man. it's been a hell of a last few weeks... call it astral, call it political, call it weather or allergies or covid, call it coincidental - everybody's feeling trammeled. here's your favorite poem this month with some lymphatic massage to free up the body for the equinox to bring in something new. This cycle of decay and regeneration isn't as much the topic of my thoughts on the Equinox in Thinking Feelingly, which focuses more on circular cycles... but the vibe I got from you in classes all this week was definitely that the letting go right now is really, really hard. So I'm attaching the Equinox chapter excerpt, but thought for the practice video, I'd focus on the poem that gave you the most comfort this week - Forman's "On This Day." 

Here's the excerpt from Thinking Feelingly:

Joy Harjo, “Eagle Poem”
To pray you open your whole self
To sky, to earth, to sun, to moon
To one whole voice that is you.
And know there is more
That you can’t see, can’t hear;
Can’t know except in moments
Steadily growing, and in languages
That aren’t always sound but other
Circles of motion.
Like eagle that Sunday morning
Over Salt River. Circled in blue sky
In wind, swept our hearts clean
With sacred wings.
We see you, see ourselves and know
That we must take the utmost care
And kindness in all things.
Breathe in, knowing we are made of
All this, and breathe, knowing
We are truly blessed because we
Were born, and die soon within a
True circle of motion,
Like eagle rounding out the morning
Inside us.
We pray that it will be done
In beauty.
In beauty.
From In Mad Love and War. Copyright © 1990 by Joy Harjo. Reprinted with the permission of Wesleyan University Press, www.wesleyan.edu/wespress


Joy Harjo, “For Anna Mae Pictou Aquash, Whose Spirit Is Present Here and in the Dappled Stars”
(For we remember the story and must tell it again so we may all live)
Beneath a sky blurred with mist and wind,
I am amazed as I watch the violet
heads of crocuses erupt from the stiff earth
after dying for a season,
as I have watched my own dark head
appear each morning after entering
the next world to come back to this one,
amazed.
It is the way in the natural world to understand the place
the ghost dancers named
after the heart breaking destruction.
Anna Mae,
everything and nothing changes.
You are the shimmering young woman
who found her voice,
when you were warned to be silent, or have your body cut away
from you like an elegant weed.
You are the one whose spirit is present in the dappled stars.
(They prance and lope like colored horses who stay with us
through the streets of these steely cities. And I have seen them
nuzzling the frozen bodies of tattered drunks
on the corner.)
This morning when the last star is dimming
and the busses grind toward
the middle of the city, I know it is ten years since they buried you
the second time in Lakota, a language that could
free you.
I heard about it in Oklahoma, or New Mexico,
how the wind howled and pulled everything down
in righteous anger.
(It was the women who told me) and we understood wordlessly
the ripe meaning of your murder.
As I understand ten years later after the slow changing
of the seasons
that we have just begun to touch
the dazzling whirlwind of our anger,
we have just begun to perceive the amazed world the ghost dancers
entered
crazily, beautifully.
From In Mad Love and War. Copyright © 1990 by Joy Harjo. Reprinted with the permission of Wesleyan University Press, www.wesleyan.edu/wespress

POETIC THEMES
    The autumn equinox marks the point where the days and nights are nearly of equal length (from the Latin, aequus nox). It’s a time of balance, where growing things begin to die and, traditionally, harvesting winds down and folks give thanks and take rest. Migrations start. Hibernation plans begin. We accept the movement of nature toward dissolution because we know it is a part of regeneration. There must be death to make way for new life yet to be, like the larva swimming in its own soup before it can grow wings. I think of Mary Oliver’s “Lines Written in the Days of Growing Darkness,” where our acceptance of death is an expression and extension of our love for the world. I imagine Mary Oliver on her beach walk in the sky, wagging her finger at us for being such babies about death. The invitation to reach past late September decay to intuit the promise of rebirth highlights circles (our movement around the sun), the balance of light and dark, and life and death.
    Joy Harjo’s “Eagle Poem” is a meditation on these mysteries, insisting on the secret, invisible messages we can’t see or hear. Meaning is conveyed through a language of circular motion. I think of this poem as an instruction manual for praying in circles, configuring the cyclical pattern of ruin and renewal as a kind of cleansing. The eagle manifests this cycle, flying in circles and “rounding out the morning inside us,” and at the same time is surrounded, “circled in blue sky / in wind.” As containers for the world and contained by it, we are asked to open ourselves and breathe, “knowing we are made of all this.” We are cleansed by the eagle’s circular flight, sweeping our hearts clean. Our perspective, too, is scrubbed clear, and we come to see that we are encircled in something much larger. We glimpse the ultimate truth that our little life is a wee blip in a broader circle of motion.
    It seems important to marry Harjo’s well-known “Eagle Poem” with the circle of decay and regeneration illustrated in “For Anna Mae Pictou Aquash.” Naming and telling the story of the murder of one woman who refused silence is part of a different cycle of continuance in the context of broader cultural genocide. This poem depicts all the same cyclical movements between this world and the next: each spring the crocuses erupt “after dying for a season,” each morning the last star dims and we re-enter this world from the spirit world of sleep. But in giving Anna Mae voice, this poem also illustrates a darker ghost dance, performed ritually to connect the living and the dead. The howling winds of this poem’s “righteous anger” pull everything down to the grinding buses in steely cities where “tattered drunks” lie frozen on street corners. This “dazzling whirlwind” of anger is an important corollary to the soft wind carrying the eagle through its blue sky circles. Harjo’s “own dark head” echoes not just the “heads of crocuses” but also the ghost dancers who “prance and lope like colored horses.” “For Anna Mae” performs another kind of ghost dance: giving voice to the heartbreaking destruction of a people is part of keeping that culture alive.


