Coda V:83 Woven of Water and Logic and Hunger, with No Strand of Love in Them

Coda V:83 Hands, Woven of Water and Logic and Hunger, with No Strand of Love in Them, ink and graphite, 2016

That whole semi-conscious in the hospital thing in the spring threw me off my drawing routine and I never got back to it, after ~540 contiguous days of drawing. But these words have been echoing in my head all week, and for better or worse this emerged... I don't know what's up with the graphite scribbles over the ink, that is so not me...

These poems, these poems, 

these poems, she said, are poems 

with no love in them. These are the poems of a man   

who would leave his wife and child because   

they made noise in his study. These are the poems   

of a man who would murder his mother to claim   

the inheritance. These are the poems of a man   

like Plato, she said, meaning something I did not   

comprehend but which nevertheless 

offended me. These are the poems of a man 

who would rather sleep with himself than with women,   

she said. These are the poems of a man 

with eyes like a drawknife, with hands like a pickpocket’s   

hands, woven of water and logic 

and hunger, with no strand of love in them. These   

poems are as heartless as birdsong, as unmeant   

as elm leaves, which if they love love only   

the wide blue sky and the air and the idea 

of elm leaves. Self-love is an ending, she said,   

and not a beginning. Love means love 

of the thing sung, not of the song or the singing.   

These poems, she said.... 

                                       You are, he said, 

beautiful. 

                That is not love, she said rightly.

Robert Bringhurst, These Poems, She Said from The Beauty of the Weapons