Month: July 2024

Solute

To dissolve some absolution

Always wants. An attempt to loosen the fibers that seemed to contain the riddle of becoming. From that bonebound island I thought I knew what I was and knowing only wants, dreamed that if I were only more, I might hold those skies, that ocean, and swell to blooming so I could let it all go into the living. I used to imagine you a landscape I might photograph in pieces to print on transparencies, hold the light of you up to your light to translate for you this wonder at your nearness. I remember where we stood above the sea holding hands up into sunset as if to catch whatever heavens might finally rain.

But what do you want, always?
What does Always want?
I am impatient to know.
Please speak slowly.

I lack fluency and miss the nuance of your most important phrases.

The phrase “bonebound island” comes from The Notebooks of Dylan Thomas.

Seaworthy

Sight fishing lessons

The first thing to learn was forgetting well enough to dream a boat to help with crossing the night, its busy port thick with interdimensional commerce. The next was how to watch the anchor, watch the ropes, keep a pen and a lighthouse nearby to allow for return and remembrance. 

Mind, Gap

Life as story and the body of work

Test, label, claim. Lose again. Markings on a page. Carry on, eating through the next one, in bedraggled astonishment. Fold after fold, brain after the pattern of its existence. The brain a character in the story we tell. About ourselves. Every story we tell a story about ourselves. Or the brain is the story, depending on point of view.

Bodies. What problematic texts you are, with your endless contradictions and shifting parts. At every turn, you are at best barely contained and forever deconstructing your own perimeters to devour some other body in constant rewrite.

The Sea of Men

Shapes, shifting

In one account, she is the wine-dark carrier of iron-laden sons to strange shores of inscrutable speech. Often, she swallows them whole. In another, she is moved by strong wind through the night to become a wall. Then she falls and swallows them whole. 

The yet-to-be swallowed write of dreaded creatures in her waters, of her treacherous subtlety, and speculate that what she is keeping from them is surely a clue to their deaths. 

When they get like this, she sighs another tide and wonders with a bright bloom of red, if any of these can remember beyond the tales of monsters and bewitchers, how once she beheld him from below where he stood, looking, and offered back to him the shine of his own face.

Immortal City

Turning wheel

I swear it was an angel, said the captive near the end
who said that she said to him, this:

Are you thirsty, stranger? Has the road been long?
Come closer. Let me whisper of what is just beyond that bend.

They say there is a city of immortals somewhere, in celebration.
Who tells. Whose memory obeys command to speak.

What river, what other do you seek. All novelty, all knowledge, all oblivion.
Whose end, whose world. What immortality, and when.

Who is fluent in the customs of that place.
Who deserts before the spoiling.

Whose mother, what monsters, whose lips at that breast.
Who dazzled in what rays of that sun, when first.

Who from those shallow graves emerges to slake what thirst.
Whose prayer. What ear and when.

What ladder, whose wall, to what courtyard.
When joy, whose patience at the gates.

Where is the river that gives immortality and whose blood is in it,
and where is the empty canal that takes it away.

Whose will on what horse.
What labyrinth. Whose center. What well.

Between the Word and Here

Language and reach

What blots out its name to carry on with you?
I meant to make amends with her. For her.
Yes, pen, I want to remember. No less or more than myself.

What comes drifting to stand soul and clear?
They say I have or had a self.
Yes, pen, I believed them.
Yes, pen. When I said believed I meant I tried.
I mean I meant to try. To believe them.
About this they would call self, but something resisted.
Pen, do you think that resistance might be a sort of self?

What breath rose from here?
No, pen, I cannot point to her. I cannot tell you where she is.
But here, I think, yes.

What could we make and know as well as any name?
I meant to offer her up to you and you could trace her, bless her in this basement altar.
I meant to descend low enough through caves and cellars to find.
Her, or the altar, or you.
That we could meet.

The first two questions are adapted from lines by Paul Celan.