Define an area as “safe” and use it as an anchor
There’s a space inside waiting
where nothing has to happen.
The mind’s machinery
gears down, releasing only a tick
now and then, like a heater
turned off. Wheels on stone shake
ground far from here, as
something like egg white beaten to air
holds me the way this morning I held a vole
in down-gloved hands, carrying it
from the cat’s jaws back to furrowed earth
and brown grass. It didn’t struggle
in that softness, that transport, and even
allowed me to stroke its head briefly
with my thumb, giving all of itself over
to a suspension between
the facts of its life
and a chance to begin again.
* * * * *
What mistakes did you make last time?
I counted wrong
I used too many abstractions
I missed the exit
I fell off the dock walking backwards in the dark
I mistook the distinguished guest for a waiter
I kept talking after I had made my point
I revved the engine thinking I was in reverse
I made my horse cross the cattle guard
I forgot the quiche was in the oven
I forgot to buckle the top buckle
I said “blackface” while giving a lecture on Berryman’s Dream Songs
I forgot the emergency brake
I ate salty chips while drinking single malt straight up
I didn’t look at my notes
I didn’t cut enough
I cut too much
I didn’t proofread
I didn’t honor my boundaries
I lost my temper
I rushed the ending
Once I sat quietly and waited, empowered
by silence, but forgot to do it again.
* * * * *
In the syntax of surrender
words push gently. Through
doubt, along cracked riverbeds
towards faith, over memory-shards
that pierce and pierce until they
don’t, buffed by continual motion
of heartbreak and insight stroking,
stroking and moving on, the sentence
never finished, ever changing.
Surrender is fed
by gravity. It invites
improvisation. Soft defiance
of blockage. Down is a force, a source
of release although dams, aggressively
engineered and financed, work
against this — what’s held inside
is trapped. And harbors a plan
for spectacular escape.
Surrender en route
is river. Carving, polishing,
digging, asking, more elastic
than the banks that direct it
and more persistent than armature,
bombast, the will’s propensity
for feints and jabs.
Surrender’s destination
is bowl. It collects all that consents to
flow into stillness even when roiled
by wind. Every sea and lake, every
word tempered by silence, fills
a hollow of its making
and is held.
Today at yoga the teacher asked, as we
surrendered self to the shared flow
of breath, What is muscle mostly made of?
* * * * *
Consider different fading systems
(Sheltering, 2020)
Absence of ink on April’s calendar.
Of spontaneous errand. Just
this mild swirl of thought —
feather-voice — harbored
by contagion and the stalled
future — my ghost-
companion. No need to dress.
Through cell tower and divided
screens, real conversation
is cushioned by familiar lamplight
and Moroccan pillows. On my lap
the cat’s drowse, her privacy, melt
into mine. I forget what day it is
while fields across this road
start to dress for spring
as do the mountains nearby, reaching
into air still safe to breathe.
I take my limbs and imperiled lungs
into them and do not speak
to the others tasting their own dram
of risk and sunlight — a wave, a smile
through the eyes. Nothing leaves
our mouths, all of us masked.
Draped carefully over our bones.
This language of the body
feeds on silence, holding space
while nothing comes to fill it —
no plans, accolades, expectations —
like rooms cleared after
someone has died.
I sleep better. I want to think
something green below the remnants
rests too—fisted, not ready to loosen in its bulb.
The ghost-voice breathes wait, float, over
what is no longer asked of me.
* * * * *
In 1975 composer Brian Eno and artist Peter Schmidt created a list of 110 Oblique Strategies which they produced as a deck of cards, one strategy per card. For Eno, who survives Schmidt and has continued to give interviews on the subject as well as compose a significant body of innovative ambient music, the Strategies evolved from situations of “panic” when he felt creatively stuck in the middle of limited and expensive studio time. These situations, he recalled, “tended to make me quickly forget that there were … tangential ways of attacking a problem that were in many senses more interesting than the direct head-on approach.” The Strategies were designed to encourage lateral thinking — to help artists break through barriers via such tangential routes and take themselves by surprise. This is exactly what I did with all 110 of these quirky, elliptical phrases, each time waiting out my bafflement and resistance until a way opened up, and I had a thread to follow. — Leslie Ullman