PRACTICE
    Perhaps you could source your movement practice back to circular dance forms from your own ancestry. It’s not only Native American dance that manifests in flesh the way we orbit around a spiritual core, even as we move within broader circles of motion. Many other movement traditions sequence in circles, both within specific gestures and in the broader structure that turns the practitioner in a complete 360. The only circle dance I studied in any significant depth was a technique by Rudolf Laban, the Austro-Hungarian dance theorist. Laban devised a circular, spiraling sequences inspired by Sufi circling, where the body moves in a deliberate spatial polygon, on the vertical, lateral, and sagittal dimensions. Mary Anthony, a contemporary of Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham, taught me the traditional Laban circle, which I’ll simplify here into an accessible exercise. Imagine a figure 8 on the floor, and take eight steps to trace one circle back to the center of the figure 8, then change directions to trace the complementary circle. Keep your eyes at the spot where the circles merge, and do your best to make each step precisely even in length, so as to divide each circle of steps into a perfect, symmetrical octagon. Slow your pace. Begin to rhythm your breathing with your steps. As your concentration transitions to an effortless zone where you begin to move spontaneously, stay with the practice just a little longer. What is the feeling-state rounding out inside of you?

This lil' film was inspired by the writing of Báyò Akómoláfé. One hot August day I felt a roiling, burning feeling of being pulled towards something scary, and I decided to make something in a medium I knew nothing about (that would be film). As a celebration of play, spontaneity, and experiment, as a resistance to notions of productivity, perfectionism, and the pressure to monetize all our passions. Below I'll paste the excerpt from Thinking Feelingly that includes more, but here are the lines that you hear in the film:

Encircled by crumbling fences and by an encroaching wildness
without maps and without answers
surrender to the journey
let the loamy fingers of this dark soil
envelope you unmake you fiddle with you disturb you unsettle you conspire with you
and birth you.
The world needs you to fly
to wait for guidance from a tree
to do something preposterous
to tell us why one and one could equal sixteen.
The future is not fixed, and the past is yet to come.
This home that is a dance with exile
drives us to find new kin
the cow down the street
the wet anointing she spills on everything
the moon that nods as we stroll by.

This play was a way of practicing, rolling around in his language and in sensation, that enabled me the following day to risk loosening my grip on the familiar to invite a new haunting by shaving my head. More on that in a bit!

FATHER’S DAY
Ashley M. Jones, “Photosynthesis”
 
When I was young, my father taught us
how dirt made way for food,
how to turn over soil so it would hold a seed,
an infant bud, how the dark could nurse it 
until it broke its green arms out to touch the sun.
In every backyard we’ve ever had, he made a little garden plot
with room for heirloom tomatoes, corn, carrots, 
peppers: jalapeno, bell, and poblano--
okra, eggplant, lemons, collards, broccoli, pole beans,
watermelon, squash, trees filled with fruit and nuts,
brussels sprouts, herbs: basil, mint, parsley, rosemary--
onions, sweet potatoes, cucumber, cantaloupe, cabbage,
oranges, swiss chard and peaches,
sunflowers tall and straightbacked as soldiers,
lantana, amaryllis, echinacea,
pansies and roses and bushes bubbling with hydrangeas.
Every plant with its purpose.
Flowers to bring worms and wasps. How their work matters here.
This is the work we have always known,
pulling food and flowers from a pile of earth.
The difference, now: my father is not a slave,
not a sharecropper. This land is his and so is this garden,
so is this work. The difference is that he owns this labor.
The work of his own hands for his own belly,
for his own children’s bellies. We eat because he works.
This is the legacy of his grandmother, my great-granny.
Ollie Mae Harris and her untouchable flower garden.
Just like her hats, her flowerbeds sprouted something special,
plants and colors the neighbors could only dream of.
He was young when he learned that this beauty is built on work,
the cows and the factories in their stomachs, 
the fertilizer they spewed out--
the stink that brought such fragrance. What you call waste,
I call power. What you call work I make beautiful again.
In his garden, even problems become energy, beauty--
my father has ended many work days in the backyard,
worries of the firehouse dropping like grain, my father wrist-deep
in soil. I am convinced the earth speaks back to him
as he feeds it—it is a conversational labor, gardening.
The seeds tell him what they will be, the soil tells seeds how to grow,
my father speaks sun and water into the earth,
we hear him, each harvest, his heartbeat sweet, like fruit.

