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.
And walking.
It was another day of humiliations, said the poet. I did not always understand him, but these daily laments I knew well. There are whole days when you can hardly speak, mind running downhill, shining through the glass even as it darkens. Yes, it darkens. Until the next morning when you walk along the fault lines, life in your hands. Lumbering with losses, o child of blood, here you are again, still being born. These notes, if I tried to work them, would make a terrible love poem. No danger of that right now; no time. I am often in the predawn hours considering the horrors outside, how they continue. This is a note just to say that I am smiling at the way that you continue, still being born. Please continue.
***
Reading the opening of Robert Lowell’s Collected Poems, absorbing a phrase here and there, and then I notice that it is Valentine’s Day and there is a funny gap between these simultaneous realities, which I can’t quite resolve at the moment but find amusing.
What aches to hear.
The affliction of this moment is the speed of its demands––no, not even a moment, a recognizable now, but a storm of futures hailing hard against the roof, and faster. I still breathe, but breath is shattered. That which I might listen through is thick or I have slipped from wherever that other sound was, into some other frequency. Cold now, and afraid. That when you call, I will not hear.
Without escape.
The sorrow quotient settles in a deeper register
of knowing, a bog of drunken insight and cat eyes.
It was said of the first poet I loved and recognized
that he lacked the rooted normality of a major voice
and this makes a new kind of sense to me now.
What rough vocation demands such strident use
of sick days to repair the broken levees of a fool
soul bent on protecting the unlooked-for
where sky and ground roar a running river
to spell variations in chorus on the page?
This silence for want of better words
only lives by careful collections of foragers
on shores who number shells on shelves
and bird feathers by weathered tendrils
of larger limbs. The thin page.
The shaking hand.
In constant vigilance.
What quickens
toward some destined end
in keening cry. O bird.
Weep for this house,
in spiraled anguish.
I feel you poised.
A sense of something
making an exit. Shore foam
and the ebb of us, waving
Kelp -swaying praise
dance toward surfaces above
which seabirds circle, ready
To dive. Then Black Hawk
shadow, lined against
the light. What comes.
And the numbers now.
Will this what then not let itself be counted,
what when it was not permitted any stop?
I walked on limbs while sorting them:
this, and then this, and so on, what
passes for mind an organizing principle.
Unless this flesh is made of minutes
would you save it? I meant to answer.
Current, fly through me.
You must be time.
Is this the hour, then?
Am I?
The warmup.
Not sure what when I am waking
I am doing, waking thinking, what
am I doing here? with the what that
I am needing not enough still and yet
going on: up anyway, out again. I have to
gather my what for an hour with my coffee
just being here in this bed with this book, these
books that I may be a semblance of passing for ready
when I leave.
And tidal shifts.
But how, though. We wanted to know. Do we get there?
The old woman laughed. What you get in this current is changed, she said, by surrender of known wants to unknown tides, your time no longer free but bound with shining threads of taut infinities.
One possibility.
The challenge of enduring through ordinary objects amid this constant awareness of something screaming and you think what you want is a beginning you can call after the screaming stopped but naming it reveals the error. No, that is not what you want, that sudden silence. Only the still living can scream. What you want is a beginning you can call when the voice found some rest in the endurance of other voices to sound its siren, when the sound of this was all, and we lived inside it, becoming so unlike ourselves that music would recognize what we were, and play us again.
Words of the unseen world of an unrecognized people.
This morning, I am careful in the hours before I am ready to be awake, when I am still in the first sips of coffee, and still with a full week ahead, where I let my eyes rest when I click open the morning paper. As one learns to be, depending on the day, calculating the risk of sliding into an abyss. Head at an angle, I slid my eyes quickly to the fringes like someone sneaking into a room, and down the right column, to rest on the image of a living face. He smiles, but not in the way people smile when they learn to leverage the image for gain. He smiles with puzzled amusement, like he is looking for the face behind the lens. His face, deeply contoured above the caverns at his neck, is a landscape unto itself, framed by an old man’s large ears.
His name is his language means dog without an owner. Dog in his language means something other than an insult. He is in his late eighties when he writes it at the table with his daughter, as his mother taught him. His mother was a memory keeper.
The language his mother taught him was the language of her grandparents and it was long considered extinct. It is the language of a people who had lost the land they lived on but not the words by which they had loved her.
We had learned over time, Jaime explains, not to speak to those who could not hear. But I exist, he says. I am here.
***
Inspired by Natalie Alcoba’s New York Times article about Blas Omar Jaime of Paraná, Argentina, who recently decided to speak Chaná, the language his mother had taught him, which had long been considered lost.
