Today’s Musings:
Recently,  two different friends have reproached me for “living in the past.”  No kidding;  That’s what happens when you naively decide to write a memoir, isn’t it? You are faced with excavating your history, your shards of broken dreams, your faulty memories and stories, surrounding yourself  with these unearthed remnants of your past.  Spade in hand,  the memoir process requires you to crouch on your personal plot of land and begin digging, uncertain of what’s hidden underneath the smooth topsoil.   Prodding the hard-packed earth,  you uncover remembrances buried long ago.  Layer by layer, bit by bit, you scrape away time.  The work is often painful; you are spent by day’s end. As you reveal each recollection, you resist placing a value on it straightaway.  You unearth,  record, set it aside for later examination, and  move on to the next trinket to be exhumed.  Some memories you uncover whole,  the ground gives them back easily.  They appear, to you, almost untouched by time.  Others are mere shards that require painstaking reconstruction and restoration.  You unbury still other recollections only to realize they are not, in truth, as you remember them.  Each piece, intact memories and shards alike, is changed, if only a little;  sharp edges smoothed by the years buried and concealed from sight.  You gently extract them from the ground,  brush them off and carefully spread this array in front of you for a discerning evaluation – what to keep, what to discard,  what is valuable, what no longer serves you.  Some remembrances you delight in unearthing while others you wish you had never found. You continue with your work until each treasure, every fragment, has been exposed.  Only then can you truly recognize where you’ve been.  Only then can you decide where you’re headed next, but do these memories fail us as guides?   

 

Misunderstanding

Make a notation dear
of this word and that
which ones hurt most
which ones feel good about our hearts

which ones we moor our tenderness upon
When in the midst of course terms
I would rather expose docile replies
It is strange how fear binds adults

Would you still admire me if
I spoke in concert again with your aspirations
with eyes of open glass
You would be captive in their sentience of you

Or if I were mute
which of my voices would you understand
The voice of my joy in you is brave and sweet
It resonates from the most inward enclosures

I’m quite guilty
I relied on poetic vision
to show me what exists
and what doesn’t

I sought knowledge of you through your body
at times making false assumptions
wrong turns
sincerely at times admit to being lost
crying, where is the felicity in this?

In small favors not on desert plateaus
In errors only
I tried to placate your worlds
with perfect skies
the contour of your body and mind

I ask you please to renounce your hardness
A favor for love

To be unpossessive of happiness
maybe in not striving for ends
just in the purpose of temporary joy
Time only falsely unmakes their sum
also fragmenting us

Before you
and after you
a region slept in me
Trees replaced you
and temples replaced you
and then nothing replaces you

Now that your absence is exposed like the desert we stood in
I search failingly for your depth in the shallow nightfall
I search for your affinities in quiet spaces

I had hoped the slow paces of enlightenment
would rescue our disappointments
not allow a trail of misunderstanding
to mislead the procession of tenderness
which once flowed in weightless rivers

What darkness cares to separate us
Existential questions preclude emotional ones
Perplexities aren’t supposed to stop Love

Once the chastities have eloped
I hoped to undertake true intimacies
Outside of mysteries

Is your body made for me
to place unutterable reasons within
to shelter your surfaces with gestures now obsolete

A lovely future dares to be here now
Don’t allow the unknown to dispel it
Don’t use doubt as a veil of shyness

I thought I had vanquished the desire to perfect
It robbed me of the ability to love what is most human
to admire the task not quite finished the way I had envisioned it
to subtract nothing
for Love

We must embrace the accomplishment
of one who gives their soul
Where doest right and wrong appear in love
just a state we know to be vulnerable

Our eyes began east harmonies
A procession of epiphanies, maybe,
but not all meetings are breathless

I saw in the mistral of your eyes
Love adrift
and sought to still your inquietudes
I failed more than once
with words
and with wordlessness

At times I thought I deserved to be loved less
At times much more
All the time wanting something else

 Don’t begrudge our pasts
There are many of them
At once remote and still intimate
I consider them like our childhood
unruly and fantastical
but our memories always fail as guides

Full of not knowing
and yet instilled with clairvoyance
We distill a thousand kinds of courage
necessary for anything of worth

Who can see the way out of adult dilemmas?
Certainly not adults
We expected so much brilliance
for such a difficult task

Tall flowers do not grow in close shelter
to survive our folly
our hearts must go separate ways for a vanity forever precluding Love

 – Jason, 1998

Today’s Recipe: