and we're going to these meetings, but we're not doing any meeting

[two-grey-rooms.livejournal.com]

"Resolutions"
This new year I want
I want
I want

I want

the clock to strike twelve oh one
twelve times still lingering oh

and in that one minute to feel
a great chasm torn open in the earth
the sound not of cheering but of trumpets

the trembling of the firmament
the buckling of the firmament
the failing of the firmament

the dropping of the diadems
the surrender of the doges

split open into two arcs
swooping

wildly into the night, against the blue sky
the arms of the angels, their bird keening

all the continents crushed
beneath the roiling waters.

This new year I am tired
of anticipation
of wondering

of the fear that lingers
of the worst

I want


the worst to come,
to embrace the earthquakes,
to follow the floods,
to make ripe and ready the fields
for the fires.

New year--
the world is weary of waiting
the weight is no longer wondrous

tell us: is it triumph or terror told
in your

oh one
oh one
oh one
--Jaida Jones



"My father and I go down to the avenue"
By the Barnes and Noble the weathered Chinese man
is playing his Gau-Hu with his knees bent
and the sounds like long rough threads, loud and lonely,
are drawn forth from it in unprecise horizontals,
all along the hurry of the street. My father says
"I stop and listen," and exchanges the dollar in his hand
for a five, then puts the rest of his money away.

By now it should be less surprising
to meet the people my father knows, even in passing.
Or to see the nod pass between them, hear the Gau-Hu crying--

always as if my father sitting next to me,
just recovering from a cold
is some messianic moment in other men's lives--
that's who he's always been, fixing everyone else's music
and leaving our chairs broken. But, "I stop and listen,"
my father says, even on New Year's Eve, and me with him.

When my father moves to leave,
he shakes the Chinese man's playing hand,
gives him the five dollar bill, says, "Happy new year."

I hear, "Thank you, thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Jones," and then the Gao-Hu follows:
all down the street, all the way down the street,
mourning the unseasonal rain and my clammy forearms.

"I saw him in the subway once," my father explains,
my father who never forgets a face, who also played
on street corners, who knows, like music, every man's angle.
"And I asked him if I could play the instrument.
Well, right away I played a Western scale.
Yeah," my father says, "we knew each other. Oh, yes,
he likes me, too."

I almost think:
well, dad, it's because you're the guy who gives him
five dollar bills. Five dollar bills!
But even I would never believe that,
my father shaking his playing hand
with the long rough grip of able fingers.
--Jaida Jones



"Mirror"
The face
is familiar. Brow to nose to lips to chin,
murky eyes to cheekbones to temporarily locked jaw,
an overall impression of one female unfond of the sun.

Confrontation is nigh.

I look her in the unimpressed, reflective eye,
the color of her archenemy dirt,
inspect her gnawed fingernails
with confidence that I may knock some sense
past those tight lips yet.

(All literature on the subject, all pamphlets
and educational, therapeutic volumes
say to begin with a compliment; I struggle
to abide by these rules.)

"At least you're honest, I say,
"at least you're not pulling the wool over anyone's eyes,
at least you're not pulling anyone's leg,
at least you're not pulling any crap.
I understand you've been thinking about it lately,
but you have to get over it,
talk to some people like last time,
make something of it like last time,
creation which gave you your momentary reprieve:
a year and three-quarters total.

"I understand you're starting to think you matter," I continue,
"so much it scares you, or maybe
you just love the world so much you hate to realize
it can and will and should go on without me. I mean,
you," I say.
"It just seems you're missing the point,
which we've been over before, and that is
you should stop worrying
and give your heart a break,
and stop looking for excuses to think about it,
and start down that path of enlightenment.

Relinquish your earthy ties,
discover a religion,
succumb to an afterlife with opposite poles,
be either evil or good but believe that there will
be a divine intervention,
retribution or reward.

"Or maybe," I say, as we scratch our ears, "you should go out
and get a new fear. Public toilets are a good one; so are
subways,
rats,
other people's toothbrushes,
jello,
clowns,
balloons,
space alien abductions,
government conspiracies,
manholes,
Utah,
FOX 5 television,
and Dick Clark.

"How long has he been alive?" I ask.

"Well, after all," I say, "you don't have to implement the change
right away. Not here in the bathroom,
where the tiles are cold
and the shower curtain is filthy, opaque. You're only human
and isn't that the problem, anyway?"

The face
is familiar, pinched upon my departure;
unfortunately,
as I leave it follows,
crying "Me, Me, Me!"
all the way home.
--Jaida Jones



"Haiku"
This haiku is like
I am: one lonely moment,
all elbow angles.
--Jaida Jones



"Discourses"
I.
For years a friend believed in reincarnation
while I was terrified of death.
On the beliefs of Buddha, vicarious, like a diver on the edge
of the over-soul,
her toes curled in monotone prayer.
I thought, when I heard her brush off fear,
of many saffron-and-earth monks trailing a blaze-line
up a mountain.

(Imagery was easier then.)

