Dec 20, 2021: THIS POST HAS BEEN UPDATED WITH VIDEO OF ROB LEWIS’S READING. (See below.) Join us on the 3rd Thursday of each month for Poems for Peace. January 20, 2022 BC poetry legend Sharon Thesen joins us.

The Zoom Meeting link on Jan 20 is https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81799264950
Meeting ID is 817 9926 4950

The time on Jan 20 is: – 11 a.m. Pacific time – 2 p.m. Eastern time – 7 p.m. UK time – 8 p.m. Central European time – 6 a.m. on December 17 in Sydney, Australia

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This is a video “teaser” for Rob Lewis’ upcoming SICA ZoomMuse Poetry reading on December 16

This event is part of a monthly series of ZoomMuse Poetry Reading of Poems for Peace, co-sponsored by SICA USA and SICA Canada.

The Zoom Meeting link on December 16 is https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81799264950
Meeting ID is 817 9926 4950
The time on December 16 is: – 11 a.m. Pacific time – 2 p.m. Eastern time – 7 p.m. UK time – 8 p.m. Central European time – 6 a.m. on December 17 in Sydney, Australia

ABOUT ROB LEWIS

Through poems, essays and activism, Rob Lewis works to bring the power of language to the defense of the more-than-human world. As owner of Earth Craft Painting, he also works to revive the use of local wild clays to paint our work and living spaces. He is author of the poem/essay collection The Silence of Vanishing Things, and has been published in Dark Mountain, Cascadia Weekly, Manzanita, The Atlanta Review, Southern Review and others. Here is the text of the poem that Rob reads in this video:

POST-READING

YouTube video of Rob Lewis’ SICA ZoomMuse Poems for Peace poetry reading held on December 16, 2021 is posted on YouTube and on SICA Facebook pages.

This event is part of a monthly series of ZoomMuse Poetry Reading of Poems for Peace, co-sponsored by SICA USA and SICA Canada.

Through poems, essays and activism, Rob Lewis works to bring the power of language to the defense of the more-than-human world. As owner of Earth Craft Painting, he also works to revive the use of local wild clays to paint our work and living spaces. He is author of the poem/essay collection The Silence of Vanishing Things, and has been published in Dark Mountain, Cascadia Weekly, Manzanita, The Atlanta Review, Southern Review and others.

Rob’s book – The Silence of Vanishing Things – is available from Village Books at https://www.villagebooks.com/book/9780692952412

An interview with Rob by SICA-USE Chair Paul Nelson is available at https://paulenelson.com/2018/04/04/rob-lewis-and-the-silence-of-vanishing-things/

Here is the text of the poems read by Rob at this reading:

A LITTLE FAITH
I have faith in the moon
that it will never turn its face
against me
or away for long.

I have faith in the unscheduled
itineraries of rain
and what moves
from word to word
as I try and transcribe
the stone’s sermon.

I trust the mountain ash
outside my trailer
to never try and convince me of anything
other than its generosity.

I trust the insight
of the heron that stares
time in the eyes
and has faith enough
not to know.

BAY IN WINTER
Level and sustained
the clear-mind water.

Dotted with loons and mergansers
pulling distinguished wakes

drawn in silver
by the metal sun.

I don’t need to know
what do to with my life

But I do need
to live its details

and to reciprocate
and be turned.

THE DEATH OF EFFICIENCY
1.
Yes, he’s had a quite a run,
And he thinks he’s just getting started.

Soon I won’t need hands! he cries.
Or even wires. Remember cable?
He chuckles, looking up
through cool blue physics
for somewhere mars,
icy, radioactive mars
like it were a lover
an ice cream Sunday
a final equation.

You’re dying, I say.
It’s natural. Things run their course.
You’ve run yours.

He turns toward me
eyes narrowing on streams of digits
I own you, he says,
clunky little craftsman
with your slow toad hands

Oh, I say.

I own more than you. I own your dreams.
The whole apparatus strives toward me now.

Hmmm. The sleeping ones
or the waking ones? I ask.
Dreams, that is.

You waste time! He hisses.

But there’s a difference.
One I receive. One you construct.
One arrives unbidden as sunlight on stone,
the other crawls out of an advertising studio.
One remains fresh even in memory
as if still speaking years later.
The other gets passed around
like a playing card, edges worn, smudged
with wants.
then cleaned up again,
painted a new color
by aforementioned advertising studio
which is the Ego. You know that don’t you.
Which do you own, I ask?

He looks over my head.
Apparently, he says, you don’t see
the armies behind you. They run towards me.

I look into his eyes, the floating white,
water-glazed globes. Apparently, you haven’t noticed
the shape of our home, and everything on it.
They will pass you
and then pass us both again.
Round Earth. Round life.
With exactly no place to race to.
And when the people realize
they are racing nowhere
while you take everything…?
By the way, what is the strange pleasure
you get, cheating life of time?

He returns his gaze to mars,
icy, radioactive mars.
See you in the breadline, he mutters.

Not if I see you first.

