See us, arms like feathers raised, we want to get it right––the angle, to hold it. For the time. For the wind. When it comes. There is so much we want. So much we want to get right.
At the Cliff
With feathers.
Month: August 2023
Blank Space
And nobody’s wind.
It was the last evening of the break, and it was nothing.
How I loved it, remembering now.
The walks we took back and again to the car, checking
on things we forgot, returning empty-handed to share
our mutterings with the cat and laughter over
your particular socks and your ice cream
and the way you pretended not to sleep
and the show we watched was stupid
and we kept on repeating its lines
laugh-crying over nothing and I didn’t even write
a page, only opened a file and closed it
I could feel the time closing for this and now wonder
if it’s what’s left undone in a place that sanctifies.
I will miss this, the lack of pretense
that we were anything but here
breathing in it.
Estimated Arrival
Return from Dreamland.
And approximately when will you be back,
do you imagine, from the beyond of
wherevers in which you have been off
sighting the next forever in the dappled branches
of those metaphorical trees in the woods
of your etceteras? Some of us are dying
to know.
What This Is
All but fire, a natural history.
Then came the question of fire, its striking immediacy. It had to do with all that changes suddenly, but we were there to describe what was. A separate matter. It was decided.
When it came to outlining the real, we would omit this strange incandescence––unnatural, wasn’t it? ––to better focus on the unburning parts. Research hummed along after that, with machine-like efficiency, without distraction by the looping songs of grieving souls.
What is this? We would say, of each non-burning specimen. And where there was no name, we could invent one, and all of it fell under a single decision, and it was Progress and we went with it, marching.
Variabilities
Of similar forms.
Considering the history of a given set of bodies, the artist posed a question. Where are the bones of the bones? she asked us, and we knew our nakedness an extension of a larger shadow, casting us out. Once in it, we danced something more than imitation. The camel’s eye our needle, we stitched our skeletons into new visions of before to scatter our tomorrows until we lost their tracks and had to make them new again.
***
Inspired by the work of Nancy Graves.
Beg the Question
To match the story.
Beyond seven rivers
o what there was
in the oldest of ages
upon a time
not now.
Tell us again
of that gratuitous evil,
its stank breath.
Its obvious malignance.
Give us that clarity,
take us back.
Calculating Risks
Proceedings, with caution.
If tortoise asks eagle for flying lessons and man for the word––and once given, wants fire. If the seed begs for better ground, let it hear the bird warning smoke. If the wolf takes the sickbed in costume to hide its want, if the girl takes the stranger for familiar. If the bull. If the labyrinth. If the thread. Run.
Trickster Rituals
Possibilities for movement.
Something that is was just here. It has significance but will not fit any storyline. There was a grotesque beauty reveling. And then, and then. Every soul has its way of coming to terms with its containment in space, contending with death. It crowds the psyche, back against a wall. It has no end, and isn’t going anyplace. It’s always going on. And then, and still. Unlike the notion of story––something that, as they say, happened. The order of movements is crucial.
The Proximity of Matter
With Cynthia Hawkins.
Changing spaces between us, we kept looking.
Form. Color. Line. Body, body, us.
We were skeptical when you confessed.
My practice is abstraction, you said.
We thought you should not say that out loud.
But you persisted. Draw a tree long enough,
you said, it will evolve. Until what you have
are lines, white space, and the pulse of intersections.
The point was not less tree, but more.
Not the sum of its parts, but something beyond.
In the beginning, you think it’s about figures.
But stay with it, and you see. What matters
is movement. What matters is direction.
What matters is space.
We wondered which space.
Between the canvas and the eye, you said,
where they float.
We wondered which they.
***
Inspired by (and using borrowed phrases from) this interview with Cynthia Hawkins. The title comes from one of Hawkins’ series.
One Hope
For what may shine.
That you may one day know a lens not terror, a posture not crouched, sounds neither siren nor drone, and weathers unrhymed with death count. Food to offer, not to reap, and time as a ladle to be passed to the tune of Here, take it. Take what you need. Did you get enough? when no host will rest until everyone is so full that they lose the count, numbers blurring back into beginning, and no one thinks to save the light for when it leaves us.