Micro-minutes on Your Way to Work

Brenda Hillman - 1951-

Days are unusual. The owl sends
           out 5 zeroes from the pines
           plus one small silver nothing. Where
            	do they float? Maybe out to
           sea, where jellyfish are aging left
& right. They have some nerve.
           Today, no new wars, probably. No
big button. The owl could be
           your scholar of trapped light or
Walter Benjamin who writes a storm
blows in from paradise. Thinking through
           these things each week, you cross 
 
the bridge: gold coils, fog, feelings…
           syllables also can grow younger like
  those jellyfish. You bring your quilt
           of questions in the car. At
work, you’ll have to be patient
           at the risky enterprise of talking
to other people;  so little progress
           in this since the Pleistocene. Mostly,
though, you’re calm when traveling: silver
nothing, moving right & left; day
           releasing the caged stars; one thought
mixed with no-thought, packed with light…
 
                                            	for MK

Brenda Hillman is the author of ten poetry collections, including In a Few Minutes Until Later (Wesleyan University Press, 2022) and Extra Hidden Life, among the Days (Wesleyan University Press, 2018). She received the Academy of American Poets Fellowship in 2012 and currently serves as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

Occasions

Themes

About Brenda Hillman >

About This Poem

“I’ve been working on and off for about a decade with a procedural form inspired by a Jena Osman essay; the form is six words per line, twenty-four lines. (I try to be strict but sometimes give or take a word or two and consider hyphenated words to be one.) I have used it for some ecopoetic pieces and also for pieces about odd emotions. The challenge is to put a lot of existence in a short space, which is what interests me in poetry in general. This poem originated at dawn when I heard an owl in a Berkeley treetop; I was thinking about the commute of a friend who has to do a lot of work in the public sphere. I often think about non-human energy and life that goes in and out of consciousness simultaneously with historical events. The poem also refers to Walter Benjamin’s ideas about history as well as a sense that thought and light are both something and nothing.”
—Brenda Hillman

More by Brenda Hillman

Sediments of Santa Monica

A left margin watches the sea floor approach
 
It takes 30 million years 
It is the first lover
 
More saints     for Augustine's mother

A girl in red shorts shakes Kafka's
The Trial free of some sand
 
A left margin watches the watcher from Dover
 
After the twentieth century     these cliffs
Looked like ribbons on braids or dreads
 
A dream had come right over 
With a sort of severe leakage
 
Ah love let us be true to one another
 
Went down to the ferris wheel
God's Rolodex
 
There were neon spikes around everyone 
Like the Virgin's spikes 

Old punk's mohawk     Evidence of inner fire 

Rode throwing words off     Red current     Light swearing 

Ah love The century 
Had become a little drippy at the end
 
We're still growing but the stitches hurt     Let us be 

True to one another for the world
 
Easy on the myths now 
Make it up     Sleep well

Brenda Hillman

2001

Wood's Edge

Infinity lifted: 
a gasp of emeralds.
 
I thought I felt 
the tall night trees 
between them,
 
no exactitude, 
a wait not even 
known yet.
 
I held my violet up; 
no smell. 
It made a signal squeak 
inside, bats,
 
lisps of pride;
 
ah, their little things, 
their breath: lungs of a painting,
 
they swept me 
in four ways, their square
plans, as I have made 
a good square saying,
 
