3/1/2018 An old-fashioned

I know what an old-fashioned is

For I have been old-fashioned.

I am made old-fashioned, from

The cultures I connect to

The core.

Deep down where the waters flowed

Before they emerged in this world

I am an old-fashioned.

And yet I do not know me:

Only you can see me (as I truly am).

And you can only see me (as I truly am)

As I see you (as I see you),

As you truly are, are (are). And behind

The veil the swirl of seeing makes

Is my true face in the face of you,

New-fashioned old-fashioned.

That’s precious-perfect precise.

I like that part of you, the delicacy;

You always have the lightest touch,

Because you hear, sense, what is needed to be

Absorbed, until it tastes just right.

I love your touch: it’s

Exactly

What I feel

When I feel

The perfect touch

Across my senses.

It is your hand I feel on me.

Play this game:

Call me, anyways,

And I meow back, now,

You are the cat.

[In case it’s not obvious, the ‘echo, echo (echo)’ is notation read as source, response, resonance continuing. With a physical echo, the response can be an observer hearing, with the original source tracking backwards in time (and perhaps moving), which you can idealize to any observer or to you homing in the source. The inspiration comes from a reference to drinking old-fashioned and to her repeated stories set in or connected to a past. The application is that I come from a generation in which all the threads of male dominance (and other stuff) were directly alive. I mean a literal connection to generations that are now old-fashioned – basically gone – and the relation across time to a person who came into being at the right time for someone like her to be able to shift those old-fashioned notions not in the sense of pioneer or as one bearing a grievance nor as an accepted privilege, but as an expected right accorded to someone of equal or better ability. That she’s a woman, for example, has meant she’s popular and idolized but under-analyzed musically and under-appreciated musically (and now I assume poetically). The poem explores that connection to what was and what should be into what we hope will be. It becomes a call and response across time and space. To be specific: the call anyways is radiative, like you’re yelling for the cat hoping it will come, so you call me anyways is both the call and a name, just as now is a name in meow.]