For your deliverance.
Your bed the hole
you return to
in this house
your den this
noise looming
scourge upon tree,
this engine to drown
your last note and
the first, how
little one, do you keep––
singing
time?
How do you––?
Keep. Sing this
time.
Time for vigilance.
Then comes a big day. The kind suspended in stop-motion with a sound in the ears like the high notes of a distant organ, with bird quaking in chest and stomach sliding sick-slick with anticipation against the ribs. For saying Okay and Breathe and Please. For hyper-awareness of need, for the moment to respond to events already in motion. To accept all offers to be carried, prayed over, protected where you go alone. These big ones have a way of reminding what a day is. The others are no smaller, only less well known.
An offering to other hands.
Over large canvasses, he painted whole body, whole space, his life.
When his given form could no longer rise to meet the wall, his family offered theirs as new mediums.
He used a laser pointer to guide their hands, the paint. Saying No, there, and Yes, like that. The work evolved, with them.
I miss being able to do it myself, he said, but it’s about the art and you have to go where it takes you.
***
Inspired by the life and work of of Frank Bowling.
To keep a flame.
May this penumbra
number routes
to lighthouse.
May this labor
allow love’s fall
into tongue.
May it speak.
Writers on writing, overheard.
What are you working on?
I am writing a series of stories. I think. Or something.
What are they about?
They are about what this book is. They are still coming.
What is this book?
Complicated, I guess. They keep adding new parts.
So, what do you do?
I listen and try to write as they come. I guess it would be easier if so much of what they do didn’t evade language.
Wait. That doesn’t make sense. How can any part of writing evade language?
I mean the verbal kind. The kind I know.
What do they use?
It’s more like an incandescent unknowing. Like the brilliance of the world after memory loss.
Do you speak that?
I feel like I could once but lost it. I am trying to learn. But I guess I am a slow learner. I keep defaulting to the old expectation that they speak mine, forgetting I’m the visitor.
***
Inspired when I encountered Ingrid Rojas Contreras’ use of the phrase “incandescent unknowing” in reference to her experience of memory loss, which she relates interestingly to her process of storytelling in this interview she gave to Kaveh Akbar.
Reflections on night work.
It’s easy to give short shrift to surface reflections. No one wants to be called shallow, but look at the distances to be traveled here. I know a guy who only paints at night, his subject always other paintings, who limits himself to reading them by moonlight. I asked him why. As he sees it, the fully lit subject offers a false sense of clarity which masks the problem of too much information. The more you look, the more a well-lit form will start to fold, collapsing in on itself. It can be very distracting. This happens to me all the time, so I was very intrigued by his solution. By taking away the pretense of clarity, he gave himself over to what he could imagine. By removing the pretense of originality and limiting himself to the study of another’s work he was paradoxically freed. As he puts it, I take comfort in the discomfort of not being myself.
***
Inspired when I encountered a description of David Schutter’s Night Work. I take creative liberties with this imagined interpretation of the artist’s process, adapting insights from a recent BOMB interview.
And other ancient mysteries.
Just the other day, we were discussing how it might be a good idea for us to pay close attention to the most enduring species, given our current trajectory. And then you showed up, looking like an underwater plant. Spineless, with branching appendages, radial arms, each like a feather. Where did you keep your fists, and how did you get this far without the opposable thumbs we so prized? What about your capacity for reason? Did you even have reasons? Name one, we challenged, but you were silent.
What you did was something else, and we couldn’t look away. You went on and on, catching what drifted before you. What you lost––namely, arms––you regrew. There is something here, we think. About the way you present as a walking plant, hiding in plain sight. We were trying to name it when you moved away. We were surprised by your speed. We wondered about your purpose but had to surface for air.
Then we went inland and sat by the banks of a river, the site of another flood. Being creatures prone to contemplation, we often sat at the edges of water bodies, looking for some way to understand the movement between life and loss. When the waters receded, we would see the crowns of drowned monuments, and these would knock against ancestral bones. And we would think of things to notice. Like how the river must know every stone it touches, and these. They went on, knocking, and we left.
***
Inspired by feather stars.
Addressing the observer.
I am not going to submit
to being recognized
or theorized,
but I will slow
here before you
somewhere between
what you see and think,
dressed in a fabric
you dreamed once
––when? about something
you strained to know.
You never knew
it, or me. But I
am here. And
you–––?
Reflections at play.
We mean to be sophisticated in our tastes. But this is absurd. Really. This whole idea of art we step into. The way you demand we become it. The size and height of these rooms, the excess of mirrors, balloons. You invite us in––for pictures, of course. For the experience. Mirror, mirror, mirror, mirror––on the wall, ceiling, floor. Which is which? Wall, wall, wall, wall. And everywhere we look––even out, there we are. You call it the reflection room. We are delighted.
***
Inspired by an experience in one of the Infinity Rooms created by artist Yayoi Kusama.
Subway meditation.
That this feeling might be bottled and passed like emergency water. How to describe the taste of this sacrament. It has something to do with the shared steam of this space between stops, thigh to thigh, hand over hand even with the gentle deference of strangers; the false metaphor of personal space, how easy it is to hold at a distance, but impossible here. Whatever territory there might be is no island but an occasional bubble in this sea and we dive from this common reef and back again, open doors take these bodies given up with a nod to this passage, and in between stops none of us are anywhere but here. This is no epiphany, it would not be so bold, it only strains the suggestion of one incubating in the chest, but holding back, too humble to intrude on the next inhalation. Who needs another revelation now? There is only the weight of our bodies, this body, the man in scrubs sleeping on his feet with his hand on the bar above, we know what this is, but Shh. There are meals to make, knots to pray out of, debts that will never be paid, and let’s not get into all that right now, not here. Only hold.
