For breadth
I am sometimes permitted to return as a single filament of root hair on an ancient tree, and stretch toward the hair of another nearby, who is not yet tree and not yet anything visible because all its life, for now, is happening underground.
Shining sound.
In the stillness what spoke we knew to hold us inside an impossible hour against the radiant blaze of sky-bright sea, looking back.
One, two, one again.
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.
With music
Strange angel, admit yourself. The upward reach is not enough where the first teachers are these cave systems writhing, diving beneath these soils, to meet the blind fish in tiny pools, in your undiscovered country still so untamed that it is unafraid to play haunted host to invisible harp. You sing the fine wind plucked from delicate fissures of split rock, and knock again. Come in.
Care and feeding of arrival
I am using pointed understatement when I tell you, this was not the moment I had in mind. I mean, who ever does? When it arrives, the thing to say is something about how no one asks for these things, they just happen. It’s part of the deal of living, blah blah, and moments like this come and–––eventually, go, so. . . hang in there! Except that in my case, it could be argued that I had asked for it, in a way. After all, no one had forced me to be the first to raise my hand at that candlelit conference in the lavender-scented room where the host on high tossed a question so airy it was almost irresistible. “Who is ready” the host asked, in fluttering words like diaphanous silk, “to start cherishing every moment of your life?”
“Me!” I cried out. I mean, what had I been doing, anyway? Time for a new chapter, right?! Carpe diem.
I should explain to you a little about the place I am calling “room” here. It was an unusual space. The arrangement was series of level stages, and beneath each stage was a level for audience, assembled in interlocking parts like a staircase. No matter where you sat, the variant lighting remained focused on the speaker directly above, while in the shadows behind this speaker was another audience, turned up to a yet higher stage, focused on a single speaker, who was in turn at the perimeter of another audience, looking up to the next, and so on. Likewise, although I felt myself to be invisible and anonymous, I was, to those at the perimeter of this series of stages, a body on a stage. When I raised my hand, I had announced for all to see, “I am ready! Yes, yes! Every moment!”
Now the conference was over, and so was the vast space, the candlelit room, fine clothing, complimentary Prosecco, and the lavender scent emanating from air ducts. I was back to the version of being commonly referred to as “normal” and strenuously meaning not to waste any of the insights of my inspired enlightenment. Sure, it was clear I had some cleaning to do. Floors, shelves, litter box, but what was important––I made a note with my pen––was to reject the complacency of terms like “normal” as the aberrations they were, preventing commitments like the one I had just made to the wonder of every moment.
That’s when my moment showed up. I was not yet done with my coffee, but no matter! As the speaker had enthusiastically encouraged, you had to “be ready to take life as it comes!” and “Cherish every single one!”
“Hello,” I said to the moment arriving. It was a large moment, limping. It resembled one of those Jim Henson monsters, but with a less hygienic look. It was covered in a thick brown fur, some of which was matted in coarse ropes. It moved with a limp on two legs, shedding some sort of wet and silvery debris with each step, grunting. With each grunting step, the moment emitted a draft of hot air from its mouth. The smell reminded me of the steam that would rise in thick plumes from a manhole cover that I learned to strenuously avoid on my walk back to an apartment I rented as an undergrad.
“Finally,” the moment said, pausing. Perhaps to indicate some arrival.
“Well,” I said. There was plenty I did not say. I did not ask the moment what sort of moment it thought it was or berate it with snide comments. I kept to myself the thought I had about this moment really being a poor representative of its kind. There was no need to insult the moment, who could possibly not help what it was, at least at this point. Who for all I knew may have been a witness to my enthusiasm the other night and decided I would be just the right host for the cherishing of its life. Which I had to assume was as fundamentally precious as any other, even though what is fundamental, when it comes to the living, is not necessarily welcome. For example, death, decay, the emission of various sounds and substances at inopportune times––and whatever this moment was.
As we stood there facing each other, I noticed that the moment could qualify for a whole ecosystem unto itself. There were various organisms crawling through, writhing in, and flying to and from the shadows in its dense fur. From its undercarriage, it dripped a dark, viscous liquid onto the floor. I would need a mop for this moment, and perhaps some absorbent towels.
The cat blinked from her perch on the windowsill, regarding the moment with apparent interest before turning to reposition herself, closing her eyes again. The moment rumbled a loud noise. Was that––a fart? I wondered, then checked myself. It was important not to jump to conclusions about this moment. Then a smell more thick and powerful than anything the cat had ever done suddenly emanated throughout the entire room. The cat startled as if a firework had gone off. She jumped from the window to the desk below her and quickly left the room.
