Ink and shadows share a common ancestry

I think poetry is an act of translation.

I thought about this after choking on my high school French as I engaged with the owner of this tiny sweet crepe and coffee shop I recently discovered in my neighborhood, one of the many businesses that have sprung up in the pandemic like mushrooms after the rain. Something about tasting the nuances of our different native languages as we wove them together strikes me as a particularly naked experience - ripples of pink embarrassment when I run out of knowledge, admittance of dreams deferred by reality, to explore and be explored by an encounter with foreign landscapes. Would I even recognize myself on the streets of Paris? What parts of myself would be revealed to me when removed from my context? Am I attracted to his foreign-ness or his openness in the face of it, the way the angle of the sun makes his brown eyes look like gold or amber, or maybe that he is about to hand me something delicious?

Poetry exists in the aftermath of the exchange, as much as it did in the experience of it. The residue of noticing the fleeting shadows and transitions, minute shifts in our perception that hold their own effervescent gravity, where the words used to mark them become pregnant with meaning before being washed away by the next rhythm of needs and realities asking us to respond.

and the blues came walking like a man

 

 

“We revolt simply because, for many reasons, we can no longer breathe.”

 

 

 

 

 

"Arjuna is overcome with self-doubt about the righteousness of the war against his own kith and kin. He is distraught at the thought of having to fight with his friends and family. It was then that Krishna took charge and explained the necessity and inevitability of the war to Arjuna."

 

Krishna could have cut to the chase and just handed Arjuna a mirror. I bet everyone would have disappeared from the field of consciousness in a flash, and he would have been left alone with himself.

Having Johnny as my tandem partner made the gap I felt I had to bridge between myself and everyone else almost non existent. Its easy to compare myself to the giggly, high pitched, little yoga girls in my classes, and within the ranks of yoga in general, and see all the ways in which I lack femininity and softness... there's a roughness and rawness about him that I wanted to rub up against like a cat, because it felt so familiar. It may have been the first time I've felt like I was on level ground since I handed in my tt deposit. The first time I could put my back down. Respond with something other than the chip on my shoulder. Problem solve like I was on a jobsite. Remember with the knowledge inside of my bones that I was there to do a job, and I was going to finish it. 

And its nice to have someone call me out. As much as I feel constrained by my circumstances, there are other issues I thought I had effectively dealt with that have finally rubbed me to the point of chafing. There resides a dragon I fight on a daily basis. Its name is Commitment. I am afraid of the gravity behind committing, so I don't. Relationships naturally define, and I'm afraid of being put in a box I don't believe I belong in. After my previous tandem, I saw what I become when I don't allow myself to commit fully to a task. And for some reason the notes I got in my first two tandems about really effectively building from ground up have evaporated, even as my relationship to time gets a lot stronger. Where did those words go?

I will be a poet someday. But I realized, watching my class filled with beginners that if I can't help them build the buildings, there is nowhere for the poetry to live inside of. The pendulum found something else to give it momentum. Things I thought I had strong were not there when I needed them. I still made it to the end. Nothing exploded.

The mundane is profound too. Repeating cues is valuable. The work is happening inside of their bodies, and I have to accept that I am not responsible for their experience, I'm just drawing the outline. I can be true to the yoga and true to myself at the same time because I believe in what I'm participating in.

The yoga is enough.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Because if you're gonna come up short

On a request like magic beans

You better be sure

The first part of that meal

Means something