poetry – Spherical Education

Portal Becoming

(Female Blanket Octopus, photo credit Jacinda Shackleton)

My friends who don’t read cards say
don’t put all your cards on the table
I listen to
The whispers in the ethers
through the dream
the tendrils of feeling
waking up changing
and the message of the visionary is
I want to be visionary with you
I want to learn beyond my current abilities
and capabilities
phase change into something
completely different
fully efface again and again
move from being
the sea to
being the sky
I want to be the reflection and the
movement
and it keeps coming back to
particle and wave and
they’re not separate I can feel them
tingling knowing wanting
becoming alive in me
me becoming alive in
new ways
my body becomes almost too heavy—molten—
to contain in this dimension
becoming the pool I once visited
becoming the pool I once was
the only time is
now
becomes a portal becoming a portal

23.1.26 xoc

LET EVERYONE BRING THE GIFTS say the Bird Women

Let everyone bring the gifts!
The air is full of wings beating,
calling.
Let everyone bring the gifts!
This is the calling, the sound of spring,
the birds singing the plants out
of the ground, the buds
ready to burst,
the color, the immediate saturation of a
sigh
the word ah —again and again—
the sound of the origin,
a beginning,
ah,
Thank the Goddess, angels, Universal
Mother beings, thank the
ancestors, thank the bird people
and the seed people and the sea
people and the wee people.
Thank the forest and the wave and
the clouds and the seals and the mountains.
Thank the trees and the sands and
the chemicals and the stars.
Thank the pens and the inks and the
poets.
Thank the swimming creatures without bones.
Thank the eyes glowing in the dark,
thank the tremors and the volcanoes,
thank the dance classes and the musicians,
who feel the life blood of the spring,
thank the tender Earth, in whose footsteps we
walk, thank the curled and unfurling
ferns, the softnesses of the Earth’s body and
our own bodies.
Thank you cats’ fur, thank you breasts,
thank you sheep, thank you lions thank
you reeds and berries.
Thank you fungi.

The glow we receive we return back
again, again, again.

The birds sing and I remember.

The birds sing and I remember,
and my memories become a song in my body.

The flowers sing and I am reminded
instantly, to exhale, to feel the muscles
deep in my belly, my neck, my throat,
my ears, unclench and re-order,
ready to listen again
for more

xoc
3.18.21

words and image C.Savage 2021

listen to this poem read by the author (on Soundcloud)
LET EVERYONE BRING THE GIFTS say the Bird Women

Casting the Net Wider, and Coming Back Home

we are insatiable—
our minds designed to crave,
to seek to hunt to track to
record to remember to find to
experiment
to pass on these traits to our progeny,
to figure out how to share these winding ways as far and wide
as can be imagined
and

we need to both cast the net wider
and come back home

we need to cast the net wider:
“man” has not made it past the moon.
a child born after 1969 does not know the taste
of that thrill
(Mars rovers incorrectly programmed between the archaic
“King’s Own” and
near-globally agreed upon metrics do not hold quite the same j’uj)

we need to cast the net wider:
our possibilities need to be set free,
released from the restrictive confines of
just one way (or the other), from mono-anything,
that we might see hear taste and
rejoice
in the Everything, in the
muchness of everything

we must cast the net wider:
we must begin to believe, once again,
that something new can happen, that
alchemical change can bring forth
something never before seen
in our neck of the universe (or not for a long long time), that
something new can become, out of our selves

and so, like those ascended of every age have tried to impress,
like tired children, like birds, like whales, like herds of
multitudinous ungulates (caribou and deer and such) we must
(don’t you think)
recover, dust off and shine up our inner compasses
and come home.

