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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.

as if the work could be finished

notes toward a twelfth labor

He arrives where the land has already been opened. He finds its emptiness arranged as a promise.

With the trees set back, the ground marked in faint lines where something will be placed, he stands there a moment longer than necessary, as if waiting to be recognized.

There is always a first task, though no one agrees what it is. In some tellings, it begins with a body—muscle against fur, breath against breath. In this one, it begins with a diagram. A way through.

He studies the problem until it yields its names. The lion appears as resistance. The hydra as recurrence. The hind moves just beyond permission, luminous and uncatchable, and so he follows. This is not about taking, he insists. He means to learn the pattern of this place. He keeps a careful distance. The distance defines this story.

There are places he is told not to enter, and yet. What kind of a hero would he be if he listened? He rebrands his defiance as a mark of nobility, enters gently.

The birds lift at his approach—metal, this time—circling back with images of what cannot be held at ground level. He watches himself from above, a figure moving through a field of tasks. It steadies him, this second vantage. It confirms the shape of his intention.

From here, the river is no body, but a solution. When it turns, when it carries what was meant to be cleared, he marks the success and looks away from where it goes.

There is a belt he must take without breaking what it binds. There are mares whose mouths open at the edge of hunger. There is a dog at a threshold that does not understand passage, only guarding. He speaks to it as if it might recognize him.

No, he is not cruel. This is what complicates things. He believes in the work, in the ordered sequence of steps and in the way each task, once named, can be approached and completed. He believes there is a version of himself at the end of it who will stand in a different light, having moved something essential.

Sometimes he imagines that figure: arms open, at a height just sufficient to prove ascent.

He does not imagine the fall, except briefly, as a flicker at the edge of his vision. By way of correction, he reviews the plan, turns to other images. These are readily available.  

Here is one now. A man in a doorway upends a table. Dust rises behind a horse. A voice intones surrender, means dominion. He carries these as permissions. He arranges them carefully, so they do not contradict. 

At night, the tasks loosen and the numbering slips. He finds himself back at the beginning, unclear how he returned. The land is less arranged now, and its studied lines have blurred. Something moves at the edge of sight, as if something had been here all along, waiting. Not a beast, exactly, but its presence implies some refusal of the entire project. 

He stands without instruction and for a moment nothing is named and he does not reach for a tool.

Then the light shifts, and he begins again.

where we stood, watching

on those who mistook their heights for flight

Consider this, we tried—but held still when they raged. We were about to say babies, offer skillets, call on memory. We learned to hold our words, to stand instead, ever ready with arms at our sides, palms open. We held them through their nightmares and when they raged that we knew nothing of their wars.

They did not come toward us. Their bodies knew a direction, some center pointing, but they had trained themselves away from it.

We waited for a decision that did not arrive. No more war at the threshold, or bringing it home, or calling its conquest flight. We held our tongues, tasting blood and what. We could not say. Stay, we pressed, a whisper. It was not a command, but a reminder of contact with the living. Here, we said, and offered skin. A reminder of how tender the flesh that holds us here, how barely.

Their systems grew intricate. Machineries of belief meant to lift them, and we grew tired of these heights, sensing the fall pre-written.

Milk leaked. Children cried to them—look, see me—but the angle was wrong. Too low. Sometimes they would lift a child as if testing the weight. We held our breath.

Our bodies became passage—grease for the next idea, pillows where their heads had been. We learned to move on. 

The next thing was the children. They wanted to fly, too, but we did not throw them. Not with one on each hip, a basket of laundry, onions cut open on the board.

Here is where they stepped in, who were here so briefly. To do the throwing. Up! They lifted. Up, up! they shouted. 

The children screamed. Again!

aerial view

aerial view of an edge

What is this cut––eye of churned earth,
a cyclone pattern, continuance replaced
by some other hand.

How am I seeing, at this height. To look from above
at the place where I might, in another version,
be standing instead.

To learn something from this
—as once, a child, dreaming of flight,
hovered above her mother

in the supermarket’s fluorescent hum,
watched her push the cart
through pale green heads of wrapped iceberg,

bright torpedoes of cucumber
& claw-tied lobsters in their tank.
Between her mother & the ceiling’s light,
she learned distance.

Capillary of shale, piled.
A filament around the iris, worn thin.
Closer down, something else.

A spine. Whose? The engineers arrive
to play king, to play prophet,
to name inheritance into being,

city of gold, encased behind glass.
The glass, compressed sand
the diggers come to move.

They call it dirt. They call it mud.
They handle what little they see,
then leave.

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

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