Wonder Archives

Dear Poet

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.

Wake

“Pity the monsters.” – Robert Lowell

How many dawns will continue to meet us, from which we might pivot to pity the monsters, from certain death to recognition of these fleeting selves as mere specks within a single monster’s eye?

***

“Pity the monsters” comes from Robert Lowell’s poem “Florence.”

Updrafting

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.

Time Being

In language.

What tongue I may have inherited has long since dissolved upon landing. So now the constant challenge is naming while conjugating past and present at once. To walk naked into this astonishing force, a mind not mine from which I am nevertheless breathed among all others––this congregation of dreams, any number of which may condense under pressure, returning to rain a new forecast.

Lens

The width of this reaching.

Compassion is furious
astonishment, weeping
in staggering elation.
The possibility of this
ongoing life.

Epithets

And the proper care and handling of what lives.

Into nature’s wordless sorrow, the naming tongue limps in abstraction, not to notice shadow of bruise across face or subtle song but into a deluge of earlier questions condensed at altitude to rain theories of endings, too many to count.

Corpus

And collective.

The words were what was happening to us, lapping and lolling their tides. The shock of being enmeshed in a work of art. If someone had asked what my life was then, one answer would be: anywhere but this body. Another: any felt where beyond its limits––both of which, I see now, would have betrayed certain narrow assumptions about the limits of a given form.

Song of Seed

Into birth.

We wanted only flesh of soil, of sky––to hold us. See us as children, planning our return. Now with our hands in the abundance called dirt, now with the earth on our faces, in our ears. Now with our dreams of flight, neverending. Until they did end, as we learned shame at the nakedness of our longings. To accept separation as a central term of continuance. To accept the terms they gave us for what this was. Such as civilization, such as fact, such as growth. But the souls––the soils that we had tasted when we held them in our hands had whispered differently: no treatise on growth or development, nothing to advance, but a call and response with the sky. Something like, here, and hear. How we had waited for our turns to call back, here! How we had sensed in our filthy guts, the wombs of all things sacred, that it was coming, and soon.

Art Walk

And historical research.

The artist told us how he carried questions as he traveled. He had worked with sound before this, but now he was into light. He was documenting dances and the history of time and space––and color, and the thing he was noticing about color is that it has a lot to say. Some called him a walking antenna. He showed us a work he had just finished. He called it Life in Rainbow. “I thought it would stop talking when I was done,” he said, “but it’s still going.” We listened. “I’m an explorer,” he explained. That sounded good to us, so we followed. Even though we had the wrong shoes and forgot to pack any food, it was a great trip.

***

Inspired by Alteronce Gumby.

Dominions

With Time and Space and the Babies.

Time’s madness had its origins in a wrong story, the flaw magnified by the velocity of its spin. We were about to lose him. He was losing himself. His voice broke and its fragments arguing inside him were a constant racket.

Still, it seemed possible that their dissonance might resolve into music, the birth song of a new Adam, wizened by the bitterness of the strange fruit of experience, to taste with less abandon and more care, his assurance of righteousness tempered by the memory of storms that still quaked in his muscles. Any pointing he did now was a movement akin to wing-flutter or ecstatic dance, hand in flight like the feathered messenger of history blown forward by the heat of the accumulated blasts as it looks back with sobering understanding of the danger of the spark that so delighted when it came.

We liked him better this way, the wilding rhythm of him in pulses we could recognize.

“He can play better now,” Space assured us.

“How?” We had reason to doubt.

“Look,” she said, pointing downhill. “No history that justifies those rivers of blood can hold. If that was his organizing principle, he’s better off making less sense.”

It was true. When we laughed, he would not take offense, but would laugh back, singing our new names. He didn’t even think to tame the voices quarreling within him, and because of this they grew fond of his presence, and would sing soft songs to him when he tired of his own chaos.

And then she breathed into us, her eldest daughters, and bathed us in the waters that knew our origins and our future wombs, and it was then that we heard we, becoming.