Return home like a wren to the nest, to where
life comes forth, to where hearth is warm
(or supposed to be), to where
loved ones wait with open faces,
open arms, open hearts, open minds,
just for the chance to light up
in greeting, in sharing story and song and
willingness to collaborate, to
sift through and shift orientation
to home, home, home, like a puzzle piece
turning to be settled and nestled
in place, it cannot be
reshaped by force or complaint, but
by movement, re-orientation, patience,
and time.

and now, now of all nows, it is time to come home.

it is time to come home to ourselves, to the possibilities,
to the potentials not yet uncovered nor turned over,
it is time to reformat old systems of
disparity—between I and other, between mind
and body, between self and world

coming home to ourselves as an act of
closing the gap and sewing it shut, of
leaping chasm and bringing two sides of
something together, forever (or for the mean time)

coming home as a radical act of care for
self and planet and universe and any and all
lands we walk in, home as beam
of light, home as beacon

come home body, come home Earth, come home tree, come home water,
come home wind, come home squirrel and antelope and humpback and hummingbird and snake and crawling thing and winged ones calling from the skies, come home to me rabbit and fox and fur and tooth and dirt and rot and claw and antennae. Come home to me transmission and transformation. Come home, home.

And so, in our capacity to cast the net wider,
let us not forget to catch
ourselves, too.

And in our coming home, let us not forget
the chance to include other.

May we hear and heed the call,
may we become, already, that which
we do not know we seek, but that which we are.

listen to this poem read by the author on SoundCloud:

Casting the Net Wider and Coming Back Home

You Can Come Home and The Bear, The Wind, The Bear

“the World and the Bear” 2011, C.Savage

You Can Come Home
and
The Bear, The Wind, The Bear

1. You Can Come Home, The Wind

Is the feeling I am mistaking for love free fall?
And is there anything inherently incorrect with that?

There is talk of “groundedness”
and then, the visceral feeling,
of the sprinting spiral trajectory of our entire solar system. **
Of our star shooting through space, even as I sit and type.
**(the former-physicist me wishes for a moment for a memory)

The plane of Between in all stillness practices,
in this moment, is this the feel of subspace,
the place of acknowledgment,
the yogis flexing and bending as their bodies hurtle through an incomprehensible galaxy,
you can come home
you can come home
you can come home

Here.
A dance of matching speeds
human v human on horse
wood v wood-fired metal
glass v gourd
bear v car
nature v structure
speaking v ~~understanding~~ knowing
is it a set up?
is it a construct of the walled mind?**
**(bridge v river)

existence in a spacetime of
imminent collision…
inevitable…
there is no toward
or getting away from

and what is it really,
and what does it matter
and I’d rather leave the
strict suburbs of why
for the open plains of
star time
and
your mind
and weeping until we are done

the rigidity of opposing
v
the flexibility of intertwined roots
lifting the land
breathing the wind

stone, water, love
beyond what is time
beyond what is concept

the feeling of my body
the feeling of knowing
the feeling of wind
the feeling of the whole thing coming down**
**(the feeling of the potential of the whole thing coming down)

i’m all shook up

2. The Bear, The Wind, The Bear

What I know is there is nothing to argue about
A state of wonder is a state of wonder is a state of wonder is a state of wonder is a state of wonder

what is being in love
what is world worry
what does the Hubble space telescope show us
what is the movement of planets
I gotta stop I almost started to cry

why spend our time arguing about the existence of love?
altho it’s me who squirms away from philosophy.

3. The Bear, The Bear

In August I arrived from Peru with Amazon River water, full of pink dolphins, still on my skin
I drove to pick up a friend, hearing his voice after years and years
gravelly like my Russian brother, and the same opening statement
Sorry, sorrysorrysorrysorry, I’m sorry
I know

In the short timespan I drove to retrieve him:
a big, fat-flowing male bear galloped across the highway, I almost hit him,
on the way back, he was dead, huge still, on the side of the road.
We didn’t have time to stop for him. I felt awful. We were on a mission.
The Kontomble had sent a recipe with bear fur.
And we couldn’t stop.

On Tuesday, now three months later, after the weekend of shamanic wind and weeping through music, I was driving to drop my child off at school and saw another bear, dead on the side of the road.

At first I thought it was a dog, a German Shepherd, but it was a bear. I felt sick. I had just mentioned the bear the night before. Here was the bear. I took my child to school. I borrowed children’s scissors from his classroom, I remembered, in my rush of the morning and all the bags, leaving my bag with the knife at home.