Copyright © 2021 by Ashley M. Jones. From REPARATIONS NOW! (Hub City Press, 2021). Used with permission of Hub City Press.
 

Gustavo Hernandez, “Marte”
 
Around the time
the first holiday billboards
go up
 
I raise a finger to a point in the night.
 
To my eldest sister say,
look                 that red light is Mars.
 
We have been more than one year
without him, and just now 
we are starting to see things again.
 
So much of our knowledge
about the skies is gone.
Chart-blind,
codices black—all questions
we have forgotten to ask:
the color of the orbs
the slabs of moonlight.
 
I tell her the planet has been
floating there for weeks,
and I really mean to say,
we must try to hold on
to everything we can still recognize, 
even the need to look
for our fathers
in the 
sky.

“Marte” by Gustavo Hernandez, from Flower Grand First, copyright © 2021 Moon Tide Press. Used by permission of the poet.
 
 
Báyò Akómoláfé, “Epilogue: Re/Turn”
(A prose piece appearing here as a poem, with his generous approval)
 
Home is such a slippery concept.
Maybe there are no words to finally rope her in.
In the stead of words, a gasp:
home is then the moment when
in a fit of sovereignty
you would have given names
to the glory-weary sun
and to the council of mountains that hum
gently in his praise
and to the sea
and the bulbous shapes that hang from trees
names for all
only to hear behind your ears
the whisper of the world
“You! We shall give you a name too!”
It is not enough to find one’s way home.
The things that stand in our way
are aspects of our ongoing reconfiguration
enemies, bottlenecks, seething memories, gnarling fetishes, haunting creeds, howling specters, grumbling boogeymen, careening splinters, frowning clouds, green giants, gaping holes, chuckling forests.
A good journey is about dismemberment, not arrival.
Look for the path with the dead end
the unmapped one
haunted by Sphynxian riddles
And yellow slit-eyed peering shadows.
Encircled by crumbling fences and by an encroaching wildness
without maps and without answers
surrender to the journey
let the loamy fingers of this dark soil
envelope you unmake you fiddle with you disturb you unsettle you conspire with you
and birth you.
The world needs you to fly
to wait for guidance from a tree
to do something preposterous
to tell us why one and one could equal sixteen.
The future is not fixed, and the past is yet to come.
This home that is a dance with exile
drives us to find new kin
the cow down the street
the wet anointing she spills on everything
the moon that nods as we stroll by.
 
For me, this feeling of home
it looks like my father—your grandfather…
Dear Dad,
Mummy told us the week before we set sail
that you might not come back with us to Nigeria
the government needed you there
in the raging wars of Kinshasa.
But we knew.
This heavy gravity that pulled down everything within
as if I had swallowed a wrecking ball.
We drove in the embassy’s Pajero SUV to the busy docks.
We got on the ferry across the Congo River
And when the boat started to drift away from the quay
You stood there on the platform, your legs
an actionable distance apart — a long cool figure
cut out from the pestilence of the background,
Silhouetted against he din of the ordinary.
I feel your prickly mustache as you press your face into mine
the anchoring hopes come undone
and the ferry drifts out,
dancing on the currents
in the wake of other departing vessels.
You did come home
many times after that
until the day you came home in a box.
I have a daughter now.
I'm sure you know that because you haunt me.
I write you to let you know
I see you standing on the quay even now
when leaves rustle with passing wind
when your granddaughter asks about you
I see you when I remember the promise
to think with her
to listen to the ghosts that wander the streets
as they whisper about world forgone,
And to live in small places
where I never forget
that to be Alethea’s father is the deepest honor
the universe bestows on me.
I love you. Don't leave me alone.
 
This, all of this,
is how home feels.
Home is your mother
in whose entrails and dust I will be entangled
long after memories are congealed into new stars.
So take these letters
pack them in a neat heap
and burn them in a fire
put the ashes in with us,
where we now lie,
in the single pot
release us into the ocean wind
let her carry us away
so we will always be close to you.
Run through the fields, my darling.
Run to your new kin.
To your new fathers and mothers.
To the ones who hold you close
as our dust churns a new night.
Gather your children close—if you have any--
and tell them of your mother and me.
Especially your mother.
Tell them of your mother.
And when you dance through the wisps
of Thursday's bright morning
know you will not dance alone.
For we will haunt you.
We are cool like that. 

Báyò Akómoláfé from These Wilds Beyond Our Fences: Letters to my Daughter on Humanity's Search for Home, North Atlantic Books. Copyright © 2017 by Báyò Akómoláfé. Rewritten as a poem here with permission of the author. 
 
