bobvsuniverse

[bobvsuniverse]

I just asked @JoeBiden to

[bobvsuniverse]

I'm attending a webinar on Tuesday, Nov 17 to hear all about the decision to shut down Line 5

[bobvsuniverse]

Two passages from “The Lives of Margaret Fuller” by John Matteson

I am happy to get back to this book after something of an inconsistent hiatus over the holidays.

 The following passages compelled me to share them for quite different reasons.

 The first is a description of the crash of 1837.  It reminds me that the capitalist system as it has been practiced in the United States has never had very long periods of prosperity, though we are rarely educated about these periodic, and desperate, decades in which capitalism’s failures destroy lives and communities.

 For most of us the Great Depression of the 1930s is the only one of its kind in the country’s history… hardly the case… and the safeguards and Keynesian reforms put into place (often called “socialist” but closer examination puts them squarely in the realm of regulated capital, not Marxism. We can argue the values and difference of those qualifiers at another time, eh?) after the Great Depression of the 1930s perhaps constituted the longest period of economic stability the country had ever known. In my past readings about the life, the short life, of Thoreau (a contemporary of Fuller) I learned that his own economic prospects were hobbled by two grave economic “depressions”.

 The second passage is inspiring in its description of Fuller’s own struggles to make a living in the aftermath of the Depression of 1837 and still continue her work as a thinker and writer. Any economic advantages her father had left to her and her five siblings and mother, after his untimely death from typhus, were swept away by the harsh realities of the economic downturn described in the first passage… but she persevered and, as the passage illustrates, was able to pass on her inspirations and ahead-of-its-time take on the intellectual life of women in her work as a teacher in schools started by the burgeoning progressive and controversial Transcendentalist schools that had been established in New England at the time.

  It is hard for me to imagine worlds devoid of the intellectual and perceptual input, and love, of women. The “men only” compartmentalization in thought and scholarship was just starting to break down as I came into adulthood after such a long and difficult pupae stage in the US that was essentially conceived and born with Fuller and the Transcendentalists! An only son in my own family I have been enamored and enriched by my intimate association with women from the earliest stage in life… all my life… and cannot imagine satisfaction in groups of association without the equal input of women.  

 My happiest and most productive work and intellectual endeavors, as well as any work in my numerous creative endeavors, in theatre and poetry in particular, were marked by a persistently equal distribution of male and female voices/”actors”.  

 The differences between groups of like-minded people, set to a task large or small, that are either primarily single gender or mixed are marked and significant. I can imagine the electric exhilaration those first Transcendentalist study and work groups and associations embodied when they broke though the shallow and male supremacist enforced compartments of study, learning, expression and thought. How exciting!

The passages:

“ The spring of 1837 was an anxious time for Margaret and for America as well.  Beginning in 1832, President Andrew Jackson had taken a series of actions to weaken and destroy the Bank of the United States, a policy that had left the country without any centralized authority regarding its money supply. Decisions later in the president’s tenure fatally undermined confidence in paper money. Almost immediately after Jackson left office, the deregulated economy ran aground. At the beginning of April, a wave of business failures struck New York, where, in the two weeks after Easter, more than 125 employers closed their doors. On May 10, the city’s banks refused to trade silver and gold for paper currency, and the economy collapsed. The depression was to last five years. “The land” wrote Emerson later that spring, “smells of suicide”.”

 ***

 “One thing Fuller could not bury was her insistence on a better destiny for women. Undeniably, she made an impression. To sit in her classroom was to understand that womanhood need not lead to a domesticated dead end. Despite the obstacles of convention and orthodoxy, a young woman, too, could converse with philosophers and walk among the gods. Mary Allen, one of Fuller’s more admiring students, wrote of her classmates. “They do not live to dress and visit, and gossip and get married. They are studious to improve themselves, to do good, to live for their higher natures.” None of Fuller’s students at Greene Street went on to lasting renown, but tis fact hardly reflects on her as a teacher. An instructor’s greatest gifts perform heir work quietly and invisibly. The inspired teacher leads the willing follower to a rare and celestial state of mind in which knowledge stands revealed as a form of love. Fuller taught with the hope of guiding a few earnest souls to that sacred grove. The fact that a majority of her students became teachers themselves suggests that she succeeded.”

