Tracing elements
How frequently I am reminded, by calligraphies beyond my reach, that I have come from nothing and will return. Blood has its own cadence, impatient with vastness. It will only sing against the fabric of its containment and we, these imperfect vessels––hold, dancing at the edge of a dark pit. There is gravity to it, pulling. What resists will not name itself in a language I can recognize. Meanwhile, this music.
Of edges
Where was the edge of that place with the weathered hands of that white-haired woman who collected birchbark as she walked? For art, she said. Whether to make something or for the sake of those scraps alone, their jagged perfection, I did not think to ask.
The open mouth
If it gets so dark
that singing seems
to stop
like a final answer
to that constant question
would you find me
where I wait
in silent suspension
open mouthed or tight-lipped
and remind me back
to music
one faltering note
at a time
to the beginning of the first
song?
Would I know
what lives
at the bottom
of the first
breath to rhyme
with the heights
of the last?
Would it know
me? Could it
enter, even
then?
Morning
Somewhere behind a fence
a child, still breathing, dares
to ask.
Witness standing
Stars throb against the rim of what I see, and my reaching hands hold like waving a signal to the departed, We’re over here! Come join!
And in their winking response I glimpse the humor of their restraint before my limits. I always think the thing to bear is longing and never consider arrival, or the unspoken answer to the questions I’ve begged.
And where do you think we’ve gone off to? And which of us is missing, now?
And how we called us once
When I lived here before, I had many names because the pretense of sticking to one had yet to be invented. I can bet you did, too. But of course, that was another here, and we never thought to set it all down for the record or posterity because those habits didn’t come until the static names, weighted to set into stones and books and badges. At first, we were excited to carry these like weights in our pockets. They kept us, as the saying went, grounded.
Before, I had names for the birds and the ones they called me, the grasses and what they whispered back; the suggestions of skies–––and not one of these was ever wrong.
Perhaps wrongness came later, too, or at least the modern form of it––the looming concrete tower with eyes on every side, ready to fire, that leaden shadow draping its weight over all the places where our names used to breathe.
In birdcall fields.
Sometimes I dream of following deer past abandoned gold mines on paths overgrown with oak and eucalyptus, with manzanita in bloom, in a dew-slick early morning where birdcall is so thick I can’t help laughing, calling back. Hi birds! And what is going on? as they continue and the widening thirst of this overstretched heart can’t help but hear what follows as a kind of answer, singing Us, us! Hey girl, look at us! Hubris, sure, but such is the lens most readily available to my kind. If I were someone wiser, an owl maybe, I would use sound to trace the silhouette of the tiniest among us as though to call it out, that form, from someplace just behind the center of an ancient hunger. Then I could stop asking what is going on because no answer could match my songsight.
Turning.
Now look what luminous
thread of water winds a knot
to mark a cycle’s sound.
Call home.
To live by the hope of moving an epoch’s need to purge an overdue confession, the harpy shrieks her body of sound with nothing but noise to lose.
First steps.
In the language I am learning, I can only falter, halting between words. I move from one syllabic rock to the next with unsure steps, their surface shining, wet, and try not to slip into the stream of all I imagine possible to say, if only I knew more of these words, how to handle their music well enough that they would hold we, floating like a pair of otters under skies that would still defy naming yet welcome the earnest try.