I was distraught, I called my friend, I drove up and turned around at the next exit and came back, looking for the bear. I saw it, lying the the grass, and as I got closer began to cry for its smallness. I pulled over next to its body. My friend asked me to be careful, to be aware and present for other bears, if this one was so small, to make an offering. I hung up.

I went over to the bear, crying, truck sound roaring by, I stayed close to my car, I felt fear, I felt a large bubble of fear, pain, disaster. It felt warm, present, watery, a different quality of air. I looked over my shoulder, feeling another bear may come barreling down the hillside on the opposite side of the road. I saw the blood pattern on the road, of the bear coming across, being hit, and stumbling to the side, collapsing. The head wound, the killing blow, was resting on the ground, the young bear’s eye half open. She looked alive, still, resting a moment before death, her spirit still in the air around her.

I was so sad and afraid. I pulled tobacco from a cigarette and sage from the window, I did not have a lighter, I ground it between my hands and sang two songs I do not remember, tears falling into the grass. I was hot and afraid, feeling the bear. Was there another bear? I opened the plastic bag I had pulled from my car door and there were feathers in it. I looked around again and felt there was no physical danger. I knelt by the bear and snipped some of her fur into a towel. The warm bubble disappeared, my tears stopped, I was able to breathe normally again, I got into my car. The Bear.

More The Wind another time.

xoc

Iquitos, Freaking Center of the Universe, 2018 ed.

Iquitos, Freaking Center of the Universe, 2018 ed.
I.

+swimming in the energy of Belen

+pink dolphins like twisting flags, traveling

+tossing friends into the air

+dancing and throwing limbs to the edges

+deeply surprising lunches and motorides

+witnessing transformation, mastery, awareness

+making a magical, medicinal space

+being held by the Amazon, swimming in space

+being healed by the hands of my community, creating a space for safety and direct contact

+listening and being delivered treasure

+receiving indigenous wisdom via community and plant medicines

II. Thank yous

Thank you
for the gifts
the gift of murga
the gift of seeing and being seen, of being heard
the gift of meeting, encountering, moving together like a cloud of birds, vapor,
molecules in a container, together, and flowing out to join with what is, with other, with water

Thank you
for the gift of your eyes
the gift of your heart—wide
thank you, thank you for your pouring
of intention and commitment to task
thank you for your sensitivity, your sensibility, your gentleness
your creativity, your flexibility

Thank you for bringing your magical self,
your mystical, mythical self,
your self as you walk in this land and other lands.
Thank you for bringing your awareness,
your care,
the extension of yourself in this and other worlds—your love,
your body full of medicine

Thank you for your kisses,
your hugs, your squeezes
around the middle,
your loving gazes

good morning, good evening, good night,
blessings, blessings on your heart, your eyes, your life

Thank you for being light bearers
thank you for being
thank you for thinking of water, and
river, and
grass, and
eyes, and
plants, and
hands, and
carrying,
carrying the gifts in
your hands,
your eyes,
your heart.

Thank you for your blessings,
Thank you for the blessings that you are.
Thank you for being kindness
Thank you for bringing joy.

xoc

The Flowers Come Home

from February 18

Something I am discovering about medicine is that everything begins to tend toward it, like a magnet. Dreams, especially, poetry and art and heart and mind. Music, intention, environment. Flowers demand to come home in a bag, be planted, be cut and arranged, keep dream company on the bedside. There is no demand, there just is. The flowers come home.

Last night I was overtired after drinking a little and painting flowers from last weekend, and completing a notebook with a poem, and I began to have visual distortion in the edges of things, and because I noticed I didn’t jump too hard.

In bed I searched for an Albert Goldbarth poem I have been looking for and finally found it— To Be Read in 500 Years —and read it, and my heart was beating like a ball bouncing off a wall and started to double skip again, for the first time in a week. The poem is 4 pages long and in me behaves like sex, rolling up through my body, my chest and head filling with blood in calculated waves, creating a sense of wonder and confusion, which, as cheesy as that sounds, is true.