[bobvsuniverse]

It’s no surprise to find comfort in poems

-- for Iris J. Arenson-Fuller

though that cannot be their function any more than love can be thought to spring from an arrangement of words when they merely describe and convey.

Here, in this world of wars, conflagrations and stunted leaders, to seek some sign of comfort could be considered necessary enough. Pulling open drawers and cabinets

in these terrifying times of duress to retrieve our heaviest sweaters, unused since the last big blizzard or that week in January when the furnace went out

and we gathered around the stove and drank tea all day is habit and inheritance. Still, protection from the elements cannot be assigned any source of light. Sure enough, illumination

helps us see what we’ve thought was lost and even in the coldest search can help us find what belongings we require and where they belong. This is, however, a secondary

occupation when, made primary, only shadows what must be brought out, found. Light has its own journey. What we are shown is not always what we seek.

Letters hidden deep in layers of wool not meant for our eyes or reminding us of the terrors of the past come forth, delineate and define,

even terrify. Seek comfort if you will, for truth can give us a path at night, or safety on some murky attic stairs, though it exists for its own sake and once lit will not be

snuffed out, whatever it shows and it shows what it will no matter what you wish for or are convinced you require. By definition illumination is not the same as a warm fire.

***

-- Bob Vance

[bobvsuniverse]

SIGN THIS PETITION! Help me show Michigan Gov. Whitmer the overwhelming support to shut down Line 5 and prevent a new oil tunnel in the Great Lakes.

[bobvsuniverse]

THE NARRATIVES ON BOTH SIDES

The narratives on both sides of the ever-widening aisle (chasm really) are so bizarrely antithetical to one another... can anyone even measure how much lying is going on? These people aren’t even on the same planet.

  The history of the Italian Renaissance can barely compete for intrigue, real and symbolic internecine poisonings, murder and torture among the smiling oligarchs, and money being the only measure of truth.

  I am completely bowled over by the extent to which the majority of the American public in particular has been boondoggled by this successful mass manipulation. I was convinced during the run-up to the Iraq War that officially instigated and condoned chaos was the primary tactic used to obscure what would otherwise be the obvious final objective of the global moneyed elite. Now I am convinced that keeping the populace confused is a primary policy in maintaining power and access to resources, no matter how devastating the outcome. No matter how authentic their in-group conflicts may be.

  At the core of the elite’s belief system is the delusional if unshakable faith in their own immunity from the catastrophic future that we face and that they insist on continuing to facilitate by sacrificing lives and homes, children and what remains of the wilds and the waters.  The outrageous and transparent propaganda, selective “news” cycles, and an abject and corrosive inability to take historical realities into account infect both sides like some particularly nefarious brain eating disease.

  I have no answers. And I trust no one who pretends or are sure they do. I hear nothing but noise from any of the elite’s spokespeople and their proxies sponsored and very well remunerated by those whose primary focus is how to protect and build upon their profound and grotesque hoarding pathology and their subsequent addiction to waste.

  And anyone who speaks clearly and cogently against such self-destructive mass suicide? They are turned into a spectre of themselves through the sickening celebrity-making machine or given a job deep in the bowels of the mass incarceration and military industrial system’s academic monasteries. They are silenced as effective spokespersons of an alternate and sustainable tomorrow.  

  And hope?

  What of it?

  If you have to look somewhere outside of yourself and past the very real calamity we face then you will be ripe for the picking by the money-equals-speech crowd whose only short-sighted and shallow relationship to us is how to inure us to the changes that surround us and make us into willing indentured zombies for their cause as if they will be our saviors when they are the demonic forces that willingly kill the future for our children and their children.

  Hope. Another lie the wealthy dish out like the slop they serve the masses in jail, the homeless and the refugee.

  And we’re supposed to be grateful and polite.

 Fuck that.

