death & the maiden | as the river swells

death & the maiden it was not you, though you were near, / [...] / it was not earth, it was not heaven / it was myself that sang in me. sara teasdale — on the sussex downs

my dearest reader, January is a month of deep longings. all month I hunger for something I can hardly name: I bleed and I hunger and my God sits lopsided on my tongue. is this metamorphosis? I do not know anymore. perhaps it is that I am twenty and utterly, inconsolably alone — perhaps it is that I am missing something pillaged from me long, long ago: my child's heart, the brief time in which I did not need nor know.

INDEX one................for january's faces two........first quarter : tuesday 1–7 three....second quarter : tuesday 8–15 four...third quarter : wednesday 16–23 five.....last quarter : thursday 24-31 six.........a letter to mihai eminescu seven.................shelf selections eight.....odds & ends & ill-fit things

for january's faces

mechayeh, so weary am I with the weight of all these forests that I've buried — each a glass-eyed ghost, the pale visage of some forgotten “I” whose bones clothed my naked soul in an abandoned life; o, mechayeh. so heavy am I grown under the corpses of these chimerae, each bearing my blood upon its' brow, a grotesque scrawling, my baptismal name; mechayeh, nothing grows in your land, nothing blooms beneath your old sun. here, it is just me and all the people that I've been, rotting away their diamond days under a pail of snow.

first quarter one : the new year finds me where the old one left me — in lotus under the open window, breathing in the night. I am ravished by a strange sort of melancholy: everything here is fireworks, gunpowder raining down in pearls of technicolor, all red and violet and gold. the noise lends itself well to contemplation, as does the rain which follows; a perilous thing. all my thoughts come in monochrome. † two : pacing, today. it is only the second, and already I feel as though we have put the skin of this year on backwards. perhaps it is because the leaf turned over on a Tuesday; perhaps it is simply my general state of stupor — either way, I am dazed, and disoriented, and my limbs make very little sense to me. I am barreling toward a new restlessness, mind whirring faster than the body may process. † three : I sink back into a healthy old habit: voracious, unrestricted reading. my original plan for the first week of January was to take a sabbath — slink somewhere quiet, disappear alongside an unorthodox amount of tomes. that flew out of the window the moment the clock struck twelve, of course; yet all the same, relegating my body to white noise status to soak instead somebody else’s melancholy might just be the cure I am in need of. I turn to Sara Teasdale and the great Russian masters — Pushkin et al. † four : somewhat more clear-headed, today. after editing the compiled material, I make the decision to cut the collection anthologizing my daily poems from last year, on account of the quality being inconsistent. they are not irredeemable, per se, but the first four months are definitely substandard. † five : I flicker, a lighthouse sending out undecipherable messages. something about me is fundamentally and irreparably broken — a fuse is sundered, somewhere, melted in on itself. time grows like a corpse under my fingernails, like moss on a crushed church wall. I wait for myself to come home. † six : my mother surprises me with a gift; a bath kit she received from a patient. she herself cannot use it, as she cannot bathe in hot water, and I am more than happy to relieve her of it. I am something of an addict where grooming and “self-care” items are concerned, and these bath salt pockets are delightful. † seven : I lock myself in my tower, today. I am trying to come up with a timetable, sort myself out by sorting out my work — I am unsuccessful. my mind is running a marathon on broken legs.

second quarter eight : “and all thy joys shall lie ashen on thy tongue” — I cannot quite remember where I picked up the phrase, but o! such aching a descriptor. today I sink; perhaps tomorrow will be kinder to me. † nine : my erratic state of mind is owed at least in part to the fact that I feel like a caged animal. this is a burnout symptom; I have never been the best at assessing damage where such hurts were concerned, and thus I have not been been processing fully the mental marathon I ran throughout the past year. I do so today, and the endeavor crystallizes itself as a micro-zine — the aptly titled from the ashes. † ten : back to the drawing board, today; through some grace of the great Other, I manage to come up with a (fairly solid) timetable for my projects. all that is left, then, is to actually work on them. woe! † eleven : I must make note of a most peculiar phenomenon: for all my mental exhaustion and grief, my poetry has not given an inch — quite the contrary. I seem to have locked myself in a graph of inverse proportionality: the more I drown, the better I write. I cannot tell if I have gotten better at separating my self as an artist from my self as a person, or if I have simply “gotten a grip” on my depression, yet alas; wherever the truth lies, I cannot complain. this is a wonderful development. † twelve : today, I am lost to the world, overtaken by a death-sleep of the deepest kind. it is immensely restorative; when late in the night I rise, an old horror at last abandoning its’ tomb to seek out feed, I feel as though my humanity is entirely tangential. perhaps a hermit’s ways would suit me better than quotidian life — shall I take to the forest, I wonder? shall I make a maenad of myself? woe, o, woe. † thirteen : I begin working on Occultations, a chapbook comprised entirely of erasures — with a twist. it is harder work than anticipated, considering previous stylistic forays, but I manage. † fourteen : a slow day; most of my time is spent outdoors, restocking our supplies. we have been having a rather dire grocery crisis as of late, chiefly on account of lacking the physical time required to shop. † fifteen : an inexplicable mood overtakes me — I sink anew, this time contemplative.

