Bog-down and after

Bog Down and After

Between the wold we don’t know and a world we remember,
by the weave of our bond and the bind of this heather,
stands a wall in the sun, a respite surrender.
In the wold we'll be known by the words we re-member,
by the twine that we wound round the wound at the center
at the base of this wall in the sun here together
bless the wold we can’t know, bless the world you remember
to the weave of the bond and the wind in the heather.

To the blue border
of the boy’s pillow
one evening, a moon
past Summer,
Night came and gnawed
at the holdfast of his heart:

Here, said the Night,
see the work of your Sister,
long years of knitting
from bog down and aster
a shirt to recall you,
slip it on and surrender,
become now a man
but always remember

like swan song once heard
like flutter, like float
like talon or cockcrow’s
first touch at the throat
you will never again sing only in words,
you will never again not be a bird.

They’ll teach you to lockstep
upright on the ground,
to see yourself simply
as only one thing
pretending that feathers,
downy and pin,
don’t sing through the hollow bones
under your skin.

So come, said the Night,
in your sister believe,
even now she is stitching
the last stitch of sleeve.
Long years of her silence

have brought you back home
but always remember
the dark you have flown.

I finally ready to comitt to this substack. I renamed it after some material in a fairy story that I have been navigating by recently. The Twelve Wild Geese. I would like to write out a telling of it, but it is too great a bit to fuck up and I am still letting it permeate me. There are several fine versions of it floating about the web. I can link one here at the end. It’s a story about re-membering, about belonging in the Jenkinsonian sense and the interplay of speech and silence (which I read as story without certainty) that can brings us home.

Speaking of Jenkinson, he recently coined a word homefulness in a interview I just listened to yesterday (here). Homefulness…..yeah, this is that.

I hope to use this subby to say out loud some of the homefulness that has been keeping me warm and peopled the last dark months. Some of the fabric is animist. Some of it Yid. No small part is an engagement with the so-called rewilding of Chrsitianity. I find this new/old reapproach to the Gospels fetching because it seems to play nice with slipping Yeshua from the ropes that bind him to Christendom, and suspect at the same time, because much of what I have heard seems way to comfortable with conventional Christian theologies that I think can only be cast out with much prayer and fasting, as they say. I am working on a study of animism in Lurianic Kabbalah and other myth-fabric of choice. I play about in the study cave art and paleolithic language. (yeah, I know) and have a deep love of the Arendt/Benjamin axle of the thoughtwheel. I once was an anarchist punk rocker. I am father of grown brigands and a homesteader in Maine. I have thing for deer spirits. I wish everyday that the feeling is mutual. My poets are Neruda, Celan, and Mandelstam. My monotheism is full of goddesses, some of them antlered. My heart is more scavenger than hunter, more pickpocket than sage. “Apostate only am I true.”

I promise I will unpack all that in some probably disorganized ordering of prose and poetics. I don’t imagine these posts as read by the living, so feel free to speak up if you end up interested in this against the odds. I can be concise if woken from my game of speaking to the imagined dead whose journal I pretend to be auditioning for.

Here is a simple version of the Twelve Wild Geese