[bobvsuniverse]

THE SNOW COMES AGAIN

So much landscape

needs a blanket

I watch a red bird

  We are quiet here

We run from the kettle

of ugly news

  the trees turn holy

all waters turn mirror

or thrash

  their white shores

xylophone god hands

up and down

 places rivers love us

and reach

crystalline

  into the heart of the muffled

pines Oh love

when we all look

  watch a red bird

in the light

softened yard

  like star lines

in a sky of pointillist

lilies

  in this cold we wrap

our souls

in the wind gathering

  dreams

and rest

and rest yes

  I watch a red bird

a seedhead

white-capped

  trembling

[bobvsuniverse]

The Canonization by John Donne (read by Tom O'Bedlam)

For God's sake hold your tongue, and let me love;  Or chide my palsy, or my gout;  My five grey hairs, or ruin'd fortune flout; With wealth your state, your mind with arts improve;  Take you a course, get you a place,  Observe his Honour, or his Grace; Or the king's real, or his stamp'd face  Contemplate; what you will, approve,  So you will let me love.

Alas! alas! who's injured by my love?  What merchant's ships have my sighs drown'd?  Who says my tears have overflow'd his ground? When did my colds a forward spring remove?  When did the heats which my veins fill  Add one more to the plaguy bill? Soldiers find wars, and lawyers find out still  Litigious men, which quarrels move,  Though she and I do love.

Call's what you will, we are made such by love;  Call her one, me another fly,  We're tapers too, and at our own cost die, And we in us find th' eagle and the dove.  The phœnix riddle hath more wit  By us; we two being one, are it; So, to one neutral thing both sexes fit.  We die and rise the same, and prove  Mysterious by this love.

We can die by it, if not live by love,  And if unfit for tomb or hearse  Our legend be, it will be fit for verse; And if no piece of chronicle we prove,  We'll build in sonnets pretty rooms;  As well a well-wrought urn becomes The greatest ashes, as half-acre tombs,  And by these hymns all shall approve  Us canonized for love;

And thus invoke us, "You, whom reverend love  Made one another's hermitage;  You, to whom love was peace, that now is rage; Who did the whole world's soul contract, and drove  Into the glasses of your eyes;  So made such mirrors, and such spies, That they did all to you epitomize—  Countries, towns, courts beg from above  A pattern of your love."

[bobvsuniverse]

ON FORGIVENESS AND ITS ALTERNATIVES

This time of year there is an upsurge in articles and social media memes that present forgiveness as the only way to clear out residual and sometimes crippling negative feelings one may have toward others who have intentionally or unintentionally made one a target of cruelty and malice.

  Perhaps this happens due to a collective anticipatory apprehension about sitting down to dinner with family to celebrate a string of holidays during which we are commanded by the culture to be “happy”.   At the same time we are inundated by faulty cultural assumptions that familial love and togetherness exist almost alone at the apex of human relationship desire and accomplishment (or lack of it).

  Personally, I think this has more to do with selling tchotchkes and bad fruit salad with marshmallow cream than it has to do with the state of reality of the American family, its possibilities and its shortcomings. And I have nothing against forgiveness. I would never disagree with the widespread belief that forgiveness does indeed offer one path to clearing out the self-destructive inner grinding machine of anger at others for what they have done to hurt us.  

  But forgiveness is only one path and it may not even be the best path toward detoxifying from a goodly amount of the interpersonal poisons that are passed along and/or inherited as a matter of course in the practice of loving others and one’s self …  or just in the act of living with people in community in the world.

  At this point I think it is important for me to offer a disclaimer relating to my interest and perspective on forgiveness… and what I think about forgiveness as the exclusive method toward the aim of promoting self-healing from interpersonal and other kinds of trauma experienced at the hands of other human beings: there are things that people do to one another that are unforgivable.

  For almost 35 years I worked as a social worker, most of it in the public sector with community mental health services. For almost a dozen of those years I also worked as a family counselor in a hospice organization.  

  Before that I don’t think I gave much thought to the practice and outcomes of forgiveness, and whether it was, in fact, as is often claimed (especially this time of year) the best and even the only way to keep from letting how others have mistreated us from eating a terminal hole in our hearts and souls.  

