to learn
Teach me
by your presence and your song.
I am too full right now to take
anymore of answers. I have been
here all day sampling those & now
i am overfull and still malnourished.
I cannot be alone in this. I won’t.
Let us sit here together awhile,
friend, attending
a concert of
shared breaths, our resounding
amens.
and the mass of a wait
sometimes it goes like this:
with should on one side, screaming
and on another, want––a solemn mass
bearing down until
one day, when the weight of it gives all
and then it’s time to hear the quiet part
now loud
what comes in whispers
The problem is always remembering, but some have none of that. They are the sort to wonder out loud where the time went. Those of us who remember well enough to be pierced every time by how thoroughly everything goes when it goes, cannot do this. But some are so convinced of their centrality that they wonder aloud about the interpretations of dreams, as if a congregation of gods had gathered to watch them sleep, leaving little dream notes to their chosen one. The rest of us went around, pulsing with the leaving of it when it had been so close. Interpretation was the enemy to that sort of charge. What it was wouldn’t stand for being caught in a goblet for drinking; at best it could be absorbed like mist into skin, to leave you feeling chapped whenever you walked anywhere drier than a cloud. Meanwhile it galloped before you, a herd of wilds never to be saddled, running the secret that would lose its legs in the telling. Hush child, intimates the dust in that wake––not a direct address, mind you. Only by not understanding may you receive anything worth knowing, even by thirds. It is like that most of the time, except for the moments when it isn’t. Being entirely unprepared for those, these tended to floor me. The way it comes sometimes, that vegetal speech cracking in husks, and me too dumb to leave my fascination. What? I’ll be asking, as it all goes dark again.
Marginal notes from the killing season.
I keep meaning to write a thing but my bones ache with a fatigue that calls to mind the early months of pregnancy. If it was that, this would be a different sort of note. I am driving in the mid-afternoon, alternately pinching my nose and my earlobes to stay awake. When I finally park, I think I’ll just close my eyes for a few minutes, and then it’s dark.
Democracy in the US is being dismantled from inside the White House but naturally everyone in passing periods between bells keeps on asking one another the usual questions. That is, when we’re not having clandestine conversations in which we agree to either pull the fire alarm if ICE shows up or at the very least to put popcorn in the microwave, set it for ten minutes, and walk back to class. Even though we think that the members of that organization would, if they had any sense or were at all in communication with local law enforcement, know better than to wear their jackets around here. We smile weakly while rushing to get in line for the single working bathroom between passing periods and say How’s it going? Like we don’t know.
Oh, you know, we say back to each other. In a certain tone meant to indicate a wry awareness of a mutual understanding of professional obligation to carry on. With preventable infections poised for a major uptick, now by some measures is no time to start risking a loss of health insurance––except. But anyway, the kids are still here so who are we to go leaving now?
Where news is still being reported with any measure of integrity, it comes at such a rate and speed that you may find yourself shaking your head with a face in the posture of the sort of disgust that appears to be on the verge of a maniacal laughter, in response to a story that in a time not long before this one would have left you weeping.
And you thought yourself to be hardened before, having seen so closely so many sides of men you wished your children would never know.
But here they are with their slick tongues and weak eyes, coming. The age of changing regimes with tanks and masked soldiers charging into conference rooms is decidedly passé. These killers walk in with khakis and polo shirts, bring donuts for the staff and fist-bump with the confidence afforded only to those at a certain level of remove from the lives of other humans, for reasons that some of us may speculate over, in likely error.
They perform experimental surgeries with words meant to anaesthetize unwitting victims. They call their actions simple cost-cutting measures for the sake of efficiency. They assure everyone they are only after criminals and grifters. Silently, in remote areas, off camera, construction continues erecting maximum-security concrete fortresses capable of housing whole cities.
One wants to avoid hyperbole in a time like this. The truth is raw enough. But I can’t help remembering histories less than a century old, of another regime overseas, who once used similar language and parallel means––adjusted for context, of course––until arriving at the inevitable problem of exceeding the capacity of state-of-the-art holding facilities. The ovens, when they fired, were not some green monster’s evil plan, but the simplest and most efficient way of dealing with the practical problem of too many bodies than the holding centers could––as the saying went, process.
Which raises the issue again, that monstrous reality of human life and its perpetual inefficiency. The officials shook their heads. Their stomachs turned at the thought of what it meant to stay the course. Yes, of course,they agreed. They could fix this. Just wait, they said. It’s going to be something like you never imagined.
within given systems
Sometimes it makes more sense to rebuff balance. Now, for example, I prefer to stay inside the unfolding, never-arriving spiral flight around an ever-renewing lost and found where it is brimming with tactile tongues in four dimensions.
But with no room for such admissions in standard parlance, one carries on. Nodding when the next one repeats the inevitable and expected line. Yes, balance. One of many agreements in a given day: pay no attention to the elephant, the peeking tusks, the tongues.
notes from the pair-share
you can be nobody
or you can be a giant elephant
in the conference room
or a shadow, listening,
taking a moment to wonder
really
what are we doing here?
on being embodied
it is not enough
to tell you i think
by way of begging
some acknowledgement
of being for doing this
would mean sidling up
to Descartes who despite
apparent cognitive prowess
managed to decide it was
appropriate to electrocute
dogs who he thought did
not think enough to feel
maybe it was their eyes
the naked love of them
that scared him into
such denial &
despite my best efforts
toward intelligence i tend
to love like a dog
prone to run
with sweet baby Jane’s
moonlit bodies stomping
muddy prints in the surf
at the shore in the light
of the moon
that excess
our all
in this space
Since nothing of me holds
in place but my feet on a
flying planet, spinning
i have wondered
where so many could
dismiss with such conviction
so much of this this––us, to call it all
background noise.
My friends glow embryonic spheres
in whispered susurrations and we migrate
along mycelial lines never to arrive
and we are moving all the time.
If my beginning is an empty
space like the origin of every other
and yet each genesis shatters every
omega back into its alpha state
such that my form won’t hold, make me
an opening for sound––
less voice than collective in chorus
not spear but carrier bag
not speech but gathering
display of longing to show
revealing nothing finally
but unceasing attempts
to name where the word
waits for tongue to lift
the earth again
dirt into soil
for breathing.
at the killing hour
and yet
I know you are a stranger here, too, so by the light of you I become friend.
Come, friend. We have places to go.
They are dark now, until we arrive.
We may not travel at the speed of light, but this love is a shining thing.
What if now is time to bring it out?
I have no answers, only this slow form.
Take it now and let us go.
of bodies in translation
It appears that the what of it all
such as it is, happens between
ordered chains of causalities
& wild storms of infinite chance
so if then i should glimpse & dare
some address, will it matter? where
are you going and where have you
been? & i wonder what other
questions hide behind the veil
of this one, a bawdy elegy for
some lost relic, now lucid,
now dense, entombed
where root whispers to
root then sings to leaf
amid reaching of singular
dendrites across impossible
gulfs, where i am made
of volatile stuff between
ice and liquid, you may
find me
in the melt between lake
and cloud where i must be
the flying off.