you I 
you not-I 
not-you I 
not-you not-I,
 
ritual of hope 
whose weight 
has not been measured—

Brenda Hillman

2001

String Theory Sutra

There are so many types of
“personal” in poetry. The “I” is	a needle some find useful, though
the thread, of course, is shadow.
In writing of experience or beauty,	a cloth emerges as if made
from a twin existence. It's July
4: air is full of mistaken	stars & the wiggly half-zeroes stripes
make when folded into fabric meant
never to touch ground ever again—	the curved cloth of Sleeping Beauty
around 1310, decades after the spinning
wheel gathered stray fibers in a	whir of spindles before the swath
of the industrial revolution, & by
1769 a thread stiff enough for	the warp of cotton fabric from
the spinning frame, the spinning jenny,
the spinning "mule" or muslin wheel,	which wasn't patented. By its, I
mean our, for we would become
what we made. String theory posits	no events when it isn't a
metaphor; donuts twists in matter—10
to the minus 33 cm—its	inverted fragments like Bay Area poetry—
numbers start the world for grown-ups
& wobbly fibers, coaxed from eternity,	are stuffed into stems of dates
like today so the way people
are proud of their flag can	enter the pipes of a 4.
Blithe astonishment in the holiday music
over the picnickers: a man waves	from his spandex biking outfit, cloth
that both has & hasn't lost
its nature. Unexpected folds are part	of form where our park is
kissed by cucalyptus insect noises ^^z-
z~ ~> crr, making that for you	Flag cloth has this singing quality.
Airline pilots wear wool blend flag
ties from Target to protect their	hearts. Women, making weavings of
unicorns in castles, hummed as they sewed
spiral horns with thread so real	it floated; such artists were visited
by figures in beyond-type garments so
they could ask how to live.	It’s all a kind of seam.
Flying shuttles, 1733, made weaving like
experience, full of terrible accidents &	progress. Flags for the present war
were made in countries we bombed
in the last war. By we	you mean they. By you it
means the poem. By it I
mean meanings which hang tatters of	dawn’s early light in wrinkled sections of
the druid oak with skinny linguistic
branches, Indo-European roots & the	weird particle earth spirits. A voice
came to me in a dream
beyond time: love, we are your	shadow thread ~ ~ A little owl
with stereo eyes spoke over my
head. I am a seamstress for	the missing queen. The unicorn can’t
hear. It puts its head on
our laps. Fibers, beauty at a	low level, fabric styles, the cottage
industry of thought. Threads inspired this
textile picnic: the satin ponytail holder,	the gauze pads inside Band-Aids,
saris, threads of the basketball jersey,
turbans, leis over pink shorts, sports	bras: A young doctor told us
—he’s like Chekhov, an atheist believer
in what’s here —that sometimes, sitting	with his dying patients, he says,
“God bless you.” It seems to
help somewhat. They don’t know what	causes delays between strings—by they,
I mean the internet. Turns out
all forces are similar to gravity.	We searched for meaning ceaselessly. By
we I mean we. Sewed it
us-wards, with flaws between strings.	It seems there is no revolution
in the Planck scale. My sisters
& I worked for the missing	queen: she said: be what you
aren’t. A paradox. There are some
revolutions: rips in matter, the bent	nots inside our fabric whirred &
barely mattered anymore. Our art
could help take vividness to people	but only if they had food.
No revolution helped the workers, ever,
very long. We worked on this	or that flag after sewing this
or that unicorn. They called Trotsky
back from Canada. Tribes were looser than	nations, nations did some good
but not so very always, &
the types of personal in art	turned & turned. Nylon parachutes in
1937. Lachesis. We shall not flag
nor fail, wrote Churchill. O knight,	tie our scarf on your neck.
There are more than two ways
to make beauty so movements end	like sutras or horizons, somewhat frayed.
Je est un autre wrote Rimbaud
the gun-runner. Over & inner &	code. The unicorn, c’est moi. The
rips by which the threads are
tethered to their opposites like concepts	of an art which each example
will undo. We spoke of meanings.
I, it, we, you, he, they	am, is, are sick about America.
Colors forgive flags—red as the
fireskirt of the goddess Asherah, white
as the gravity behind her eye,
blue for the horizon unbuttoned so	the next world can get through.
The “thin thread of calculable continuity”
Santayana refers to —it’s not a	choice between art & life, we
know this now, but still: How
shall we live? O shadow thread.	After the cotton workers’ lockout 1922
owners cut back sweatshop hours to
44 per week. In string theory	the slippage between string & theory
makes air seem an invented thing
& perhaps it is, skepticism mixed	with fear that since nothing has
singular purpose, we should not act.
To make reality more bearable for	some besides ourselves? There’s a moment
in Southey’s journal when the tomb
is opened & the glow-beast exits—	right when the flying shuttle has
revolutionized their work—by their I
mean our —& cut costs by	half. So lines are cut to
continue them & if you do
help the others, don’t tell. String theory	posits symmetry or weight. My country
’tis of installing provisional governments.
Why was love the meaning thread.	Textiles give off tiny singing no
matter what: washable rayon, airport
carpets, checked flannel smocks of nurses,	caps, pillowcases, prom sashes, & barbecue
aprons with insignias or socks people
wear before/during sexual thrills after	dark subtitled Berkeley movies next to
t-shirts worn by crowds in raincoats.
Human fabric is dragged out, being	is sewn with terror or awe
which is also joy. Einstein called mystery
of existence “the fundamental emotion.”	Remember? You unraveled in childhood till
you were everything. By everything I mean
everything . The unicorn puts its head	on your lap; from there it
sees the blurry edge. How am
I so unreal & yet my	thread is real it asks sleepily~~

Brenda Hillman

2005

Related Poems

as the owl augurs

I have an hour to read marcabru and fall in love
to study the medicines and put a rock in each corner of the house
and pray over it with pollen as my elder advised
to test my extraordinary knowledgeses
to briefly wonder whether I was actually under a spell
to write my poem about being a mongrel
I must love even the fox that impedes my path
n jettison my former ire n any gesture toward abstraction
n go to the dump finally w/ the disused bicycle tires and the broken antlers and the cracked stained glass of a ship that formerly I wdve harbored because I did not love myself
but the broken shelf
I want namore of it
the jangle-mongrel and the rose and the ndn cowboy that layall closeted
along w/ my availability to my own mind and the killings of our familyes queer and black and brown and ndn
slaughter at orlando symbol of our hermitude
massacre at aravaipa gashdla’á cho o’aa big sycamore standing there
bear river sand creek tulsa rosewood
n when I finally sussed them out
n laid the tequila in its proper trash
n attempted to corral the pony of my mind
they say the ohlone were here as if
there were no more ohlone
erected a fake shellmound called it shellmound avenue
my friends dont like that
my friends dont like that excrement
it’s not like youd give away the algorithm, my bf pointed out,
to the one yr tryin to put a spell on
marcabru uses the word ‘mestissa’ to describe the shepherdess his dickish narrator is poorly courting
which paden translates ‘half-breed’ and pound ‘low-born’ and snodgrass ‘lassie’ but I want to say mongrel, mestiza, mixedbreed
melissima most honeyed most songful
what catullus called his boyfriend’s eyes
honey the color my dead dog’s eyes the stomach of the bee
I’m going to gather pollen from the cattails in a week or two
to pray to the plant tell it I’m only taking what I need
use a coathanger to hook the ones far from shore
filter it thru chiffon four times
what is love
but a constellation of significances
lyke-like magic
los cavecs nos aüra as the owl augurs
one gapes at a painting
the other waits for mahana

Julian Talamantez Brolaski

2017

Poems

Micro-minutes on Your Way to Work

More by Brenda Hillman

Sediments of Santa Monica

Wood's Edge

String Theory Sutra

Related Poems

as the owl augurs

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