I will.
I want––
For you, I do.
I want to will
––something, until
you know it is for you
and here –– hear
and will yourself –– and will you?
Child, take it.
Promise Loop
Willing continuance.
Blog
Bread
And the heart of the matter.
They come to see us, hungry for our size.
Look at our faces. We tower. They dance.
One says, walk slower. One says, closer.
There are more of us now, as though prayers.
Into clouds. No command is needed from this height.
They sing us. A dirge, they sing for beloveds
and the birds call back. From their ovens,
the smell of bread. When they taste,
they will look. Up, they will see us,
our suspended faces
against sky.
***
Inspired by a recent New York Times article about Peter Schumann’s Bread and Puppet Theater.
The Land Before Us
Facing its faces.
The land before us
suggested as much
by gesture as by intensity
of gaze returned.
It was tempting
to call out, Hello?
and Who is here?
But we saw them
seeing us and
the grasses
spoke first.
***
Inspired by Osman Can Yerbaken’s description of the paintings of Ghanaian artist Gideon Appah, who as Yerbaken puts it, “commands the landscape genre as its own form of portraiture by depicting the emotionality of a place like the piercing immediacy of a face.”
Last Stand
On sacred ground.
We wondered too late if there was any other place to go, dry winds making rubble of our throats, their silence to echo the ruin we could not bear to see when it was yesterday and still only possible when other states were also possible and still, we will not say it, how we want the rain, as though to say nothing is to trick it back, as though language itself were only a game, no longer trusted to sing us forward, to call the heavens down and return the waters of our lives to our waiting tongues as we hide them in shame and will not say the word and it is true there has been a betrayal here for the word, too, can be trampled under feet too quick to march, who would not stop to meet the ground when it introduced itself, and asked to touch the naked soles
––of us.
You Are Here
Trying to read the map.
Some of the old masters believed the ear outlived the heart, so they would sit with the dead forty days, giving directions. We didn’t expect that kind of treatment, given the times. We thought we had better get to where we knew the map.
We weren’t sure what to make of the artist’s work, so asked. There is something unknown in you, she said. She wanted us to see it. We asked her if she was sure about that and she laughed, shaking her head. We did not always know how to talk to the artist.
In one series, she created shapes from mathematical theorems, but we took them for angels. The effect was like walking in a cathedral. We wanted to know how she did it. Something happens, she said. But when I work, I do not think of things.
I wish you could see it, and we asked what. How the void is the place where you stand, she said, and left us. We are still here, looking.
***
Inspired by the work of Dorothea Rockburne.
Pleading Words
For newcomers.
Dear dreamer. Dear time-traveler. Lover. Adventurer, architect, healer–– of worlds. Please, don’t let the lost language of this one rush you to death before you attempt. To hear its music, to try at the song of your life.
At the Cliff
With feathers.
See us, arms like feathers raised, we want to get it right––the angle, to hold it. For the time. For the wind. When it comes. There is so much we want. So much we want to get right.
Blank Space
And nobody’s wind.
It was the last evening of the break, and it was nothing.
How I loved it, remembering now.
The walks we took back and again to the car, checking
on things we forgot, returning empty-handed to share
our mutterings with the cat and laughter over
your particular socks and your ice cream
and the way you pretended not to sleep
and the show we watched was stupid
and we kept on repeating its lines
laugh-crying over nothing and I didn’t even write
a page, only opened a file and closed it
I could feel the time closing for this and now wonder
if it’s what’s left undone in a place that sanctifies.
I will miss this, the lack of pretense
that we were anything but here
breathing in it.
Estimated Arrival
Return from Dreamland.
And approximately when will you be back,
do you imagine, from the beyond of
wherevers in which you have been off
sighting the next forever in the dappled branches
of those metaphorical trees in the woods
of your etceteras? Some of us are dying
to know.
What This Is
All but fire, a natural history.
Then came the question of fire, its striking immediacy. It had to do with all that changes suddenly, but we were there to describe what was. A separate matter. It was decided.
When it came to outlining the real, we would omit this strange incandescence––unnatural, wasn’t it? ––to better focus on the unburning parts. Research hummed along after that, with machine-like efficiency, without distraction by the looping songs of grieving souls.
What is this? We would say, of each non-burning specimen. And where there was no name, we could invent one, and all of it fell under a single decision, and it was Progress and we went with it, marching.