Between Doing and Done

Geof Huth, "in Go at" (27 June 2011)
Silence abides.

Silence abides, though I can never accept it. Watch a movie and you will know you are listening to it for most of the time, but what you see is what you feel, what you know, what you accept as what you are watching. You watch, after all. The acceptance of silence, even the use of silence, we overlook, me more than most because I am a construct of words—sure, words written or said or thought, but words nevertheless.

So I've let this space go silent.

For some of the days of these silences, I've thought to myself, Well, I have nothing to say, nothing to write about. But I know that this is not the case. It is just that nothing attached itself to my body, nothing took to me parasitically so that all I could do was to accept it and take care of it, as a gracious and reasoned host. I am overtaken by thoughts. It is not that I am a creator of them. I find them in the creations of others. Or sometimes even within my own.

Silence is retreat. It is death. We know this. We know that a blog dies the death of a dozen days left fallow. But it is a digital space, and time to its own devices improves no environment, allows no seed to better grow the next time it is planted.

It is not that I am announcing a disappearance. It is not that I am disappearing, for (truth be sold) I have never really been here. Only a few words have been, words replaced by other words. And nothing here ever disappears, though I occasionally edit those that remain here.

So silence has been extended in this space.

In the meantime, I have slowly begun to finish projects, so that silence in one direction is not the same as silence in all directions. I'm just a few days beyond a month from the point where I had finished writing a 1500-page book of poetry, and I still have five or six of the letters to send out to their recipients. (My printer died in the last few days of the project, and I have yet to mail out those final poems to the recipients. Sometimes, the smallest impediment holds me back for the longest time.)

I'm cleaning up. Boxing up books, boxing up papers, neatening the life strewn or piled throughout this house. I'm in search of order and looking to clean away what I don't need. Maybe some of the 5,000 books I estimate (conservatively) I have in the place. After a life so long in one place, things (objects, possessions, even dust) accumulates. And I have to clean it up.

I'm writing fewer poems now, though still plenty, still (if memory serves) too many. But I'm also focused on finishing some books. I'm typing out the 366 poems of This, Thine Earth, the book of poems I wrote, one a day, for the year 2010, each one based on a page of devotional text, which I find all the more appropriate from someone so undevotional.

Sometime soon, I have to look at another yearlong project of mine, They are as You First Saw Them. If I have any good poems, they probably reside in there. Or I should finish the final edit of my book of minimalist Twitter-fed poems, atwhich. There rest, somewhere near me at the moment, a number of books of visual poetry I must put together soon. I have books to assemble from the pieces of my life, all of which pieces are words.

I am stunned by the sunlight in the morning, and I need to change the sheets on my bed, but I don't do it. I am living in the past of the words I've already made, and the words I cannot take back. Poems after goddamned poems, little rivulets of words drip down my arms, in swirling patterns red as blood. These words are cautious, extemporaneous, violent, damaged, thoughtful, quiet, virulent, bestial, beautiful, redundant, revelatory, dull, dumb, and essential. Though only to myself. I write for the pressure of silent sound against the barricades of my inner ear.

Today, I was overcome, for seconds, mere seconds, maybe only two, but twice, so twice times two, by tiny spells of dizziness while gently pushing the lawnmower against and across the thick and velvety lawn. When I knelt to pull a few of the billion weeds (miniature maples, slightly larger oaks, violets, crabgrass, clover, plantain) out of my yard and garden, my heart fluttered (my cardiologist's word). To me, it was a crunching, the heart cracking against itself. All together, these events amounted to six or seven seconds of my life, and meaninglessly so. My cardiologist thought nothing of them, and I did too, noting to him that I would have forgotten all about these tiny events if my appointment with him had been scheduled for tomorrow instead of today, which the day my heart told me it was still there.

(Today, I learned that I weigh one pound more than I did the day I graduated from high school 33 years ago.)

But the reason for this story is that my cardiologist, when he saw me today, smiled brightly and thanked me for the poem I had sent him. It was the most life-affirming response I'd received to one of these 365 poems I had sent out, unarmed, into the world, for he responded as a man who had told me how much poetry had confused him, how its indirectness led him nowhere. I had, for sure, written him a poem made for a man with this issue, but not one made simple and transparent. The poem was made to make him think, to make him work, to make him enjoy the poem, and he seemed to. It's a poem I still like, though I know that liking one's own poems is like enjoying one's own image in a mirror.

Still, to reach a non-poet, someone perturbed by poetry, with a poem, seems to me an accomplishment. And it is good to have accomplishments, even if fleeting and evanescent rather than substantial.

I draw my poems with my hands. I write them with the blood of my body. I sing them out of my chest. I have incorporated my poetry into my life, because these are creatures of my body, a body tired from not sleeping for years, one worn out in some ways, but always pushing out, with some crazy and life-filling intensity, into the world. If I have to live in the world, I'll love it with my entire body or hate it with the entirety of my soul. Or both.

I am not done, but I am between there and this incessant and unavoidable doing that keeps the blood in me moving and the heart pumping clear and steady.

ecr. l'inf.