The Soul We Share E-Book

Ricky Ray

• Herausgeber: Fly on the Wall Press
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 111

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

Winner of the 2023 Aryamati Collection Competition. Through visceral and vulnerable poetry, Ricky Ray meditates on the pain and gratitude that arise from a keenly felt awareness of our fleeting existence. Recognizing his humanity as a facet of natural processes, Ricky measures the ache of living in a disabled body against the joy of \'being lived\' by the places he inhabits. As we accompany him and his soul dog, Addie, through the scenic woodlands of New England, the concrete jungle of Manhattan, and the swamps of the Deep South, the lines between humans, animals and nature begin to blur and move in concert. Shifting between forms both physical and elemental, we read of an existence lived not 'upon / but as one' with the Earth, \'whose being we are throughout and beyond our brief sojourn as human\'. At the heart of this collection is the transformative experience of Ricky's life with an old brown dog, which teaches that soul isn't merely something we possess—it's an animacy deeply shared.

Leseprobe

First published 26th of July 2024

Published in the USA and UK by

Fly on the Wall Press

56 High Lea Rd

New Mills

Derbyshire

SK22 3DP

Printed in the USA by

Ingram Content Group

1 Ingram Blvd.

La Vergne, TN 37086

www.flyonthewallpress.co.uk

Print ISBN: 9781915789259

EBOOK ISBN: 9781915789334

Copyright Ricky Ray © 2024

The right of Ricky Ray to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Typesetting and cover design by Isabelle Kenyon, imagery artist Anna Hamilton. https://www.annahamiltonart.com/

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without prior written permissions of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable for criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

A CIP Catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

for the dog who saved me, Addie

for the dog who raised me, Rascal

for my wife, Safora

for my inspirations, Wendell Berry, Brigit Pegeen Kelly & Jorie Graham

& for our beloved mother, Earth

Praise for ricky ray’s work:

“These moving, well-made poems follow the author’s meditative engagement with a beloved companion dog but also with creatures of other kinds and most particularly with the earth itself. These are poems of true immersion in the belief of the earth as Gaia, whilst at the same time making known and felt the author’s painful and disabling condition, his everyday life and his hopes for the future. Unlike any other collection I have come across, these poems are remarkable in their success in showing the reader both a deeply personal and a universal story.”

—Dr. Maura Dooley, citation for the Aryamati Prize

“These shadows passing — / are they birds of prey / or whole days I stayed in bed,” writes Ricky Ray, in lyrics that are as precise as they are evocative. Poet is a professor of the senses, Lorca told us, and you can surely see how the poems here stand with this notion. Exploring subjects as different (or similar!) as body, family, theft, place, pain and rupture, the poet teaches us that understanding (“at night, when Addie sniffs the snow for deer / and I sniff the smoke from the neighbor’s / chimney for understanding”) comes spoken in tongues, and if “at some point the body cannot pull its cart,” it then “becomes the cart, while the spirit steps down / from the seat, picks up the cart and hauls.” Indeed. These are beautiful poems, built to last.”

—Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic and Dancing in Odessa

“Ray’s poetry enacts that rare poetic alchemy of infusing craft with an actual heartbeat. The language here pulses, paws, pushes us into a more expanded, animistic sense of what it means to be in relationship with one another in the more-than-human world.”

—Sophie Strand, author of The Flowering Wand, The Madonna Secret, and The Body Is a Doorway

“To read Ricky’s work is to learn, just a little bit better, how to live.”

—Devin Gael Kelly, author of In This Quiet Church of Night, I Say Amen

To care for what we know

requires care for what we don’t,

the world’s lives dark in the soil,

dark in the dark.

—Wendell Berry

§

The fidelity of a dog is a precious gift

demanding no less binding moral responsibilities

than the friendship of a human being.

The bond with a dog is as lasting

as the ties of this earth can ever be.

—Konrad Lorenz

§

The earth is the lung by which I breathe,

the earth is my greater flesh.

—Margiad Evans

Prelude

The What of Us

I

The idea that someone lives here

gives birth to the illusion of who I am:

Aging poet.

Broke and broken.

Suspicious of anthropes.

Lover of dogs.

A muddle of music, morals and blood.

I have chosen to be human

more days than I wish to admit.

I have chosen animality too few.

The canary of my courage

clutches my clavicle

and pecks at the emotions

I offer its beak.

The idea that somebody lives here:

a false coat. The body lives,

and something, not someone,

picks the spine up in the morning

and feeds the mouth bananas

and puts the head down

on the pillow at night.

II

Many little bodies inhabit each body like a nest.

Each body inhabits a larger body like a nest.

I hear you in there.

Do you hear me in you?

We share what we are,

what lives us, what is us.

It wears everything.

It wears everything out.

We want to name it.

Language issues from our bones

and the ground

and the invisible indivisible that wants to be said.

(Or so we say,

coloring the quiet with desire.)

III

It warms the mouth.

It looks in the mirror and sees the ghost

of every man, woman and child who made me.

The ghost of every animal,

mineral and element who made them.

It sees the ghost of the last male

in my human line

childless by a choice so hard

the tears shatter my sight like glass.

IV

One day, I will tell you why,

but for now, this branch

of the family tree bears no leaf

in preparation for falling away.

Turning brittle. Breaking off.

And yet how many sticks

have I thrown,

have my dog Addie mouthed

from the ground in love?

There’s hope in it

I can’t explain.

The tree reaches towards the light

until it too falls over

from too many riches.

That which lives us

unselves us, unveils us:

sweet revelation impales us.

How beautiful that who

was always a brief glimpse

into what.

