“Our undoing is also our becoming.” -Terry Tempest Williams
Fall apart. Let yourself crash to the floor and come apart. Pick up the pieces and see an iris of an eye, a tree twig on another, a sliver of sky, a letter that looks like it could be Q: a Question, a Quandary? a Quiet? You are a puzzle you did not know you were. Find the edges first then work inward from there.
When finished, fall apart again. Pour yourself into the box of God. Shake. Slide yourself out on the ground of being. You are now a shattered crystal vase to superglue with sunsets. It will hold the roses you have just brought in from your garden overgrown with excuses. One hides a spotted lantern fly the experts say that you must kill. You smash it. It becomes the pattern of your dying– red and black scraped across the concrete pathway you no longer walk that is still cemented in your heart.
Fall apart again
You are not just a puzzle to be solved or something unwhole to be heroically healed: You are all of these and none: your breath in continuing circle: unknown to known: known to forgotten: back again repeating: always new, always old: your heart broken open to a begging world.
Once more, fall apart.
You are now a billion stars. Orion and the Pleiades have left; Wanda the Story Weaver is waiting in the wings of your experience.
The morning calls, the star, smack dab in my face. Yellow and wide, it drips across the sky like my deepest wound or a broken yolk on a pink china plate. I break my dark fast from joy today.
Today I have no mind for philosophy for dasein or ontology, interstitial sentences, prohibitory fences set up against the sun. I’d rather play with angels AWOL from their allotted choirs. They show me squirrels on the backyard electric wires, their rodent toes embracing the hum, outrunning death. Today. They show me the front-yard oak trees, fast toward and slow from acorns. They show me the counterclockwise morning glory turning in quarter circles toward the sun. One day, its bloom will bond with August light releasing all the hoarded hopes of its assent in one audacious boom of blue.
But today, I live at the center of this same sun: there is nothing I can do to make God love me more; there is nothing I can do to make God love me less.
Prologue: This began with a dream: I am teaching a class in a sunken atrium-like classroom. On the way to class I think that I will assign a research project: what is the most important book ever written? When I get there, however, I assign a group research project: what is most important in life? The class breaks into two groups: one says water, and the other says wisdom.
It was clear to me that I should invite Lady Wisdom to speak.
I. I’ve known you. I’ve watched you consume a library book by book, as if it were a pound of chocolates to savor all alone, licking each melted passage off the roof of your mind. You danced with each new idea until its shoes wore out and it clanged back onto its flat metal home. New partners always awaited your curtsy and admiration for a well-argued waltz, a syllogistic samba, a polka for persuasion, a non-fallacious foxtrot, or even the a priori bunny hop hop hop on to the next one. Knowledge is power, you thought, over what you never were sure. Real power, you found out, was not getting what you wanted but getting what you wanted that you had not known you wanted. And there you saw me: The step beyond. The perspective of wait.
II. I am the pattern seer, staring at disparity until I see its sameness, like your forehead’s wide span of skin curling in a wrinkle, given time. Love has a billion forms, each one unique, as does hate and courage and fear and all things human, but I see chords and echoes everywhere in the meter of beating hearts. Listen to the lives of uncountable souls, all taking one breath, then another and another and hear the rhyme of living: people are a boundless poem– neither sonnet nor sestina–pulsing meaning in the rhythm with the kindling stroke of love. In images of un-love even, the daily news, love throbs on, made loud and louder by its absence, the volta between octave and sestet, the midline’s caesura, the stanza break, the punctuation in the verse of being human, created by a poet God.
III. I speak this poem by heart. It is the way to the gem in the lotos, distilled by age and the concentrated sun of close inspection that burns off fluff, excuses, broken resolutions, a crystal rendered from sleep, from loss, from the unbearable borne, hard-pressed by the weight of waiting: Bright diamond! Hagia Sophia! I am not the source or word or spirit. I am she with whom they sit, prudent and still as a mountain.
If you would see me, build a home for your soul of light and glass, warm the stones of your suffering with meaning, attend the stars when you wake at night’s center, find a face for me in your teachers and elders, then look in your mirror. I will be there with your books and your darkness, admiring the fugitive beauty of purple chrysanthemums and the faces of children against a blue morning sky.
-Kitty Yanson 1/2022
To the reader: Thank you for taking the time to read what I have been writing (and now painting). Your time is a generosity! If you are so inclined, I invite you to follow this blog and to comment on what is here. When I was teaching creative writing at Mercy High School, we would read one another’s works and comment on them. A reader’s reactions are the most valuable guide for improvement, and I would value any of yours about content or technique or its affect on you. Even if you hated this piece, knowing why you hated it would help me a lot. So blessings, all!
May you be happy and know the root of happiness. May you be free of suffering and the root of suffering. May you dwell in peace.
Memorizing the Laws of Gravity 