  But I did have my own list of grievances, as anyone does.  I have been fortunate and resilient enough to be able to go on without dwelling too destructively on the people, groups, and communities that have burned an imprint on my soul.  It is a common enough skill and is called to the fore in situations that are perhaps more often than not much more destructive and traumatic than the ones I experienced. And I, by no means, wish to minimize my own. They have been hard enough, thank you. As the great psychoanalyst and Auschwitz survivor Viktor Frankl said: “Everyone has their own Auschwitz.”

 In my work I was able to flesh out the kinds of cruelty and the kinds of people who were best able to manage life in a satisfactory if not exemplary manner after it has been irrevocably altered by abuse perpetrated by another.  I don’t think it would be productive or timely for me to call up a detailed accounting of the various people and situations in which I found myself acting as mediator and healer to recuperation from trauma. That being said, I can more succinctly come up with a few words that aptly describe the kinds of situations I was routinely made privy to.

  Here are some of them:

 Devastating. Murderous.  Torturous. Blindingly and numbingly double-binded. Gruesome. Cruel beyond all reckoning,  Monstrously, bloodily, selfish. Stupendously self-aggrandizing and hurtful.  Shattering. Obliterating.  Astoundingly agonizingly heartless.

  I could go on, but you get the picture.

 It didn’t take me long to recognize that people could, in fact, instigate pure evil in others’ lives in ways that left marks so brutally present and un-erasable that urging, insisting by inference, that victims of such acts work to forgive was in itself an act of cruelty.

  Some things are unforgivable.  I remember being quite upset about something I discovered about a client that was even more disturbing than usual. Something he had survived at the hands of a parent. A wise mentor matter-of-factly told me this: “Some things are unforgiveable”.

  I should add that early in my career I did a little research project among my caseload, which consisted of mostly men that showed that over 80% of them had documented histories of serious and brutal abuse at the hands of relatives. My caseload was made up of some of the most challenging “cases” in the attempts to re-integrate people with persistent symptoms of mental illness back to life in the community.

  Some things are unforgivable.  I think we should all start there.  Not just because we may be professionals working to help others who have been designated as the primary victims of such acts, but as our own self-healers and as the defacto healers of people we love dearly who may struggle daily with the long-term aftermath of being mistreated.

  If we start, instead, with the idea that forgiveness is a desired outcome, the only or best outcome, for someone whose hurts are deep and lasting we run the risk of propelling ourselves into the role of re-traumatizer, of making the act of forgiveness a requirement for healing when the people we are in healing partnership with (including ourselves!) are no where near being ready for such a leap and may, rightfully so, never be.

  The process of healing and letting go of potentially self-defeating and -defining rage toward a perpetrator and his or her acts is a long and arduous one. It can be life long… and may in fact also be a defining characteristic of the subject’s potential and greatness. It may resist the dissolving power that forgiveness assumes, for reasons that have everything to do with the process of healing and completion and the imperfect act of forgiveness.

  If we assume forgiveness is the most desirable outcome, and push for it before it is possible if it is possible at all, might we not be reacting out of our own discomfort with a sometimes grueling recovery process or with the presence of the reality of human-to-human cruelty that defines much of how the human race and its individuals have, in surviving it, accomplished transcendent greatness in the midst of abject misery and evil?

  Not forgiving does not equal not healing.

  Forgiving is only one way of innumerable and highly individuated ways to prime the pump of healing and what is called recovery.

  And it is a damn good one. Don’t get me wrong… if it is available. If it is appropriate to the circumstance and nature of the process of healing.

  What is interesting is how in our culture, in taking forgiveness off the table of the required goals toward healing, we are left with little in the way of an ongoing narrative. There is an assumption made by those who strongly recommend it that the ability to forgive is practically the only way to demonstrate that one has moved along significantly enough to declare that he or she is healing.

  But that is exactly what I want to do. Take forgiveness off the table and ask:  What else is there?

