Blog - Page 54 of 145

What are you working on?

And why: a rough outline.

It’s an ongoing project, this who. And the question why here, which necessarily brings its entourage of related questions: where is here, what is this trajectory. Why suffer. What beauty. What truth. Remember. Forget. Give it all up. Let it bowl you over again. Try other selves. Notice other suns. Wrestle angels. Demons, too. Hear the chorus. Then the individual breaths. Notice yours among these: now it is distinct, now it blends into the others, now it is missing, now it returns. The work is no good for finishing, but at least the company is lively. What an ensemble. At the end, death calls on each of us, ready or not. Until then, this is something to do.

Not It

And the posture of reaching.

Once it was declared that we were playing hide-and-seek, the first thing to do was call “Not It!” but I tended to be late when it came to calling anything. So now I am out here still looking even though it is way past dinnertime and the others have most likely all gone home. Is this it? I persist, but it isn’t. The words are still all wrong. As consolation, I might aspire to the endurance of the dark star, of sloths and tortoises and the legends of creatures rarely seen in the wild, of the dancer’s posture of reaching for something not yet grasped, of the sense of having not yet arrived. At what, no one will say. The point is that whatever this is, it is not yet, as they say, it.

What Now

The weight of what survives.

What air. What hollow light. What weeps in shadow. What receives. What mind slouches forward to be born a new god? Whatsoever is loosed here will be loosed above. What art, then? Whose? What thunder. What fire. What wrath.

[May this not end on wrath. As it does for–how many now? The count will not hold. Of these, how many too young to pronounce the word.]

What rage, what grief. Whose ears? Whoever has them, what do you hear?

Not Making It

Against progress.

Sometimes I arrive but not now. Sometimes now is mostly reckoning. Often, I do neither. The machine takes more. I want to hear music. I can’t hear it over these droning gears, the constant engine, the alarms. An announcement loops, Look! We are getting somewhere now! I don’t want to look at whatever it is highlighting for display. I miss song, and safety. Yesterday I read a word denoting longing for a state never experienced, useless and vivid. I did not write it down. I could not stop to write the word for the longing to be away from the machine. I know machine learning makes it possible to look up the words we forget. I could do this now. But what I want is not to use the machine to find what I have lost. I want instead to be returned to a state––not of wholeness (I am not entirely unreasonable), but less rapid losing, less accumulated loss. I am wholly aware of the uselessness of such longing. It is mine.

Look, Moon

Witness, washed.

You can’t bring anything back, so we do this other thing. We walk outside alone at different times. Look at the moon, we say in our heads. Then in a message. A photo in the message. See the moon. Its light a soft wash for the nests in upper branches, for the cliff’s edge, the canyon brush, the witness. There is work tomorrow, and this moment won’t be reversed. Look, we say, when the other prayers won’t come.

Crows

The day they carried me off.

Do you have a destination? One was saying, and I was an elegy to be written, then misplaced, then found again by a crow in the early morning light. Let me be part of your nest, crow. Your families tell the best stories, and I watched you pull the mist off the road like a blanket with your collective beaks. I was looking for notes, but the walls kept sliding. It’s true that reason never gets us there all the way. I looked for a better map like I looked for my notes but after the crows found me, I was home. I did nothing. I was carried and everyone was talking. My voice slid to my ears and my will beneath their weight. The musk of their feathers. It was all I ever wanted. I thought of all the times I had looked up to see them, watching as if working something out. What took you guys so long? I heard in my ears, the joke on me laughing.

Aral Sea

Salts of the earth.

Where did you go? Where we went was once a sea, but the sea was gone. Hulks of ships cast shadows on the sand. It’s these and the saxaul, dust, and the red sun.

The face of this, being. The radiance of this alarm.

The sea of before had fed surrounding towns: sturgeon, flounder, caviar. Now tourists come, for pictures. We are among them.

What matters more, the beginning or the end?

Sand blows. Moments sweep past us.

Now would be the time for a hawk overhead. There are none. We are the birds of prey, clipping our wings, the dream and death of flights of sons. The sun.

***

A Giant Inland Sea is Now a Desert, And a Warning for Humanity, in The New York Times.

The End of Seeking

An arrival.

It’s fair enough to speak of perpetual mourning and mean it, and to wonder if keys were made for losing, but there is nothing of fairness, nothing deserved about finding at the end of any of these losses neither keys nor answers to any of the questions about where they went, but here this sudden hand, its open offering, the press of its continual pulse.

What Dawn May Bring

To the missing.

Dawn, and time slides down the ache of long sight. Not blind, only blinding sometimes, having offered the eyes one at a time to visiting creatures while still unripe, like here, take it, finding relief at being done seeing what we thought we knew, finding in it only the too-muchness of what is not. But this is about how life when it grows will vine and bud around and through and within the spaces of our missing parts. So, sight returned, and our hands, holding as we walked back into this our lives, still unknown, on the unsteady limbs of newborn foals still wet with the flood of our birth.

What Passes

Still life with axial shift.

Something low and lithe creeps around the edges of a dream that has me pushing hands away so I can get my face into breathable air. A passing thing, it leaves the lasting mark of its metaphor, this lens. It won’t be replaced. Like that, the body told back to its life, her silenced hunger now a howl. What blessing can hold at a table like this, quaking above the groan of this rumbling earth? One of us notices. The other is primed to accept whatever comes as naturally granted, another gift for losing before it is opened. There is no sense to what is shown with no figuring and nothing to explain. Nothing, I will say, if anyone asks. Go back to sleep.