Category: General posts
Three Recent Poems on Plum Recruit
Read and listen here.
Fierce Wind
for George Floyd
George, the air today is charged with light.
I breathe and hear your words seeking breath.
Because I can walk, can breathe, I push
uphill the hard way, steep and close
with rocks, tight as my throat, closed and angry
with words I can’t find the voice to say.
Instead I speak your name to silent stone
older than law or hate. I say your name
to the fierce living wind, sing your name
like birdsong in waving grass. I give
your name to the endless sky that holds
this weeping world spinning in black,
star filled space.
Blue Hunger Collection Available Now!
I’m delighted to announce the release of my new collection of poems, Blue Hunger from Methow Press. You can order a signed copy of the book from the Confluence Poets Store.
Here’s some advance praise for the book:
Initially, the poems in Subhaga Crystal Bacon’s fine book show her keen eye for delivering the natural world. It’s tempting to think of her as a naturalist, but as her book progresses it becomes clear that, more broadly, she’s a human nature poet; poems of love and loss and community occur with the same acute precision. For example, in “Awake at Night” . . . she begins this way, “I feel beautiful, young and dying/as the cricket song lifts and calls/and you are far away. No happiness/like this…” All in all, a wonderful collection.
–Stephen Dunn, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Pagan Virtues.
Grounded in the beloved Pacific Northwest, Blue Hunger is an account of a soul’s journey, “empty of longing./Luminous, lambent.” In this world where grief merges with love, so does the poet merge “with that great distance.” Each moment and season in a life is carefully observed, and Bacon’s world abounds with raspberries, garlic, choke-cherry, jays, owl, deer, lizards: a “tunnel of loss.” . . .” Blue Hunger is a book—a place—I will revisit again and again because “What I remember most was the flavor of those words, scented with lost possibilities.”
–Jennifer Martelli, author of The Uncanny Valley and My Tarantella
These poems show the love for one’s vision of nature as the shifter of shapes. All of the landscape’s Thingness–as Rilke saw it–ebbs and looms here, and Bacon follows their rhythmic changes. Bacon builds an album that honors the universe’s traffic, the gaze melting to honey. In these poems, the economies of silence, well: The lotus has its foot in the mud.
–Cynthia Arrieu-King, author of Futureless Languages
In these intimate, meticulous, compassionate poems, Bacon seamlessly marries the self with the world . . . of wild rivers and dark trees, of coyotes and hawks, of snow and summer grasses— or the human body, with its love, its aging, and its griefs . . . With a deep mixture of curiosity and vulnerability . . . Bacon sings of our human hungers— “diligent, defended, devout”— with wild consciousness.
-Kenneth Hart, author of Uh Oh Time
High-Desert Spring
Earth exhales
moist, fragrant
breath of thaw.
Pungent pine bark,
needle rot composting,
soil awakening below the top inch.
No rain falls. Snowpack
long since melted
feeds grass and flower,
flows up tree trunks
into gauzy green haze.
Meadow thrush,
redwing blackbird,
Steller’s Jay’s ecstatic shrill,
and flicker’s knock on tree and barn
all call to mate.
Clouds gather and glower.
On the Cascade peaks
shadow-snow or rain
falls like a mirage.
Garden draws deep,
footfall welcome in yielding touch,
sighs a sweetness short lived
until summer sucks it into sun.
Terminal Mental Illness
Some years ago, the daughter of an acquaintance of mine died by suicide. While her husband and children were out, she lit a hibachi in their living room and died from carbon monoxide poisoning.
The obituary her parents wrote said, quite truthfully, that she had succumbed after a long illness.
The recent suicide death of Gregory Eells, head of the University of Pennsylvania’s mental health services, brought to mind my friend’s comparison of lifelong mental illness with a chronic and ultimately terminal disease. In suicide prevention work, we say that many suicides can be prevented. Many, not most or all.
For some people, the lifelong challenges of a mind that berates, undermines, and negates their value as a human being is ultimately unbearable. No matter their outward signs of success, love, or accomplishment, they “know” themselves to be inferior, undesirable, unlovable. No matter the support they have in the form of medication, talk therapy, and interventions, like the Safety Planning Intervention developed by Gregory Eells’ colleagues at U of P that is proving so useful to many people living with anxiety and depression, the illness thrives at the expense of their wellbeing and life force.
We’ve come a long way in our attitudes toward mental illness and its compatriot, addiction, but we have a long way to go.
Myself, I struggle to accept the choices of the terminally ill who seek self-selected euthanasia under plans like Death with Dignity. I’m inclined to a world view that says life is what it is and is ours to experience no matter what. But when I encounter deaths like Eells’, I understand the analogy to terminal disease, that the suffering of acute, unrelenting mental illness can become too great. The prognosis unfavorable and unchanging. The best option to “shake off the mortal coil.”
What is the counterpart, for those with unrelenting mental illness, to hospice and end of life care available to the physically terminally ill? I only know that its foundation is compassion. We can no more blame those who succumb to mental illness than we can those who succumb to terminal illness of the body. We need to start loving, listening, and accepting that we cannot know another’s suffering, nor can we fix it. Our good intentions, pep talks, and interventions may, in the long run, only add to the weight of depression and anxiety. Not only does our loved one feel that the world would be better without them, but they carry the extra weight of our implicit message that they should be able to do something to make things different. Instead, our responsibility is to stand in compassion and serve the best we can as witnesses of life’s various ways of being.