  Certainly there are a great number of people who survive, heal, even thrive, who are willing to admit that there are things that were done to them that are unforgiveable. I know people who have either not made it a point or don’t have time to make forgiveness a central fulcrum in their journey to reclaim wholeness or make their scars more flexible, or they outright admit there are things that were done that are unforgiveable.  One would hesitate, even be ill advisably presumptuous and condescending, to suggest that someone's healing process is incomplete because they have not forgiven.

  Let us start by recognizing the power in admitting: some things are unforgiveable.

  So, you ask, if not forgiveness then what?

  One of the problems with making forgiveness a requirement of healing is how narrow a scope of possible intervention that leaves; how many people it leaves out of the conversation who have managed to make great progress in their own recovery when, in fact, we should be trying to pull in as many perspectives and methods of healing as exist.

  What do people do who make tremendous inroads into their own personhood, sans forgiveness, once past the trauma inflicted on them? People who aren’t focused on forgiving their perpetrator/s, but just on reclaiming their life-lihood?

  They do what they do.

  If forgiveness becomes a part of the package, and it works for them, so be it. Good for them.

  But the same goes for those others to whom forgiveness is not central or is impossible because there are things that are unforgiveable.  Their work is just as important and just as successful. And, as almost anyone who has survived and thrived after great trauma might tell us, the work of recovery is a life long process, with forgiveness or not.  The illusion that forgiveness absolves the perpetrator at the same time that it releases the traumatized from the clutches of some inner sweatshop of recovery work short-circuits the entire endeavor.

  There is power and transcendence in the work toward recovery, however it is approached and whatever tools and methods any one individual employs.

  Personally, I think that “letting go” is a much more accurate and all encompassing, defining, aspect of moving toward wholeness after trauma than forgiving, even if forgiving has been employed as a way to reach letting go.

  Personally, I think that to be effective forgiveness should be asked for.

  I know many will disagree with me by saying that forgiveness is for the person forgiving, not the perpetrator being forgiven.  That may be so in a certain percentage of people to whom forgiveness has proven to be integral to their ongoing process of letting go, but certainly there are many, perhaps a greater percentage of people moving into and through letting go, who have no need to forgive and recognize the circumstances of their trauma and the people involved have no will or ability to ask for forgiveness, no real presence… because what was done was unforgivable… because forgiveness for a situation that produces such devastating trauma often enough denies clear and precise enough indicators of who perpetrates and what is ultimately to blame.

  Still, one must go on. One DOES go on.

  It is okay not to forgive.

  Maybe forgiveness will present itself as a reasonable action in the future.  Maybe not. Maybe you will still move through and into your recovery, and at times do it brilliantly. Maybe you will awaken at some time in the future and realize you needn’t concern yourself with forgiveness.  Maybe you will have found you without it.

  What a day!

  ****

  — Bob Vance

 ****

[bobvsuniverse]

TWO POEMS (that aren’t happy)

*****

What Fuels Your Throne Destroys Your Kingdom

 Looking west I saw nothing.

As I approached shore the hawks

spun through the catalpa

and all the small sounds were rich

in a music I could not hear.

 I was fixated on filling the void

that I had created because I knew nothing

and could not see what was already there.

We call this gold.  We call this

growing past the limits of growth. Impossibility

 is faith. Now the forests burn like Dante;

now the rivers cough like Keats.

We consider fracking the entire foundation

of our last perceived emptiness, all the layers 

of the history of our kin, what has lived

 before us, the earth’s books beneath us,

because we have not learned what is clearly there.

It is so alien to our purposes

and our Baal, our dances with suicide,

our refusal to share.

  Looking west I saw nothing.

I walked over the blood, I told lies

like today's lies, to keep my war pure

and my gods blind.

Looking west the illness was always

  behind me and it pushed me on.

I shat in the river upstream

from my new village. The natives

would have laughed

but they were already dead.

***

***

When the Dead Begin to Speak

  the jaguars of the soil erupt and tell


stories of a million names.


The rich hot blasts of songs of dancers dancing


for hours chant the story of hands and laughter,


crease the ice that drives the mountains


into the seas. The dead

 begin to speak and artists of the blooms


of what we do to go on create drums and tambourines


in the ears of the children who have been lost


to the drones of the blasts of mourning,


the losses of oilfield and mine


where sweet tubers once grew with their edible greens.

