SEASONING

SEASONING

by Audre Lorde

What am I ready to lose in this advancing summer?

As the days that seemed long

grow shorter and shorter

I want to chew up time

until every moment expands

in an emotional mathematic

that includes the smell and texture

of every similar instant since I was born.

But the solstice is passing

my mouth stumbles

crammed with crib sheets and flowers

dime store photographs

of loving in stages

choked by flinty nuggets of old friends

undigested enemies

preserved sweet and foul in their lack

of exposure to sunlight.

Thundereggs of myself

ossify in the buttonholes

of old recalled lovers

who all look like rainbows

stretching across other summers

to the pot of gold

behind my own eyes.

As the light wanes

I see

what I thought I was anxious to surrender

I am only willing to lend

and reluctance covers my face

as I glue up my lips with the promise

of coming winter.

 

Season of gorgeous death

All that you touch 

You Change.

All that you Change

Changes You

The only lasting truth 

Is Change.

God 

Is Change.

That's Octavia Butler, of course.

As wind,

As water,

As fire,

As life,

God

Is both creative and destructive,

Demanding an yielding

Sculptor and clay.

God is Infinite Potential:

God is Change.

Your teachers

Are all around you.

All that you perceive,

All that you experience,

All that is given to you, 

Or taken from you,

All that you love or hate,

Need or fear

Will teach you --

If you will learn.

God is your first

and your last teacher.

God is your harshest teacher:

subtle,

demanding.

Learn or die.

I love Death, so I don't hear this last bit as an invitation to escape her. I hear it as a declaration of fact: if you try to hold change still, you will lose touch with what is most alive. 

Thank you, plants. Thank you, season of gorgeous death. Thank you, Ms Butler. I bow to the lessons.

There is no way out of a spiritual battle

 

rant :: diane di prima

You cannot write a single line w/out a cosmology
a cosmogony
laid out, before all eyes

there is no part of yourself you can separate out
saying, this is memory, this is sensation
this is the work I care about, this is how I
make a living

it is whole, it is a whole, it always was whole
you do not “make” it so
there is nothing to integrate, you are a presence
you are an appendage of the work, the work stems from
hangs from the heaven you create

every man / every woman carries a firmament inside
& the stars in it are not the stars in the sky

w/out imagination there is no memory
w/out imagination there is no sensation
w/out imagination there is no will, desire

history is a living weapon in yr hand
& you have imagined it, it is thus that you
“find out for yourself”
history is the dream of what can be, it is
the relation between things in a continuum

of imagination
what you find out for yourself is what you select
out of an infinite sea of possibility
no one can inhabit yr world

yet it is not lonely,
the ground of imagination is fearlessness
discourse is video tape of a movie of a shadow play
but the puppets are in yr hand
your counters in a multidimensional chess
which is divination
& strategy

the war that matters is the war against the imagination
all other wars are subsumed in it.

the ultimate famine is the starvation
of the imagination

it is death to be sure, but the undead
seek to inhabit someone else’s world

the ultimate claustrophobia is the syllogism
the ultimate claustrophobia is “it all adds up”
nothing adds up & nothing stands in for
anything else

THE ONLY WAR THAT MATTERS IS THE WAR AGAINST
THE IMAGINATION

THE ONLY WAR THAT MATTERS IS THE WAR AGAINST
THE IMAGINATION
THE ONLY WAR THAT MATTERS IS THE WAR AGAINST
THE IMAGINATION
ALL OTHER WARS ARE SUBSUMED IN IT

There is no way out of a spiritual battle
There is no way you can avoid taking sides
There is no way you can not have a poetics
no matter what you do: plumber, baker, teacher

you do it in the consciousness of making
or not making yr world
you have a poetics: you step into the world
like a suit of readymade clothes

or you etch in light
your firmament spills into the shape of your room
the shape of the poem, of yr body, of yr loves

A woman’s life / a man’s life is an allegory

Dig it

There is no way out of the spiritual battle
the war is the war against the imagination
you can’t sign up as a conscientious objector

the war of the worlds hangs here, right now, in the balance
it is a war for this world, to keep it
a vale of soul-making

the taste in all our mouths is the taste of power
and it is bitter as death

bring yr self home to yrself, enter the garden
the guy at the gate w/ the flaming sword is yrself

the war is the war for the human imagination
and no one can fight it but you/ & no one can fight it for you

The imagination is not only holy, it is precise
it is not only fierce, it is practical
men die everyday for the lack of it,
it is vast & elegant

intellectus means “light of the mind”
it is not discourse it is not even language
the inner sun

the polis is constellated around the sun
the fire is central

Bulbs, April, November

(April)

Always struggle with the area around the fig tree in spring. In late summer and fall the whole south bed is overwhelmed by the Pennisetum grasses I keep dividing (an invasive here, turns out) - maybe when I move the back line of sturdy yellow diffs out, I'll push a bunch in around the base. 

(November)

Will I leave these dahlia bulbs in the ground? Or risk trying to over winter them in storage?

(April)

Another good place for some sturdy bland daffodils - this strip by the deck. Everything I plant there I end up moving, except strawberries. 

(November)

Filled the north side of this bed with double daffs, the south side with the tall dark purple tulips that I wish were black. Moved two Panicum from elsewhere. The Nasella have thrived everywhere I stuck them - in the spring they were almost the only friends in this bed. Divided the orange flowered echinacea, prayed over them all to thrive. Not sure if I will keep those lilies there. Maybe they will resonate shape-wise with the banana in spring?

(April)

Last bag of bulbs to plant are these gorgeous dark leaved tulips - who knows if they will be sturdy. I want to put them in the big bed, just there to the right. 

(November)

(April)

(April)

(November)

(April)