Colette Palamar
email the author: cpalamar-@-yahoo.com

P&P Poem

Clay Art

Depts. of Applied Philosophy and Ceramic Art, Bowling Green State University

salt and sun-whipped breezes, thick, sticky spray, wet tiny rocks beneath my feet, within my hands. graceful curves of big broad birds, above me here in this once-nursery. my eyes are focused distantly outward, seaward, toward the gradation where fresh water meets salt.  toes: bare, cold toes, tentative touches. the water forms close concentric circles around where i touch it. as i enter, my feet are surrounded by a glove, a water glove, close, cold, there. little brown fish, barely visible, swarm as my foot touches the thin soft slip of the creek rock. they nibble at my skin, at my toes. violets: i like to eat wild violets, what a perfect purple meal, violets.

back in the depths of my mind i dream up monsters, birds with beaks that don't close, frogs with several sets of legs, with many heads, birds without feathers, with brains on the outside, fish with holes in their sides, sea mammals with cuts and gashes, salamanders with skin split along the back. 

monsters don't exist, mom said, but we have created them. modern technology creates monsters of nonhuman animals, monsters of humans cramped too tightly in the same square mile, violence, hatred, jealousy, crowding: monsters.

once, when i was a child, i collected butterflies. bright white cabbage butterflies, beautiful as they flitted through the summer sky, landing briefly. i wanted to hold them, to keep them, to keep their magnificence. and so i captured them, pressing their live bodies into books, then displayed inside clear plastic cases. i wanted their beauty; i wanted to hold them close; i destroyed what they were, once.

touching is the basis of the Earth 's sculpture: an intricate, balanced moving conglomeration. pieces piled up, pieces piled atop each other, growing, each piece touches another, and touches other touchers. each touches each even without touching
 

toucher, the wind never stops, it circles us, moving, touching me to an infinity of touchers. see ivy covers everything and even the grasses, small as they are they can reclaim a parking lot, a sidewalk, they demand that these places be relinquished as we refuse them. they move the sidewalks, they eat the bricks, tearing away small small pieces, pieces we barely notice, but pieces that are touchers still. the crumbling takes place too slowly to see.  see we are like ivy, the Earth is our wall. the crumbling takes place too slowly to see.

infinite, uncountable, untrackable connections always moving, touching, and from this, we are. 

infinite, uncountable, untrackable connections always moving, touching, and without this, we are

whimper: what is it to be alive? what is it to live in the world? the Earth, touchers, the Earth's sculpture, creating monsters, butterflies, too many monsters and nothing is possible at all. too many monsters and it all shatters but not even shatters, not so grandiose, so loud, so definitive rather everything whimpers. "this is the way the world ends, this is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper."

I had a little, pale, teal-colored, stuffed, bean bear: pooh-pooh. he comforted me. in angsted moments of fear and distress, I'd grab him and he was always there. he provided me with a hut of safety to dwell in. but once, his ear was stuck under the couch and I pulled and pulled and pulled with all of my little child might and his ear came off, torn clear from his head. and mom says I let a wail out like no other: and no wonder: my life-long shelter had been damaged, broken, assaulted, even though I was the one responsible. if only we could still wail when our dwellings are so shattered.

or maybe we do wail but no one hears, or no one knows how to hear, or we've learned not to. after all, with all the wailing going on, how would we discuss the weather?

hot summer days can turn into chilled summer nights with stars like patterned pin holes above us. the sleek softness of the satin strip slides by my cheeks as we slip deeper under a thick, yellow, scratchy, wool blanket in the middle of a tall, green cornfield.
 

there's a small, arced spot of flattened smooth round grass around a big open-limbed oak in the field behind my house. the grass there, underneath the tall old oak is different. its softer, smoother and flattened against the ground. I can braid it and twist it into shapes it will hold. leaves in fall blow off of it easily. the grass grows in a perfect arc, just inside of the shaded shadow of the old oak. the tree trunk is thick barked, wide and taller than any nearby trees. there is a large orange granite rock settled a bit into the dirt at the foot of the tree. I sometimes sit on this rock with the tall grasses of the field's edge moving in, criss-crossing my vision as the wind winds around me. the deep brown scent of dampened ditch dirt fades into the background after a while.

escaping the car, we walk quickly along heat-cracked blacktop toward the descent. finally we find it hidden in wild weeds and thicks of poison ivy. we descend the rocky, bouldered slope into the cool shaded stream bed far below. along the water's whispers, we walk toward and into a canyoned room.

sometimes tropical tribes will leave a bowl of white rice out each day, a spare bowl just for the ants. and by giving this small amount up for the ants, the ants stay out of their huts, out of their clothes, out of other foods. a small generosity in return for a peaceful co-existence: dwelling.

to dwell is more than to live and stay in a place, more than just being sedentary. more than just looking at the small details. to dwell is to be aware, a full awareness of connections, interconnections, the human place in a more than human world. but so many times, so much of the time, almost always we are entangled, lost in the human world, dwelling there and no where else and so really dwelling no where at all.

talking of a middle aged couple who are both potters and self-taught subsistence farmers, Wendell Berry says, "The table is spread with excellent food and beautifully served on beautiful dishes. Eating, you feel the cycle turn [historicity stretch], completing itself yet again. The cow eats, the chickens eat, the hogs eat, the people eat. The life of the place comes in as food and returns as fertility; comes in as energy and returns as care."

