Oh Yeah!
I love this quote, lifted from the site of the Heartless Bitches:

Here's the thing: If you ever get me, you wouldn't have a clue what to do with me." -- Maxine (in "Being John Malkovich")

Depth Charges
On Blogsisters, Jeneane Sessum posts about Helene Cixous, whose urgings and urges find their visceral marks in the writings of such as Chris Locke, Mike Golby, and Jeneane herself -- bloggers who careen headlong down those brambled, precipice-riddled paths of memory and desire, prodding our pulses with their raw prose and challenging our own emotional inhibitions with their soul-full honesty. What they mean is what they say. Unlike my word trips that have always tended to slide along within the protective cover of metaphor.

Take Spring, which always seems to put me in a funk; it always overwhelms me with its sweetness, its promise, its newness, its hope. Yet, despite the prolific stirrings of nature, I have never felt any kind of passion generated by that season. It offers me heavy pregnancy but not heady passion.

Waiting for the Fall
I was never one to yearn for spring,
the sky too full of eager wings,
the air a burden of song.
Even the ground swells, straining
under a yoke of seeds.

I wake with the winds of autumn,
when a cold sun
fades the trees to clarity,
when the line of the sky
cuts clean and sharp
above the leveled land,
when the earth is a slate
set for the poet’s chalk.

Leave me in spring
to wait for the season’s passing,
and look for me then,
when I turn with the leaves
and hold my mouth
to a hungry sky.

Maybe it’s that Spring is mating season, and, not having a mate at the moment, I’m out of synch with the season. Rather than feel fertile and rooted, I feel separate, untethered. There’s something major missing, something just beyond my grasp, something unspoken, some fundamental secret just beyond my ken.

The Hunter
On the rise beyond the stream
on Trout Mountain,
they say, he shot himself—
a still-young man
despaired of a world
too full of fear.

On the west wall of his cabin,
hang the antlers he tore
from some stalked fair game,
banging the nails bent
through thick bone,
clumsily shattered skull.

In the shifting summer light,
their shadows writhe
in fearsome memory.

(They say he loved the land,
the hunt, the kill.)

Some think the land is haunted, now.
They say they can feel the fear
in the heavy mountain mist,
hear it in the hollow scrape
of bone on stone.

(They say what he feared
he loved too much.)

When land was finally sold
(to someone starkly purged
of love and fear)
the new owner found a photo
face-down on a dusty shelf –
a stiff-faced young man
in an unforgiving setting,
sternly victorious over
his finally fearless prey.

And so I ask for the antlers,
chipped and weathered, now --
artifacts made unworthy
of either fear or love.

Is the answer hidden somewhere
in the pits of those old bones?
If I scrub them clean, soften the scars,
set them like icons on an altar
ringed with strings of stones,
will I dream one night
of some daring beast
who lifts me gently
on his gleaming horns
and tells me
the unspeakable secret?