Ran

Kim Mosley

To "Ran" by Kim Mosley

It is not what we see
in the bright shapes of the day--
a crinkled gold of sunshine
on flowers and steps,
a pond we walk by catching the sky
a watered lawn the right green.

These are there, of course,
and true in their way,
as is the gray of concrete,
rainy morning duty 
where we rise with not enough sleep
and drink our coffee, shake our arms, 
our shoulders, to rouse ourselves.
Look at the sunshine creeping 
under the blinds, we say,
You can do this—get out there!

But behind all that—the sun catching 
rainbow on the drops from the sprinkler,
the paper we draw from our briefcases—
lies an ocean that sun and paper 
float in, a dark they rise out of, like islands.

An antelope runs the plain. 
It leaps the absence,
the gap,
the lightless fjords between the known.
Its body—not-body—is a black possibility,
a night that turns into the face of day

that turns into so many things—faces
and oranges and isthmuses, 
crowded onto our mainland of the real.

Beyond it float fragments and wires 
of the ungraspable,

an island of fog 
where the unnamed and the unnameable
rub against each other in the mist

and the broad water beyond it all, 
the deep below things and their names,
the black of everythingalltogether 
not yet born
ready to rise.

—Sarah Webb, 11/16/20

Kim's artwork and Sarah's poem published in Just This, December, 2020

Meteor

To Kim Mosley’s “Meteor” on the Eve of the Election

Ooh, coming right at us
the slam!

It
hurls us upside
down
and sideways
splashes a thousand
ponds
into the clouds

steams us
wrings us

topples
buildings to house-
shapes
under the sand
walls
the archaeologists can puzzle over—
why?

Oh, why not?
mutter lava
and melted coins

A tree stands here and a
segment of
brook

Maybe a mountain range
can make it through
a child
a deer
or two.

Sarah Webb 11-2-20

The Dreams Escape

20201127: The Dreams Escape

Dreams are rising from the sleeper
like steam from a hot towel.
They waft past bedstead and dresser
bump and jumble their way toward the window.
The sleeper thrashes his sheets, 
throws off his blanket.
Fragments of dream—llama quilt-suited
for winter, striped Christmas candy,
spaceship diving toward Earth—
collide as they float.
Out they go into the damp of the night,
drawn by the need of dry-minded sleepers
up the hill, across the bay, fog on the water.
They are eager to say what they can't quite say,
share their stories that won't stand still,
find their way to dream islands, dream continents.
A wave of them—puzzle pieces, shards of letters—
float from the house, followed by a second,
and the dreamer drifts toward the day. —Sarah Webb

Remnants

a modest rose

flowering, because that is its nature

energy springing out to be

but not claiming attention or demanding

tattered, tentative

but fully itself

—Sarah Webb

Curvilinear/Rectilinear

Breaking

The curve of the earth has broken

under a weight of thought.

Stone holds fast

as it has from ancient beginning

but the world of soft bodies

townships, leaves and blossoms

is slashed and scattered.

We have given our faith

to what can be explained,

lay thought over living reality.

Plan and ambition justify

fire and boiling flood and poison,

the death of the land.

Spirit withdraws.

—Sarah Webb

Another View

Another View 1

2 dark waves, everything changing, fragments of an old life carried along

—Sarah Webb

Kim: Nice. I keep messing around until I see something that speaks to me. I guess it would be like throwing scraps of paper down until you like the arrangement. 

Sarah: That make sense, a bit of a found art process.

Kim:  Is it different than writing? You throw down words until they make sense. Or is there more?

Sarah: You have hit a button for me. I am often thinking where do the words come from, the poem comes from. And who writes it. It's not that different from visual art. Where did that image come from? what does it mean for you and why did it come up?

As for writing being throwing down words until they make sense, I would say, that's not it at all. 

We can make found-writing poems, but that's only one corner of writing. I did one out of a state sign on a creek that had a history related to the Civil War and another about statements and objects in a classroom related to the theme of apathy. Much like your nephew(?) selecting from data until a point emerges. But what we are responding to is a similarity to forms we use in created writing and a meaning that emerges. You in your present artistic project look at a series of randomly (?) created images and pick one that resonates. It resonates because you can see a symbolism in it or point to it and at least an impact from the visual composition. So in that one little corner of art and of writing, it's a lot alike. I guess I'd say that's letting a lot of random input come in until something flows by that grabs you because it doesn't feel random, but, as you say, makes sense. 

But as far as writing created from scratch (as opposed to found), there's no throwing down words at random. Even the first beginning phrase or word, which might come to you, comes with at least unconscious sense to it. Or at most, if it is truly random, is immediately connected with symbolism and associations. We react to a found object or a random word with a Rorshach connection--the shape becomes a butterfly or 2 faces or whatever, constant creating of meaning. And from that seed a sentence forms and then another, following the meaning that appears. 

I would say words do not come at random. They are meanings that elaborate themselves through associations and memories and ideas and rhetorical structures (like story or contrast or cause and effect or description or image) and even things like sound similarities. And they originate below the conscious mind out of something that is not yet words (T.S. Eliot--"a frog voice waiting to be born"). Perhaps from the primal void, the dynamism that is constantly spilling from formless potentiality into being. That surge becomes partially formed into emotion or dream-image or movement. and then it comes more fully into form shaped by words and structures. 

A found poem or found art would have to be a variation on that. Something in the unconscious recognizes a correspondence between the random image and some emotion or imagistic symbol that it can give voice to. It "makes sense." We agree on that part, the image making sense to us. I just disagree with the throwing words at random part. 

