{Digges & fahrenheit}

after picnic-ing in Washington Square Park and workshopping with the Vision Into Art folks and eating some crazy dinner, we went to see Fahrenheit 9/11.

there is almost nothing I can say but just go see it. even though none of the "funny" parts made me laugh, even though we emerged emotionally exhausted, even though maybe everyone in that theater already had some vague notion of this nation's abiding and increasing spiral into corruption... it's necessary and devastating.

the good news is that it was showing in three theaters, and the Urban Word poet we ran into at the concession stand said that they're selling out almost every show, so he has to work overtime.

this poet has to work OVERTIME at a movie theater because of a DOCUMENTARY. this is good.

I'm re-working some of the free-writes from these VIA workshops and Roger and I are hitting a museum today, so let's all hope that I have new poetry to post soon. like tomorrow would be good.

wow this post is uninspired. um, hold on.

The Way Into Stone
by Deborah Digges

I hate to think how long I must lie here
face down, kissing myself
into the stone, or into the wood
becoming stone buried in water.
I hate to think how long it's going to take
for my dream silos to empty,
wind inside the bright theaters,
all that I am translating into stone --
my love for the taste of semen and the smell of my hair --
I for whom waiting does not come easily.
Nothing in my experience will say
what terrors last, which wear smoother than sea glass,
which love, which bitterness survives the frieze.
I have no gift for this waiting.
And yet I would be stone.
I would be stone by Philistia's gates
regathered for another execution, stone
which the builders refused
become the headstone of the corner.
I would learn to wait
the better to be stone, the many fallen into one,
cycloptic, deaf to the bells sounding that the soul has birthed
the last of her three children.
What do I know?
I am loose matter, sense and approbation,
the spirits of a house with six doors
slamming, merely the imprint of the autumn
and the dragonfly.
But it seems to me, when called upon to sing,
a stone is something to be listened to.
And that the coming of its song
sees all the words in books blackening
against their origins,
and the meanings rushing backwards as light
climbing the eight octaves.
And the roaring ceases in the ears of the drowned
at a stone's first heralding,
and cell by cell, the prisoners
make move to themselves in the asylums.
Oh yes, a stone's a mockingbird.
And midway through its aria
most of the angels flee the earth holding their ears,
and the beloved weeds are envious, and the trees,
summer or winter are longing to be stone,
and the walls would crumble to be stone again,
and the lilacs give up their color to be stone.

***

the form -- the stretched and surprising metaphor threading, threading
and the meaning -- what lasts, to last, to wait and wait for stone, what we trade and hold and release