When you read the Diamond Sutra, you will read these characters:
Depending upon nothing, you must find your own mind.
--Diamond Sutra
So last evening I was looking around for a story to do for today and I ran across this article about Trace Peterson, who will teach a class at Hunter College this fall on the poetry of transgender people.
Literature departments and studies of literature are very comfortable approaching transgender subject matter as theory, or as types of metaphor. But there’s very little study of literature by transgender people.
--Peterson
Peterson is editor and publisher of the journal
EOAGH and coeditor of
Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics
And I reminded myself that I have not written a poem in ages. I didn't start writing them until I began to transition...or at least to explore transition. And now I have written over 200. But its been a few years since I visited that art..
That lead to me having a serious mind dialogue about the subject of Legacy...and mostly what I have failed to do to create one. Once upon a time I gave some serious thought to parsing the transgender narrative...and what I could do to explain who we are and how we got to this situation...and what I could do to help construct a transgender mythos...and even if that might be deemed appropriate.
Here's Peterson's poem After Before and After:
I’ve been freed from
inside the Fall of Rome,
my contract disrupted.
Civilization will
not descend without
my bet against it rising,
a weather balloon
that hangs against a vast
usurped sky. A carrier
pigeon, to be,
carries me. And from here
I can find the edge
of the cunning, supposedly
clear window that
divides us from the world
of Michael Kors, that
divides a kiss from
its aftertaste.
A coda is a beginning.
After before and
after, humane enclosures
air whips through
with a taste for blood
oranges and secret
unpoliced
temporal lace
have been spread out
imagining possible
goddesses in
bed. What’s free
about a woman’s stubble,
what’s enhanced
delivering an urgent note
across a field of blue.
Why are we here?
Because we're here
Roll the bones
Why does it happen?
Because it happens
Roll the bones
So I guess I need to do some deep diving once again...down past that clump of consciousness I call a self...looking for some fresh nuggets to grind and shine and assemble into something that is meaningful.
It's action...reaction
Random interaction
So who's afraid
Of a little abstraction?