Category: earthling

Against the Sirens

The telling

Tell me about it, we say, nodding at the most recent lament before us––in the chair, at the table, with the tired voice; in passing in the wild rush. Tell me, we repeat, like shaking a clean sheet to fold it before stacking with the others, who whisper in chorus at this gesture and its countless kin, constantly throughout each day, a plea for a home not quite remembered or fully left. Tell me about it. Tell me about that place I can always remember, ever almost. Whisper to me of this collective hush again, what I need to hear against the sirens.

Solute

To dissolve some absolution

Always wants. An attempt to loosen the fibers that seemed to contain the riddle of becoming. From that bonebound island I thought I knew what I was and knowing only wants, dreamed that if I were only more, I might hold those skies, that ocean, and swell to blooming so I could let it all go into the living. I used to imagine you a landscape I might photograph in pieces to print on transparencies, hold the light of you up to your light to translate for you this wonder at your nearness. I remember where we stood above the sea holding hands up into sunset as if to catch whatever heavens might finally rain.

But what do you want, always?
What does Always want?
I am impatient to know.
Please speak slowly.

I lack fluency and miss the nuance of your most important phrases.

The phrase “bonebound island” comes from The Notebooks of Dylan Thomas.

Mind, Gap

Life as story and the body of work

Test, label, claim. Lose again. Markings on a page. Carry on, eating through the next one, in bedraggled astonishment. Fold after fold, brain after the pattern of its existence. The brain a character in the story we tell. About ourselves. Every story we tell a story about ourselves. Or the brain is the story, depending on point of view.

Bodies. What problematic texts you are, with your endless contradictions and shifting parts. At every turn, you are at best barely contained and forever deconstructing your own perimeters to devour some other body in constant rewrite.

Immortal City

Turning wheel

I swear it was an angel, said the captive near the end
who said that she said to him, this:

Are you thirsty, stranger? Has the road been long?
Come closer. Let me whisper of what is just beyond that bend.

They say there is a city of immortals somewhere, in celebration.
Who tells. Whose memory obeys command to speak.

What river, what other do you seek. All novelty, all knowledge, all oblivion.
Whose end, whose world. What immortality, and when.

Who is fluent in the customs of that place.
Who deserts before the spoiling.

Whose mother, what monsters, whose lips at that breast.
Who dazzled in what rays of that sun, when first.

Who from those shallow graves emerges to slake what thirst.
Whose prayer. What ear and when.

What ladder, whose wall, to what courtyard.
When joy, whose patience at the gates.

Where is the river that gives immortality and whose blood is in it,
and where is the empty canal that takes it away.

Whose will on what horse.
What labyrinth. Whose center. What well.