*
2.
Begging to be remembered
Efficiency sits on a curb
that’s slowly being overtaken by moss
and the star-shaped purple flowers
that grow in the moss. Watching the people
walking by, he grimaces
as they choose the slowest, most meandering
routes.
A father and son come along.
He looks up at the man.
You gonna raise the boy lazy
like everyone else around here?
The boy looks up at his father.
Father looks down on the old man.
For 200 lineages you divided us.
Separated us on your tracks:
our common growing years
and best daylight hours together,
fed to productivity.
Next to Life there is Time.
and for centuries you took it.
But my grandmother
was among the ones who figured it out.
found the language trails
through your spells.
and my father peace-stormed with the WaterLeague.
He swept his arm in a wide gesture of abundance
All this plump soil, flowing moisture, rising green
will make a good grave for you.
You will finally rest.
And we will finally live.

PEACE OF NATURE, NATURE OF PEACE

1.
Peace of nature
nature of peace
and at the center of each
the same silent
diamond.

At the center of the diamond?
Time, perhaps. Or maybe merely
the peace at the center
of all origination,
that which can’t be seen
only enacted,
the autumn park at dawn
enacting it,
the cloud dissolving behind
performing it,
the ritual
disintegration
out of which
each thing
and moment
blooms.
Somehow, we all know:
the invisible world
is at peace.

Meaning, attraction, language, beauty—
that which speaks
from the dry shell
held in the hand
to the sea brine eyes
floating in the skull.
Where outside meets inside.
The slow trading of places.

*
Peace of words on a page.
Peace of laying words on a page.
Peace of their meaning
enlarging though time,
and of the broom leaning in the corner
and the light brightening
then dimming through the curtain.

Peace of a heron
settling time with his gaze.
Peace of an eagle
banking circles against sky
looking down
through its death-spread wings.
Peaceful the field’s below.
Peaceful even the eyes of mice.

2.
All falls toward level
And that falling is peace.
Movement seeks rest.
Rest seeds movent.
Peace is the mountain
inside the major chord,
all the little creeks flowing down.
Brook trout holding against the current
with the grace and detachment
of geologic strata.
Peace is always the wish.
Where light shines
on the aluminum water bottle
peace is in the gleam.

*
In bay light
vertical trails down through
the window skinned in mist.
Bonds of water:
hands reaching and releasing.
for each drop.
The way is made by other drops.
Peace of falling
into those hands.

The cream-colored coffee mug rings ascent.
Over its vessel curve a drop
has slid and dried into a slender
snake of glaze, darker at its edges
lighter in the middle, like cellophane.
Somewhere in the fade
peace is sleeping.
Or roaring.

Maybe a ceramic mug
IS INTENSELY a ceramic mug
wholly devoted to its atoms,
a storm.

Of presence.

At peace.

*
A microscope sitting in a laboratory
is not at peace.
but is caught in transition
defiant even of its own metals.
Rows lined up on a shelf
in the high school biology lab.
Our mission: to ensure
that no young person ever
be part of it, merely satisfied
with the life that is.
Better they suspect
even the edges of peace.
Better they cut each thing open
just to be sure
they know their place.

We rob them
of their own mountains
and send them out.

Psychologists therefore nearly secure
as undertakers. No one to blame.
We are simply In it
upgrade stuck, trying to piece together
the severed threads, some thought
or inner fragment of mood remembered
from when the cloth was whole
And held us.

3.
What did you do?
What didn’t you do?
What jagged branch
sticks out of the sack
you drag behind you.

Can a poem give permission?
Can the wind?
Can a shell held in the hand?
Can birdsong coming in from indeterminate directions?
Can a salmon scaling a waterfall?
Can a mothering cedar?
A daughtering creek?
The hawk crowning a snag
seems to demand it.
The sharpened gaze, talons and beak
cut the tethers
and say
fiercely

Now.

In any case only shamans
can change the speed
and direction of time

And like a hawk
time hunts in peace
We move through its sights
neither forward or backward
but only deeper in
can we go. And deeper still

into the present.

4.
The runner is at peace.
The bluesman, high up the neck
String-bending tears out of a Stratocaster
Is At Peace.
The weaver, the potter, the piano tuner
the carpenter, the window washer, the tailor
anyone
with a simple, manual task
finds the pace that is peace
and there deepens the track
unless pulled into production
by the violence of efficiency.
The capitalist with his hook.
Come along now, were heading to the cutting edge
like it was a war front.
The economy is a war front. And everything is losing.

*
Peace is a very, very, old
Sprawl of roots,
and the feeling gained
Sitting upon them.
Look up into the branches
The pattern is there
Branching fractals
Pure utterance.

Photosynthesis, the drinking
by a leaf
of light. Peace on peace.
Uncountable enactments.
Growth, the flow
of sugars down the sap tunnels,
mineral laden water rising.
All directions expanding
becoming
a constellation
a city
at peace
growing it
giving it.
Inhaling and
exhaling it.

The holy round.
Home into home.

*
Horizon to horizon, the rain falls.
The ocean is above us now
and the waters of the body
listen.
Peace is the emptying cloud,
the fallen and falling water.
Later the fields
lensed in sky mirrors
indeterminate depths
shining.