FootprintsintheWind.com

If I cannot get there
maybe I can point for you
or only stare

:- Doug.

Mysteries can
only ever
be penetrated
partially
but did we?

:- Doug.

The world is large
and full

:- Doug.

A conversation is a question.
We ask it of ourselves.
We ask it of our friend opposite.
We cannot expect answer
Or even presence.

:- Doug.

The plenitude of meetings
comes and leaves
stays a while only

:- Doug.

I cannot be sure I will get the driveway done today. I’ll work toward it. That is all life permits me to say.

:- Doug.

Contingency
the poet writes
is who we are
Nay!
Oranges in tissue

:- Doug.

I write and I converse on the chance I might stumble on a peculiar jagged rock of conversation: a conversation that tends to meeting. You probably want that too, odds are you have been stretching toward it all your spiritual life.

:- Doug.

Read! How else would you run across Viktor Shklovsky’s admonition to “make it strange”? How else would you start wondering how you could make our conversation strange, and how that could make it wonderful? In looking at things out of their home environs, or purposely failing to grasp the wriggling thing that makes them understandable, you fall together into the cidence of coin!

:- Doug.

Theodore Roethke wrote an article to draw me out, “How to Write Like Somebody Else.” Using his title as a sourdough starter, let us think how might—why might—we converse like our friend? (Just to be complete: for me the title had more meat than the essay. This means we must, as ever, find our own way. Don’t use all the starter your first baking.)

:- Doug.

Is attention the center of conversation? Perhaps it is attention, intention, leaning, pulling, stretching.

:- Doug.

We will not know we are meeting while we are in it. Nor will we know we are in a conversation in its midst. One is often immediately thrown out of the state by asking if one is in it. Take your cue from happiness—ask if you were.

:- Doug.

Where do we open? Where have we hidden ourselves?

:- Doug.

Poetic Conversation

If poetry does what
Other forms of thinking
Cannot

If we allow
Conversation to set us
Thinking
Jumping tracks other forms
Will not

What bread can we
Savor
Kneading these?

:- Doug.

“[A] good poem can never be completely entered,” wrote Jane Hirshfield, “completely known.” (Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry, pp 31-32.) A good person can never be completely entered, completely known. We are all good persons. Yes?

:- Doug.

Where are we after
The humans die out?

:- Doug.

Conversation is a way we process our lives: in rehearsing what transpired (breathed across), we are gaining an understanding of the nuances and extensions of us.

:- Doug.

Conversation adds complexity to two complexities.

:- Doug.

A woman was telling us about her husband’s dementia: he has almost totally stopped speaking. She said plaintively, “There is no conversation. There is no conversation.”

:- Doug.

We can look at many places to take conversation to home, to focus. Two of them can be expressed as continuous threads from 1. differentiation to integration, and from 2. utility to expression.

:- Doug.

We keep the conversation going when by sparking and inventing new outgrowths of complexity between us.

:- Doug.

My work is an intimate spiritual in-vestige-ation of conversation.

:- Doug.

Each conversation is each person’s way, this now, for making meaning in the world. Complicate that with each persons making meaning out of the other’s process of meaning making. Complicate it more by the reflective process each takes after—whether complex, simple, or not at all.

:- Doug.