third quarter sixteen : among my many “plagues” is that of metaphor; here a bird, here a wolf, here a maiden. I am too many things, creatively speaking, and at times it becomes so very tiring to think of one’s self in abstractions. alas — poetry is not itself without signets, and I would sooner be too much than too little. † seventeen : today, I am melancholy. it is unusual for me to be seized by apprehension at the thought of my own, distant mortality, yet nonetheless I seem to spiral into a shape of fear most unseemly. I will be better tomorrow — for now I shy, however, shy from even the figure of my dearmost darkness. † eighteen : in the small hours, I take on the monumental task of piecing together Occultations.; of all my books, this was the hardest to bring into existence. its’ labour pains have taught me quite a lot. † nineteen : final revisions, today — Aya and Quinn, thank you ever so much for lending the manuscript your keen eye. by the time the day is through, I am not only content, but outright happy with the result. † twenty : I fall in love with winter all over again, this dead season so full of strange fruit. climate change has transfigured it into a misshapen chimera: rain chases snow, the weather permanently affixed to a precarious tether. I listen to the wind as it whispers; I allow myself to be filled with longings abmortal. † twenty-one : a little down on inspiration, today, and I suppose more than a little down on my luck. no matter — I shall dig myself out of this rut even if I have to do it by the skin of my mouth. † twenty-two : I will detail this another time, but for now, here is a condensed observation: to create is to dig. every now and again you are faced with a snag — your shovel hits something hard, a rock that will not let itself be crumbled. so you pause; you take a smoke break, you regroup. and then you start digging again, pulling that rock out with your bare hands if that is what it takes to keep going. when I cannot write, I read instead — no real ritual to it, no rule governing the selection. tonight it is occult treatises. † twenty-three : another slow day; my mood worsens with the environment, and so I set out to do some deep-cleaning. the fatigue which follows is profoundly cathartic.

last quarter twenty-four : of late, I have been trying to make a habit out of romanticizing myself — sideway glances at my reflection as I walk past, unlearning shame when I bury myself in the comfort of my own scent. it is a slow process; yet still. brick by brick, I am building a temple consecrated to genuine love of self. † twenty-five : in a strange way, I feel as though I owe this love at least in part to my preexistent affection for Death, both as a symbol and as a figure, a person I have constructed wholly in my mind. in writing from his Maiden’s perspective, I have made myself feel loved by him — and it has given me such courage. † twenty-six : the wee hours find me out and about; after years of sleeping on a borrowed pillow, I at last purchase two of my own. I decide to further spoil myself with a jewelry box. † twenty-seven : my trail of thought grows fragmentary. I am thinking about rot and about the rebirth that rises from therein — but then again, when am I not? ah; already I feel I have fallen heavy with fruit. † twenty-eight : I slow down, today. hit some sort of dead zone. the fear that I’ve run out of verses returns. † twenty-nine : my fears prove to have been unfounded; rootful January finds it in him to be soft to me. thus, I steer my writing toward familiar tides — God. there is such a sense of wonder whenever I pen a stanza calling upon one of his many names; deeper still, a kind of all-consuming ardor. I like to think this the truest kind of worship. it certainly is the only one I know how to do. † thirty : rain, unending rain. seiged by such deluge, the outside world becomes a dream: even concrete seems to me diaphanous under the ceaseless rippling, painted fey with flickers of green streetlight. for my part, I surrender gladly to the weather; it is no secret that I adore rain, aseasonal though it may be. I spend most of my day thumbing through a database of postage stamps, saving interesting finds. more notably, in the evening I release my fifth proper chapbook: Occultations now walks the waking world. † thirty-one : I conclude this month with gentle hands — in my dark room, as always, awaiting a dawning or a dusking or, perhaps, the thing that fills their intertwining. may February be kind to us, dear Reader.

sweetrobin———

There is a melancholy to you that aches. I wonder if you knew, writing your first verses, how large your shadow would one day loom. It covers all; no poet escapes it. Even I, had I devoted myself chiefly to our mother tongue, would not be able to slither past the inevitable comparison of our Romantic dispositions.

