued with fragility across rooms and halls
a dampening effect of the quintessential collapse
home where hearts bend
and break to grow
home where mice hide in the rain
and rats come eat the sweets
the rats the sighs of rooms rarely heard
home: I left the cherry blossoms
they bloomed like filthy children
home takes in the deep breath of yesterday
looks comatose
exquiz—
tinted blue
blue in memory can’t you tell
home where hearts bend and break to grow
where the mice hide in the rain
and the rats come eat the sweets
where the sighs of rooms are rarely heard
where I left the cherry blossoms bloomed like filthy children
home takes in the deep breath of yesterday
looks comatose and tinted blue in my memory
the screams and crackles and the shades of the present—
how they rumble like shadow quake and brittle skyscrapers—
how they reach us, slice off our tongues, set fire to our beds—
no more walls of the bedrooms—
intimacy floodlit with guillotine spark—
decapitated home of the decapitated—
screams and crackles and the shades of the present—
how they rumble like shadow quake and skyscraper brittling—
how they reach us, slice off our tongues, set fire to our beds—
no more walls of the bedrooms, intimacy floodlit with guillotine spark—
decapitated home / of the decapitated /
splits open the image
let the bastards come
let the twinklingly literate arrive
we are ready with our grunts and moans
we are ready to ejaculate and spasm
like spines diced to neural mush
we await letting out the long mouth of pause
this world in its infinite fireworks, channeled energy
broken windows and new gardens
train tracks and gory investments
the reflection on the screen and mutualism
dead and gone, spiritual quagmire
(and it can be discussed globally over the Pacific Island
and its kingdom of invisible plastics)
an aerodynamic thirst
splits open the image
let the bastards come
let the twinklingly literate arrive
social in media
we are ready with our grunts and moans
are ready to ejaculate and spasm
like a spine–diced to neural mush
we await and we are ready
we are letting out the long pause
we who have mouths
this world in its infinite fireworks is dim
the root cause!
the channeled energy!
broken windows and new gardens
with views
train tracks and gored investments
memories of lots revisited
transport of bottles, bags, bins
the reflection on the screen mutual
dead
the reflection on the screen mutual
gone
hint of the spiritual
discussed globally over and over
Great Pacific Garbage Patch
kingdom of invisible plastics
quagmire rotten and sweet
Ellen and the convulsive heart
Let rip be rip and polish be polish
I dream of the expressions of joy
I dream of the resolute distancing
Fantasy and projection
of the long walk through warmth
If you could have it disturbingly clear
would you live dutifully and terrified?
The last bird I saw: either a crow or a chickadee
Some common creature flitting across a common scene
This realm really, really is the fullest sense
Bold and interrogative and bloodied with experience
Healed, bruised, unreleased to the currents of air
I dream of the expressions of concern
Drop me into thinking there is a reasonable explanation waiting for us
Allow me to hit my head, break my neck, and convulse freely
(And allow, please, to exist faded, like mist or breath)
For Ellen
Ellen and the convulsive heart
Let rip be rip and polish be polish
Dreams and expressions
Resolutions and distances
Fantasies and projections
The long walk to warmth
If you could have it disturbingly clear
would you live dutifully and terrified?
The last bird I saw: either a crow or a chickadee.
Some common creature
alive and flitting across a common scene.
This realm really, really is the fullest sense.
Bold and interrogative and bloodied with experience.
Healed, bruised, unreleased to the currents of air.
I dream of the expressions of concern.
Drop me into thinking there is a reasonable explanation waiting for us
Allow me to hit my head, break my neck, and convulse freely
(And allow, please, her to see, and to say her piece, her whole self,
and fade thoroughly, like mist or breath)
Homicidal or domicile within a tarnished translation
Domestic blues in the whip and whorl above the sea
Who wouldn’t be blue with the grand eloquent you?
