I came into the moment from the field.
I wanted to think about unknowing, and shame, and the stutter, and OCD, and oracles, and fountains, and the unknowing ever opening its arms.
I came to the hammered dulcimer and picked the dulcimer up and placed the dulcimer in my lap so the vibrations could vibrate my body.
I played the dulcimer and wrote a translation of what I played:
Not yet stuck not stuck anymore in the warm rising to the arc
All morning waiting for a breath of window
All mistakes held in arms with breaths between like strings
passing below
an arch
A gallop swift in the ear
The ankle asks questions. A voice goes into a wind and hides there.
Wears shame as a garment.
Ask where the philosophy is riding to.
Whose hair remembered? Whose tummy held?
Fingers weave years into the early spring garment
Laddering spiralwise from and to the body
Gallop is another garment
I find safety in the meter that changes without my noticing
A measurement of pain
I speak with a stutter. This stutter is made of strips of birch. Two bridges of maple.
So often I want to swim into the music and think there, shielded by feathers of sound and dripping rhythms.
Who do I meet when I swim back upriver? The stutter spreads wings through years of calling.
*I swam back into the music, and translated more:
Hold fast to the falling sheaves, each a year suffused with distance
Trip all the way down, gathering rope along the road
Fullest rising of three tilted shadows
a literature of grass and all the time to read
a horse may speak to the snow of new things
all the compositions of the stutter spread out beyond knowledge
and, gathering rope along the road, the rose of the stutter twines the fence of prose
Nowadays, so often what I’m trying to see seems to lie between the strings of the dulcimer and the words that gather in my mind. I’ve been practicing, when I want to think about something, going to the dulcimer and playing.
*The dulcimer is an oracle. Twenty-three courses of water running through the dulcimer like years through the body of the young yellow-crowned night heron.
In Ursula Le Guin’s Always Coming Home, she describes a drum that can be used to accompany thought.
The stutter is a fountain of crisscrossing, stained, perfumed, hollow arcs of travel and tuned patience.