  When the dead begin to speak


those whose art is manufactured from deafness


and knives that carve muteness into songs


do not quake but grow hungry: our old wounds


store underground, intact, for a millennium


and push up like wind chimes bones tangling

  over isolated islands of the denial of the beasts


they have become, how they forsake their voice


for the cacophony of a brutal and primitive


technology of murder. We can see the sea again


when the dead begin to speak


we can see how a new world rises

  in the midst of the currents of our distant lore


how our story passes down from mother to father

to mother
to father, our stoves and our fruits.


Because they are our voices, the voices


of the dead, we know them.


We cannot turn away. The voices of the dead

 rule our cantina of love because that


is what the beasts of silence try to take away.


We hold on. We know it lives longer than bones


and it webs the dissonant loveliness, a history


of our stories and the stories of our stories.


Take my heroes away if you dare!

  I have found a shred of shawl


I have uncovered the genetic code of my losses


and the holiness of my deep will in the tooth


of the silence you dare try to extract from me.


When the dead begin to speak


the trees themselves create a barrier of ravishing winds

  the poisons we are forced to swallow


become the armor of our singing.

   — Bob Vance

  ***

— Bob Vance

***

[bobvsuniverse]

What Can a Poem Contribute to a Conversation About Torture?

We want so much for our songs

to relieve us from the wounds we inflict

either because we do not look away

or because we can.

  And for those who want their lines

to stay pretty, pastoral,

or simply celebrate some shallow if troubled life

what can a poem about torture offer?

  At one poets’ conference I recall

light and clever verse

about tossing clothes to the maid.

What harm could come of that

  even if there are poets with bullets

in their heads lying in a ditch

mistaken for the usual demons

when all they could sing was the truth

  or love.  Ask

Akhmatova about that, her little love poems

betrayed a whole idea

just memorized and repeated 

  over and over in a cold flat

between friends.

What can poems say about torture?

That poets have known it enough,

  the real ones? What a shame

we refuse to know the songs

those killed in error

after a simulated drowning sang

  over their children until they would sleep

or how the gruesome mash of secret lusts

split the rectums

of the designated devils

  only to betray a president

and his astounding excuses

called advisors, lawyers…

And if these do not belong in jail

  which of us do?

The man who sells cigarettes

in the street?

A Black boy with a pellet gun?

  This dying is a dirty affair

if you must find such weak reasons to kill.

The poets have known that and they

are silenced or purposefully unheard:

  an owl after a gurgled moan

a whip-poor-will in an inky nightmare,

they all disappeared into the deep

or were planted with the others

  in the ditch of our sins

and the limits of our imaginations

to envision a world, this one, our neighborhoods

populated by such bloody lies.

  ***

  — Bob Vance

***

[bobvsuniverse]

WHAT SAVED ME

Over the hills

outside town

across the wide fields

the cut corn stalks

and converging roads

  past the wide spaces

where hills rise

above the leaves letting loose

from a ridge of maples and beech

the dead elms and ash

  the slate clouds

pass under the streaks of sun

coming and going

and a haze billows down

through the light

  distant rain, a filmy scarf

of release…  I am on my way

somewhere, so is it,

its motion is made

into molasses, like mine,

  the syrup

of time inside time

we are the same

I know it now

blossoming.

  *

 Earlier the little creeks

far back in the cedars

  spilled and clung

and foamed

  over rocks

over clear clear sands

  over tracks of deer

and coyote.

  My little dog could sense a bear

passed there

  the spring that gurgles up

into the grass and runs,

  the birch trunks

streak into the still river

  mirror moving, moving

but barely stirring

  *

  and after dark, when I needed it most

when the radio and the road

conspired to make me heave

behind the wheel

trying to stay some course

some inexplicit unknowable way

between being a killer or the killed—

the bloodstains in a silent kitchen

filling with crows—

I saw the moon.

  *

 A friend shows me a picture

of a persimmon

floating just above the trees.