And so after the poetry I tried to sleep, and here is this owl, from behind my head, and I am already at the very edges of the physical world, and I allow the memory of the malevolent pushing force to surface and he/they/it begins to walk the room, and my heart is double beating and the owl is hoo hooooing in the small patch of woods and there are no flowers on the bookshelf to look over the dream—I left them on the table—and he/it begins to round the corner of the bed and I also don’t have any Frankincense and then I remember Thuy is on the floor at the foot of the bed and I call a stop. I breathe flowers into my body and reorder my heart. I know where order rests, and how to quickly calm a rise of adrenaline, in my own home.

I try to sleep. The owl is calling and calling and there is this other animal, this other owl, or dog, in call with it. I think it is a dog, and imagine shouting out the window at night, to ask some neighbor to put the dog in, or have it shut the fuck up. And then I start to think it is a fledgling owl, or some other injured party, who does not know how to properly call, and I think this other owl is being very patient with its call, responding to the exaggerated and obnoxious, incorrect one. Out of order.

I fall asleep eventually and the owls are still calling, and what happens is: they begin to build an icaro. I watch it being weaved. Circular, with patterns being called by the top to bottom, branching out to the edges. The two animals are calling the patterns next to each other, and I am starting to feel the feeling of being able to understand how the medicine is to be used, and the stitching is reaching the bottom and edges and

Thuy calls out, calmly, in an awake voice, not a night terror voice, “Mommy? Mommy?” and the dream begins to dissolve and he is cold, his blanket has shifted and I get up and lay it back over him, on his little pallet, and I say I Love You and Good Night and Stay Cozy Baby and I try to stay in the dream mind and lie down and imagine the edges of the weaving and where the magic and the medicine was starting to lead out into two sticks maybe and it didn’t come back. And by now the owl too had moved on or gone to bed and I let myself hold loosely to the image of the unfinished edge and fell back into dreaming but of something else.

xoc

Allegiance

Eastern Hellbender Cryptobranchus allegeniensis photo: Bronx Zoo

Listen to this writing on SoundCloud

“To Whom and//or what do you give your allegiance?”
“How Does Such Allegiance impact your sense of self and thus your writing?”

Aham, my allegiance is to the trout, the stars, the folded cups of mountain laurel, pale pink centered.

“How is your writing a form of peyote?”
“How is your writing medicine to bring back to your community?”
“Take these 15 minutes of peyote time.”

Is my allegiance really to the shovel?
I bought such a beautiful one—German-made, expensive,
not from Home Depot.
I sparkled over its heaviness, its “heirloom” quality—
my five year old asked if it was his and I said “sometime.”
I hacked through 4—or, really 2 square feet of crabgrass and
cursed the roots, cried about deforestation of my place,
which isn’t really my place,
which doesn’t feel like my place,
without any living trees,
and hoped the cherry tomatoes would volunteer again,
and glared, sweaty, from my kitchen over a glass of cider.
This is work for machines.
And as I write this I think, “no.
I will take the shovel to the decorative parts of the land and
put in my peas and my radishes where the crabgrass
has not yet taken over.”
I will water the pear trees and make offerings to the
one great oak left—
I will tie it round with ribbons and flags
and people zooming by with confederate plates might wonder—
“what the fuck is that little girl doing, dressing up a tree?”
and will I have the bravery to make shrines?
Will I have the peace in my heart to walk with questions to the native peoples and request introductions to places.
I need an invitation, a calling card.

And the little, pointing, laughing, curious, drunken, activated little spirits say:
Stop with all that lamentation. You have had your introductions,
you have made the spaces and the fires in your heart and the
mountains see you, darling,
and the rivers love you,
dear one,
and the fishes and the dreams request your
full presence.
So turn your eyes TOWARD, instead of AWAY FROM.
Turn them into eggs, turn them into bellies, turn them into
honey and holes.
Listen with your spots, with your salamanders.
Speak with your stones and your hands and your bloody heart and your toothiness and your
radiant eyes. Speak little one, speak young one, speak.

