OK. I confess. I am a poet who craves solitude and inner silence. The slow pace of walking and swimming are my most conducive places of contemplation. Yet, I browse Twitter several times a day. What’s that about? Surely, the 140 character limit appeals to my sense of poetic compression. The interdisciplinary and multi-cultural nature of my “Following” list supports my discursive nature. But something happened this week that captures the gist of it.
 
On June 1, Banksy, the anonymous British graffiti artist, through the Twitter id @therealbanksy, posted this video of an entire town in Istanbul that learned sign language to surprise a deaf man. Banksy’s post was retweeted 29,900 times and liked by 43,700 people. This occurred several years ago and was part of a Samsung ad for a video call center. It has been posted by so many people and organizations, I stopped counting.
 
A few days later, I saw the following post. On June 3, The Episcopal Café retweeted an image of a noose found near a Washington DC elementary school. There were 14 posts about this horror. One of those had 849 Retweets. Several had none. And a few were in the 100 range.
 
The kindness shown by the neighbors in Turkey’s Istanbul, juxtaposed with the hatred expressed in our own nation’s capitol, is both troubling and ironic. These juxtapositions are also complex, once the commercial motivations of South Korea’s Samsung are woven into the equation as well as the public response as gauged by the retweets. However, these aspects are not all that strike me.

​With these two posts, I am left holding in my heart two extremes. Unresolvable, probably. And that holding, revisiting;
that “unsolving” seem to be at the heart of what it means to be human.
 

​It’s an old art school trick meant to loosen up the literal line between eye and mind and hand and the page. “Don’t look at the thing you are drawing, but trace it with your eyes.” What you’ll get is something a little bit like the thing looked at, but
​off-kilter, unskilled.
 
Take this drawing of an owl, for example. It’s a likeness, to be sure; recognized for its owlness, not a robin or a squirrel. But it lacks realistic detail, is missing its feathers. Is primitive, primal, even. Yet, when my friend, Linda Bills, an accomplished artist very capable of rendering an owl, sent it to me, I thought mostly of the Japanese word, kokoro—meaning heart. But also mind. Heart & mind. Heartmind. This owl, drawn without looking at the page, is seen with the eyes and drawn with the heart. All those impulses shoot straight up the spinal cord, meridian, chakra highway, axis mundi…you name it. And a resonance vibrates between eye, heart, mind and hand. It probably spills back over to the owl, too. Who knows? Everything in relation and vibration. All made possible by disabling verification.
 
It’s a little like faith, isn’t it?

​

Welcome to my first attempt at blogging. I hope we'll get a conversation going. 

Perhaps a poem to start things off. The title of my upcoming book, from Paraclete Press, is inspired by a line from one of my first favorites, Hayden Carruth. In his poem, "Testament," he wrote that—at age 86—he was almost entirely love. Here's my dedicatory poem to the book. Stay tuned here for future sneak peeks and various musings.

Carruth
​
Carruth, my first loved poet, said
in his “Testament:” Now I am
almost entirely love.


He imagined his ego’s heaviness
sifting through the narrowness
and settling on a gathering
cone of love below.
 
He didn’t know, then --
that when I lift his book from the shelf,
the love he has become spills,
like galaxies in my hands.