Sure, I am interested in keeping time. Who isn’t? But there has to be more to it than clocks. I can lose a clock, or the clocks can go all wrong, and then what? I will not even keep my body, and yet. As long as I am of the keeping kind, it is where I hold the world.
Sometimes I dream of knowing the world through other bodies. That I am a bird, for example, or whale, spider, tree. Of course, I do not know what it is to experience the world in these bodies. I can only imagine. If I ever did know, I suppose I had to give that awareness back, too.
Perhaps my first body is imagining. I cannot seem to keep myself. From asking, how did this happen? And when will? Or was, and then back again trying to collect some lingering residue of what, like the scent of a lover, is then gone.
The bower bird, to draw a mate, collects. Some make arrangements of blue rocks, blue buttons, cerulean feathers, chipped glass. Here is a keeping kind, too. I seem only ever tethered to this place by what I try to hold, even as I am aware that the point, they say, is letting go.
It is an easy thing to say––just let it go! But I think that we are so made for holding that the only way to know whatever insight might be held in this reminder is by drawing what will be released so close that it is married to your next breath, and on exhalation, finding that what flies is less air than essential limb, less tired past than the future hope you meant to breathe the next breath. And then what? No one goes around saying Just let yourself go!––with the same enthusiasm, and yet.
I’ve lost it again, lost the thread and probably myself and all that follows is another opening, another chance to hold and one less limb to do it with, and this sense that the constant act for me may be keeping and I will not keep up.