“Well, Moment,” I said, when my cough subsided. “It’s just us. Now that you’re here, let’s get you settled.”
I was realizing that I was much less prepared than I had wanted to be for any moment. Also, that I might have avoided this if I had passed on the third round of Prosecco, but, Oh! The candles! The soft music! When in Rome. But now was a whole different setting and my instincts fluctuated between crying, raging, and wanting to disappear after a large dose of something strong and annihilating.
Really, I had never seen a moment like this. But I had met some bad characters in my time, some of which had really thrown me off, and if there was one thing I had learned it was that it was better to stick to those routines that you knew, when it came to getting through a day, rather than spin around and hope to grow some new ones to launch you out of it. I might not be very enlightened, after all, but I never let anyone sit hungry in my presence if I could help it.
“Have you eaten?” I asked the moment. As the moment lumbered closer, I sensed that a faint might be imminent and tried to position my back to the bed. It took considerable effort to resist the impulse to cross my arms or hold out an elbow in defense against this moment.
Now the moment was sniffing my ear, my neck, and a few other places. I tried to hold still. Then it sniffed the air and followed its nose to the cat food, then outside to the pantry shelves, and finally to the refrigerator. An hour later, the moment slept on the bed, having effectively resisted my efforts to coax it onto a makeshift pile of old towels on the floor. The moment was snoring. The cat returned, pausing to sniff the hairy, clawed foot of the moment, which was dangling off the edge of the bed. Then she resumed her spot at the window, pausing briefly to note her empty bowl with a pointed look in my direction.
I made a grocery list. It was hard to tell what I was going to need or how long this moment would be staying. It was so much larger than I expected a moment to be. If I stayed there, I would have to sleep in the chair or on the towel bed. But there I went again, projecting my own concerns into the future of this moment.
Right, then. Food first. I grabbed my wallet, keys, list. “Okay,” I said to the cat and my new moment, “I’ll be back.”
Cyclic repairs
Because you can only hold that mouthful of silence for so long until it guesses you empty of time and the breath comes loose where the reins give way, let the eyes finally mute their speech to find what drifts downlight to arrive along the banks. Claw nearer to some jagged edge and hold.
And a language of love
I was reading Paul Celan in the season of coming into awareness of a need for glasses but not yet seeing the full picture (!) so I kept having these delightful misreadings which were less graceful than what he said but somehow more intimate, like the poetry of glances between secret lovers in a crowded room while everyone else is speaking in very matter-of-fact tones. Instead of cavity awake, I read sanity sneakers, and not heartstorm but heartstream, and not blessed but bleeded, and in a sentence about libraries, I saw beaks, not books, like Oh Paul, you imp, I see you, winking back, and then when I got the glasses there was a moment of trepidation before I opened his collection, because maybe after all that winking and innuendo of double meanings in a room crowded with strangers we would find ourselves alone with frank expressions and nothing much to say, like how he looks on the cover with eyes that seem to be daring the would-be speaker to break the silence of that pause, and it turns out that the words I’ve been reading as whispers have been in larger letters all along, not whispers at all but a normal tone like two people sitting in a room full of space and regular furniture even though everyone knows about the bodies interred in the cellar walls and when that happens what do you even talk about anyway that can do any justice to the naked fact of being the only other person in a room and all that human baggage? This is why it is no small relief to see, in a line about hands, that the speaker still calls what he is doing arrowing with you. (!) And why I close the book and stop there for the day and hold the thought like Oh Paul. How did you–––?
Peripheral flash.
Learning to wait by passing rays to harvest the seeping cellar of the weeping sun as candle end drips to wet the waiting lips.
From a book of days
The truest words were best saved for the dark because sunup had a way of making all that magic scatter back to business everyone what do you want for lunch and time to buy milk again and when exactly are you going to fit that in on top of everything else in the litany of needs churning on the cycle of these faces until the suns plunged again to be sewn into the dreams of other days by the sons at the shore, ever open-mouthed for the reaping.
Moonlit expertise
There was a group we would see at night by the river. We wanted to know what they did there. If it was nothing good, as everyone said, we still wanted to know, but how? One night we went to see for ourselves. With blue-shadowed feet they danced the shores to pieces, and we woke in our beds and went back the next night to see why? and they explained that they were seeking out the marrow of the river stone and to our question on for what? they said to talk. There was a precision to their foolishness. This, we recognized. These were definitely not the ones you called if you had a question about calculations having to do with variable rates but could tell you in the space of a single breath the minutes until daybreak or the number of feathers needed to make a heart on the ground the size of your head, and whether when you are done it will even fit, and how to go about attaching it.