  In the glowing gloaming

just passed, the light behind a scooting cloud

for a moment, bright as straw

  emerges again

a lovely face, tipped, reflective

bigger than the lit paper globe

  you hold out

in the firefly summer

just to let it go until it disappears

  so far over you do not remember.

  *

  It is not summer now.

We wait for some cataclysm

  we wait for something to save us

and then that moon,

  bigger than any streetlamp

hanging there

  joined these other miracles

and they saved me.

  ***

    —Bob Vance

[bobvsuniverse]

PLANTING SPRING ONIONS AFTER AN EARLY SNOW

  At last the light

is too irresistible

and the garden,

gathering its first snow,

fills with it.

  Odd

perhaps

to take a broom to the place

where beans once lived

and sweep the snow away.

  A sudden pass of sun more sun

and then more sun with

the day’s cold breath

wakes you

in some essential way

  as the beautiful

black dirt is

laid open not yet

frozen, its new furrows

mottled with streaks

  of snow.

It’s taken me longer

than I would like to admit

to get out

in the bright

  snowy day its astounding

lightness

and fresh

wind

but here I am

  hoe in hand

scratching out ditches

for little bulbs

Egyptian walking onions

they’re called

  by June they will be

ready to pull, sweet

pungent little thumbs, the patch

where they grow

ready for pepper plants

  basil or broccoli.

I am on my knees

now. The first time this year

I’ve worn my flannel

lined jeans. Clumsy gloves

  place little bulbs

down the furrows

when suddenly the bright day

darkens

a cloud bank

  out over the lake arrives and

showers me with flowers.

I hoe dirt over each trough

pack each row

and the snow sings

  on the last

of the leaves, furs

dried flowers

and sings it sings and

its song sounds like

  yes yes yes.

 ***

   — Bob Vance

 ***

[bobvsuniverse]

B&W shots Lake Superior, south shore, taken during the eclipse 2017

[bobvsuniverse]

Rip Current

The instructions are common:

do not swim against it.

You will tire and sink.

Wait until it deltas out

beyond the bar

and swim parallel to the sand

until it sets you free.

  Hire a wave to take you in.

  Float.

  *

  None of this matters in a panic.

As if the whole crowd could stop

pressing forward just because you

your calm reason have become a part of it

as unwilling as you are,

knowing what will happen

if a sudden mighty push rolls you

  to the bottom, that deep disquiet.

  You cannot breathe.

  *

 Waves can be that dangerous.

You stand in the surf,

a tern or pelican make quotations

in the air. Far off the tallest wave

moves in. You stay ahead of it,

practice what you have learned

since you were thirteen

  all foam

  and sand in your shorts

  * 

 And the times one knocks you down?

bends a limb

impossibly under the churn

and pull? There you go, scraped

and bumped across the bottom of the sea.

No matter.

Some of us survive these falls

  that final wave that crushes you

  to the sharp berm.

  *

  Still, a rip current can be stealthy as lies.

You relax in a calm stretch

and suddenly you are far from shore. Yes,

we are given instructions

but many will die. We all do.

It is the story of our time.

Under tow against our legs, surfacing

  surfacing so far

  we cannot hope to swim in.

   **

 — Bob Vance

  ***

***

[bobvsuniverse]

WHEN THE WINDOW BLOWS OPEN

I am alert for signs:

where the yellow flower lies

in the torrent and how much light

approaches over the waters.

 When the window blows open

and the sounds of the rain

reach in with a cold rush of air

everything moves quickly

and slowly at the same time,

 the hidden stars cross the firmament

the same paths they have always taken

the moon eclipses and then

swells again, my heart yes

my heart is wounded because

 you are in some other room

healing and I cannot exclaim: oh

the window has blown open

look at the grass, how its green becomes

a miracle. We could almost watch

 the last little patch of snow

tangled in the raspberries

disappear. Everything pushes up

or out. The window blows open

this early when I am almost awake

 and I think of you again

and these days without you nearby.

I am alert for signs that can tell me

something of the future

beyond what I know. Miracles

 and curses. The damn window

blows open and I rise in the cool dim

rooms with only the song of the muffled

rain. You are not near me

and I want you everywhere.

*

— Bob Vance