Blog - Breadcrumbs

the hidden kept

care and language

I pack a spoon
in my daughter’s lunch.
Then another,
in case the first
should disappear.

Love misplaces things.
I try to preempt the loss.

When a line begins
to murmur
I swing it by the neck—
a soft animal
I mistake for a rope.

I call it poem,
but it writhes,
wants teeth,
wants blood,
won’t feed me
when the guards come.

Just stands there,
quiet and damp,
like something I’ve left
in the sun too long,

then tried to water.

Now my throat closes.
Words spin.

No one comes
with a towel,
no one checks the floor
for shards.

She may find the spoon.
Or this one beneath it—
the one I mean to hide,
a love for when
forgetting comes.

This poem recently appeared in the spring edition of MUSE Literary Journal.

I like the creatures no one chooses as a spirit animal. Skinks. Ice worms. The little dog whose back legs are supported by wheels and who is walked faithfully around the block by a small old woman. If approached from the opposite direction, there comes a moment when she looks up, surprised, with a wide mouth and kind eyes.

The bowhead whale, Balaena mysticetus, may live over one hundred years in the cool depths near Greenland. Or the shark of the same region arriving at reproductive age no sooner than the end of the first century alive.

Also swamp sparrows.

Cephalopods.

Bagged goldfish.

The as-yet-unnamed ones, still undiscovered.

The swan of Hans Christian Anderson’s Ugly Duckling, who does her best to fit in with the duck family she meets upon hatching, having no way to know that the egg she came from had only rolled away from its proper nest. Whose attempts at doing duck things fail the more she becomes her swan self.

At a formative age, I decided to be done with the person I seemed to be, and so I set about making a new self. I went about this the way a young, old-feeling person might: by cobbling together suggestions from available sources. Having decided I was missing something vital to the project of becoming, I occasionally took seasonal employment in places I had yet to visit. In the Sierra Mountains, I found unexpected teachers and learned to sing while walking so the black bears would know I was coming.

I also tried smoking while writing, like Joan Didion or Tom Waits. The experiment failed almost immediately. And yet. If I vomit, will that be the old self leaving? I persisted.

On New Year’s Eve, outside a restaurant, the old self remained.

Later that week, I left the just-opened pack of cloves on a wall at the edge of a Vons parking lot, hoping that whoever found it would take it as the kind of serendipitous surprise that announces fortune taking a turn toward some unexpected wonder. That they might pause to enjoy their find and feel themselves understanding that this place, routinely referred to as the Vons parking lot on Tamarack, is so much more.

That they might see it suddenly: an ancient geography of unknown forces.

And be moved to some greeting, however hushed.

Hello, powerful stranger.

That this discovery might nudge into being the possibility of an astonishing response from this sudden sanctuary. Which, while wordless, would sound the body like an urgent whisper.

Come here.

a short history of subtraction

with misunderstandings re: freedom

First attentions focused on survival, and survival appeared to require a truth. It would be singular. Properly applied, it was supposed to offer liberation. Instead, it invoked additional struggle.

Then came another approach: disappearance. Stones managed it, and certain fish. Entire civilizations, even. With so little remaining after the act, results are inconclusive.

Some seek security by sharing every feeling. Others store provisions in hidden rooms. One strategy involves carrying everything. Another takes nothing at all. No method proved universally reliable.

On the other hand, there are many ways to die. Neglect remains popular. Repeated transplantation has produced mixed outcomes. It is possible to survive by developing shallower roots.

The gliders seemed promising. They moved across the water without disturbing it, attended by doubles made entirely of light. From a distance, the arrangement appeared effortless.

Several years were devoted to the study of reflection. Several more to subtraction. One working hypothesis suggested that freedom might consist of becoming lighter. This hypothesis eventually collapsed.

The way of the ray turned out not to be available. It could pass through what those of earth were required to carry. Below: buried bodies, hidden boons, forgotten names, and other dense materials.

At first this seemed tragic. Later, less so.

The discovery arrived gradually, as weather does. By accumulation. Particles gathering at altitude, suspended in vapor, waiting to rain.

By then many necessary pieces had already been removed. They remained scattered across the hills. Under the pink moon, they resembled sleeping animals.

Recovery efforts continue.

