Candace Jensen

Just as All Things Come (As Above, So Below)

Candace Jensen

We go walking. The working of

wonders is from one. Just as all

things come, bring them to heel—

go walking amongst things that

are, go walking amongst things

that are usually only half visible

and hard to reach, jam sandwich in

hand. Go right outside on nights

such as this.

Go walking, just walk right into

the stream.

I am trying to become a woman who suffers no fools.

Go walking, just walk right in. To the stream

I am trying to be nice but what I would rather

be doing is becoming ferocious

the windmills aren’t enough the solar panels

aren’t enough the quiet lemonade made in

the pale shadow of my life’s bright lemons

isn’t enough

for god’s sake,

Man.

I am in the rain dripping cold, hiccupping

tears, feet in the piss-hot stream, little

lava flows curling down through the

chthonic,

the sublunary, the most holy shit and

soils; not merely illuminated by the

moon when turned aside in grunting,

shuffling nighttime—

they are the sopping moonlight. Seeping

through the compacted, moonlit minerals.

They are becoming and unbecoming our moon;

calm lady, queer deity, beckoning siren

of astral waters and starry bloods.

Eventually, even the creek goes silent,

dark. The bones of the earth

disintegrating in the space between my

toes there, in the water.

You

So you made something beautiful out of the middling

parts. Unashamed of the heart shape, you bleeding heart.

A proxy, a prodding parody parroting the palliative; understanding

nothing, this great cracked-open oystershell of you.

You’ve made something beautiful but that

doesn’t make you good.

Truly, there is no doubt.

Thus it was, the highest is from the

lowest, and the lowest is from the

highest— you subtle wreck, you empty

habit, brittle egg you crawl out of the

gift of attention, the melancholy, and

morose pleasure of the belayer merely

witnessing

the fall.

I am made of the stuff of stars.

I boil and gleam and implode with each

hesitant stumble and razor

burn, broom soothe, broom,

kind plums and kindred spirits.

You

Thinking you figured out who God is is merely

preamble because then you must become a godly

instrument. You must clean house, erect the

shrine, place the sweet smelling flowers on the

altar and prepare to pray. You must pray, you

must pray and hear the echo in the most profaned

silences of your limited, mundane days. You must

abhor the desecration but love the desecrator and

also recreate the sacred body.

Bathe, clothe and feede her.

Here.

Me & You

We are trying. It takes time. Watching the grasses

sway is an instructive act. You see the hairs the

veins the remarkable dimples of sentience.

Watching the clouds shift first to lavender and

then to cotton candy in an unplaceable memory is

an instructive act. Refining the way to see, really

see the green fey colors, liminal pastels—

the genius vibrancy of each and every habanero

leaf, frost-bitten mint vines, stalks of persistent

lemonbalm. Soothe, balm, soothe.

Balm, soothe.

Hospice. Go walking,

just walk right in, to

the stream.

It takes time. Watching the grasses sway is an instructive

act. The violet leaves a blushing curl, and

as above,

so below.

With immense thanks to authors & translators, Andreas Weber and Brian Cotnoir, whose books “Matter and Desire” and “Alchemy, the Poetry of Matter” respectively, gave powerful language and conceptual bones for this poem to wind itself around, like a fruiting vine.

Candace Jensen is a polymath artist, writer and radical idealist living on the unceded lands of the Elnu Abenaki and Pennacook people (Southern Vermont). Jensen has exhibited her work in New York, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Brooklyn, Vermont and Antwerp, Belgium, and is currently represented by Amos Eno Gallery in Brooklyn, NY. Interviews and selections of her art and writing have been included in Ante Mag, Studio Visit Magazine, The Ruth Stone House podcast, Last Born in the Wilderness, Iterant Mag, the Cambridge Writers’ Workshop (forthcoming), and others. She earned an MFA from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and a BFA from Tyler School of Art, both in Philadelphia (traditional lands of the Lenni-Lenape). She serves as the Book Arts & Letterpress Director at the Ruth Stone House, Art Editor of Iterant Magazine, and is Cofounder and Programming Director of In Situ Polyculture Commons, an arts residency and regenerative culture catalyst. Her next exhibition, Recalling the Chimæra, will be a collaborative exhibition with Coleman Stevenson and Thomas Little on view at Amos Eno from May 5-June 5th, 2022. Jensen will be reading her poetry at an AWP off-site reading in Philadelphia on March 25th with Iterant Magazine. Candace Jensen is online at CandaceJensen.com.