The metaphysical poet, John Donne wrote “No man is an island. . . Every man’s death diminishes me.” Each is a cause for grief and contemplation of our own fragile mortality. “To live in this world,” the late Mary Oliver wrote, “you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.” For me, this is sage advice for those of us who bear witness to friends and family for whom life is an insurmountable struggle, to love each other’s mortality and to hold it as our own. Our lives depend upon it.
Portents
Beetle, snake, apples. We walk single
file under willows, the dappled light
casting shadows. First the beetle, on its back,
and one side missing a few hairlike legs.
I flip it with the fine point of a pen revealing
its pale shell with elegant black stripes.
What to read in the moist spot it leaves
scuttling into the weeds? Immediately,
a slip of snake whips quickly into hedge,
slender tail a question mark, disappears.
Three small apples in a row far
from orchard. Four of us stepping
lightly on the concrete walk, stepping
lightly into the mystery of being
here together in this moment,
where everything is contained.
August Gift
Over the usual dry silence,
the million soft footsteps
of rain, exotic on this desert
summer Sunday. Awakening,
my mind reached out to cup
the din in the cistern of memory,
penetrated by recognition.
I unfurled from sleep,
from the deep fear of fire,
to the smokey grey sky
of cloud. Trees offset in limpid green,
their leaves bowed by the press
of wetness. The earth patters
beneath falling water, volume
increasing in sound and ground.
The generous eave built for snow,
where winter’s ice melts into spears,
this morning drips with summer’s
grateful tears. Runoff returns to river.
Reprieve from burn.
Tantra: A Teaching for Tough Times
No matter what your political bent, most of us can agree that we are going through some tough times. Ideology can’t fix global warming, drought, rising seas, poverty, alienation, isolation, or a bevy of other social ills that cause many of us pain. What it does do, all too well, is create riffs between ourselves and others, whether they be strangers or family members. If they see the world differently from us, we see them as “other,” and, typically, as wrong.
Today is the eighth anniversary of my awakening as embodied consciousness. It’s been a wild unfolding over the last eight years. One of the cornerstones of my awakening was the unshakeable realization that there’s nothing that’s not God. This statement invariably brings up questions and complaints. Poverty is God? War? Rape? Incest? Genocide?
Yes; it’s a hard truth to grasp. But for me, and for a little over a thousand years of nondual Tantra, it is the truth to which one ultimately awakens if one realizes the elegant non-separateness of this path. Writing in Tantra Illuminated, Christopher Wallis anticipates the questions of those who find this precept difficult or impossible to grasp.
Why not create a universe in which suffering is not a possibility? This form of the question presumes a dualism between creator and created . . . If we alter it to the question of why the universe is created in such a way as to allow for the full range of possibilities, from the most horrific to the most sublime, then we have the sort of question that was of greater interest to the Tantric thinkers . . . It is out of love for itself that Consciousness bodies itself forth as a universe, and it is out of love that it allows for the total range of possibilities in that universe (because to negate any possibility would be to reject that aspect of itself.)
For me, this gets to the crux of the beauty of the Tantric path. When we realize Consciousness, when we fully embody it as that which arises fully and freely as and through everything that is, we can come to a place where making others wrong is a fool’s errand. Wallis says “differentiating those we wish to call ‘evil’ from those we wish to call ‘good,’ [reflects a] relative degree of ignorance of the true nature of reality.”
Judging is an innately human, maybe even incarnate, function of survival. Is this being I encounter my friend, or my foe? Predator or prey? Poison or nourishment? And this is important to our wellness of Being. But when we shift that simple and important act of discernment of duality to a world view, we are lost to the truth that everything we encounter is Consciousness manifesting as itself in limited form. It cannot be “wrong,” or “bad,” or even “right,” or “good.” It is Consciousness painting itself onto the canvas of itself. It is a continual unfolding of life’s arising as life. We are passengers, not drivers.
It’s normal to find others’ repugnant ideas off putting. But beneath that limited, localized perception, we can lean into and find the love that is at the core of everything that arises. The Christian Bible says: “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten son.” This is the nature of Consciousness “bodying forth.” If we find fault with that, we are missing the point of being here. We’re missing the heartbreaking beauty of our human life purpose, to see, feel, live, and speak our truth in the midst of uncertainty. To stand together in the recognition of life’s unending paradoxes: loss and gain, love and hate, birth and death, sickness and health. We are not powerless if we rest in the truth of nondualism: there is nothing that is not Consciousness/God/the Universe. “For everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven.” We are “under heaven,” here in this human realm seeking our divine nature, which lies in the realization of the Truth.
Thanksgiving Morning
Window shades lighten
as dawn arrives
gray light, chill.
The house is quiet,
still, each of us
in our cocoons.
Soon, the fire must be laid
and lit. Shades lifted
for the short day’s light.
My heart is soft
with long life,
with all it knows
about love and loss.
My father, mother,
strangers and friends,
war and famine, disease
and disaster. Yet comes day
with its quiet joy
stirring the blood
and rousing me
to prayer: may all beings
be free from suffering.
My riches are safety,
warmth, shelter, food,
health, and love. And knowing
they are not free. They
are not free.
subhaga crystal bacon 