Hope that is not just a big jumble of words.

Kim: I love what you wrote… and I disagree, of course. At least I think it is not either or. Just take the thoughts that pop into our head. They seem random, but we can follow them or ignore them or something in between.

It St. Louis, sometimes our writing group would pick a book randomly and pick a page and paragraph randomly and then that would be our prompt.

But that’s just the beginning. It would be like dropping a photographer out of an airplane. That’s the beginning. Then she would explore that landscape and develop it from his random beginnings.

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Teeth

To Kim Mosley's “Teeth” 

Lively, happy, the Earth. 

But, no, a screaming face 

a furry man with an extra arm sending out waves of energy

a gaping whale and a gaping ghost.

Near them, coming up and out, a camel 

a man-phoenix 

a slug, a horn, the numerals 2 2 7.

Reality in all its ways—real and unreal,

spinning into numbers and dunes

breakfast and the phantasmagoria of the mind.

Out of the movement of water 

a whole that lasts a moment or a day.

published Just This, October, 2020

—Sarah Webb

H.E.R.O.N.

Today I swam, silent, behind my daughter

through cool water, the wind a touch,

riding low waves, green and silver,

following the signs she is teaching me

in my new deafness:  H.e.r.o.n.  D.o.c.k.  Come.

 

Her head bobbed, a dark seal, past Jean's dock

and submerged rocks, out onto the open lake

and the rougher waters of the drowned river channel,

Tim's pier then and the neighbors' past, and there, See.

A gray shape under the silver Xs of the pipes,

stilt-legged, slow. The heron.

 

And my daughter tracking him.

She turned to point and I bobbed my fist to say, Yes.

Yes, I see him. Yes, I see you. You have led me to a good place.

 

She raised her camera in its pouch,

head and camera blending in the bright of the water.

He stepped along the shore, and she followed.

Brown against brown, I saw her take her shot,

shadow stepping into light, the jab for fish,

then, tall against blue and cloud, head lifted,

iconic bird of water and rock and sky.

 

Heron and girl fixed in my gaze.

I saw her glide to the bird through the silver, close,

so close she looked up to see him and I marveled he did not take flight.

And I took my own picture, having no instrument but my heart

to say, Look and remember: here is the one I have loved in this life

learning to see, learning to live. 

—Sarah Webb

—Heron by Amanda Webb

booth published Just This, September, 2020

Dancer

 

—Kim Mosley

Dancer

At the center a figure 

dances. Around him the 

bubble of the world spins.

Fragments float and fall,

reflections and objects:

gate, lightbulb, plant and bird.

A foot raises, a mouth gapes.

Cornets and lines of crops

moon launches and petroglyphs.

Dancing the world into being, dancing 

the end.  Continuous beginning 

out of continuous decay.

Exhausting, exhilarating, 

exhausting, creating order

out of a chaos of sticks and gravel.

Juggler, the man keeps the world 

in the air, will not let it crash

will not let it sling into chaos.

The mind tires, the body falters.

Who can keep a world alive,

keep a world from breaking?

What man can do it?

Dancers stumble and lose hold.

Their mouths go slack.

Turn then to the one inside the man 

who speaks from the dancer

through a hidden ordering

who shapes his dance

—Sarah Webb, 9/7/20

published September, 2020 Just This

When I Rise

 

When I rise in the morning

the world is dark.

I fall, seeing the darkness,

thinking dark is the day.

When light edges in timid

in mist in the east

I fall timid to meet the day.

I fall timid, reaching for this to do

thinking, oh no, avoid, refrain--

do and refrain, gain this, lose that.

I fall into dark before the day rises

fall into the small confine of my body

and the day not begun.

When I rise in the morning

the floor cold on my feet

water cold in my mouth

and my mind still caught in the cool of dream

and the day glimmers through the blinds,

I turn from the room where I cannot see,

to the day that is turning to morning

to a junco on the wire of the feeder

to steam from the kettle under the stove lamp

and I do not say, this is what to do

this what I expect, what I expect of you.

Then the day rises with me and around me

and the sun appears over the hill.

—Sarah Webb

Just This, August, 2020

To Katia Mitova's Dream Diary

Thank you for the door into night.
You have cut it with heavy scissors
and we bend it to open it.
Night on one side
and night on the other.

Sarah Webb's poetry collections, Red Riding Hood’s Sister (Virtual Artists Collective, 2018) and Black (Virtual Artists Collective, 2013) can be purchased for $15 each from

• Sarah Webb for signed copies (bluebirdsw.webb@gmail.com) 
• independent bookstores (unsigned) (vacpoetry.org site can direct you to these) 
• Amazon (unsigned) (Red Riding Hood’s Sister | Black ) 
• BookWoman in Austin Texas (unsigned) (Red Riding Hood's Sister | Black )

or buy a signed copy at a reading.

Error leads to error in Red Riding Hood’s Sister, as a girl in love finds her marriage has turned violent. The poems in this collection mix fairy tale and dream with the everyday to tell the story of a girl not so different from anyone else who finds herself in a desperate situation. Sarah Webb's 2018 memoir, Red Riding Hood’s Sister looks into abusive marriage. What traps us? What can set us free?

The poems in Black come in large or small ways from the peoples of all the major religions and shamanism. Poems call on the traditions of every continent as well as from ancients living before times in memory. I made up modern myths too and told stories from science and everyday life. My aim in all of it was to find the root beneath the hints and stories. What is it that we all share, that we sense beneath the surface?