You and you and you and you
A trumpet of rocket fire
Flare as face, facial nation
Skipping forward embracing feelings
I hold up my palm with the cut from the bowl
I remember the slash and the immediate shock
I think, therefore I am sitting here and writing thoughts
Dharma as blisters
Phalanx as workshop
Within the eye of an echo is the karmic release
homicidal and domicile
tarnished translation
domestic blues in the whip
in a whorl above the sea
who wouldn’t be blue
with the grand and eloquent
with the you and you and you and you?
You and you and you and you.
But the trumpet of rocket fire
Flared face
Facial nation
A skipping past the embrace
I hold up my palm with the cut from the bowl
I remember the slash and the immediate shock
I think therefore I am sitting here
I think therefore I am writing thoughts
Dharma as blisters
phalanx of pain as workshop
Within the eye of an echo is the karmic release
Within the slump and the trudge and the embrace of the laughing system
This weeping is of joy, not disappointment
And retroactive they could be watching from the curb
the dust collecting in the corners of their ancient eyes
The fullest sentiments of a modest Wednesday vision
Imaginative scolding of the scalding-hot conceptualism
Drinking the slurps of a poetry poised in a cup brimming poison
Purplish-rose tones rising to the lips of the weakened
It’s grave the gravely nature of those last lips of survival
Photographed before the decades-long smash in a single full moon
We and our resilience capsized by the weight and stalling
The dead stop is the stop of death and it’s placeless and warm
The specialists are returning with their urges toward upkeep
The grizzly, speckled ashes are pouring over the skull-shaped urns
Coffers are the fulcrum moving masses into the slay
An aftermath of ruinous lisps lingers like an aftersex or afterbirth
(after visiting Tacoma)
And retroactive they could be watching from the curb
The dust collecting in the corners of their ancient eyes
The fullest sentiments of a modest Wednesday vision
Imaginative scolding of the scalding hot conceptualism
Drinking the slurps of a poetry that’s poised in a cup brimming poison
Purplish rose tones rising to the lips of the weakened
It’s grave, this gravely nature of those last lips of survival
Photographed before the decades long smash in a single full moon
We and our resilience capsized by the weight and stalling
The dead stop is the stop of death and it’s placeless and warm
The specialists are returning with their urges toward upkeep
The grizzly, speckled ashes are pouring over the skull-shaped urns.
Coffers are the fulcrum moving masses into the slay.
An aftermath of ruinous lisps lingers like an aftersex or afterbirth.
(Yangon, day 2)
upkeep. clandestine. the whirlpool. the fanblade. the festivities. the chants. the sirens. the caws. the ambient buzz. the reclining ignorance. the best foot forward. the champions. the realities. the furthest. the photobombs. the incorrections. the misperceptions. the masses. the proclivities. the belting out. the bulging in. the foray into time. the chiseled grin. the phallic gold. the rosy intonation. the spirit. the stunts. the trespass. the complacency. the waiting. the movement. the race toward a single emerging experience.
The dust settles like ink
Therein lies the problem:
more ink than I know what to do—
the interruptions are like radiation.
They settle. We get used to the poison.
Come to expect it.
Prose minded. Swinging across lanes.
The changing of the guard of the path.
Lights on or off with the motorbike customs.
Come to expect it.
A long way from home at Mt. Popa.
A long way from home at the banks of the Irrawaddy.
Steel Fighter adornment on the side of a truck.
They know what they’re saying, we just find it funny.
At what intersection between time and place,
between birth and death,
between the act of creation
and the creation.
Explosive. Plosive.
The long walk home is drifting in and out of—
Remembering Libby on a road trip.
But here with the sleepy dogs, cats, lizards, birds, etc—
here with the monkeys, cows, goats, horses, etc—
here with the clamor of footsteps (pilgrimage)
and the blast of fallen rocks (or coconut husks)—
damn the monkeys and our reliance on them.
We as audience and we as sellers.
Me and my own unmystical definition.
Where capitalism and mysticism meet
there is a finely-grained instance of expectation.
The fan blades thicken and the stomach loosens.
The motor of the bike grows closer even to this very spot.
Fallen.
I have eaten the goodness of the vegetarian
and am currently digesting,
thinking about war, independence, the fundamental will towards liberty—
is that what this visit, in all its luxury, affords?
A visitation of the random acts of sentiment.
Enticing acts of glass splinters of vision.
Exposed roots within the panatha-leaking rouge.
Melancholy of the poor with their outstretched arms.
A void in place of indecision and inward sludge.
Laziness is godlessness to some.
In sum:
a tract of lessons that can be foraged and before that be forgotten.
The spirit of Bagan and its ancestral quadrangle of pagodas.
The leniency of my own swiftly-blistered ambitions.
Thorough acts of gaudiness with windows open and moans invisible, muted.
Update: this title is now available as an eBook through Amazon.com.
Newly released. Limited run of chapbook Like salt. Like a spine. Handmade in Seattle. Created for release in Yangon, Myanmar in March 2019. Featuring poetry by Maung Day and myself. Translated between Burmese and English. Email me if you’d like to request a copy or have comments. Digital edition may be forthcoming (still undetermined).
Originally written 2/6/19
Distanced amidst the mixed berry seltzer blitz, a bubble too open, I am refreshed. Coconut dregs to the other direction. These are the swamped days that burst out like chrysalises after the need to exhibit (share) energy has been expressed. Gray countertop punted into view like political anchors. My hair is a bath of soft line drawings. Sketch comedy. Her eyes shooting me down like bullets: out of where, and where, and where comes the next exceptional (and acceptable) intrusion? In forms expressed. Bob Cobbing. Robert Ashley. The unrivaled psychosis of new person. New human. Our hearts beat like gull-flaps in gale gusts. Earlier: several hours I’m reading CDMX Blues like it’s short, of breath, and the world (Ode nada) feels alive and full and pulling down from the cross (Tom Waits now, then, again). So many decades. Mexico 60 years. Mule 20 years. My god my youth the eternal sadness of that burst of time’s ultimate orgasm. The receiving end of the entity of our times minus times so just “our” smile.
FIERCE is what the may sez when he’s dead and frozen joy-cam from my early 20s, I was the punk addict impression on the world that was or was not needed. I dream in better understanding “horror” as a concept. Have I been horror to you, to me, the plastic godless skinner of clouds pile of soot o robbers my fingers like cradles for microscopic worms my skin the lousy state of eruptive (pre) Buddha dance(hall) with flailed limbs releasing glass vessels FIERCE! & it could be that this inquiring mind yet one more seedling the WE ARE VAT theory the continuum of simulation theory (the referee to Joe Rogan and Elon Musk and the symbolic aperture of smoke, in its corrupted commodified sense). Fascinating case study, with feet of flames and for the sentinels of bickering to scream (albeit softly and intentionality) down Road of Echoes. The definition of the limit is set to include a kaleidoscopic path of hills and turns. Imagining doom keeps the pressure going and personalized. It sits like ink before this newish moon that was long cyclical before rest and can dance again in blue glades.
On Piestewa in the Phoenix Mountain Preserve, 1/21/19
Foot before foot. Each journey belongs to each. The last clap is never the last. I often wonder if this hike will be the final. Then I’m back at the question again. Candlelit now but then it was the sunlit choking effect. I imagine writing “oaking” and can’t help but think of the Oak Creek Vista, and more Arizona laughter. Then Trump. The wall. More symbols. That insidious-cum-necessary laughter a symbol dispelling more and more, more and more, the thoroughfare, it is as important to stress this as it is the systemic prevalence of the Native American stores that are giving life and persisting to an enslavement. It is. And so it is. We walked by the man who said hello so helpfully it was hard not to be completely drawn on in. Vistas abound. Transport back. The man who carried their child down the mountain. The want to tell him: Great Job. And: the group of women and the single voice expressing an insecurity of height. The want to tell her: you are perfectly formed! An exquisite fondness. At the mountain’s top: can’t pronounce Piestewa, but try anyway, and pick up that empty bag left behind like a reminder.