Poetry

Reading as a Sacred Art

Rae Spencer7 Comments

Reading as a Sacred Art

If the words said nothing at all
You would still read meaning
In the spaces between them

Feeling your way through tangled text
Pauses and pronunciation
Bend under your touch
Familiar words flex into phrases
As hard to know as a stranger’s yesterday

Anything I meant to say
Is obscured by what you meant to hear
And the words remain mute

Captive in the spaces between us
Unable to convey
What I am saying
And not saying
The words do not speak

If anything spoke
It could not be written
Muttering along the margin

Reciting in the tongue of Eden
The first rule of words
Which supersedes both our meanings
That innocence and truth
Cannot lie together

Now we understand
As long as we speak in Eden
Say rib and serpent and lost

What you hear
Was not written here
Could not exist
Until it was lost and found
In your own experience

And if the words said nothing at all
We would still need meaning
In the spaces between

Courage

Rae Spencer5 Comments

Courage

Courage surrounds her children
With sharp railed chairs
Rowdy friends and wasps
Conceding the wisdom of pain

She knows the world
Which her children must meet
Its deep rushing water
And sweet-tongued strangers
And cabinets lined with poison

Courage hopes children see clearly
Between fear and danger

She allows her charges
Conversation with fanatics
The writings of heretics
And knowledge of many gods
With their many different histories
Of savagery

She aches
When her children discover
That not all facts are truth
And not all truths can be known

And Courage stands by
As her children learn the only skill
That can ever, really, be learned
The individual and perfect art
Of survival

Where deep water holds less dread
For one who understands its current

Photo Failure, Tufted Titmouse

Rae Spencer2 Comments

I’ve been hearing a tufted titmouse call for weeks. These birds have a loud, clear call that carries. (You can hear a sample here.) I find it hard to guess how far away the bird is, when I hear one calling, but it always seems to be across the road or in a neighbor’s yard or a few streets over.

Today one visited our yard, hopping through the pear tree as it sang. I desperately wanted a picture of this little bird and managed to catch several frames of it. None of them are quite right. The top photos are my best shots of the day, but I never did get “the” picture.

The following are a few of my failures. They are like many of my writing failures, suffering from poor focus, flat light, or awkward angles. But, unlike my writing, I can’t save these photos. They are missed opportunities with no chance of salvage. I can’t edit them into success.

I hope to remember these photos the next time I sigh over a stubborn phrase, resenting the work of revision.

On the Learning of Things Small

Rae Spencer1 Comment

On the Learning of Things Small

Eve understood her sentence
The source of such expansive pain
Which blossomed in her womb
Seeded by an excess of knowledge

But her children
Though given the tale
Lapsed into miniature schemes
They hungered to harvest

New fruits and found suffering
Weaves through the smallest gaps
Like atoms and genes
Twined into a fitful scale

Until detonated, when
They unwind their blinding
Flash in every flesh, then
Mushroom into brilliant loss

Poet’s Block

Rae Spencer10 Comments

Poet’s Block

An image of a weathered seashell
Keeps my monitor from standing blank
Like a cruel mimic of the blank document
That repels my words
They fall from it
Veer around its margins
Break their brittle syllables against the screen

Which is once more a seashell
I press my ear to the shell’s flat shadow
To hear my own intent
The low tidal ebb of phrase
Whispered in computer current
But there is only hum
And static-snap
And the odd warmth of waiting

The shell’s soul was stolen
Taken from the ocean
In proof of all the wisdoms
That counseled fear of cameras
Because nothing whispers from an image
Nothing breathes
And yet

And yet all is there
Every conch curve
And shaded whorl
And all my words that failed
To echo the ocean
Or uncover the cloud shrouded sky
Or mention how snails are never simple

Or charge their syllables with metaphor
To mean more than a word
More than a blank screen
More than a poem
I haven’t written
Lost for days
In the image of a seashell

Published in The Journal of Liberal Arts and Education Winter 2010