Sight fishing lessons
The first thing to learn was forgetting well enough to dream a boat to help with crossing the night, its busy port thick with interdimensional commerce. The next was how to watch the anchor, watch the ropes, keep a pen and a lighthouse nearby to allow for return and remembrance.
Unknowing
How close we seemed to the barren edge of that wilderness when something woven of ripe grasses came to collect us back to the fertile bed of an original dream.
Translation
Once when I was a mouth burned from the effort it took not to scream, something not me rose to walk that mouth to this stream where something not yet was beginning.
To see here
No One and No Thing
kneading this
incanting this
soul-bright bloom
above the thorn.
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.
Language and reach
What blots out its name to carry on with you?
I meant to make amends with her. For her.
Yes, pen, I want to remember. No less or more than myself.
What comes drifting to stand soul and clear?
They say I have or had a self.
Yes, pen, I believed them.
Yes, pen. When I said believed I meant I tried.
I mean I meant to try. To believe them.
About this they would call self, but something resisted.
Pen, do you think that resistance might be a sort of self?
What breath rose from here?
No, pen, I cannot point to her. I cannot tell you where she is.
But here, I think, yes.
What could we make and know as well as any name?
I meant to offer her up to you and you could trace her, bless her in this basement altar.
I meant to descend low enough through caves and cellars to find.
Her, or the altar, or you.
That we could meet.
The first two questions are adapted from lines by Paul Celan.
For breadth
I am sometimes permitted to return as a single filament of root hair on an ancient tree, and stretch toward the hair of another nearby, who is not yet tree and not yet anything visible because all its life, for now, is happening underground.
One, two, one again.
Sure, I am interested in keeping time. Who isn’t? But there has to be more to it than clocks. I can lose a clock, or the clocks can go all wrong, and then what? I will not even keep my body, and yet. As long as I am of the keeping kind, it is where I hold the world.
Sometimes I dream of knowing the world through other bodies. That I am a bird, for example, or whale, spider, tree. Of course, I do not know what it is to experience the world in these bodies. I can only imagine. If I ever did know, I suppose I had to give that awareness back, too.
Perhaps my first body is imagining. I cannot seem to keep myself. From asking, how did this happen? And when will? Or was, and then back again trying to collect some lingering residue of what, like the scent of a lover, is then gone.
The bower bird, to draw a mate, collects. Some make arrangements of blue rocks, blue buttons, cerulean feathers, chipped glass. Here is a keeping kind, too. I seem only ever tethered to this place by what I try to hold, even as I am aware that the point, they say, is letting go.
It is an easy thing to say––just let it go! But I think that we are so made for holding that the only way to know whatever insight might be held in this reminder is by drawing what will be released so close that it is married to your next breath, and on exhalation, finding that what flies is less air than essential limb, less tired past than the future hope you meant to breathe the next breath. And then what? No one goes around saying Just let yourself go!––with the same enthusiasm, and yet.
I’ve lost it again, lost the thread and probably myself and all that follows is another opening, another chance to hold and one less limb to do it with, and this sense that the constant act for me may be keeping and I will not keep up.
Cyclic repairs
Because you can only hold that mouthful of silence for so long until it guesses you empty of time and the breath comes loose where the reins give way, let the eyes finally mute their speech to find what drifts downlight to arrive along the banks. Claw nearer to some jagged edge and hold.
And a language of love
I was reading Paul Celan in the season of coming into awareness of a need for glasses but not yet seeing the full picture (!) so I kept having these delightful misreadings which were less graceful than what he said but somehow more intimate, like the poetry of glances between secret lovers in a crowded room while everyone else is speaking in very matter-of-fact tones. Instead of cavity awake, I read sanity sneakers, and not heartstorm but heartstream, and not blessed but bleeded, and in a sentence about libraries, I saw beaks, not books, like Oh Paul, you imp, I see you, winking back, and then when I got the glasses there was a moment of trepidation before I opened his collection, because maybe after all that winking and innuendo of double meanings in a room crowded with strangers we would find ourselves alone with frank expressions and nothing much to say, like how he looks on the cover with eyes that seem to be daring the would-be speaker to break the silence of that pause, and it turns out that the words I’ve been reading as whispers have been in larger letters all along, not whispers at all but a normal tone like two people sitting in a room full of space and regular furniture even though everyone knows about the bodies interred in the cellar walls and when that happens what do you even talk about anyway that can do any justice to the naked fact of being the only other person in a room and all that human baggage? This is why it is no small relief to see, in a line about hands, that the speaker still calls what he is doing arrowing with you. (!) And why I close the book and stop there for the day and hold the thought like Oh Paul. How did you–––?
