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.
Against light pollution.
These eyes trained on sky still guide wild flights by stars, set courses for migration at midnight––
But what can they find in the glow bleeding from the empire’s cities?
Still singing hallelujahs of nobody knows, forever-present notes that know what no hand grants, no thief can steal.
Reaching back to the original promise in the first split of atom from an original rib to give birth to the genesis of song––
In the space of a womb, a surrogate tomb for the still unburied,
long dead still––
singing unnamed solids behind these gates
the liquid river sings us––
still
singing
our home.
Prayer for hands in wartime.
After every blast, the sky was obscured by dust. But look, you said to me, touching. There is an old man selling oranges. Dust in his beard, his hair, all over his coat. Look closer. See the shine of the oranges. You don’t get that, after a barrel bomb, unless you take a wet rag and polish each, one at a time.
O watching stars / O birdcall
O hands over faces/ O names
Come back. Come ever.
Come now.
On this dreaming.
You can put a question to it, define some central arc. With a working x-ray, you can find the skeleton, hold it up. Strange balloon, there is something beyond these, a milder sun to know you whole and mirrored in its sky. Don’t fly to it yet, love, it is not yet time to know the altitude of that dormant mountain you’ve selected as central metaphor. Wait. You may find that instead of a symphonic saving it means some other mischief, that it proves a certain madness you only suspected was yours when you chose to suspect you were only dreaming too hard, chasing some symbol to seal this torment shut. Where was the white rose, the singing bird, the rest at the end of your long nights of questions? O wild spider, no one hears you cry. Lacking tears, you seem only ever to make more spiders. There they go again, animating shadows. Look.
With music.
Why this song now, ribboning its shining ascent?
The atmospheric river of it, its attendant wind.
How still a body becomes when carried.
The width of this reaching.
Compassion is furious
astonishment, weeping
in staggering elation.
The possibility of this
ongoing life.
With shipwreck.
The secret of the stolen apple: an inverted sweet to burn the tongue. When the old vision of paradise meets its wreckage on this shore, the storybook rainbow breaks with it, and from the collective corpse erupts a wild flight of blue lotus, each of these a newborn god, laughing.
The loose thread.
And yet, this persists: the force of dew to still doubt while stirring a whispered belief in the power of a single song to call up the sun.