 
POETIC THEMES
            Maybe we’re finally ushering in a time of “Parent’s Day.” If I try to hunt down what fatherhood is, somatically and essentially, I guess it might be rooted in a seed and then in the practice of cultivating its growth. In a beautiful bridge to Juneteenth next week, Ashley Jones’ poem recuperates the image of her father working the earth from its history in slavery and returns it to a “conversational labor” of love. Pouring elements of light and water into the earth is likened to speech, the soil has a voice, and the seeds speak back with what they want to become. In this ecology of heart work, there is a comingling of the elemental and the auditory. Our father’s voice grows inside us, so sown into us that we can taste it: “we hear him, each harvest, his heartbeat sweet, like fruit.” “Photosynthesis” helps us see how one thing becomes another, across generations. Sharecropping transmutes into a mode of dropping worries like grain. Great-granny’s love of color shapeshifts from hats and flowers into food. Work becomes power becomes energy becomes a heartbeat.
            If “Photosynthesis” inspires us to listen for our fathers in the earth, “Marte” invites us to look for them in the sky. In fact, this poem is more than an invitation—it’s a plea. The poem’s jagged lines seem to be shaking us, jostling us back to an awareness of the old ways of our fathers, and ancestors further back. The grief of loss leads us into a kind of blindness, a forgetfulness that threatens to take away our maps, our customs, even our questions. Hernandez encourages us to “hold on” to our need, squinting to find traces of “everything we can still recognize”… even our fathers in the sky.
            Which leads me to Báyò Akómoláfé’s These Wilds Beyond Our Fences: Letters to my Daughter on Humanity’s Search for Home. In the book’s foreword, Charles Eisenstein adopts the metaphor of a crystal for the way home refracts prismatically in Akómoláfé’s letters: “It isn’t like the bull’s-eye, the destination, heaven, home, doesn’t exist. It is only that it doesn’t exist in linear time. It is like a crystal hanging above our entire timeline, refracting partial images of itself onto our world that we recognize as home.”
I feel fatherhood, too, in Akómoláfé’s work, as something exploded, expanded, and dissolved into the sense experience of the whole world, from the humming mountains to the “loamy fingers” of the soil to the nodding moon to the wet-anointing cow to the “bulbous shapes that hang from trees.” The universe gives us our name. Fatherhood is bestowed like a gift and then re-gifted generously. Nurture must be shared with new kin, those who will hold us close when our “real” parents are turned to dust. This beautiful paradox of holding on to our hauntings (his own father’s ghost, waving his tall and noble goodbye from the quay), and the need to let go of the finite (the ashes of our parents and the proverbial letters they have written us) is the mystery of Báyò's worlding project. We must release our tight grip on the past so that we can open ourselves to being haunted in new, just as intimate ways: “let [the ocean wind] carry us away so we will always be close to you.” Kinda like his response to me when I sheepishly apologized for presuming to re-sculpt a prose passage so personal to him, so foreign from my own experience. He responded,
No, you are not writing to me about my own daughter or my own father’s death; you are writing to me about yours, about his, hers, theirs. Somehow, in re-presenting those lines to me like a poem, you brought it to me in a new way—in a way that wasn’t mine to begin with, but was and has always been a collective, affective, sociomaterial swirl of homemaking/place-sensing becomings. I say yes to this, sister.
 
#goals: to be, even for a day, cool like that.
         Báyò is doing what he describes, by unsettling, disturbing, and dismembering fatherhood as a home-base. He destabilizes any single, static, in situ ground or moment—even the image of his own father on the quay—and sets it into a movement migration. The ferry, the ashes, invite us to configure our own, tentative, temporary definition of home, in turn to be disturbed, burned up, and recycled.

 
PRACTICE
            How do we invite homemaking/place-sensing becomings into our daily practice? Maybe we could call up a seed memory of a paternal figure and consider an associated sense experience. This might be one of the five senses like listening for a heartbeat in a garden or peering out at the night sky to find Mars, but it also might be a subtler sense impression like the feeling of being ferried away from a static figure. Look for this perceptual experience in your world right now, this day, this week.
If we could shift a parental memory from a moment into a whole field of perception, we might feel more cared for in this world. Right after my dad died I had to walk the dog, and I felt companioned by his spirit in the open horizon of the playing fields by my house. For a while, every morning and night I would visit with my dad at those fields. Now every big open sky carries his imprint, every horizon holds me. We need these re-homing patterns—what’s yours?