Still, this brought me no comfort:
I thought of myself and of her, and of the world,
as having pieces lost through living. If you go barefoot
on the cold, ragged earth,
your calluses mark the end of your newborn youth
and the harshness of your windworn body will grow like an oak
but for nowhere near as long.

II.
I could envy the trees, then,
for their deep roots. Though my toes clutch at the earth
the lines of my muscles are not as strong.
I could live as a tree,
a non-sentient,
a tall form in the breeze. Winter
would not end me; would strip be bare, yes;
and would then make me an ice-phoenix
and I would each spring be born again.

III.
I begin to think of death--not morbidly
but curiously
through the slats in my mind, a student of ending,
a body thirsty for that scent of ultimate knowledge
(to want to know is ingrained
into all of our wood-working like the knots and the lines
of an oak, from the beginning
it was apparent that to seek such knowledge
is to court destruction)--when my grandfather
died. I do not say 'passed away,'
though he would.
But I was there
and I saw him settled against silk,
not merely moving from one place to another:
he had stopped.
He was ended, a man turned off, a thing alive
alive no more, and no words, which can
convince anyone they please,
weasel their way into hearts and out of situations,
that could soften this blow to my senses,
or make him know what it was
he was.

It was not sleep.
From the point of view of a book
it was a narrative ended.

But for my grandfather,
a firm man firmly planted in the Church,
there was nothing to worry about.
Where he was going was far, far whiter
than hospital walls.

IV.
I begin to take it further.

What is ending when you cannot name it?

What is ending when you do not know
to know you've ended?

V.
In the following summer I spoke with
a cousin in the heated water
of a chlorine-blue pool,
treading tubed ripples around our bodies.
Looking down to my distorted legs
the image of my clammy skin was anything but immortal.
I believe," he said, and it began again, "that we are all part
of one very, very big thing." I was not so much comforted
as offended by the assumption
that I was not so pleasingly unique as I had previously thought.

"We are all divisible from that whole," he said,
"and can return to it."

He
was a mathematician.

VI.
In the shabbiest but most appropriate apartment
of my mother's friend, the scientist,
I learned the ideas of his "lazy fare"
along with my divisible body
and grew agitated,
disturbed down to my atoms.

VII.
It is not true that all I have to fear is fear
itself. From every fear--
the heavy, water-logged drowning
the stomach-in-my-throat of falling
the writhing scorch of burning
the breath burden of choking
the sedentary disappointment of dying in bed--
comes the bitter truth: were it not for death,
which roots in the root of me,
I would fear nothing. In comparison
to this godfather of terror even failure
is unimportant. Without him
I would have all the time in the world
so I could try again and fail better,
next time.

VIII.
It had grown rather bad, so that I sat
with a brush in my hand,
pretending to be a painter and fooling no one,
musing to be a real painter about life and my own plans
and the inevitable.
In an attempt to grasp at the immortal, or touch upon it,
or breathe in how it smells, I thought man, or woman,
or simply I,
needed to be noticed.

"What motivates you," the artist said, "is what you are,
and what you always will be.
Don't write for your mother. Don't write
for your teacher. Don't paint for the galleries.
Hey, who are you writing this for, anyway?
Who are you living this for?"

He had a rough voice
that spared no one.
I liked it.

IX.
To be taught
is to be reborn.

X.
To teach
is to fornicate with nature,
and you will leave the children of your fornication
to walk the earth in your stead.

XI.
To be sensual
and to drink the wine of Babylon's whore
is to live life as a bright flame:
perhaps not so wisely
or so long
but the best part of death
is having so much life to lose.

XII.
To shun the earthly pleasures
to cast off such fornication
will make you very pure. The God
or the over-soul or the indivisible
that watches over and is all-knowing
will embrace your cleanliness.

This is why religious men do not fear.

XIII.
To theorize
is to give reason
to that which terrifies you.

A scientist knows it is best
not to leave things,
no matter how small,
unnamed.

XIV.
The mathematician will equate the whole,
the parts of the whole.
It all seems very simple
until you yourself try to make it add up.

Then,
it is merely impersonal.

XV.
Artists will say it is not what you do or say
but how you do or say it.
They will not truly answer
your question.

XVI.
In the end you have gone the circumference
and traced its curve back to yourself. Your friends,
your teachers, have found ways to satisfy themselves.

But such thoughts as they have are not your own so really
you don't think they amount to much.

In this that is life it is impossible to spend every second
thinking about that which is death. Things pass. You pass.
We do not merely pass away.

Amidst the throbbing of your thoughts
and the pounding of your heart
you blink once and realize that second
fleeting and unimportant,
unnoticed and irrelevant,
is death.
--Jaida Jones



"There is never a sudden revelation, a complete and tidy explanation of why it happened, or why it ends, or why or why you are. You want one and I want one, but there isn't one. It comes in bits and pieces, and you stitch them together wherever they fit, and when you are done you hold yourself up, and still there are holes and you are a rag doll, invented, imperfect. And yet you are all that you have, so you must be enough. There is no other way."
--Marya Hornbacher