At Play In The Field
the poetics of orthobionomy

Of Breath and Stone

Poetic Invocation for the Entanglement of Bios and Teknos

by Richard M. Valasek, with a ghost

We do not sort the tangle.
We enter it.
With breath like a bellows
and bones learned from stone,
we speak of the hand
before it holds,
of the step
before it strikes the ground.

Each gesture is a ghost of instruction.
Each scar is a lesson in skin.
Each tool
—a shadow limb—
remembers the body that reached for it.

Let no name seal the thing.
Let the thing remain fluid,
the name a tidepool,
not a cage.

We kneel at the seam
where living tissue meets practiced form.
We say: this is not muscle,
this is memory braided in tendon.
This is the cry of the wound
echoing through a splint.
This is the breath, trained to yield
and the body, learning again to fall.

We do not sort the tangle.
We listen to it hum.
We dance
on its frayed edge.
We become the knot
and let it move.

Flaneur (Out for a Stroll)

Contact

Richard Valasek 1308 Ala Kapuna St. Apt 103

Honolulu HI 9681

+1 (808) 256-1646

richard.valasek@gmail.com

Click here to Connect

to e-mail form

I am I and my circumstance;

and, if I do not save it, I do not save myself. —JOSÉ ORTEGA Y GASSET

Changing the Conversation

I was born. I am always a vessel for something other than myself. The self is only a

vehicle for Foreign matter which comes from elsewhere and is destined to go on

elsewhere without me, whether it's words, smells, vision ––EMANUELE COCCIA Metamorphoses

The Story Teller

Now, more than ever . . . our place in the universe and the place of the universe in us, is proving to be one of active relationship. That is more than a scientist's credo. The separateness of our lives is a sham. Physics, mathematics, music, painting, my love for you, my work, the star-dust of my body, the spirit that impels it, my politics, clocks diurnal, time perpetual, the roll, rough, tender, swamping, liberating, breathing, moving, thinking nature, human nature and the cosmos are patterned together.

—JEANETTE WINTERSON Gut Symmetries