Give your heart fully to the things you love
without fear that it will be removed from your body—
for it does not reside there anyway.
Remember the green, the smell, the water full of toes and
hellbenders.
I give my allegiance to the hellbenders and their
ugly, magnificent kin,
to their riffles and ruffles and
nose holes and hiding places,
I burn pyres for their deaths and for their lives.
I give my love and my honor and whatever I have—
my voice.

from a writing prompt at Asheville Wordfest: Geopoetics
session with Todd Levasseur: Writing Through Collapse

xoc

Asheville Wordfest

Birthday Gift

Birthday writing, Sept 1 2017, Well Bred Cafe, Biltmore, Asheville NC, with Aile Shebar

I wrote to you, Aile, on the evening of my birthday to say, “look at the clouds!”

I was on the lookout for them, the memory of our write night last year with the shelf of clouds—impressive, ominous and awe-inspiring—this duality of non duality clash and uprising. Is something hiding there? or just
the feeling—TOO GREAT, must be something behind it—
GREAT, maybe something else AND
just the beauty, the great-ness the
simple combination of
super powers—air, water, wind, light. Something SO HUGE, so mystical
and ordinary.

My heart is calling me toward the color and the form— of
cloud, sunset, tree, leaf, stream. My eye is alerting me to
WATER. WATER. WATER.
Like a timer going off.

Many memories pop up in my brain like an alarm WAKEUP WAKEUP WAKE UP.

On my birthday, I sought the pool that is the color of my eyes.
Sitting, feet and hand in the water, praying,
asking,
Mother, what can I do, Mother,
what can I do for you—

singing.
Silently at first and then with voice,
(here I am starting to grip my pen closer to the nib)

singing. a breath. another breath.

Mother—
what can I do for you?
Please.

And like a wing beat the answer came into my body

you can return.
you can come home.

When I am singing
songs of longing,
longing for you,
you, you
I am waiting here always for
you
you
you—

like a drum my heart finally started beating
FOR.
ITSELF.
FOR.
MYSELF.
I have been waiting for
you you you and
you are right here.

I cried. I let the hot tears fill up and spill out. There was maybe one other person there, I don’t know if he was on the rocks and observing a part of this ritual, this silent, crying faerie in the sometimes sparkling water//A small woman crying with her feet in the pool, under a shelf of boulders.

I made the pool for myself, blocking the views other than birch and rhododendron and water and rock. With my feet I observed the small flows tucked back into the rocks. The undersides trembled a little bit.

I put my right hand in the water, to hear.

I cupped my left hand to my heart, to hear.

And I listened, until the question came,

and I listened, until an answer was there.

And then I listened to the heat in my tears and to the shush of the falls and to the color and the shapes in the rock sticking up in front of me and to the green, green leaves filling my vision.

Mother, I am here.

Love Remembers. Lillie and Daniel’s Wedding Poem (April 6, 2014)

(photo Nanny Glick)

love
loveliness
appreciation
dedication
celebration.

love as a path
in nature
in the brain.
love is
in our hearts
in our minds.
love is in the air.
love. is.

so.
why does love
continue to take us by surprise?
love—
that we know about,
(that we think we know about)
that is all around us,
(though we may not remember to remember)
suddenly
or bit by bit
love becomes new.

do flowers, fresh from bulb
remember they have before been bloom?
their eruption from dormancy
as much a shock to them
as it is to us—
coming through long winter
to be amazed by the spring.

love remembers.
love remembers us to ourselves.
love remembers us to ourselves.
respectively
and
collectively
love remembers us.
love remembers
lest we forget.

C. Savage 4-6-2014

Intimacy with Water

I ask the water to
hold me
I ask the water to
forgive me
I ask the water to
envelop me
I ask the water to
unfold me
I ask the water to
read me like a letter
I thank the water for letting me know myself
better.

I ask the water about
love.
I ask the water about giving life
life.
I ask the water to
hold me
I ask the water to
forgive me
I ask the water about
love.

C. Savage 9.15.15