This one is for Sinéad, y'all. This loss is for many, but certainly for gen x feminists, a catastrophic blow to the abdomen. Head heart and gut, she stood for everything we wanted to be. She walked the walk we only dared dream, her brave skull rising while we were hair-flipping, her combat boot stance wide and clear while we were teetering on heels that shrunk our dignity. She howled, she strutted, she camera-stared with eyes clear as the sky. The wind-filled sail of her solar plexus, like a cobra hood flaring, fucked-you-ed every possible form of invisible power-mongering, oppression-rehearsing, capitulation to the daily regime of our culture's practiced cruelties. The defiance to stand inside her vulnerability, her heartache, her loss, her pain was unlike the familiar expressions of strength we'd known. Holy shit, you can strip yourself of protective armor and still sing a war song! She lifted us into who we wanted to be when we got enough breathing room to step into our power. 

Here's an excerpt from Adrienne Rich's explanation in the LA Times for rejecting the National Medal for the Arts - so much like Sinéad calling bullshit on the Grammies: 

My 'no' came directly out of my work as a poet and essayist and citizen drawn to the interfold of personal and public experience. I had recently been thinking and writing about the growing fragmentation of the social compact, of whatever it was this country had ever meant when it called itself a democracy: the shredding of the vision of government of the people, by the people, for the people. ...Like so many others, I’ve watched the dismantling of our public education, the steep rise in our incarceration rates, the demonization of our young black men, the accusations against our teenage mothers, the selling of health care--public and private--to the highest bidders, the export of subsistence-level jobs in the United States to even lower-wage countries, the use of below-minimum-wage prison labor to break strikes and raise profits, the scapegoating of immigrants, the denial of dignity and minimal security to our working and poor people. ...Many of us today might wish to hold government accountable, challenge the agendas of private power and wealth that have displaced historical tendencies toward genuinely representative government in the United States. We might still wish to claim our government, to say, This belongs to us--we, the people, as we are now.
We would have to start asking questions that have been defined as non-questions--or as naive, childish questions. In the recent official White House focus on race, it goes consistently unsaid that the all-embracing enterprise of our early history was the slave trade, which left nothing, no single life, untouched and was, along with the genocide of the native population and the seizure of their lands, the foundation of our national prosperity and power. Promote dialogues on race? Apologize for slavery? We would need to perform an autopsy on capitalism itself. 
...What is social wealth? How do the conditions of human labor infiltrate other social relationships? What would it require for people to live and work together in conditions of radical equality? How much inequality will we tolerate in the world’s richest and most powerful nation? Why and how have these and similar questions become discredited in public discourse? And what about art? Mistrusted, adored, pietized, condemned, dismissed as entertainment, auctioned at Sotheby’s, purchased by investment-seeking celebrities, it dies into the “art object” of a thousand museum basements. It’s also reborn hourly in prisons, women’s shelters, small-town garages, community college workshops, halfway houses--wherever someone picks up a pencil, a wood-burning tool, a copy of “The Tempest,” a tag-sale camera, a whittling knife, a stick of charcoal, a pawnshop horn, a video of “Citizen Kane,” whatever lets you know again that this deeply instinctual yet self-conscious expressive language, this regenerative process, could help you save your life.
...There is a continuing dynamic between art repressed and art reborn, between the relentless marketing of the superficial... to reach through armoring, resistances, resignation, to recall us to desire. Art is both tough and fragile. It speaks of what we long to hear and what we dread to find.
...I wish I didn’t feel the necessity to say here that none of this is about imposing ideology or style or content on artists; it is about the inseparability of art from acute social crisis in this century and the one now coming up... In the long run, art needs to grow organically out of a social compost nourishing to everyone, a literate citizenry, a free, universal, public education complex with art as an integral element, a society without throwaway people, honoring both human individuality and the search for a decent, sustainable common life. In such conditions, art would still be a voice of hunger, desire, discontent, passion, reminding us that the democratic project is never-ending.
For that to happen, what else would have to change?  
​- Adrienne Rich 

To read the whole article, paste this link in your browser: 
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1997-aug-03-bk-18828-story.html


Adrienne Rich, “Planetarium”
 
Thinking of Caroline Herschel (1750–1848)
astronomer, sister of William; and others.
 
A woman in the shape of a monster
a monster in the shape of a woman
the skies are full of them
 
a woman         ‘in the snow
among the Clocks and instruments
or measuring the ground with poles’
 
in her 98 years to discover
8 comets
 
she whom the moon ruled
like us
levitating into the night sky
riding the polished lenses
 
Galaxies of women, there
doing penance for impetuousness
ribs chilled
in those spaces                        of the mind
 
An eye,
 
‘virile, precise and absolutely certain’
from the mad webs of Uranusborg
 
encountering the NOVA
 
every impulse of light exploding
 
from the core
as life flies out of us
 
Tycho whispering at last
‘Let me not seem to have lived in vain’
 
What we see, we see
and seeing is changing
 
the light that shrivels a mountain
and leaves a man alive
 
Heartbeat of the pulsar
heart sweating through my body
 
The radio impulse
pouring in from Taurus
 
I am bombarded yet                I stand
 
I have been standing all my life in the
direct path of a battery of signals
the most accurately transmitted most
untranslatable language in the universe
I am a galactic cloud so deep             so invo-
luted that a light wave could take 15
years to travel through me      And has
taken               I am an instrument in the shape
of a woman trying to translate pulsations
into images                 for the relief of the body
and the reconstruction of the mind.
 
