Joseph Anthony > Recent Status Updates

a mash hawk
tips the solitary
pine ~ John Wills

“Grand right & left!” Pa called out, & all the shirts began to twirl & all the boots began to stamp. The circles went round & round, all the skirts going one way, & all the boots going the other way, & hands clasping & parting high up in the air.

Invitation

If you are a dreamer, come in,
If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar, a hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer… if you’re a pretender, come sit by my fire
For we have some flax-golden tails to spin
Come in!
Come in!

The nearest town was far away. Laura & Mary had never seen a town. They had never seen a store. They had never even seen two houses standing together. But they knew that in a town there were many houses, & a store full of candy calico & other wonderful things- powder, & shot, & salt & store sugar.

The room was still and warm and full of fire-light. Ma’s shadow, and Aunt Eliza’s and Uncle Peter’s were big and quivering on the walls in the flickering fire-light, and Pa’s fiddle sang merrily to itself.

I write to ward off fear and the clawing wind that lodges in my throat.

…: the silence of compression, the silence of existence itself. This is how the years fly by. This is how we lost that beautiful animal happiness.

I have made the leap from myself to the dawn.
I have placed my body alongside the light
and sung of the sadness of the born.

You’ll come to me with a faint accent that evokes an open door, or the shadow of a finely named bird, or the residue of shadow in my memory, or the substance that lingers after they throw the young woman’s ashes to the wind, or the trace of lines on the page when you erase the drawing of a house or a tree or a sun or an animal.

On hearing the crunch of the wagonette in the drive, and the swishing of the wet rhododendrons, they glanced at each other reassuringly, taking heart at the thought of the bright fire in his bedroom, the carefully chosen supper that awaited him. But when he stood there before them and they looked at his red twitching face, they were abashed before the austerity of a grief so differently sustained from their own.

Where Eagerness Circles In

When it does arrive my eyes will gleam
with the light of the one I mourn for
meanwhile it breathes a rumor of light
into the heart of all things

You choose the site of the wound
where we speak our silence.
You make of my life
this ceremony that’s much too pure.

At night at your side,
words become clues, keys.
May your body always be
a beloved space for revelations.

Accept this face of mine, mute and begging. Accept this love I ask for.
Accept the part of me that is you.

Isn’t this how it is? We want back
what we’ve taken, the way a child tries
to set the head back on a doll.
Houdini underwater, escaping the chained suitcase,
Jesus risen in white robes
standing outside the door of his grave.
We destroy what we desire:
The lithe and fearsome tiger,
humans adorned in feathers and the skins of bison,
entire forests, quiet as cathedrals. And then we want it back…

Beneath the base of every flame, there is a still, clear absence; a mysterious gap between the death of substance & the birth of light, w/ time itself suspended in the void of transformation, this strange pause between two elements. I understand it now, that there has only ever been one fire, that blazed before the world began & shall not be put out until the world is done. I see in the flame…the unborn & the dead

What is it in us that wants to take
whatever has ascended to the heights of spirit
& pull it down into the mud to wallow with us
in our own, holy humanness?

As if we needed to assure ourselves that this is enough,
this realm of rock & stream & dust
to which we belong a little while
before we bequeath our atoms to the wind.

The burning & the song are one. If I gaze hard with the black jewel that is my only eye, I see the spit and flare of it, aware they’re in the centre of that cold, wet coal where is my night. It was my friends they set alight, not I. I was denied that last deliverance, to be consumed within that timeless bright that is in truth one single blaze decanted down across the aeons.

I am so afraid. I’m afraid of being dead, I’m afraid of being nothing, & that great unease that I have kept so long at bay is made companion to me now. I see the life of me, the life of all of us, our wars & copulations, all of our movement & philosophy & conscience, & there is no floor beneath it, & it stands on naught. Beyond my window, early, stars emerge into a firmament with purpose fled.

The celebrations are already underway, streets heavy with the stench of ruffian life. They piss in doorways, swing ores at each other’s heads, & laugh, & kneel in their own sick. They fornicate against the alley walls like prisoners. They fart & shout & they are all that is…Slow, I shuffle out. a jug of ale is pressed into my hands. With rotten smiles they grip my arm, & kiss my tear-tracked cheek, & draw me in.

My path of thoughts is therefore drawn from all the paths about me in the truth of life. These territories that we span are as like spanned within, where there are monuments of notion, chasms, peaks and streams for night-thoughts there to spawn.

Below my fur and naked save my fancy-beads, my eyes are shut but not my ears. Her words float through me. Essence. Spirit-ore. The hobbles of the flesh. Change. Be transformed, refigured in the passion, passion, passion ash…

Not I alone stray to the cave, nor do I alone burn with love for fair Endymion; oft times w/ thoughts of love have I been driven away by thy crafty spells, in order that in the darkness of night thou mightest work thy sorcery at ease, even the deeds dear to thee. & now thou thyself too hast a like mad passion. Well, go on, & steel thy heart, wise though thou be, to take up the burden of pain, fraught with many sighs

Not I alone stray to the cave, nor do I alone burn with love for fair Endymion; oft times w/ thoughts of love have I been driven away by thy crafty spells, in order that in the darkness of night thou mightest work thy sorcery at ease, even the deeds dear to thee. & now thou thyself too hast a like mad passion. Well, go on, & steel thy heart, wise though thou be, to take up the burden of pain, fraught with many sighs

Turns he now bout, that one edge of he’s frightening face is all with bright, and sun blood wet on branch-horns of he. Glean I Hob is not of dirt, as is I and I’s walking-people, born of dirt and live by dirt and put to dirt and all. He is of fire. Fire’s black bout of his eyes. Fire’s blood on of he’s horns.