You polarize me, Mikh. Not through your poetry — which, admittedly, does at times have its’ charms — so much as through your personhood.

No son of Dochia is more contested, at once so hated and adored. Your defendants form a veritable gendarmerie; you have been put on a pedestal that sees you as beyond criticism, not just as an artist, but as a person. I wish not to judge, considering the river bridging your then to my now — but I have lived through the aftermath of what you died much too soon to witness.

I am intimate with the damage a too-powerful nationalistic spirit may lead to — the carving of a blood crest into the deep of the land. Oh, Mikh. I wish I could meet you, pull you from your grave, show you what history has done to us.

Perhaps, then, any reservations I have about you would be quieted.

Perhaps I could embrace your verses fully; alas. Time forgives no one.

Least of all us, doomed to love it so fully.

from under the linden, L. Schreiber

shelf selections

We walked in the dew, in the drowsy starlight To the sleepless, sleepy sound Of insects singing in the low sea-meadows For miles and miles around; Sara Teasdale, September Night The above fragment is presented as it was first printed in the 1926 Dark of The Moon collection; there is a certain melancholy to Sara that I find hard to describe and which has endeared her to me, as well as each of the poems contained within this volume.

Not to live in thy arms, o beloved — I do not ask that of fate; […]

Only to die in thy arms, beloved — Thy kiss to drink my last breath; Anne Reeve Aldrich, Refuge Collected in Songs about life, love and death, the above is merely one jewel in a chest overfull with pulses of iridescence. I myself adore rich language — this is no secret — yet between these two formidable women I find I am halfway a convert of simplicity.

FEAR, TOO, IS AN ANCHOR, said Death. ALL THOSE SENSES, WIDE OPEN TO EVERY FRAGMENT OF THE WORLD. THAT BEATING HEART. THAT RUSH OF BLOOD. CAN YOU NOT FEEL IT, DRAGGING YOU BACK? Terry Pratchett, Hogswatch The Discworld has left a deep impression on me in my formative period; every now and again I return to it, usually gravitating toward the books in which Death is a central character. The season being what it is, Hogswatch seemed an appropriate (re)reading.

“[…] Even if it means oblivion, friends, I’ll welcome it because […] we'll be alive again in a thousand blades of grass, and a million leaves; we'll be falling in the raindrops and blowing in the fresh breeze; we'll be glittering in the dew under the stars and the moon […].”

Phillip Pullman, The Amber Spyglass The final installment of the His Dark Materials trilogy, The Amber Spyglass is the conclusion to a fantastic journey. You may by now have noticed the pattern to my choices in literature — I am fond of things that vivisect what makes us human, of things that encourage belief just as well as they encourage rebellion.

We buried the forest. We sawed the trees into meter-and-a-half pieces and packed them in cellophane and threw them into graves. I couldn't sleep at night. I'd close my eyes and see something black moving, turning over — as if it were alive — [...]

Svetlana Alexievich, Voices from Chernobyl A nonfiction rec: the above is an excerpt from the recount of Arkady Filin, one of the liquidators tasked with cleaning up the Dead Zone around reactor four in the months which followed the April 1986 catastrophe. Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Holocaust etches a composite portrait of the incident through the eyes of those who not only lived through it, but must continue to.

Traditionally, a tree was planted at the time a child was born, and the child’s soul was considered to be intimately linked to that tree. A person might die if his tree were cut down or, likewise, the tree might shrivel up and die when the individual died.

Gary R. Varner, The Mythic Forest Another nonfiction rec: Gary compiles within The Mythic Forest, The Green Man and The Spirit of Nature a wonderful array of the folk lore world civilizations have woven around their groves. It may not contain quite everything there is to know about sylvan mythos, but it most certainly makes for a wonderful introduction.

odds & ends

as January has been all about roots and a return to their watchful aegis, this section is dedicated to an old tradition. onions are a very integral part of Romanian (and Slavonic) cuisine; it is then hardly surprising to find them used as charms in all sorts of folk magic. on every New Years’ night in my grandmother’s home, we would halve one and leave twelve layers out on the windowsill — one for each month of the coming year. then, in the morning, we would check to see how much water had accrued in each. an old way to predict weather...does it still work, I wonder?

Christina Aguilera was born for jazz; Back to Basics fuses her love of it with modern urban elements. as much as I love every song, I am partial to Makes Me Wanna Pray.

a closing fragment

fingers pressed to my eyelids and I say,

mechayeh, you never told me absolution would cut as bone-deep as this does — God is silent. the moors bleed into us, solemn and dark.