Adrienne Rich, “Planetarium” from Collected Poems: 1950–2012. Copyright © 2016 by The Adrienne Rich Literary Trust. Copyright © 1971 W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. Reprinted by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
 
 
Adrienne Rich, “August”
 
Two horses stand in a yellow light
eating windfall apples under a tree
 
as summer tears apart and the milkweeds stagger
and grasses grow more ragged
 
They say there are ions in the sun
neutralizing magnetic fields on earth
 
Some way to explain
what this week has been, and the one before it!
 
If I am flesh sunning on rock
if I am brain burning in fluorescent light
 
if I am dream like a wire with fire
throbbing along it
 
if I am death to man
I have to know it
 
His mind is too simple, I cannot go on
sharing his nightmares
 
My own are becoming clearer, they open
into prehistory
 
which looks like a village lit with blood
where all the fathers are crying: My son is mine!
 
“August.” Copyright © 2016 by the Adrienne Rich Literary Trust. Copyright © 1973 by W.W. Norton & Company, Inc, from Collected Poems: 1950–2012 by Adrienne Rich. Used by permission of W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.
 
Susan Stewart, “The Forest”
 
You should lie down now and remember the forest,
for it is disappearing--
no, the truth is it is gone now
and so what details you can bring back
might have a kind of life.
 
Not the one you had hoped for, but a life
—you should lie down now and remember the forest--
nonetheless, you might call it “in the forest,”
no the truth is, it is gone now,
starting somewhere near the beginning, that edge,
 
Or instead the first layer, the place you remember
(not the one you had hoped for, but a life)
as if it were firm, underfoot, for that place is a sea,
nonetheless, you might call it “in the forest,”
which we can never drift above, we were there or we were not,
 
No surface, skimming. And blank in life, too,
or instead the first layer, the place you remember,
as layers fold in time, black humus there,
as if it were firm, underfoot, for that place is a sea,
like a light left hand descending, always on the same keys.
 
The flecked birds of the forest sing behind and before
no surface, skimming. And blank in life, too,
sing without a music where there cannot be an order,
as layers fold in time, black humus there,
where wide swatches of light slice between gray trunks,
 
Where the air has a texture of drying moss,
the flecked birds of the forest sing behind and before:
a musk from the mushrooms and scalloped molds.
They sing without a music where there cannot be an order,
though high in the dry leaves something does fall,
 
Nothing comes down to us here.
Where the air has a texture of drying moss,
(in that place where I was raised) the forest was tangled,
a musk from the mushrooms and scalloped molds,
tangled with brambles, soft-starred and moving, ferns
 
And the marred twines of cinquefoil, false strawberry, sumac--
nothing comes down to us here,
stained. A low branch swinging above a brook
in that place where I was raised, the forest was tangled,
and a cave just the width of shoulder blades.
 
You can understand what I am doing when I think of the entry--
and the marred twines of cinquefoil, false strawberry, sumac--
as a kind of limit. Sometimes I imagine us walking there
(. . .pokeberry, stained. A low branch swinging above a brook)
in a place that is something like a forest.
 
But perhaps the other kind, where the ground is covered
(you can understand what I am doing when I think of the entry)
by pliant green needles, there below the piney fronds,
a kind of limit. Sometimes I imagine us walking there.
And quickening below lie the sharp brown blades,
 
The disfiguring blackness, then the bulbed phosphorescence of the roots.
But perhaps the other kind, where the ground is covered,
so strangely alike and yet singular, too, below
the pliant green needles, the piney fronds.
Once we were lost in the forest, so strangely alike and yet singular, too,
but the truth is, it is, lost to us now.
 
“The Forest” from The Forest. Copyright © 1995 by Susan Stewart. Used by permission of University of Chicago Press. 
 
 
 
