And hearing range.
I know, love. The anxieties are legion.
But for now, I would like if you could
return to me the absence of my face
from where you’ve been hanging
these ghosts on its edges like
draperies to keep out the draft.
I rather like the velocity of that chill.
I have other uses for these bones.
I want to feel the air run through them.
It is something else, the air.
But that word is the custom
in this place.
I try using terms you know
––air, face, bones––
because the rest will not
translate.
Notes on Juneteenth, 2024.
One wonders about official days of remembrance sometimes, to what extent any one of them might serve as convenient cover for a miasma of forgetting that is, if not enforced exactly, afforded by numerous conditions, one of which is the immediacy of other disasters, collecting in such a swarm that they naturally imply a single organism, a looming and shapeshifting singular catastrophe, foreclosing belief in tomorrows.
And yet. Afraid for the living––all of us, I want to remember. The admission feels like a prayer from when my grandparents were living and the top of my head reached only their waists, and there was much to worry about but I had yet to come into full awareness of the idea that the moment at hand was one where the systematic extinguishing of living beings was as common and transactional an operation as real-estate sales. I am not worthy, the prayer went, but say the word and I shall be healed. Adjacent to another prayer, I believe. Heal my unbelief, and both came before the commercially-manufactured wafer was transubstantiated into the body that made all tomorrows possible for everyone, however few so long as we are gathered in that faith, however wavering.
I suppose I remember this now because I am aware that such a day of remembrance suggests celebration but also a sense of something hanging in the balance yet to be resolved. A call, perhaps? To which I may respond or stand in silent defiance, doubting its veracity. My favorite writer on these matters, Richard Rohr, reminds me that “The opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty.”
By this spirit, I am compelled to hope against despair, aware that I am not alone in wanting to remember in a room with a vast table from which none will be excluded. In this spirit, I want to remember every tomorrow, especially those newborn flames in danger of being snuffed out for lack of oxygen. To each tentative baby flame I want to whisper, I see you, and this of course is not selflessness but a symptom of hunger, for I am a wretched specimen of a so-called species (I mistrust taxonomies of the living) which after all may undeserving of persistence, and yet I am also a baby flame, not yet fire but not yet gone.
It is summer and I have a break from teaching so I read with the thirst of someone who is crossing an arid region in a heat wave. As so many are. And to what end? I cannot answer but this morning it is Paul Celan’s “The Dead Man,” an early poem written while his parents were being extinguished in the death camps of the last century. I nod my heavy head into its image of a passing wind, considering this life the kite that depends upon it, which can fly only as long as the wind persists and a hand other than its own holds at the other end. The speaker witnessing the poppies near the man’s wormy body, face down in the dirt, notes how they scrape blood from him, urging, kneel now, and drink it in!
Such is the posture that is now. To kneel, cupped hands, amid the collected bodies of this impossible moment as the machine drones on. And yet, the eyes before the single body still blink. The hands in anticipation yet hold. The word, does it come? Even now, can it be said? Perhaps I only move my pen to reenact the waiting for the moment when the body becomes. Tomorrow and tomorrow, heal my unbelief and breathe. Baby flame of we, ignite.
Time, space, heat, weather.
And I said, no, dear. Without any claims on infinity, I am only
here, threaded by vessels to this time where they river thick
until I don’t know when and many are broken but enough
keep on, motley constellation of us around aorta’s arch.
Much of what passes for memory whispers in that hush
with dawn’s birdsong of some impending rush––out, out!
It will run when that geography comes to catch in dust
or metal, the rust of us howling ––you can’t, you can’t!
we shrieked, catch me! and fast and faster than you
thought we were racing from that place but into it too
we were content to move in circles and knew nothing
of direction and content with little else but the chance
to spill the contents of ourselves those shrieks those
cries that liquid laughter out and out, nearer.
Bagged at the county fair
Given enough practice
a body can learn
to go missing
to protect the parts
always invisible
that have survived
the stabbing attentions
of being anybody’s prize.
Shielding
I remember the shadow
of that tree’s ancient grief
knobbed where it grew
into the breaks,
how it held us
from the heat,
the solid weight
of that shade.
When a bird
How often I wish I could tell you about this exquisite bird in such a manner that you might know her, too. She was here before me, before the shattering. Bird is an inadequate word in this context, but I use it because it approximates a reference to a creature with a beak and feathers. She was much larger than I am but bowed her magnificent neck to meet me at eye level. I wanted to look into those eyes endlessly. This seemed like an indulgent and selfish response to such an offering, so instead I started numbering her feathers. I recognized that this was likely an impossible task, especially for someone of my limited intelligence who lacked training and had neither tools or methods beyond the steadfast attention that had long been a symptom of what my elders gravely suggested was a somewhat outsized and possibly obscene capacity for devotion. One, two, three. . . I was at 13,426 when abruptly interrupted. An official voice demanded to know, What are you doing? but I would not turn my head from those undulating wisps. I meant to keep my count. Other things were shouted but I ignored them, meaning to hang on.
That is not, the voice insisted, real. I heard a click of metal.
What followed was not feathers, but sky. What ghosted through it has no pulse, no blood, no song. There is no after here and nothing to save by the counting. Only this continuance. I am rearranged inside it, but I cannot tell you how. I thought the words would appear at the end of that count and if it did not end that I would live inside the action of keeping it––forever, with no need for language beyond what was passing between the count and that vision in pieces. Now what.
Of being
Given the common knowledge that some plants emit sounds inaudible to the human ear, it is no stretch to imagine how these might consider the two-legged marchers on the road of progress: mute, mindless, mechanistic creatures, incapable of understanding story, with no sense of how meaning is made.
And remains
You could hear it, the echo of each in that fleet of arks, each meaning to save in the coming storm, but the rain did not come. Only this flood of arks, and the small ones crushed beneath the weight of them. Then there were arks at the speed of sound and now approaching light, the rate at which the saving reaches the cycle of completion, finally and fully invisible. Tell me, angel, do you still breathe under there? I want to hear you.
Notes on form
You managed to learn instead of what they meant to teach you, the salvific possibility of carceral silence, to balance the weight of bird death and tree life, to sing love poems while exiled to the latrines. In this way, you taught the human form as a thing to be created, even and especially now.
Inspired by the lifework of Nazim Hikmet.
Pulse
The small trembles before the great, a learned response, essential for survival. What happens when the small is so puffed up with the air of his own invention that he forgets trembling, dismissing all capacity for awe of anything beyond his mirror?