Minutes from the Society of Dirt

where attendance is consistently excellent

I am not the subject, but the background against which he performs himself.

For example, I can be a receptive audience, pliant and agreeable. A receptive audience is always preferable to a resistant one. I am neither, and also both. But these details are irrelevant to our subject, who insists upon unity of vision.

Pulling this off successfully—and it is always a great feat, isn’t it, when everything comes together? —requires a total alignment of the environment. All parts separate, each in its place.

It takes a great deal of effort.

The parts of me that refuse taming learn to separate when needed, as a lizard separates from a caught tail. So I go around leaving tails everywhere, little souvenirs for whoever comes looking.

This is a preferred mode of movement in the subject’s realm. He runs a tight ship, and I am made of whatever collapses an edge. Now solid, now not.

I reject the purity tests, the display cages of possibility, the passion for classification. But I accept these as intractable features of the environment, like leaf blowers and occasional dogpiles.

Poor subject. He exists inside a fiction mediated by others. He notices them primarily as objects requiring arrangement.

He cannot account for the resistance because the resistance is made of teeming earth. By definition, it refuses purity.

He calls us dirt.

From below, we teem here, a laughing rumble at his feet.

with history trapped inside us

from the days of light and thunder

The problem in the highway days was where to begin.
Even the lions we imagined becoming went lame.
Our backs bent early, sights set on oblivion.
War was everywhere. Fathers called it peace.

Developments advanced battalion by battalion
toward the rumored end of history. The weather ecstatic.
Furniture ads relentless. Strip malls glowing
in rivering taillights. The id ran out of land.

A gas station canopy burned red against the dusk.

Mirrors closed into screens. Our drives consumed us.
Who were we to think ourselves architects?

After the getting and spending, what remained
but the shock of touch, the idea of rest?
When the desert bloomed, we misread it—
called it sudden. That was what we knew.

This piece recently appeared in Your Impossible Voice, Issue 34

at the hour of the Angelus

after Leonora Carrington

Surely, I carry enough madness for the long voyage, having packed enough pieces, and left some, devilishly scattered about, to make for you a puzzle. From the railing, I scatter some upon the waves like fish bait. They rise and eat and I leave.

Immune to the affliction of telling anyone what I know, I know nothing except that I am a fuzzy form of human animal who will one day die.

For a time, I walked to and from walls of gray sandstone beneath birds of stone. The building is hollowed out now. Only the birds remain. If you approach, as I do sometimes, to paint from memory, they flit between the apertures.

No one is there but the birds, but whoever escapes the childhood home?

A giant goose commands the scene. A horned creature holds a broomstick. Three hooded figures at the table, one in dark glasses at the stove, the red-robed figure at her feet. Corn upon the metate to be ground and served with the fishes the nuns ride in upon.

At the hour of the Angelus, they sing the wild anemones from the woods. I go again to greet them.

undocumented gravities

what bends the fabric

One physicist told me: picture a bowling ball in the fabric,
the fabric caving in—why bodies fall toward one another,

spinning. How spacetime curves. My grandmother spoke of weight
in other ways: the hush between names in an unread ledger of losses.

I finger that line, the jagged edge of scab, the raw grain Ellison heard
scraping every blues. What do I do with this mass of memory

now bending every moment into its warp? She lost her mother
to fog-lung at nine, crossed alone to a house with chandeliers,

quiet corrections. Her eyes went dark when I asked about the war.
She kissed me once, called me her lost sister’s name,

then whispered into the rosary beads drawn from pocket to lips.
A song she didn’t teach me hums in my sleep.

Here is a shape made of silence. A dark bloom:
cells within cells, watched by a thousand quiet endings

spreading? Grief is such a mass, perhaps, when left unspoken:
a metastasis of memory in a land that names the stranger alien.

I am trying to reach mine, cannot find where it begins.
It arrived before language, encoded in the spiral of blood,

older than my name. Like starlight long gone, still arriving.
I squint into the most distant layer of stars: fine dust.

Some of it shines from bodies long dead,
their last emissions only now arriving

here. Their light arrives always without their names
like a jagged, cracked-open ledge,

this brief flesh against it,
struggling to sound.

