Sounds between us.
When I asked how, she told me, too. To find the tree to hear its sound and the sound of shaded earth beside it. To find the water, sounding water. To notice the call and response between them and listen for your cue.
On being here.
Plant the crab in the sky. You must do this regularly, every season. Now the archer. Pay attention to the bull looking back and follow the gaze of the frog. Notice the tide. Tonight, it glows in full bloom and the cat snake dives gold into wormhole. Follow the fish where it echoes you back. Give recklessly of your abundance and hold fast only to your name. May it tether you to what may never be pronounced. May this be what keeps you, always.
Reaching.
maybe all you wanted at the start was to take
the perforated present
shot through with holes to carve it to make
the dappled light it held look like it meant all along
to be held like that maybe you only wanted
to test some strength against the coming loss not
necessarily yours maybe it was in the living fossils
among us, the beyonds they tended to point to
by being there where we were
o teeth
o sorrow
o wonder
o breath
where do you go in this now
but shh you tell me try not to look
like that meaning I think this gulping way
where you try to take it
o all of it at
once
Visual communion.
A shell, a glance, the hush between them. Your pyrotechnic palette, flashbang bravado only masks the stillness as we enter. Once inside, we become the bare guts of ourselves, removed of all packaging, and no one moves in the aftermath, to take up arms again.
***
Inspired by the work of Sylvia Snowden with phrases from Joe Bradley’s interview with the artist.
Study of extreme closeups.
There is something to know about the parts that are not here.
Move the lens again. Closer and still. Guess what this is. What
looks like a forest is a few square millimeters of flower head.
And what seems like desert stones framing gem is lizard eye.
That fairytale forest is moss on rock, and the apparent geode
is squamous cells from cheek swab. Point the lens and still.
Closer and shoot again. You want to see.
And the cosmological constant.
The doctor is telling me that dark energy is more fluid than the matter I am used to, which seems like somewhat of a gross assumption about my given norms, but I am not in the mood to be difficult so I let it slide and then he leaves the room, and me in it with a sense that things might be pulling away, looking for a phrase opposite to “lightbulb moment” and it’s fitting, I suppose, that I have yet to find it.
***
Inspired by this article in Knowable, exploring how an early dark energy idea offers a way to resolve a problem known as the Hubble tension.
Morning notes.
Early, in darkness, listening for a chord to shine the sunup. They say there is water below here, an underground stream, roiling currents of it, unseen. Nothing about land makes it separate from that knowing, from the air. I wait between breaths and it enters again. This land, before I leave.
An interruption.
Listen, the wing somewhere upstairs.
The sound of a cry still seeking a mouth.
How it flails behind the closed doors
against tease of glass pane
trying for sky.
Early exercises.
A memory. Of clouds. How they carried early poems. As if to illustrate some measure. It had to do with distances. The ones between language and aim. The ghosts were not deterred. They had seen it all. So long silent, they were done with all that, pushing out from the chest, up.
Like, Go.
Like, Stand.
Like, There.
Petitions, remembered.
We stood below it, whispering things like: One of these days when I call, I want to say your name and know it because in the beginning was the word and I want to go back there,
but I don’t know if she will have us––
anymore, such as
we are and–––
Then came the long wait.
