FootprintsintheWind.com

If we were to create a ritual for a conversation (nb: a particular conversation), what would it contain? What do we want it to do? What spirits call in? What if a conversation were a prayer?

:- Doug.

What do
the ears
of the skin?

:- Doug.

Momentarily filled
in conversation
Accept
—gift
—responsibility

:- Doug.

Conversation is growing
a garden of flowers
tending each other

:- Doug.

If I am sitting at my desk writing away
If the artist is painting away
If the meat cutter is cutting away
If the sleeper is snoozing away
If you are thinking about it, what’s your question?

:- Doug.

Stay near for
Something you will want to hear
Someone you will want to meet

:- Doug.

In spring:
We are pieces
In our life’s puzzle
Leaves fall:
Strange
How new people
Fit

:- Doug.

Find the images
Compress them
Till they yield oils

:- Doug.

With sorrows
He too
Goes your way

:- Doug.

Writing poetry is making
me
and this as well:
conversing is making
us making us

:- Doug.

Remove the lessons
lighter, lighter
so the poem may

:- Doug.

Have I grown from writing
This book? Each poem?
Has this conversing
Yet
Edited me?

:- Doug.

What I do
To receive you as like me
Is doing that matters

:- Doug.

A season alone
how little one needs
then, “sit, sit.”

:- Doug.

Let’s ask
a new question

:- Doug.

If you were to travel to a different
world, what would be in it? How
do you know that would be any better?

:- Doug.

You say, unimposingly,
this is what I need
to remember.

:- Doug.

Do you hear
the conversations
beyond the curtains
across the divides
plants conversing?

:- Doug.

Ask the price
Get a story:
Now you’re in trouble!

:- Doug.

What’s this poem to do with conversing?

:- Doug.

The math myth: adding numbers or pricing out things grabs our attention and pulls in us. When it does. But it lacks weight and the nut meat of the thing’s truth.

:- Doug.

Go farther into space
Go farther into fog
Go farther into void
Go farther into breath
So far you leave behind
Breaths and persons known
How did you ever say “deep?”

:- Doug.

What do I not remember?

:- Doug.