Movement I

Quiet Opens the Door

It’s snowing, again,

and the Earth’s mind feels most beautiful

when she whispers

my thoughts

so far down

into quiet,

I can hear an idea

echo all the way back to creation,

where the Universal Spark—that quivering mouse—

has a chance to slip out

into the owl-less hours

to admire what’s become of itself.

Walk with Addie: Eureka Lake

Addie found the strange scat full of fish scales again, found it on the peninsula where the beavers murder the trees, eating the bark, the sap rolling down the exposed wood like tears. Addie found it and, unlike the deer and goose poop she gobbles faster than I can say no, this she wanted to roll in, to embed herself in the scales, the scat, the scent. Imagine being a creature with a nose so strong you could smell a piece of crust two hundred yards away, and being so enthralled by the waft of shit, your instinctual response is to enter it. She rolled and rolled, sneezing irrepressible sneezes of joy, then she stood and shook, briefly, and all of it fell.

She trotted on and I felt fortunate to be taught by her. To witness the embodiment of an infatuation one dives into like a second skin, then leaves behind, head down, already on the scent of the many infatuations ahead. I think I live in my head the way she lives in her nose. The way I roll around in the perfume of an idea, which slowly fades, the faint aroma lingering in my thoughts throughout the day. An idea like: we’re helping the Earth know herself, and in exchange, she’s gifting us intimacy, consciousness, the experience of being everything in sight. And in smell.

I’d like to live in the part of Addie that processes smell for an hour. The part that can read the air the way I hear the Earth thinking my thoughts, revealing the shape and scent of comprehension. The size of the beaver. The fish become scales. I close my eyes, wanting only to linger in this communion while I can.

Addie and I climb a hill and sit on a rock, overlooking Eureka Lake. Geese honk their little notes of gruel from the water. The Earth hands me a heartbeat and I hand Addie a treat and the way she eats it is gratitude. The way I watch her eat it is gratitude. The wind speaks and we nod. We talk of our hike and our fondness for each other without saying a word.

The End of My Brother

He couldn’t walk, eat, and my father didn’t tell me

until after he put my brother to sleep—

a kindness I never wanted, still don’t: take it back.

There was a hole the size of a pawprint in my chest

so I went outside to give my eyes something to do.

I remember it was hard to cry, as though the news

had blown out all moisture and made of my body

Oklahoma. There was something about the sky,

the way it bled, dimming over the horizon

where my brother went to bark and never came back.

Pass me a beer, I said to someone who wasn’t there,

I just want to hold it till all the cold is gone,

and I wasn’t talking about the can. Too warm,

we call it, when the inner and outer match.

Imagine Florida and two inches of fur.

Imagine a dog who saved my father from alcohol

and despair. He was my brother, my guardian,

my teacher, my guide, and he raised me

on a savage hunger for every morsel of this world:

we drooled fuck yes at the dog biscuits,

the only food left in the house. So dry, so dry:

maybe that’s what my grief recalled.

I used to throw my head back and bark when

I was young. (Rascal and I had long late talks.)

When I was fourteen, we lived alone together

for nine months, the animal just one of seven kingdoms

we inhaled. When he was fourteen, he sniffed the woman

who put the needle in his neck. (I wasn’t there, I wasn’t there.)

I’ve yipped a bit but haven’t howled at the moon since.

The low rumble of a growl, however, has never left

the spitworn nest of emptiness in my throat.

Aches, Quartet #1

Substitution

For a decade I watched the wind

shred the plastic bag on the fire escape

because there were no trees.

Adaptation

I cut the carrot with my teeth—bite and spit,

bite and spit—because my shoulders

are too ruined to cut it with a knife.

Dread

These shadows passing—

are they birds of prey

or whole days I stayed in bed?

Ache

I want a poem so close to hurt

it bruises my lips on the way out.

Into the Dark

Every year the cherry trees fatten with brag.

Every year we return.

Addie presses her nose into my palm for a treat.

On each kernel of popcorn:

the scent of my heart:

raw in my hand, she’d eat it with haste.

I hate cold days but pray for them

so I can watch her sparkle in the nip.

The daggers of my spine come for me

and she rests her head in my lap to soften the stab.

Her worn teeth make me wince.

I check the grey in her muzzle and wish it back.

I rehearse her death in my mind too often.

I am rehearsing my own death in hers.

I don’t want to die before her.

I want her nose—the chocolate nose

that can lift into the air and scan

the placement, history and hurt of everything—

to smell my hand on her head

as she closes her eyes, and closes her heart,

and I let myself follow her

into the dark.

Pain: 8 on a Scale Out of 10

Some days, I never make it out of my head,

that coal-eyed melon where all my dreams

crumble and drift into the weeds of Styx.

The impinged nerves crack their whips

within my animal pelt

and my tongue plays dead in my mouth,

afraid of how much more it would hurt to cry out.

But some cries cannot be stifled.

Some hurts have to get worse before they get better.

If they get better—if.

Some nights, the sleeve of me seizes

and I hear in my writhing the devil’s laugh.

He’s a son of a bitch, but I don’t even have enough

left in me to hate him. Let him have this.

Let him gnaw me past care and bone.

There’s nothing here but hurt, and I don’t want it.

I want to close the eyes of my eyes,

stuff the blown world in a sack,

throw it over my shoulder

and slip between two ticks of the pulse,

leaving all the arguments of the flesh

to burn down like a house condemned.

(Dis)ability

Some days, my body is so beautiful

I can’t believe I get to live here.

Once in Twelve Years, I Go to Church

I go to the church with the cross in it

and I kneel, because it hurts too much to sit,

and I pray, wordlessly. I go when it’s quiet,

when service is over, ideally when no one

is there. But someone is always there.

I don’t mean the priest. I don’t mean Jesus

or some deity who looks down on us.