this is extraordinary. every word a gift. i hope one day Brice Powers work will be in a book so that we all can sit down and be nourished. enjoy... Brice Powers: (props self up on one elbow, shakes head like a dog, icy dreams spray off in prismed dropplets, a mist through which sleepy eyes widen, looking up into Winters chisled, fading face. Stands up on thawing feet, a little wobble, a little sprig-hollow stemmed waver...takes a deep breath, speaks...) Thank you, Winter. I can tell by the birds circling my dizzy head that youve knocked me deeply, a cold blow to my soul. A good one. Ive never grappled with anything so encapsulating as your white-iron fingers, slapped so thoroughly into a cocoon, not choked, but slowed down breath by your pressed bones on chest. Your technique of quieting is disquieting, but effective, even for the wild scatted husks of my mind, frozen and somewhat suspended into a focused survival, a slow flow of simple tasks. Heat, food, sleep, dream. And your chill morning trance, frosty spectacle dance To you thanks, for the many splendid cups of coffee that I poured into words in your mornings. But your nights, especially, were a lesson worthy if not beyond the most ancient dark eyed gurus of myth. Your woodsmoke hair clasped to my vision, raking the sky, where I saw Orions belt tighten, then loosen, after an evening meal of silver gold and crow. The nights. Your nights, Winter, so long and laid out, a flat sheet of hammered metal toiled so that I could only imagine with what I could attatch to make something of nothing. Forcing me to lie down, dream, then of the wolf and its fur and breath, then of the Moons sickle and Venuss stare, of fire and hatchet, then of the necessity of water to flow, the lights to glow. Laid down in a bundle so many nights, alone but for your deathly weight pressed firmly on my head, down into my pillow. I see now how it was not a sufficating, but a liberation from life, and its expectations of expansion and doing, and going, and acting. I went down into my pillow, into the ground, curled into dormancy, shut tight against your raspy, effluvial breath, popped inward and into sleepy stasis where my dreams gave mindful workout. The future did not hold spring, or summer, or fall. The future was pushed condenced into the core of the Earth. I went down. From there I saw the stars. The molten suns, the infinite springs, the bones and debris of a life/death cycle. All through your grey eyes, Winter. And now that Spring has come trapsing down a sun-bathed muddy path, with cheers and fairweathered moans and creeks of adulation, and put up on a sprouting pedestal of comfort and wet warmth, I will not forget your long and gruelling lesson of timeless patience. Ill throw that frozen little pearl into the fields, for you. (Turns and walks, limping but smiling into Spring)
Posted on: Fri, 21 Mar 2014 12:26:34 +0000
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