Category: poetry

Final Assembly

Of rotating parts.

We were a constellation, each complicated by the gravity of the others and held in place by it. Individual desires, fears––whatever these might have been, if they ever had been––were opaque to us, except when they involved another. 

We had only our rituals, and by these choreographies each could lose it all again and find a state adjacent to what we thought people of another time might have called holy, might have called grace, or something like a visitation. 

Having arrived long after the date for believing that anyone might come to save us, long after whatever might have been offered at another time had surely been squandered beyond repair or recognition, we knew only to hold in this suspended state, for as long as possible, lighting the utter doom.

There was laughter in that space, never expected. And song. Yes, that too.

Flying Directions

From coffee to eternity.

Take the long view, starting from any horizon where it gathers like rain. Then try a movement in time, leaving reason behind. Go from moment to moment to moment, but no bridges between them. Cellar doors will do, no stairs. This allows for the sudden drop from one to the next.

We move these tiny flames on sticks, and then wait. One sign is the flash of sunrise around the window. Another is a breath of letters flooding the veins, flowering tongues, chiming the ear.

These are useful reminders. Let go, syntax, let’s go. There are more ways to arrange a voice beyond the tired grooves of your worn paths. You can cut the ankles again on low thorns, catch webs in the mouth, know your face by the cheek kissing the cat tail, and forget the mirrors.

Bodies

In solvent.

Across this wide, crenulated landscape, these internal contradictions pulse our continuance. 

Each fold a valley of storms, each groove a supernova. Light into mirror and back again––as it was once, body without organs, and will be. 

Watch how we shine in an absence of light. Would you dissect the sea for its parts? You may try, but none of us, separate from the rest, will retain an original form.

Underwater, our flying forms draped in starlight, we are watched equally by mothers and monsters, and lose our faces to know our substance.

***

Inspired by the work of Warren Neidich as well as Katherine Bradford.

Unkeeping

Embedded promise.

This is more than a box, more than any one thing at a time. More than the sharp line or the sum of coordinates of any of my known locations. This geometry is made of history, and it is personal.

Secret language of liquid belonging, live. Return me to the distance, remind me back to its original embrace.

***

Inspired by the art of Torkwase Dyson, borrowing phrases from her installations: Unkeeping (2016), Liquid Belonging (2022) and I Belong to the Distance (2016).

Child

In time.

Because your first language was translation between surface and depth, solid and void, active touch, and bodily abstraction, many were prone to fantasies of keeping you, collecting you in tomb-like cells of preservation. For time, they said, but you splashed in it.

Your nature was evasive as the substance of shadow and prone to grow and renew its seeming self out of bounds, and convictions had a way of sliding over your skin like bathwater, the force of you resolute in its refusal of definition beyond liquidity, demanding to be passed between vessels, your eye forever in your mouth.

Recumbent Figure

Harmonizing vertebrae.

This is not a poster, you said. Not something to be grasped while riding on top of a bus. This would admit no witness without proximity.

Your body a landscape of fossil-ripe skin. Your body an ancient object of bone, stone, shell and wood, the promontory above storied seas, the cave of hillside forests. 

Your body inviting touch, that the fingers may know the harmony of its swells and hollows, the full aria of its full-throated longings, even at rest.

***

Inspired by the sculpture of Henry Moore.

The Long Look

Window, lens, hand, soul.

You appeared on a certain corner every evening with your camera, to enact a ministry of light. Recalling childhood, you arrived in the circle’s fullness each time. Former strangers worked with you. You created each image together. This is how you said, I know you. 

Every moment was a breath of spirit. In this world of surface illusion, you reached your illuminating hand, your goal always, touch me, touching you. 

By devotion to the details of flesh and fracture, shadow and shade, the drape of traffic lights over wet pavement, each frame became a reminder: look at us here, in the same image. 

Those birds are one creature. Those ants are one creature. Gathered on the corner in the glow of wet streetlights, one creature. And you took it all in, and said, we are here to work out our fear of being.

***

Inspired by the work and spirit of Khalik Allah, as generously shared in an interview with J. P. Sniadecki in BOMB.

Whisper Like a Magnet

Wonders of slow work.

Worry faces, worry rug, worry gesture of hand, furrow of brow, the expression of the weary in love. Wonder the ritual, the circle, the bared breast, and mythic flight. Stitch these stories of threads from what the weather tore open. Your arrival is an act of mending, of repair, the slow work of hands and thread, returning and returning to worry a single line into light. How like the handling of a body, where each fiber has a mind of its own. How all-consuming to do, how uninteresting to watch. How unlike the heroic arrival of the vanquisher with the sword. How unlike the swift rescue, the problem solved, the fix.

***

Inspired by the astonishing work of Sophia Narrett, interviewed by Colm Tóibín in the most recent issue of BOMB. The title of this post comes from one of Narrett’s works.

One Way

Into the beyonds.

To set off, advancing, arms folded over stems: tulip, iris, gladioli, desert rose–– down a path of forking tongues, the question ever which branch, now? ––and be content to dance around an emptiness and never satisfied, to be always on the way and getting nowhere, arms scratched with low branches, thorns; ankles bitten with flying questions, the bloodsuckers biting a frenzy, each new itch auguring branches to come, and know this is happening now, the meaning, it is happening all over you, and never try to catch its supple forms in feeble nets, knowing each tool too insignificant to hold any single marvel, capable only of taking a wandering body––just as scratched and bitten––from its true glory, the act of moving out and out, beyond itself.