Month: April 2024

Irreverence

Lords of the land

The only problem with that forward gaze was its original intent, to moor a land to an immature idea of the body she cradled while the cradled one, standing just past infancy, assumed dominion before he learned the force of a grown body, bowed––to stunning ignorance––as he kept his shoes on, surveying with proprietary gaze while making speeches, deaf to the winding hymns in currents past his plugged ears and blind to the ancient eyes perched just above, and forgetting the feel of her soils in his hands where once he kneeled.

Against Intuition

Between poles of a whole

At times it became clear that there was something very wrong about the way things were going, and that it was best for everyone seen to pause until the critical unseen factor could show itself. The risk of making things much, much worse was grave. But the movers of the moment were insistent. Action was valued for its own sake; it didn’t matter in which direction. To resist implied weakness. So, they kept on doing rapid things with decisive speed. More things! They announced, Happening Now! and More Things! Coming Soon.

These Times

Beat drop

The fabric that had held us had been thinning for several seasons. When it gave way, the rhythm changed, and we dropped. We had moved into another time, adjacent to the one we had been in. No one said, we are in another time now. It just happened. One layer pulls back, revealing something of an entirely different texture contained within the form. Neither did we ask, are we something else now, too? But of course, we were. As creatures of time, we felt its shifts within us, in our blood attuned to each one, the waves and tides of us, keeping what held us until it did not.

Parts of a Tree

Bodies in time.

While the idols of the hour were blasting libraries to dust, we were driving home from practice with a snack and my daughter was saying, When I die, I would like to be a tree. Then my body will feed the other creatures, and the earth, and everything. Swallowing, I said great idea and we talked like that for the rest of the drive, growing limbs toward clouds, reaching for rain. And talk turned to the cat, Buzz, who was napping in the window when we got home, so we tapped it twice from outside to say hello and then laughed at the face she made back. We took a picture from outside the window and smiled to see her floating inside a reflection of the sky, clouds at her ears. I want Buzz to stay forever, too, my daughter said, and we thought maybe she could be a bird to keep napping on us and coming and going whenever she wants, and we went on like that for a little while more, wondering what we would remember together with our threaded roots and the chorus of the morning making nests in our new ancient flesh.

To Say the Word

In time.

What bears the clock’s repeating to fold a blanket again, soft on the back of the chair where yours just was, what names the length of time to your return? I was and I remember once collecting names and meaning it my mission to hold every noun of a single tongue. I wrote them one by one on cards. How young then with so little time for waiting. Did the project last a year, three weeks, a day? Not until I ran out of cards, I can tell you but you can say I am still at it, minus the cards, minus the gathering––and I’ve slowed. I spend so much more time repeating, turning over the few I have: tongue, memory, hand, fold. Collection, I––You. What bears the name’s repeating, to fold its vowels between lips and hold them as if to absorb a promise till it takes. What names the way a body learns that name is just the first sound of the word that holds the door open for a moment where the flesh of form may enter folding body over threshold to bear time by letting go to gather names as leaves of leavings and the word was to begin and the what was folded wing and when it opened it revealed a new name for the next place not yet known–– I go

Dream Melt

From the last ice age.

the imagination is where it rains paint onto frescoes
of figures to crowd the divine comedy clubs where we
come and go every evening, no ID, no cover at the door

carrying our huddled masses of memory on backs
crunching shells of peanuts and empires on the floor
the strobe light pulsars keeping time with unborn stars

first wears the crown––it is the chicken or the egg,
but who can say is on the mic now, to proclaim
in a language unknown to whomever has ears

no tears need translation and what is the time?
it is lost and what is the point? only a moment
and where did it begin? in the beginning

was the word and the word rained down where
we gathered here to catch it back to the mouths
of us speaking all at once in the land where

the constant rain is coming
from the vision at the bottom
of the iceberg where it

melts

The Making of Myths

Of the stuff of facts.

How crystal on one side, flame on another: one self-organizing, the other of order from noise. How both rivet the gaze. How depth must be hidden on the surface. Why what is hidden is often of no interest. Except when one is looking for something merely possible. Except where merely possible looms a vast atmosphere to contain whole cosmos, where the opus has no definitive form and is instead a series of attempts to reach it. What monster in the waves before the days of recorded history waits beneath the surface beyond detection, to re-emerge as who.

In the Time of the Story

Rituals of nourishment.

Time had his moods, his sizes, colors, shapes, and volumes––depending on the story that held him. When he was out, Space and the other mothers and grandmothers had an expression. “Stories take no time,” they said while skipping over whole months, years. By this logic, a journey spanning continents and decades might happen in the span of a cup of coffee in the midafternoon, light slicing through the blinds across a table to rest on the crown of one or more children at breasts. One might begin here is a story where someone tells a story in which someone tells of someone telling what they heard from another, and so on. By this ritual, the storyteller was saving her life. By this ritual, they nursed the children until Time returned.

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