The Writing Cycle
When your conscious and unconscious selves
Meet, how will they recognize each other, like
Two species of warblers with slightly different
Wing bars, black or yellow, how do they know
They are of the same emberizidae family?
The art is to become one, the discursive side
Critical like humming mosquitoes, and the writing
Breaking through until you feel the good like
The stillness of a mesa top as you lie on a ridge
Between two cliffs, facing sixty miles of gorges.
The continuum from dry to wet must meet someday
The wild words must eventually sit quietly on paper
Visible, stationary, unvarying, framed in white
Space, the black marks clear as hieroglyphs.
In a museum hangs a large cream page with pale
Words in white letters scattered around the perimeter
Gathered off a favorite list by a writer who wanted
To show the movement of sound. Once you finish
Writing, the still hand belies the agony of creativity
Like pumpkin seeds hiding in dried petals of squash
Blossoms discarded on a path when spring warms
To summer. The cycle is complete when
Your angry notebooks become fine antique type
On handmade paper, or windblown scraps for birds’
Nests or the lined burrows of field mice and frost like
Pencil leads coats the dry twigs in sinuous shapes.
Wholeness is the present divining last fall’s tangled
Mat of leaves and watching the returning chickadees,
When you know the pictures will reach through your
Fingers and write themselves down your arm.
It is good to see someone read your words
And nod slowly.