POETIC THEMES
            The month of August is associated astrologically with the sun, and I have to go personal for a beat here, and not just because Adrienne Rich is my poetic sun. My dad was in a poetry class with Rich at Harvard, and I remember him describing how everyone was struck dumb when she first read aloud. I couldn’t get that image out of my head. Rich’s story was like mine—an upbringing pressured by her dad’s intellectual ambitions for her—and like my mom’s, marrying a professor. She did divorce him to carve her own path, and she wrote “August” in the throes of processing his subsequent suicide.
              The poem begins with an image of the sun’s yellow light illuminating two horses quietly eating apples under a tree (with all this creature’s ancient association with the sun, in Greek myth, Hebrew Scripture, and Vedic lore). But the poem breaks quickly from this sunny scene, as summer burns itself out in the solar flare of August, with its staggering milkweeds and ragged grass. The progress of the poem can only be autobiographical, trying to break from the nightmare entrapment that opens from her own story to history, or rather a prehistory, of separations marked by paternal claims and blood. It’s not an exaggeration to say that Rich’s departure from traditional marriage was also her departure from patriarchy, launching her into position as a leader in second-wave feminist thought. Diving into the Wreck, her most famous collection, in which these poems were published (along with others from the three years following her divorce), established her true voice. Margaret Atwood described hearing Rich read from it: “It felt as though the top of my head was being attacked, sometimes with an ice pick, sometimes with a blunter instrument: a hatchet or a hammer.” Tantamount to a solar explosion, she blew everyone away.
            We found in my dad’s study a note from Rich saying, essentially, “Thanks for last night.” He declined comment. When I met her at a reading and asked her about the note, a coy grin stretched across her wrinkled face and she said, “Yep. Sounds like me in college.” Maybe my dad reminded her of hers. The descriptions of her father sure remind me of mine: a literary snob who gave her daily writing assignments and lauded her poetic achievements especially when they best replicated Western canonical form. Her departure from her father’s language to find her own brilliant, blinding voice was like Minerva bursting from Zeus’s head. I’m still trying to get there. When I can afford it, my plan is to tattoo the final lines of “Planetarium” onto my heart, in some kind of outward-spiraling explosive shape:
“Iamaninstrumentintheshapeofawomantryingtotranslatepulsationsintoimagesforthereliefoftheboddyandthereconstructionofthemind.”
Maybe it will help. 
            “Planetarium” is dedicated to the famous German astronomer Caroline Herschel, whose biography is a lot like Rich’s, struggling with typhus as Rich had struggled with arthritis, relegated to assisting her brother’s scientific work and struggling to emerge as an astronomer in her own right all the way until he died, and after his death, busily cataloguing nebulae and star clusters and comets. Herschel’s gravestone reads, “The eyes of her who is glorified here below turned to the starry heavens.” One might say the same of Adrienne Rich. In “Planetarium,” looking up at the night sky, Rich sees “galaxies of women, there / doing penance for impetuousness,” until the poem encounters a nova, an astral phenomenon that expels solar masses of material at the speed of light and sends shock waves that can even trigger the formation of new stars. That’s a pretty good way to describe Rich’s effect on the world. She captures the experience of finding her “untranslatable language” so viscerally: “every impulse of light exploding / from the core / as light flies out of us….” The heart, here, is configured as its own sun, exploding outward.
            Compare this vivid description of the effects of heat, light, and blinding sun to the conditional uncertainty of “August.” She has yet to truly know her burning brain, throbbing dream “like a wire with fire.” She seems to crave the knowledge of how her flesh threatens the patriarchy. The poem’s description of the sun’s power could be describing the effect of Rich’s own, neutralizing the protection of magnetic fields to pierce right through to the bone. And she does. I go back, again and again, to the explosive last stanza of “Planetarium,” my future tattoo. Maybe to live in the shadow of the solar event that was Adrienne Rich is to strive to digest the impulses of this culture and transform them for the liberation of others. To seat feminine power in the solar plexus, reclaiming the sun from its association with masculinity, is to conceptualize feminine power as the capacity for transmutation, the witchlike translation of one thing into another form.
            But in the burning heat of summer, perhaps we could marry this with a cooler model. “The Forest” is the perfect mulchy answer to the call to ground down and cool off in the heat of August, beginning with its direct order: “You should lie down now.” The language that captures a new quiet in the air, a new stillness and movement toward the end of summer—“disappearing,” “gone now,” “lost to us”—is joined to the hint of nature’s changes in early autumn: the air’s “texture of drying moss,” something falling from “high in the dry leaves,” and the increasingly covered ground. The forest floor is such a useful and evocative image for the ground floor of our being to which we need so badly to return. We settle down into the poem’s musical repetitions, like a chorus returning again and again, “light a light left hand descending.” The layers of grounding, going back and back, “fold in time,” grounding us in the places we remember. The forest floor as “the first layer” calls up the physical reality of the pelvic floor whose layers are crisscrossed. As the source of life, the pelvic floor issues a call to remember, to go back to beginnings, again and again—root, family, origins, home, tribe. This covered ground is the home turf of Mama Earth, eternally feminized. It is both an entry, a doorway back to our early lived experiences, and a “kind of limit,” as we are unable to change or truly inhabit them. 
           A lovely image for the grounding principle is the left hand on the piano, regardless of what tinkling upper keys the right hand might be playing. This is such a useful way of imagining the two hemispheres of the body. With the heat of this month, its fire and solar flare, we need the balance of the left side, always present, associated in myriad traditions with the moon and the grounding principle. So perhaps Susan Stewart’s forest floor is a model of female power that balances Rich’s solar flare. The strength of the pelvic floor is in its layering and its multi-directionality, strong enough to hold not just the content of one body but more than one. As a metaphor, this would claim the capacity for holding multiple views, experiences, and truths without having to choose one, sustaining not just one person but guaranteeing the survival of many—a departure from the zero-sum culture of competition and dominance. Perhaps you resonate with one of these models more than the other. In any case, they are not mutually exclusive to our experience: the two can hold hands with one another.
 ​