and we must seek to find an opening and a closing at once: an opening of our organic past to the present in a full way, an opening and disclosure of the successful; a retrieval of moments and thoughts and actions and ways of life, a re-guard of the past's relevance toward informing who we are now and who we think we will or want to be. and we seek another opening: of technology, of scientific knowledge, of the knowledge and benefits of the industrialized world. and we seek a closing: a closing of the horrors of the industrial past, of the genocide of millions of species, the obliteration of ecotones, of small hutches of habitat way out there in the wildness, the environmental holocaust, the ignorance of the other and the Other. and we seek another closing: a closing of the paths in our organic past that cannot and do not work today, a closing of blind romantic sensibilities seeking superfluous relics of a day gone by.

dwelling spans by offering outward, upward, downward, inward, forward, backward, heedful, circumspective attention to all those Others and others all around us.

dwelling spans by looking ahead and finding homes for animals, by leaving them what they really need to be who they are, by seeing where improvements can be made, by thinking seeing, talking, writing, creating ways our whole wide world in all its otherness can find a way to dwell.
 

dwelling is at long last a peace with ourselves and a peace with others and a peace with Others and a peace with the world. dwelling is at long last a peace within ourselves and a peace within others and a peace within Others and a peace within the world. dwelling is living in the house that care built.

imagine if we learned to dwell in the world.

baby birds, inside the smooth egg whiteness, poke outwards with a tiny tooth, a saw tooth, breaking open, breaking out, exiting and entering all in the same moment.

bird babies inside the smooth egg whiteness, crushed by chemicals and the weight of parent birds.

constructed busyness: busy with work, with school, busy with all that surrounds: we barely have time to notice what's ouside our constructed
 

sometimes oranges are fresh and bright on the outside but after you tear off their shin, the insides are sick, dry, dead, sometimes. more interiorly, inside my bedroom, I tightly close the door. the grey walls are calm, quiet, subtle, unmoved. I sit and stare, protected here from: the noise without, your voice on the telephone, the shouts and gunshots of TV, the riotiousness of notes strung into music. here I find quiet and solitude, here inside the interior of my house.

crocheted curtains, white, bright, block the sun. shining inwards, the sun is held at bay, stopped, momentized, set along a boundary and made to obey. but the exteriors are where the rain gets in, where the color gets in, where our sight gets in, where rumors get in, where cold words and heated emotions and traces of anger and hate and kindness and love sneak around the sunlit cracks like bespeckled rays through striped rafters of an old barn: rays run in streams in and in and it can all get in and it seems an erasure of boundaries.

windows like eyelids lifted expose while keeping outsides out. but they can open, the transparent glass lifted and the free air rushing in, surrounding, allowing the exterior to move interiorly.

interiors touch the depths of us and exteriors are our branches to the worlds. exteriors connect us, touch us to all the other touchers, interiors touch all the other touchers by touching the exteriors. tied together into inter-touch.
 

huts as houses or interiorized safe places, sacred places, secret places, removed from the exterior though always in relation and reaction to it. these inner huts, dwellings and dwelling-places are certain sites within which dwelling exists. if I listen intently as I walk along the path through the field, I can hear the music of the thick winter frost on the still-green grasses as my feet flatten the tiny bright crystals.

wild city

diamond-dusted December mornings: the sun makes tiny rainbows of the frost; tiny rainbows that move as I move, that catch my eye, that shimmer as the sun slides toward day.

dwelling I paying attention to the small details

dwelling is knowing we are part of this big round world

dwelling is accepting our place in that world without overstepping the boundaries

dwelling is a sensuous approach to the world around us

dwelling pays attention to the aesthetics of it all.

I step into December's frigidity: my cheeks sting with cold, my lungs chill with icy air. I breathe again deeply, to feel the wind sting me, to feel the air around me, to bring the frosted air within me. I pause: the air pushes cold force against my bared skin.

moonlit diamonds gleam, strobe, sparkle, flash, glisten on long, strong, brown strands of crushed glass grass.

interiority stretches, like the time of temporality. through place to place, through shades of dwelling and non-dwelling, though layers of place and space. each interior gives way to an exterior interiorized, inner me to you to us to family to friends, to house, yard, town, city, state, region, country, earth, space. the outward is inward through close inspection. the interiority stretches, does not rest in moments, but spans moments, spans space and spans time into dwelling.
 

the windows are eyelids to the exterior. I can see the world without, all out there on the street: a dog passes by, and moments move as I reflect on what they deliver to me, to myself inside, even as I see them outside, exteriorized, alone distant, parallel or divergent. windows are an opening where the light gets in, where externalities internalize themselves.

wild city2

wind and air and thought and water travel through these breaks to remind us that we are here, that we are not simply anonymous, autonomous, interiors moving more or less mindfully.

doors are gateways from the interior to the exterior. open they offer us out and offer the out in. closed they keep us and keep out.

doors: thick oak with three tiny windows, hollow pine closed all the way down, painted metal that rattles in the wind, glass doors, like body sized windows welcoming in the outside without allowing an interior presence. doors, fitted and framed within our foundations, open and close, interiorize and exteriorize, participate in the interiority of coming, learning, finding, dwelling.

in my yard, underneath giant silver maples whose leaves shimmer in summer moonlight, the tall, weathered, wooden fence surrounds, protects, isolates, interiorizes, and I feel kept, close, safe.

to dwell is more than to live and stay in a place, more than just being sedentary, more than just looking at the small details. to dwell is to be aware, a full awareness of connections, interconnections, the human place in a more than human world. but so many times, so much of the time, almost always we are entangled, lost in the human world, dwelling there and no where else and so really dwelling nowhere at all.

this outward and inward attention to what's seen and what's lost, to what's felt and what's not, an inward also outward attention to the specificity of interior is made clear in place.

in place dwelling comes.

Colette R. Palamar

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