Category: writing

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spectacle, witness, aftermath

The circus men came and went and we listened. As women, we had been raised to believe that some sanctity was possible in the sacrament of attention––that attention, once received, could be enough to transform its object.

They thought we were applauding the show. We were only waiting for them to drop it. The babies were coming with open mouths.

My grandmother taught by example, how even if it hadn’t quite happened in our lifetimes––yet––it might be possible to pull them from themselves by sheer force of love. They had spectacles to offer and we watched. The point, she taught me, was not to feed their illusions but to draw them away from what deluded them, like pulling the host away from the poison to salvage what you can when it becomes clear that the poison has become the central mass. The power of the constant gaze could do this, she believed.

My grandfather was full of wind and she loved into him; it was wartime and every would-be flying man was still charging toward the sun. The war disappointed, but not the rewards that came after if you managed to come out alive; annual parades guaranteed a lifetime supply of empty praise and then with a home of his own and her inside to keep it, he sold used cars, telling stories again and again. She held on and listened, placing his vitamins in a plastic case, ordered by days of the week. 

She listened until she died of a rot too long ignored. She had held it in her gut for years, in silence as we do when we know this is no ways good but knew first to keep looking in love. Not for something coming, but as an orientation. Hope is a posture. Hers never slouched. 

Dammit Bob, she used to say, and I thought the rest of the sentence had something to do with how she wanted him to live already and cut the crap. His best, when he managed to pull it together, was still so much less than she saw in him. He walked around with his toolbox measuring to no end and schooling any woman within earshot on the importance of the level. A child on each hip, she waited until he left to patch the holes in the walls and mend whatever needed repair after he was through fixing, and she nursed the babies and until she died, repeated, don’t get caught up in ideas, they take you nowhere in the end. She was on morphine in the end. 

They said she went peacefully, for living had taught her nothing if not to die well and full of grace. He didn’t last long after his Grace was gone, with no one left to wait for him to come around to living. Then he gave up the ghost of his self-importance and he followed after. What remains are the shadows of a collection of statues, looming. He never grew into them. They are still here.

say the word

in the dark times, singing

Three weeks ago, I met a daughter, just out of rehab, tattoos on her face.

You don’t get tattoos on your face so young and so beautiful unless. You don’t get those without knowing what it means to be taken from all knowing and collapsed into container for taking the pain as it comes from the strangers who come from a place from which memory has long been erased and every effort made to replace its former volume with desperate force. It doesn’t take so much imagination to understand what happens to girls in desperate places.

She was gentle and frightened and I sat with her in solemn awe, I see you, daughter, and now––here. I could offer only space and calm (no, I didn’t have the wifi code, none of us did) and said what I could about the possibility of story, to take the stuff of before and bring it before the fire of pen on page, fingertips on keyboard, voice taking stage before the formerly silent self, to sing brokenness back into being. “I like this,” she said, “I need more of this.”

It was days between losing and marking the loss to a system of regulations in the name of keeping safe and I nodded my acceptance when they told me as I imagine she may have, eventually, after they took her away––even through boiling rage against another senseless day in the wake of so long breaking–––meaning to maintain devotion to the hope for an ordering hand, coming where waiting feels like a looping prayer, Say the Word.

May she find that word, or it find her.

perennial questions

in muddy waters

Everybody always asks me these questions, the writer was saying. Hah, like I know! For me, it’s all about the desperate questions, you know? Like, what’s the matter?

But then, he said, everything is like that, my whole life––you gotta stay close to hell, and also to joy. And somehow manage not to melt. Maybe that’s what it is for me, why I also stay so close to water. People are always asking me about the water, he said. I guess it’s the eternal quality about it, and that savage beauty, where everything is eating each other.

We were eating beer and catfish at a party in his honor. Someone asked him how he kept things fresh. He laughed and said, people don’t know how interesting they are! Then he invoked Beckett, who said nothing was funnier than unhappiness.

At this point, we were interrupted by a mutual friend, younger. How’s the work now? The friend was asking and the writer made a face. It’s going, he said, but who knows where?

saudade

with filling fantasies

Some of us can remember when all the play of the boys in certain areas involved the phrase, Bang, you’re dead! on loop around fantasies of patrol over living targets, amid the wild promises of ending famine with flying cars. I remember the dizzy vertigo of sensing what I could not express, which might translate loosely into something like, there is too much future here. Sensibilities, such as they were, were overfilled water balloons, ready to be tossed, bang bang, you’re dead, except they were bombs. Wait your turn, said the adults to these boys, and take the bull by the horns, and you don’t know war, for you are soft. The boys couldn’t talk back, and you could hear their resolve, filling each balloon body one at a time. To prove them all wrong, one day.

Deer Friends

In this condition

Being a human creature makes me prone to bouts of fantasy. Such as, sometimes I get it in my head that I would like to go out and run with some deer, with feelings of vague and wistful longing. Then occurs to me that following an impulse like this to its natural conclusion will likely result in an awkward encounter, as I do not currently have any actual friends who are deer. If I did, I would probably know that going for a run through some woods or across a field or even a highway–– however spontaneous it may seem in a moment–– is the sort of thing one must be invited to do. Then I recall what kind of creature I really am, and feel vaguely ashamed, which seems like another habit particular to my kind.

Every Grain

Our sands

With bone worn backs we huddle
in the shadow of empire, nursing
unborn stars, to beg the question:
how many dawns remain? Against
vain attempts to tame the hungers
of that constant, mechanical mouth,
its gaping hole the void in the centers
where we once met beneath another
sun, in another time, before time was
eaten too, to be excreted in legions
of micro units, meted out in
increments
of perceived
worth.

Against the Sirens

The telling

Tell me about it, we say, nodding at the most recent lament before us––in the chair, at the table, with the tired voice; in passing in the wild rush. Tell me, we repeat, like shaking a clean sheet to fold it before stacking with the others, who whisper in chorus at this gesture and its countless kin, constantly throughout each day, a plea for a home not quite remembered or fully left. Tell me about it. Tell me about that place I can always remember, ever almost. Whisper to me of this collective hush again, what I need to hear against the sirens.

Keepers

After Jorge Luis Borges

You forking paths, tongued by seekers
who pose over volumes, boring into our flesh
read the sins of fathers in our pages, see
me a harlot waiting to happen, a hope unleashed
are binding us––feet, knees, waists, necks
you stitch the skins of us tight, fisting the pages
certain you know what you’ve read, certain
you know us, that we may unleash what dreams
may come to the unfettered flesh, unbound, to
understand the soft-footed silence, treading near
my unshed pages saved from the burn, awaiting
language to make ourselves into all that you fear will––
?

*
The first word in each line comes from a sentence in Andrew Hurley’s translation of Borges’ “The Library of Babel,” (“You who read me, are you certain you may understand my language?”).