PRACTICE
            The two diaphragms, solar plexus and pelvic floor, move together like a dance. Both naturally lift up when we breathe out, and both drop down when we breathe in. If this diaphragmatic tango is new to you, try lying on your belly with a pillow under your abdomen. Gravity accentuates the feeling of the belly pressing into the pillow in the inhale. Picture the diaphragm dropping into the abdomen, stretching the striations of muscle around the solar plexus like sunbeams. This, in turn, helps us ground, as we naturally align the pelvic diaphragm with the abdominal diaphragm, dropping downward on the inhale. If it’s elusive, consider placing a hand on the pelvic floor, receiving the added pressure when your belly swells. If possible, spend a little time reflecting on the experience. Does one or the other of these muscle groups feel more familiar, toned, or powerful to you, or do they feel balanced? Do you relate to one or the other as home-base for some material/essential (pun intended) quality of femininity? Are there any recurrent images or thoughts emerging?

Mary Oliver, “The Summer Day”
The Summer Day

POETIC THEMES:
Schoooool’s out. for. summer! 21st be damned, it’s summertime. To see the extravagance, the unabashed pomp with which nature shakes out her feathers in early summer is to hear the call to be present. This poem begins with a question about God, and ends with another question - Mary Oliver's most famous lines. We don’t need to know who made all this, we just have to commit to feeling it, moment by moment. This might be called the manifesto for the religion of Oliver’s oeuvre as a whole - a kind of agnostic worship of what is. And I do mean worship in its etymological sense - the sense of worthiness, what is worthy of our attention. The poem is not about a summer’s day, it's entitled THE Summer’s Day. This one you’re in. 
Side note about the general versus the specific, as it pertains to another famous poem about spirituality. The most well-known haiku ever written is by Basho, in which a frog jumps into a pond and makes a splash. It's generally agreed that the pond is an analogy for the meditation mind, and the frog jump the arrival of a thought or other disturbance. The translation into English is the subject of endless debate. Is the poem's focus on the water, the jumping frog, or the effect (in ripple or sound)? Do we translate with a pond or the pond? A frog, or the frog? (Basho's Many English Frogs) Answers to this question reveal different understandings of mindfulness. For Oliver, the still water of the mind isn't the point - it's the music of what splashes in. The rhythm of noticing each thing is, for Oliver, spiritual. Present-tense noticing. 
And indeed another repeated word in this poem's description of this grasshopper is "now" - the first word of Patanjali's Yoga Sutras. The first of his 196 aphorisms reads, "Now, the discipline of yoga." Again, there are many translation debates. But one interpretation is that to inhabit the present moment fully, attentively, is yoga. 
Mary Oliver calls herself a “praise poet,” and American transcendentalism finds its 21st century expression in her poems. She distills her message with quotable quotes like “Attention is the beginning of devotion." It would be hard for her to have been more explicit: “Instructions for living a life:/ Pay attention./ Be astonished./Tell about it” (from the poem "Sometimes"). We pay attention, like cash money, we give it. We devote our attention, the most precious of gifts.  
In this same explicit vein, she specifies that this is not just any grasshopper, it’s this one. And repeats "The one who" twice more. Every one of us is as strange and complicated as this grasshopper’s eyes. Ours is not all human life, it’s this one we’re living. And Oliver’s famous second person address to discern what it is you will do with yours is exportable to every calling that brings us into the immediacy of what we are meant to be and do in this world of ours. We are challenged to fall down and surrender to that calling, to offer our lives like a prayer.
The central line of the poem, cutting it down the middle, confesses, "I don't know exactly what a prayer is." And in this poem, prayer turns out to be falling down in the grass, kneeling down, bowing to this earth of ours. 


PHYSICAL THEMES
We could examine the grasshopper’s specific movements, but that’s not really the point here. The grasshopper is one object of attention, and we are called to find our own. The crucial verbs here are falling down, kneeling down, as a physical expression of worship, in the sense of “worthiness” mentioned above. There are indeed, in the words of her beloved Rumi (or at least the Rumi she grew to love through her friend Coleman Bark's translations), a hundred ways to kneel and kiss the ground: “Do you bow your head when you pray or do you look up into that blue space? Take your choice, prayers fly in all directions.” (Huffington Post article) So in this practice we’ll anchor our attention - quite literally, anchoring our attention to the earth - by practicing down dirty, in the grass. “Grass” is a noun mentioned no fewer than 5 times in this relatively short poem, and movements that concretely engage grass are fun to explore. Key to this honing of attentive curiosity is to stay spontaneous with what is drawing our regard, heeding the natural wandering of the observing mind. So after exploring the nearest grassy domain, be sure to take some time to just be.