Poets’ Corner: Christmas Spelled “Origami”

21 Dec Poets’ Corner: Christmas Spelled “Origami”

“How does the ordinary person come to an experience of the transcendent? For a start, I would say, study poetry. Learn how to read a poem. You need not have the experience to get the message, or at least some indication of the message. It may come gradually,” Joseph Campbell,  from “Thou Art That.”

One of our family of extraordinary poets, Kierstin Bridger is nothing if not unconventional. Her edgy spin on the world at large and with this poem, Christmas specifically, are as mystical and magical as any painting by Gerhard Richter.

All I Want For Christmas is Forgetting Instructions

On this snowy drive,

in this origami of us,

reason is pressed against the blink-back of you.

What feels like hollow socket is only hazy vision.

Sink the tip I was told,

until we are star pointed and opposed.

We are an eight-tip projection

shot with holes.

Astral colanders, light spilling through us,

the vision I drive toward.

The road, like an unwound cassette tape

disappears behind me in the storm then into night.

Abstraction, into memory,

the same deep recess where I want you to stay- please stay.

Somewhere sharp paper hangs in midnight

made of valley and mountain folds;

we could live in this paper map,

the way home bleached to white.

Re-crease vale folds, remember how it was done.

Re-trace, thumb up to Orion’s belt, right hand on the wheel.

If only it were visible, and you were you were here.

I could conjure your likeness,

carve a landscape from an atlas,

hold my camera out and superimpose what I erased.

Only a few dashes of skid and spark left—

until I absorb all of the tender lines once creased,

toss them in the suggestion box unopened.

Do I? Don’t I? Like a child’s numbered lotus

pinched and offered, numbered and opened to possibility.

I swear I feel you as if through the car’s padded vinyl.

Is there a way to poke through, make a pinhole?

You said we’d craft a way to see the lunar eclipse

even while we protected ourselves.

We repeated the steps in and endless loop, like mind tapes,

and by the way, it’s the solar eclipse

I warned you about— not tonight,

not any crumpled sheet night.