This poem recently appeared in Sky Island Journal, Issue 35.

without the use of now

after an unlived hour

She lived in the hour. He kept it for later.

The body learns. At first by leaning—tentative, offering its small faith in the moment, then less so.

The mouth that hungers for bread learns the shape of waiting. How to soften the edge of asking. What it means to accept how he forgot—not by cruelty, but by being nowhere at all when it mattered.

When it mattered: paper towels, toilet paper, the coffee gone. The latch he knew needed fixing, leaving someone to know they were still at risk while he knew it, did nothing. This is how absence accumulates: a field of what must be thought of by someone.

He is many things, most of them possible. In the end, he is not that someone. Not careless—that would imply contact. Something else. Drawn again into the bright perimeter of what might be.

No idea so good as the next idea. No plan like the one untried. No life like the one he has yet to begin—this one, finally, worthy of him.

Meanwhile, she begins to sort what can be carried; what must be thrown away; what cannot be asked for again. The body keeps score even when the mind refuses.

At the water, he is something else again. Watch how he rides the wave cleanly, beautiful in it, held by the same force that could take a life. He does not look back—not by choice, but because the frame does not include it.

Behind him, outside the shot, someone learns the cost of air.

Later, he will say it was a good day and mean it. Tomorrow, he announces, will come. The other day he speaks of is always the one that has the best of him.

Never this one. Never the hour that asks to be met.

Here, he is a maker of atmosphere. A summoner of possibility. He can speak a future into near belief. Who would not follow that voice. Who would not, once or twice, be pulled back into its hold.

He kept himself intact for a future unveiling. Called this becoming.

She lived among the opened things: torn roll, empty shelf, the latch that would not catch. Her body learned how not to lean.

He did not think himself absent. Where he lived, the hours gathered for his arrival. Nothing began until he did.

Her questions thinned, then fell away. In their place: the work. The hour, arriving whether held or not, asked to be lived by someone.

Years passed. From time to time, he spoke again of beginning.

She, already inside the life of daily flesh, did not answer.

Departures (Unconfirmed)

arrivals not recorded

to fly was all he wanted––to sail the boat unfurl the wings, kissing wind; fast and faster across the land of the sometimes sure, sure enough

to fly again, he demanded––to where was insignificant––to hurl headfirst toward some invisible purpose, hard and harder across the land of the dream

i listened, how some record the songs of birds at the brink before they go, taking notes, noting what it took to know how he would stay flying fast and lost in the land of the dream from which i decided to go

quickly but soft, & likely unnoticed until one day when he wakes with a sense that something

happened, how it seemed real like a song

so real (he could almost hear it now!) or (maybe then!) or at the time of some other when, when he one day once upon a time got around to listening to what was somewhere (wasn’t it?) close enough he could almost sing it, there from the tip of his tongue

and later means to name what is leaving, to trace somehow its contours, but what is gone is good and gone and has no edge but what returns to the initial wish––

fly

notes from any weekday afternoon

on arriving after the high point

Here comes a familiar question. So now what? It’s the end of the long part of the day and the beginning of the part where I mean to redeem some of the best of me. But the glass is empty too soon, and here’s a challenge. If I don’t rush past it, a response waits. Saying, now you try to make. Something, but not today. Today I want to open the notebook, the laptop, the inbox and find it already made.

In the Mass, there was a moment after the bells and before communion that some called the High Point, where we said I am not worthy to receive, but say the word. It came after the part where my grandma would whisper, Lord, I believe. Heal my unbelief.

I return each evening in a diminished form, somehow. Determination is not the posture of prayer, but of the glossy ad. It makes demands, offers vapid encouragement, relentless goading on. Get yourself together, this part insists. How can you be finished if it isn’t even dark? How when others are just beginning, can you be done for the day?

True, this day started at four, and then came everything I will not list. I mean to get beyond all of this. Here comes Dante again, interrupting a line of thought with whispers of how the dark wood were better followed, translated. I am inclined to agree, but keep finding concrete corridors, fluorescent track lighting, deafening bells. The railings and the gates and the traffic keep me moving over leveled ground, but airless, crawling in this steady stream. I eddy again among the bent ones, each of us shouldering the rest of the day forward until it turns on an eventual collapse, and comes back for us, again.