From the dark.
Who now? From these soils, what buried visions. Who knew. Move now. As a memory reaching for the threshold of remembrance. The veins of earth strain. Who is the salve and the wound. Of daughters who learn to flee men. Who buried seven days in earth up to their necks learned to wait. O mother of men. Return.
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.
A song for dark times.
To whisper in music of this abiding sorrow, to braid longing
with abundance, a near-ecstatic mourning
into unborn tomorrows.
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.
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.
Study of the world: views from below.
Amidst an immensity too vast for containment, one vessel’s first heresy was division. The sorting into kinds: an exhilarating project for its heroes who were––(un)naturally self-proclaimed. From their abdomens they emitted the substance of webs of significance, and from these spun stories to support conclusions about which were to be marked for life and which for death.
So here we are. And now.
But who, we? And when.
If what is to be done is freedom for all, we move to unwind the choking snake of this original heresy from its tail/tale, to return to the beginning of the Word.
Approaching.
When the saints go silent, and the church doors are shut,
and the hum soaks up your hearing and the minutes
you meant for keeping spill a mess at your feet,
as the engine grinds another skull––
When something floats a hand from the hollows
of the day’s drift, may you reach for it.
Quickening reminders.
Remember to leave room for the winds. Of our ghosts to sing. Inside the stories we tell ourselves. In order to live.
And time in pieces.
The woman we called Space because she held us was talking about how she managed to survive. “Performance, mostly,” she said. We were waiting for Time to get ready, but he was arguing with himself again under his breaths. “I’m no monolith!” he was saying, and then, “Hah! Whatever you say!” Watching himself through splayed fingers: now a bright hope, now gone; now horizon, now barrier, now blank. And what of tomorrow? And tomorrows.
Philosophy of leaning ear.
Because she may speak in wind one day,
water in another, and in stone the next.
And when she sings through all in chorus,
I want to hear.
