Liminal play.
When we were children of the sun and our play was a running banter with shadow and shine, I remember how you laughed to catch his spray in your teeth and our skins would carry it back inside when we were called in twilight hours.
Our shapeshifting forms morphed and when we were children of the moon, we knew our skins to slip like the bellies of jumping fish, winking light just to feel it swallowed by an original sea with night waves lapping whispers to return.
Our tumbled shards.
sounds called what we would not say
until the shadows in our ears besieged
our remainders we screamed
for their release but they stayed
laughing into our wet faces
we could not see them
or our faces where we stayed
the stank breath of death rot
creeping through our breaths
stopping the songs
we meant to sing
of how we flew
after scratching our snakeskins
we were removed and outside
we could not hear the songs
in the street as the dragon still
spread the photos called
our monsters out
to hush them back
Time ran off
we had the babies’
toothless mouths looking back
lining their faces in half-moons
on our beds and with them looking back
we kited from the cells anchored
by the buds of lost mothers in our teeth
to one day fit ourselves back
into homes we had once carried
on our backs before we left
the sea
before the after
we left it
back there for the
sea
What hides.
What makes the running child in an everlasting dream suddenly slow at the base of a breath, to crouch here, beneath a rib? It is a passing shadow. It is not unlike hunger or pain, but it is neither, exactly.
To the child, it is not unlike the uncanny feeling of seeing someone familiar wearing the changed face of a stranger, and this is cause for stark concern, like nightfall at midday.
So, the child waits here, crouching behind a rib, until it passes. The child waits for a long time. Naturally, they continue to think, this will pass. Naturally, they whisper comforting phrases while waiting. Like one day. Like when it is safe. Like ever after.
Testimony at sea.
When the officials came to demand my history, I pointed to the sea. She had the only enduring record, I told them, of our bodies, our wrecks, the wreckage we endured, our ancestors.
Did we call it known, once? Ask her. Did we know our first breaths through gills, and before this, much thinner membranes? When each of us was a single cell, did we imagine that this would make us invisible one day to our later selves–– or were such concerns trivial beside some vastness of knowing–– or was nothing too small to be named?
When the officials came to demand my measurements, I said, keep your instruments and I will keep swimming in this saving ignorance, in the margins of your marked territories.
When the officials moved toward me, I said, friends, you are welcome, too. Anyone can be taught by the twilight and by the other transparent creatures known to glow.
Calling with matters of life and death.
The round bird call was constant. Its audience would no sooner hush life than they would have thought to banish death. These creatures tended to hide when we approached, as some children are cautious after being abruptly silenced, in the crouching way that the banished will learn to move.
It was rare that we heard her full song, and just as rare to witness the extravagant leaps and turns of her dance, the revelation of her full plumage something she had learned to save for the shadows.
And yet she would emerge sometimes, with the upright carriage of a dancer, to find us in our own reflections at the water’s edge, barely listening, as was our custom. With a deft fingertip she would nudge the temples, saying look up.
Go, she would say. Go to the babies and hold them, for they are like us, too.
On seasonal records.
1.
I’d love to tell you, but the words become ghosts, choking intention.
2.
Once, they showed their insides, breaking open.
3.
Meaning tends to expand at the site of the cut.
4.
The next attempt reminds: what is necessary is also impossible.
5.
The space after time’s vanishing has a way of losing its contours.
6.
To compensate, you can try cross-mapping histories to create an architecture of memory.
7.
Now we are inside the stones, now we are their erosion.
8.
By exposing matter, you can revisit its secretive nature. Some colors don’t happen in paint.
9.
The synapses around a single sentence can curl a face into the face of another time.
10.
We pierced the soft flesh of old monuments.
11.
A child makes bricks of debris, each block a memory.
12.
If each of these haystacks is another time of day, seeing is what happens between them.
***
Inspired by Monet’s Haystacks.
A brief encounter.
It was a single date, but memorable.
Who wears a watch anymore? he quipped, except if you are trying to impress.
He was referring to the old watches that just did time.
Laughing as they entered the restaurant, she removed her coat to reveal a dress made of old watches.
What is this? he asked.
She had her reasons. It’s been a week of dark dreams, she told him, and she was done with fighting them off. They are creatures too, these memories. She supposed they just needed a home.
Now nervous, he tried to make light. So, do you have the time?
I have all the time in the world, she replied. Take your pick. Every watch was set to a different time.
Suddenly, he remembered something he had to do. There was no time to explain, he told her. Urgent business, he said. So sorry!
She waved as one does from upper deck of an ocean liner at departure, smiling.
What followed was a beautiful meal.
***
Inspired by an encounter with this reference to L. Mylott Manning’s Kiss the Dark.
A note: for breathing.
When time cracks
the crease of the last
laugh to break
the feathered frost
of this pilgrim’s final
hope,
let me not miss
the chance to look
kindly
on its teaching
and laugh back.
In mythic memory.
In the days when we knew forms were only provisional, you called Leap! at the sight of the next star. Our metamorphic world buzzed with a panorama of possible and the hours were a cyclic series of somersaults.
We read by the myth from inside its closed shell, unlike the heavy-headed beachcombers trying to recover something lost. From inside, we dissolved selves well enough to forget our tired, temporary names and donned instead originals of dark dimension. In these we splashed back to the undergrounds where the Mothers knew us, to restore the old tales to their first beginnings. We chased the slivering prints of angels’ bare feet to catch them only long enough that they would whisper again the small verse assigned to each of us. This one is yours to bring forth, they told us, one at a time.
In dawn’s purple flame, the branching capillaries of eons swelled our skins, and Time’s wild clowning made us know ourselves at once alive and dead, ending and beginning, never and again. By this light, the world’s creatures seemed to know us, looking back as though waiting to be named.
On the real work.
At the end of a long day in a long month, I read a hiring notice: Professional Cub Snuggler! it says, and I think, this is something. The work is to wrap baby bears in blankets, hold them in a coat while the mother gets a checkup.
Now I can’t stop wishing that this was a model for some other things, the practice of stopping in the work week, no matter the job, for the most important work of the week. Time to hold the babies! everyone would say, and the babies would be held, and there would be enough hands so that the ones who had been caring for more babies than they had hands for could take a break and tend to other things, knowing the babies were okay.
There is a trick the handlers use, for getting the orphaned bears accepted. They cover the bark of a tree with a scented goo, and after the birth babies and the orphan run through it, back to mama, they all smell the same. And there’s something in this model, too.
***
Inspired by this notice: “Dream Job Alert: Michigan DNR is Hiring Bear Cub Cuddlers.”
