And resistance.
Behind the veil of official information, a justification for maiming, these blows administered at regular intervals by calculated technique for a purpose, and silence effectively shields it.
Here is a hearing aid. Take this stethoscope. Hold it to her.
Listen, wait.
Keep listening.
***
Inspired by the work of Sung Tieu.
At the bottom of the lens.
Where is the story to account for waves of squirrel over branch, or this ache reminding there is no way sometimes it seems to reckon with (to recognize?) the way things are and when the fall and the hawk and the fire–––?
No. Look. Stop this.
I am looking. It’s the seeing that won’t come. I remember when sight was like a vision, the undulating body of it, ripe with equal parts recognition and want. Now this spinning, keeping watch, shapeshifting dark. It knows me. But I want to remember the other one. Who laughed and meant it.
The stories we keep.
Which history? The people, or the book? Language or lens? A soul reveals itself by the memory it keeps. It is less like the cementing of bricks than the stitching of squares. The quilters’ collective eye has its aesthetic aim, an effort of seasonal return. It is a functional art. But to forget either one of these––function or art–––is to make it something else.
Against exile.
Who would draw
these margins drawing
blood press words
into walls except to keep
us from these hands
this here that now whispers
take off your shoes
From womb.
Beyond
the zone of exclusion,
all thought begins with remembrance
and this renews an order
before the rule of any king,
threading beginning, now,
and ever
in her.
Praise song for the dancers.
Face buried in her warm bread smell,
I cannonballed into dreams of flying;
she kept watch with one good eye
trained on roaches in the ceiling.
*
As I cannonballed into the next flight
she said Just a little while,
good eye trained on roaches in the ceiling,
in the room beneath the church of the sisters.
*
Just a little while, she said,
bandage over other eye
applied by sisters after landing,
and changed it when she thought I could not see.
*
Bandage over blinded eye,
she left the bed when I slept
to change it somewhere where I could not see,
and then she danced.
*
She left the bed when I slept
for a basement where music played
and then she danced
with the women in a circle, and they laughed.
*
In a basement where music played
danced Leti, and Patrice, Maria and Janae,
these women in a circle and they laughed,
away from the men they had survived.
*
Danced Gina and Kira, Shondra and Renee,
and my mother, and I, for the time being,
away from the men we had survived —
and you should have seen her dance.
_____________
This one first appeared in High Shelf, 2019.
For your deliverance.
Your bed the hole
you return to
in this house
your den this
noise looming
scourge upon tree,
this engine to drown
your last note and
the first, how
little one, do you keep––
singing
time?
How do you––?
Keep. Sing this
time.
Time for vigilance.
Then comes a big day. The kind suspended in stop-motion with a sound in the ears like the high notes of a distant organ, with bird quaking in chest and stomach sliding sick-slick with anticipation against the ribs. For saying Okay and Breathe and Please. For hyper-awareness of need, for the moment to respond to events already in motion. To accept all offers to be carried, prayed over, protected where you go alone. These big ones have a way of reminding what a day is. The others are no smaller, only less well known.
An offering to other hands.
Over large canvasses, he painted whole body, whole space, his life.
When his given form could no longer rise to meet the wall, his family offered theirs as new mediums.
He used a laser pointer to guide their hands, the paint. Saying No, there, and Yes, like that. The work evolved, with them.
I miss being able to do it myself, he said, but it’s about the art and you have to go where it takes you.
***
Inspired by the life and work of of Frank Bowling.
To keep a flame.
May this penumbra
number routes
to lighthouse.
May this labor
allow love’s fall
into tongue.
May it speak.
