a field in which opposites attempt a body

after Hilma af Klint

Make of me a glass and through it this kiss. One bends her neck, blue-white into his, pale against the dark field above him, to pierce the edge of that night. Another, below her, reaches for where the light ends, the craning neck, the body a dark field beneath it. Wing tip.

The cold outside, the dark. Inside, these brightly colored forms. Swirl now. Spread. This is an opening. Now an egg petal. Now what are these shapes. Is this the moon? Whispers, how does it mean. Someone suggests religion. It is years before Kandinsky.

What radiates from this. What broke its wings for this landing. Say it is a swan. Say it is light. Dark. Say there is before this blue-footed white feathered swan, another. Say this other, black-feathered on yellow feet, is reaching. Up to pierce the light that shows his dark. That the other reaches down. That the tip of their wings touch, and their beaks. What night is this through which the white swan reaches.

One body running in paint. Show me the next. Another body. I have not cried. Yet this week. Cannot turn my head. Backache, shoulders pinioned in firelight. I lay this dark head on the ground. Then breathe. Watch my breathing. As though by watching I could move its hush to cool that sparking fire. Breathe, then. Turn the neck. Watch sparks click again.

I will give. This fire an offering to that swan. Present this fire as the site on which this body may be offered up. Take it, then. O light. What are you? Speak.

Now with another. Trace where she had been. Her body unfeathered now. The smooth wear of this skin. The jagged edges of old scars now striped into the wear lines. I want to change what I am seeing. I feel this next war changing me. I am wanting. To make some alterations first. What sky against what day. What body now in rubble. What in the decorated tomb. What body armed, who bleeds. What unmoved will make what of the body now seated with a pen. For tracing feathers on the wings of birds. Who listens now for birds in this silence. Over the machine, a high round melody. Looping. Something loose. In the machine where the bird might. See it.

***

Inspired by The Swan, No. 17 (1915)

ochild

notes toward a minor crossing

one day
I will tell you in music
what I mean

and show
by the curve
of my bowed back

this violin

and wait
while you remember

and say
by this instrument—

listen

I will show you
the sound a bird means

singing

above her heart
pounding

too fast
for you to follow

while alive

and I will say gently

try baby

and for a moment

you will

and you will
try baby

still alive

(meaning what?)

then
you will know
what I mean

enough
for us to leave

and be still again

the problem of shape

preliminary findings

The year I learned the war was inside me — even if some of its battles were without — I began rummaging through the wreckage, hoping to find more than detritus accumulated from years of warring. Around the mess: sky.

I had wanted to be a bespoke collection of formidable weight, but I was discovering I was one part bargain-basement yard sale, another part fairytale creatures — some feathered, some furred, some horned, some visible, many unseen.

And the last part of me was something else. It wasn’t the war exactly, or the yard sale, or any single one of these creatures. Here was a drifting thing, like a cloud.

How long had I tried to pin her down? Or, when I couldn’t, solicit outside help. There are always people eager for this work — telling the unruly body of a woman (ethereal or enfleshed) how she should behave, ready to point her back toward some imagined vessel of herself.

Mine was always either pouring out or sponging in.

I told myself I would learn to regulate the leaking. To absorb less. To hold my shape. I may have been lying.

In defiance of common sense, I was more interested in the experiment. I kept testing it, again and again, in different ways: how much could I take, how much could I let flow away?

It had to do with boundaries. Mine were the kind cell walls have — osmotic. I wanted to know what that meant. I wanted to live it better than I had.

I knew this would make no sense, so I kept it to myself.

I spoke instead of love. And of endurance.

ongoing

regarding capacities

A simmering discomfort persists. I live inside it, knocking softly at the limits of a body never quite mine. Often, I imagine shedding this skin of competence, of expected gestures, but time does not loosen it yet. Questions and requests arrive. I answer. The skin I mean to outgrow is made of small, capable acts. Sometimes I wish someone else would lift them. Once upon a time, when someone would say you do too much, my ears would perk up. Perhaps this ailing was only my stubbornness, refusing any other way? But then I’d look again, and there were lives set down everywhere, a scatter of need underfoot. So, I pick up what I can and carry on.  I dream sometimes of bearing witness to another carrier, who is too busy doing the work to announce themselves, whose very presence at my side would be a comfort, whose humor in the effort would be the best laugh I ever had in my life. 

what learned to stop rising

On the Golden Toad (Incilius periglenes)

The year the rain didn’t come, the toads did not rise. This creature required conditions, resisted the rescue of cages. They lived most of the year underground, waiting for the world to signal conditions for their appearance.

When they emerged, they emerged together, bright as warning, an astonishing whole. A joyous display, observers said. It would not stand for translation. When the clouds changed and the pools would not hold, the pattern discontinued. 

Their discovery and disappearance happened in quick succession. The last of it when I was eleven.

I knew nothing of the toads at the time. I was learning to read the atmosphere, to time emergence. How to translate the strange creature I was into more legible forms.

The process, I was learning, required aggressive taming. The first rule of living here was learning: one must not be too much. Too expressive, too taken by joy, eruption, wonder, body. 

I never saw the toad. By the time I was old enough to take my own inventory of loss, she had long since lost the predictable rains she needed to appear, having entered the realm of beings named only after they are gone.

the speed of almost seeing

a poem of reaching

a poem whose seeds were birthed on this blog over the summer, out this week in Blue Earth Review, a publication of Minnesota State University.

I am in love with Minnesota, home of Minneapolis, the occupied city bravely resisting takeover by the goon squad of a fascist regime––with love and care, courage and grace.

what survives

On the Guam Kingfisher (Sihek) and the Preservation of Bodies

This is a story of extinction that appears as a continuance of life. In which the life in question persists in captivity. Where the life in question is removed from her presence in a world. This happens when the life in question has survived the loss of a world.

For what purpose, this silence? This heavy-handed saving. This bird. These brilliant blue wings. These heads of rusty cinnamon.

She of the long-ago understory of limestone forests, who birthed within the soft rot of trees left standing, of a wilderness allowed to age—until progress arrived.

Who needed darkness without predation to sing the day through her light.

Legends called her the loud woman bird. She of the bright fabrics—until.

This is a story of snakes who came in on cargo ships in the wake of the war, who raided the nests at night in forests raided by day, until the remaining canopies stopped speaking back, and presence became a memory.

This is how captivity preserves the body whose world has gone. The body whose world has gone goes on living, held in an unfinished until.

*

Context: I am working through some memoir material and it needs a larger container. So I’ve been researching species declared extinct in my formative years, and working toward understanding various connections between these stories and my own, which was largely dominated by a sense of horrors happening quietly without comment by anyone in my immediate environment. Considering each lost species in a space outside of these longer, more complicated essays-in-progress helps me to gradually understand the relationship. Thank you for reading with me.

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