Aaron Tieger's Anxiety Chant

Jeffery Beam

I SPENT lunch today with the lovely looking Anxiety Chant and Tieger's words which feel, particularly today, which is rainy and cold like a sit at the window, like a ponder, a pond, of ferreting out—of self's closed doors now ajamb, and then a measured gateway to expose the mind's contraventions. I love the cat therein. And certain moments have struck me as perfect in the way that human things are not 'that' yet are, here demonstrated by fragments taken from wholes:

"all I need as spirit / drifts toward the low tide / of the long ride"



"Lighting on the edge
of clouds      Land
      opens up
  & so

do I"



      "A once lucid sound
  blurred
by string"



"in heart
        blue eye
& green mind"



"stillness in the midst
of volume
        or
    If you like

surface quiet
subsurface volume"



"A falsetto conscience
    reminds me"



"Every thick blue dusk"



    "the light of one bulb
the sound
of one night"



"Cows
    in thin trees
dull leaves"

Especially like those cows. But find all of these . . . distinct poems within themselves—but love the way Aaron has made a path of them. Reading this book again over a year later after writing this I could excavate another whole pile of phrases/phrasings. I think the mirror cover just the right thing for anxieties and chants.

. . .