Response To June 27th's Post

[Lately the trick has been to learn how to take certain insoluble difficulties
out onto the dancefloor without falling into the usual habits: sour assessments,
rigid approaches to the honest. The best possible dancepartner knows that
ease and grace and lightness are the rarest qualities; and that's what I've been
taking lessons to learn. Meister Eckhart, Iris Murdoch, each has taught me
a little elegance in the face of what I'm dancing for. So when I read your recent
instructions on how to tango, I had to agree. Yes, the deviations, the little bits
of chaos that other people introduce into our own orientations of self, our smooth
and measured moves, should be absolutely welcomed. Inches of differences with
and within ourselves. No dance without a partner. In fact, I'd go so far as to say
that the tone and direction of that poem I wrote, which you responded to, was more
than a little influenced by my prolongued exposure to Beckett and Sebald and Proust
than my genuine response to people I have met and related to. Though, then again,
I think the crux of soulfulness, or at least mindfulness, is a willingness to delay
exuberance for the sake of seeing what emerges in the interim. The details of the
whole person, the full moment. The complexity of the shared, and not just the weird
joy of participation. Objectivity, skepticism, analysis: the older and more initiated I
get into the more difficult aspects of life, the more I feel the temptation to overuse
this kind of necessary equipment. But life, the shared array, isn't rational. It's a
dancefloor. There's music. There are couples bumping into each other. Some collisions
are so rough and dramatic that casualties are inevitable. It's these instances that
occupy my mind the majority of the time. Too often, maybe. That, to continue dancing,
one must step over the bodies of the fallen. This puts serious limits on the uninterrupted
gracefulness of my moves. On this and other things, then, I have written this response, a
poem. Which at times is a bit too focused; so much so it can dip in and out of the beginnings
of hurtfulness, fear, hesitation, skepticism, irony, worry, senselessness, and--and I should
admit this--an uncharacteristic, almost rhetorical, mistrust of my partners, inside
me, out on the floor.]




praise can be a steroid
to ruse strength into
the frankly defenseless

which i adore, the details
confusing into human

but since they are and
so am i, both here and there,
friend, i am a creature
of implication
implicated by their relation
not only to me
but them to themselves
and where they are
in the mind, as it reduces

itself often enough just to
like against the troubled work
of actually loving, itself and others,
to survive
implication has its
responsibilities. to see clearly.

to be gentle with illusions
the brain convenes
to continue to agree
with, itself, rare though
how often it happens

less than honestly


no judgment in this. the
tone i fell into
earlier may have implied it

but what that really was
was conflictedness before

devotion to be lost
to be a free being, for them all

is what i hope for
the direction inside them

i simply can't know, because
i can only ever partially

go there, comfort, repair, care.


and because there is a glass
ceiling to love, necessary
to its containment, which
whispers "this is", i have always felt
something entirely intenseless
and without glamour
a duet alive to voice
the rarest organized
wilderness, reciprocal
an opague play of
transparencies

accuracy of caring is what
presents the worried world

before us, and friend, no measure
of rhetorical optimism
can erase that. worried


because worry is a sign of it
which is limiting generative magic

compromise, what you
indicate calling down the
mistletoe, "collaboration"


what is given as our responsibility
to watch for, though, is
knowing our care invested
as the often pained freedom
of another, that they may not

know themselves or what is vital

often contradictory to what is
actually best for them, to respect the
mess is to always encourage
its path even when anguish

is explicit, devoted to submergence
into problems they want you
to collaborate in by believing

you mention fixity,

the mumbling of strangers
as inherently the opposite

but strangers mumble
always from fixity


and concerned measured navigation
keeping one's head oriented
in their presence, FOR them
to be a still conscious movement
oriented to the overwhelmingly
alive, is not exactly fixity, is it?

better to call it the

ecstasy of realism. regarding
the sport of both ambitious
and small-time anxieties

from a mentally undecorated slowness.


it seems that, against
the continuous winces
of skepticism, one should

cultivate a kind of
total exuberance
but how much of this

is sensation's love of self

and how much
are actual people dissolving

in their problems, which
in caring about one is
always in danger of
resembling


i would have to question
the proposed soulfulness
of uncorrected
consideration
if you see the original
of what most call god

in their differences, their details
then what do we call

the sad erase of well-being

by way of learned lost mind
in context of details
because i am also

a detail, adoring to my own
detriment, from

often imperfect concern

for myself, to still the
place they struggle
to come from, be it

poem, wife, or husband,
as you say