And the road.
We were missing the inner music.
One held a bowl of earth. It blazed.
We wondered of the steam.
When did it rise? And does it relent.
She knows something but will not.
How long the road. I am done, one said.
Our heads, the eyes. It hurt to look.
We used to hear what would play––
to ease the burden, brew the blood.
Not done, came another, saying wait.
Reading with a question.
How to rewrite
the shining things we took––
to heart when they were among us
where the sun still touched?
An offering.
The sky mouth open
and our reaching hands
up, insisting, Eat, Eat!
Take us.
To collect them.
Like a lost memory, this dawn reaches for day but does not make it. Not on the tip of the almost-naming mother tongue, but not attempted, with no other reaching back. For this cold egg, unable to hatch, too late arrives too soon. All around here, there is so much else to do. But name it. Lost memory, reach us remembering back. With the presence. Of mind to forget the sleek. Driving idea, its compelling speed. These are children. To mourn.
Against the cessation of stops.
To see the shining belly of a gaze, hungry,
we warm to it because it looks like relief
from another madness, a way to peel
the clocks to feel the membrane of each
hour’s sections cool against tongues,
nectaring the Eden we missed, minutes
running off our chins from the body
of Time, our subsistence rations
after nothing of that space or any place
could reach us singing any––more,
though she tried, calling with an offer.
But where do the children play?
Sound bites fly in on the drive home and spend the night flying around. O god, a young woman says, there is no one left. O god, o god, she says. They are killing us all. Then birds against the glass of the dream window and children kicking, flushed, and fevered in their moving beds. We are moving, but where? Everywhere you can see the overgrowth of mechanic replication stretching its tentacles to our throats. The children will tell you. Ask them how they are, and they will tell you. I am tired. I am so tired, they say. The officials respond: we have more! So much more. The children are not sure about the water. There are rumors of lead. Of runoff. Human waste. They are sure, if you ask them to elaborate, that there is probably a camera somewhere recording them, making a weapon of their faces, their voices, to be turned against them at a future time, yet undetermined. This morning one cries quietly under his hood. I do what I can to keep the cameras from him. The sirens continue, the blast of alarms calling time. Officials reach measuring sticks and probes toward the bodies of the children. The children are backing away. Official talk revolves around the question of reaching them. Ways to bypass their resistance. In this world where the machine winds its algorithmic fingers toward their necks and birds crash against windows where the children are tired, I cannot help. Hoping. They are learning, I want to believe. To resist. But what? And how? They do not say what, not yet. They do not say how. I offer only words, poems. Music, metaphors. Try this? Or this one? I do not know what passes through. We continue, for now. Some of us, then fewer over time. How are you? We ask. And answer, so tired.
Call and response.
Editing a manuscript but the voice will not hold until I see it. Who must be the unborn who decided to save a life by delaying the opening. In the meantime, the weight of eyelids shutters the shores of lost continents and the priest repeats: You must. Be ground like wheat until. And I cannot leave this body even as its pilgrimage in other lights seems just beginning, and there is a voice caught in the throat and she is in a running dance after the sauntering river until she stops. Again, that sense of waiting for the lens to adjust. But into what? Then the thick sound of hawk lifting behind my head––off now, that circling cry.
In song.
There will be no total here, no summing up. Instead, a polyvocal cacophony of riddles exerts a centrifugal force away from the presumed center––out. Only the permeable find it. After recognition of the way that meaning in abundance winds toward silence interrupted only by the exultant shriek. Only the indirect, circling utterance will do.
and findings.
But how? When submerged in a field of study. When the subject of discourse is the limits of knowing amid a sustained ordination of unknowns in a place of ebbing permanence. When the illuminating hope is for another possibility. When the practice of this hope demands that I accept of the unreliability of impressions passing through this passing form, and witness anyway.
In the belly of the whale.
Through a certain lens, you think, here is a moment adjacent to, or inside of, some incessant hunger. Which repeats until it breaks. Which breaks only when it kills the host. Above us, as storm of a century (another?) ––and below our feet, until the raft where we were standing is also gone. This was hunger, too. And the sea sounds to be made of a hunger all its own, but this is not what it is. That swallows us. This is not what it is that has fed and ferried. Us between homes where we dream of the floor of it. From where we go looking for the floor, in vessels and with instruments. Sometimes we do not find the floor. Sometimes the vessels do not return. Sometimes they return to tell us that the floor is home to life for which we have no name, that the floor is an opening to something else, a liquid earth that rises through its own cracks, spreading.
