Good morning, Beautiful Readers! Today’s blog and poem come to us from the incredibly talented Bethany Beeler. https://www.bethanybeeler.com/. Please enjoy an in-depth look at why poetry offers us intense and true experience, in an angel’s breath of time and, as Beeler so eloquently says, “poems are your and my experience of a unique and intimate moment that can’t be replicated“
I would love to see some discussion on this blog so shoot me your comments and questions. Also, look forward to enjoying some of Bethany’s poetry in The Beautiful Stuff’s new anthology “Wilderness of Soul“, out next Fall.
Here’s a little more about Bethany and where you can find her work:
Author of North Street Book Prize Finalist, How to NOT Know You’re Trans., and artist, Bethany A. Beeler was born and raised in the Pittsburgh, PA area. After college, she settled in Texas for the next 37 years with her wife Pamalyn, raising three children, and mayoring the city of Krum, TX. She’s been a professor, teacher, and tech writer. Her work has been published in The Twinbill.
Links
Website – https://www.bethanybeeler.com/
Amazon Author Page – http://amazon.com/author/bethanybeeler
Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/BeautifulBuddhaBethanyBeeler/
Medium – https://medium.com/@beautifulbuddha
Twitter – https://twitter.com/bethany_beeler
Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/beautiful_buddha_bethany_b/
Goodreads – https://www.goodreads.com/
Another Kiss
Goddess fingernail moon over pines,
Crepe myrtle early
Bloom. Huntress
Belt, chaste and fair, Hekate
Gift and swoon. Thrush song’s
Dark, creeping
Cold
Grips my soul. Walk apace,
Venture, snap,
Brittle face, I
Take her lavender
Kiss, lips trembling. I
Sing silent, sibilant, unsated heart, hand in
Nest, breast aflame, this
(Nipple spark)
Touch too wet,
Soft. I
Hush, her hand awash in
Me, greet, guide, hold, caress, I
Burst, dripping
Star and comet, quasar and
Dust, fecund harvest,
Birdsong lush in night of
Morn and noon. She takes
Me home too soon to sleep in
Parted lips, hastening another
Kiss.
In The Alphabet Versus the Goddess , Leonard Shlain says that “written words and images are
entirely different ‘creatures.’ Each calls forth a complementary but opposing perceptual
strategy.” He’s wrong in two ways—words and images are not merely complementary but are
abstractions of a deeper reality, which, of course, also means they aren’t in opposition at all.
That deeper reality is experience, which is neither an abstraction nor a material thing but an
event that is life itself. Nowhere do we better see the wholeness of which image and word are but
facets than in poetry. Poems are liminal moments of experience. If novels can be likened to
movies and short stories to snapshots, poems are not even the camera flicking on; they’re the
threshold between “on” and “off,” an event that can’t be filmed or recorded but experienced only.
We don’t observe poems. We live them.
In poetry, words cease to be signifiers but image things themselves, and images cease to be
“like” anything but word experience itself. When I write a poem, I’m both aware of and
oblivious to being watched. The absorber of a poem is eavesdrops on the speaker’s
liminal/threshold experience. I am not the speaker of my poems, but we couldn’t eavesdrop on
that speaker without me as the poet and you the voyeur. I hope you feel the same about poems
you write and ones you take in. Whether composed or received, poems are your and my
experience of a unique and intimate moment that can’t be replicated. The quality of your and my
experience and the event you and I consummate is more unique than you and I are individually.
Here, in this moment, at this doorway, we meet in a way we’ll never meet again, even upon
repeat couplings. Ours forever, it can’t be taken away.
So what is “ours” about “Another Kiss”? I love words sounding to me without my thinking about
them. I want their thud, slither, or hiss to knell me and you without their having to “mean
something.” Simply put, I try to make words “image” experience for you and me.
That being said, consciously or not, I don’t choose just any words to thud, slither, or hiss us.
Those chosen words image a river of cultural and personal significance for you and me. In a
poem, we step into a river that was there before us, caresses us right now, and will tug us after.
But you and I change its course. For the better. In a way no one alone, nor any other pairing of
persons can recreate.
But I want us to recreate, too. And “Another Kiss” is as sensual a poem as they come. I
swallowed this night, wooed by plants, scents, breezes, stars. I invite you to seduce the event, as
the event. For you and I are the event. Enjoy.
Sarah Reichert Author 