by: Norman Fischer
Norman Fischer’s poetry is like a dream about how one’s own mind is dreaming. It urges us to see and explore the language we use to tell and retell our experience of world and self…
O
only in dreams or especially
in dreams do I meet friends
who want to tell me
what they can’t in life in words
voiced in mouth with tongue
making intermediate vocalizations
for in dreams ears or eyes speak
in smells & colors shapes
sensations touches slight
nerve quiverings im
possible (other than in dreams in
which such things have clear meanings)
to define for definition is word formulation
conceived otherwise than in dreams
in which what happens simply
does with a feeling of meaning though there’s
no meaning anyone (not in a dream)
could sensibly tell so there’s a feeling of full
ness & completion that can’t be
told in those indefinite words
I just used to erase it I
could not help but do so for
in referring to them (they
are place holders for the
immediate feelings which
I’m writing about here) during
which (the writing of which) there’s al
ways (there has been — as in writing
in midst of a dream) a fixation
with words’ beginnings words’ initial
letters
Solitude
(for Mei Mei Berssenbrugge)
Plants are dreaming of me there’s distance
in their dream at whose vanishing point my
dream meets theirs which effects a
melding in consciousness so that my thinking
of myself is a plant’s thinking of a plant
In mythical realities I can hear them
referring to things I’ve written in poems
but they are neither impressed nor unimpressed
Downstairs in someone’s room I
hear a cricket’s song outside
distant thunder As I said, our lives are myths so
ordinary things like meals or per
ceptions are symbolic
People can’t communicate & that’s
painful yet people are closer to
one another instinctually, genetically,
molecules of one flesh merging,
mixing though pseudoidentities, lost, wander,
bodies tuned to identical frequencies
Because they are equally beautiful
people & plants merge usually in
meals & death & become each
other, instinctually feeling support
& love though there’s only dreaming no thinking
so there’s no illness, that’s
conceptual & based on a distorted
projection into the space between molecules
while in fact every living thing constantly
thrives in its own way
Still I stayed in bed today weakly
at the same time I was transporting
myself into those plant-stems &
those purple buds being visited by
earnest bees Was I asleep or awake then?
Were the purple buds — now flowers
fully opened — aware it was me dream
ing them or was my dream more real
than Mei Mei expected or deigned to
describe in her text that’s this I can
hear the multiple buzz now, earnest
Again today I’m not feeling well
a feeling that’s good in the way it’s
not the feeling I’m used to that could meet
an expectation of a certain kind of
activity I might wish to be doing —
I’m thinking — but I can’t
That’s my memory jogging itself into action
deciding what I think I might want
(wanting implying time passing from
one state in me — as if I were — to the next)
No experience is one experience first
it’s unregistered, next, it’s a (false)
memory, then I’m making a puzzle
out of it assign it a meaning
I’m assimilating you the various
digesting consequences & re-shaping
them though there’s really no agent
As with each different leaf
on that aspen tree, there’s repeating without
repeating, a finite number
of possible shapes reiterated, fractals, nothing
the same — not even the same
as itself (identity having come much
later, like cuisine) I keep thinking through something
since I can never think through nothing
(though I can think of that word) —
anything is something
a thing so thick and adamant facing
me expressive yet dumb like earth
begging the question — so I become
that, thought’s only fooling
me in the meantime to be thinking
me, though I think I’m thinking it
All this leaking out of me or
into me from the day’s clear or
diffuse clouds from the hills gravel
on the road large black beetle the
bees downy woodpecker the sound now
of machinery There’s a subtle vibration within
(or as) silence that I feel as
quiver in the hairs in my nostrils
or small downy hairs on back
of neck Alone in it there’s a
fuller sense of being as if it were actually
something or anything combined with
nothing — meaning silence or
space — as I was saying that I
remember participating in or
as little white pieces of torn paper
fluttering down indoors or snow
Self colors, covers that — I
don’t have to be naive
this speaking there’s nothing
to explain when I’m here you must be too
I noticed early on there was a
difference in the room if someone
were present or not that they’d
draw me into an understandable
world as a form of sharing to
ease the anxiety that possibly
there isn’t anything filling in
the immense hope with rainwater
or tone of voice But there’s no solitude otherwise
no social world nothing
to speak about, people always
controversial with their opinions &
needs they’re moved exactly as
water flowing onward moves when re
directed by rocks or banks or
slowed by silt So there’s only
solitude Yellow yarrow flowers cluster
in a bunch beyond them flagstone &
a cherry tree Little leaf movements twitch
in slight breeze making a pattern
speaking a language I don’t know
(a natural Morse code of short &
longer movements) I stop to ponder
these movements my pre-linguistic thought
dances in tempo then body moves also
as these words my pen Time isn’t
moving while I gingerly absorb these
flavors my memory a story that
never occurred except as I configure
it my belief makes it so
Connection — nothing in itself—
appears as a visual image I can’t
identify any object but feel met &
welcomed by space
Mirrors shine,
glitter, reflect image
at a point in time So
much now past — more
than is future or present or
past future present always
one quantity one tiny breach
or gap into which suddenly
a wave breaks drenches
recedes leaving again a gap
for wave Where there’s feeling suddenly
I see space opening I’m tired now
so weary I think I hardly exist
except as low hum of sub
vocal thought whispering
me into almostbeing this tiny
point of feeling between us illuminating
me — or you —
Norman Fischer’s latest collections are “Conflict” (Chax, 2012), “The Strugglers” (Singing Horse, 2013), and “Escape This Crazy Life of Tears: Japan 2010” (Tinfish, 2014). He is a Zen priest, founder of the Everyday Zen Foundation, who lives in Muir Beach, CA.
