Sometimes
there is only falling…
You
don’t quite stop. Fall so far and fast enough—Sometimes it feels like flying.
You wonder when the crash comes, when passion burns up again. What happens when
it doesn’t need stoking? Yet, all things in our incarnate world are subject to
time. Can the carnal provide a realm for understanding, alchemy of the self,
and transmutation through togetherness?
When
you’re falling, whether you’re a shooting star or photons streaking from sun to
moon to water, you’re present in the alchemy. Sometimes, when falling, you’re
with the right person; with someone who teaches you as you teach them. They don’t
supply any answers or make any excuses.
Yet,
you feel that thing beyond infatuation, that
alchemy that could change everything,
if only; but it is the edge, a
reflection of other we see, an alcove of safety we carve together as lovers
loving each other.
It is the risk. It is a trust.
It is the risk. It is a trust.
It
is both.
It
is both, which echo the call in the heart.
~
The
following poem is a villanelle, the first formal structure I found that comes
as easily to me as free verse. I was inspired to write in this form after
reading Sylvia Plath’s A Mad Girl’s Love
Song (1951), composed in the same structure, which has become a favorite
poem not by conscious choice but by resonance, by its call; to me, this is the
most important element of poetry.
Scholars
who favor the study of such forms note the villanelle for its often treatment
of obsessions in its ballad-like structure, having no fixed poetic form aside
from its repetition of certain lines, so very reminiscent of times when poetry
was passed down through oral tradition. The villanelle gives a whimsical
structure to the unnamed for me. It provides the trust, where the words play
with risk, and in this the falling finds its way.
A New Dance
of Moon and Sea
It
may be unwise to risk, but
like
the moon coerces the tides and stars shoot out to sea,
I
want to call you back to me.
Your
just-right-touch shivering the sea of my spine,
a dance of
tide and need and skies thick with clouds,
I want to
call you back to me.
It
may be unwise to risk, but
how meteors fall from the sky and burn
dangerously
igniting—I think that’s me
I think that’s
me, maybe, falling
falling past
you falling past me, falling
I want to
call you back to me.
It
may be unwise to risk, but
what
if we can catch one another
and
still be as the moon and as the sea?
If our dance
of wild moon cries,
and stormy
steps map a new cartography?
It may be
unwise to risk, but
I want to
call you back to me.
Tiffany
Chaney
is a N.C. based poet, a witchy woman that still swings on the swing set and
wishes on stars. Her poetry collection Between
Blue and Grey won the 2013 Mother Vine Festival Award for Best in Poetry.
She has been published in the Virginia Quarterly Review (InstaPoetry), Rebelle
Society, Thrush Poetry Journal, and through Moon Books, among others. Tiffany
believes in personal story weaving. Symbols, reading pattern and metaphor,
whimsy, story-telling, and good old empathy are her calling in life. She paints
naked people and people naked, naked trees and trees naked, and non-naked
things that are really naked. Tiffany seeks to inspire others to reclaim the
whimsy and creativity within, to hold ourselves accountable for authoring the
narratives of our lives. Get in touch with her via her website or Facebook.
~If you are interested in seeing your poetry appear in this blog, or submitting a poem by a woman that has inspired you, please click here for submission guidelines. I greatly look forward to hearing from you!~
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