How we
through us moved
like hurled bricks
into glass to break what
would not say our names
or ever yes
only no
and once we knew
we threw us anyway
all in.
masses
velocities over time
Month: December 2024
confession
of desire
I want to do so much more
of what I dream may last
but most of my offerings
are ephemeral in nature.
authorial voice
and mirror shadows
The writer, aware that the telling of certain stories in the third person might, by another writer, be handled effectively as neat confessionals, sometimes laments. It would be good if she could walk into the world naked, saying “I am that I am!” like some deity.
Having lost belief in selves as focal points some time ago, now she can only watch what happens to her body with uncertain degrees of remove. Having also lost allegiances to what she once might have considered a certain landform of facts like a single continent against a singular ocean, she now thinks that it does her no good to try to figure where any of these went.
Now that any nascent sense of would-be self is gone, memory can also be recognized at some distance, for the fiction it is. Her old ways would never admit such heresy. Once, she tried to say things like “I did,” and “I went” and “this is how it was.”
She is no longer convinced that she has been anyone, anywhere, ever. However, given various expectations of the current milieu, this emerging understanding is going to continue to present certain problems. For now, the writer may decide to ignore these, keeping vigil in this bed in this underground shelter where this pen over this notebook continues to move.
*
First published in Exist Otherwise, January 2023
way finder
to fit this fabric
one escapes the body to find her form
and asks, what can I give to you, love?
to catch a current of blood and fly
back to salt tears singing all that makes
such reckless reaching so despised,
to keep on with her flayed and wild
drumming, to dance beyond repair
into some manner of light that will
resist all explanation.
stilling
waters and what they carry
Sometimes I write notes and then find them later with something near gratitude. For an ability to forget to have the common sense to keep these things close. The finding sometimes happens when I am trying to remember what sort of self I ever was and if it matters whether I can answer.
It would be a stretch to call this feeling glad. I am not so mindful that I regularly feel glad to find my next breath. But here I am, needing one to come. And then this funny note from a strange stranger, and we fumble on in the dark.
benediction
from a time beside ours
Child. How old do you think I am?
Don’t answer. What can you know
of time, having tasted–-what, a drop?
What fills your mouth has enough
volume to fill the space of the cave
around your tongue. Hold it there
and pay attention.
Don’t talk to me about time’s layers
when an atom has flown like pollen
into your nose to stick like a note
at the back of your throat,
substance enough––
to make you sneeze it from yourself
like one or another abstract theory
about its essential substance
as though your words can do you
any good in your current state.
Taste, child. Try holding
what comes. Swallow.
Know nothing. Try again.
This is what we do.
They spit on our foreheads.
It does not mean to us
what the spitting kind want
it to mean, and so we carry on.
que c’est
Qu’est-ce que c’est ?
It is like wanting to be able to dance
in a place where my feet are steeped
in tar pits, and I am the soon-to-be exhibit,
wailing with my tusks turned to sky.
Je veux me réveiller et je veux croire
qu’il est peut-être possible de rester là,
pendant un petit moment avant d’être
choqué en retour d’accepter la violence
quotidienne.
I want to dream believing it is still possible
to stay there for a moment before
being shocked back into routine
acceptance of the routine violence
of a given day.
I sit here, bleeding, wanting to insist
let us not for now pretend to be saving
each other when simple company
is enough. If it isn’t, then what do I do
with this knowing? That you will never
hear.
The idea of rescue for anyone here is far
past the depths, and here is my confession.
I do not know what those depths are called.
I do not know this space. I cannot name this time.
And yet, time keeps insisting. On seeming to know
me. What a thing, imaginer.
But I suspect.
That something about being makes this happen.
Peut-être.
That I spend what life I have in service of what
I will never be able to offer in kind.
Où es-tu ? Je ne peux pas en voir.
Enough,
éventuellement.
When hope gives out, I only want
to dream.
chattering
chill
Go forth, love,
follow the bird
that flies from
you into night
so dark it trains
the eyes to watch
for what shimmers
over dirt under rain.
ayah
yet here
To calm the sphere through which the train still barrels on at reckless speed, this Space continues to insist on her arrival, as gossamer vapor to swaddle Time.
dogear
creased cosmos
If the only given I may assume asserts this universe as a story in pieces, with each unseen place a fiction to be assembled from salvaged shards of knowns and unknowns found and undiscovered bits, then my only conclusion may be to wonder at the mosaic brilliance of the map that swallows the all that any of us witnesses, in the valley of the trace of a single fold.
after Dionne Brand