FAMILIARITY
Ode #17 - Transcribed Poetic Dictation, Familiar's Ode
[This ode was very patient with me. She started knocking this past Friday early afternoon while sitting with a loved one. I told her she had to wait — which worked. I thought, perhaps later that night I would be available. But not. Then, Saturday surely. No again. Not until just a bit ago did I slow down enough to properly sit and receive her words. Familiarity as an experience has been particularly and peculiarly bright these few days, illumined in the caverns of consciousness (fungus growing downwards from the ceiling). I attended earlier today a talk by a dear friend on Dante and was taken into the waltz. This sort of cosmic waltz, moving together in pivots, around and back, then on. To the next set of threes, across the dancefloor. Was this a vision? Sometimes it is a little tough for me to parse out. There was enough separation between the image and the ode that I won’t properly group them together as confounded, except perhaps as constellatory neighbors. Viewing and supporting one another in concertia. And so I invite you to sit with the ~familiar~. The experience of familiarness. The transcendent dimensions and depths, and expanses of it. To where does it point?
The final two lines I wrestled with, changed many times. Something about them felt or sounded off to me. I also can never decide if I agree with the meaning of lines like these (however well-echoed they may be from/in places like the Bhagavad-Gita), and so tried to massage them into a framing I find more personally fashionable right now. But after a good tussle, the message was clear — go back to the beginning. Just because one is allowed a few edits every now and then doesn’t make the story a linear progression of permission. This too may be more a waltz than a marathon~ ] Received 11/9/2025 | 4:37-4:49pm
Companion Missive #17 - WELLCOME TO ~WARP SPEED~ (9/9/2023)
Listen to the Recitation:
FAMILIARITY
Is preclarity, paucity
Of milieu, the middle of between
Latent mingling in a pivot waltz
Step two three, the sparkling hint
A half memory unveiled in the dormer
Attics are basements of the mind
Where sleeps the face of the one we knew
In every life, lived and unlived
Yet and before — we look through the branches
Towards a mounting sun, as if it will carry us
From one shadowed patch to the next, but
Listen we to the midnight grackle:
Our road is overrun! Stampede of shallow
Evaporati descensus; we wake
Only to walk in the valley of dreams,
Wondering a myth into belonging
Do not stop; move in spirals to each new edge
For the edge becomes the center
And each center, a new edge —
What is it about you? Have we met?
The mettle of you is a memory to me
I cannot reach — but I find
In every interruption a certainty
Here too, the face shines forth:
I smile, and laugh. The culmination turns
To threshold, bearing more trials
I follow the trail to certain doom, giddy
For that familiar tinge on the edge of feeling
Before falling into the reflection,
Before the adoration became ill
Possessive of every good virtue
Themselves a bell-ringing, I endorse
The dutiful dilution, attaching contradiction
To paradox, the seat on which truth sits
Down they tip, over into before: oblivion
A joy for the knowers, who otherwise suffer
Extremely, in each day live — to reach
New heights, new shallows, new depths
Of what? We have felt untold times
What each time is a marvel to be held in
Holding onto that precious fleet of fawn
Chasing, we never catch, are led
To a place of recognition, even more
Familiar to me, to you, to us in this hour
Of four-footed terror, an unexpected amazing
Relishes in our embrace, too soon released
The pain too is precious, the anguish
Of someone we love more than anything
Before we even meet them,
For we have already met them —
And when all is done, we shall not be separate
From that in which we all reside
But which resides not fully in us.
