connection Archives

the problem of shape

preliminary findings

The year I learned the war was inside me — even if some of its battles were without — I began rummaging through the wreckage, hoping to find more than detritus accumulated from years of warring. Around the mess: sky.

I had wanted to be a bespoke collection of formidable weight, but I was discovering I was one part bargain-basement yard sale, another part fairytale creatures — some feathered, some furred, some horned, some visible, many unseen.

And the last part of me was something else. It wasn’t the war exactly, or the yard sale, or any single one of these creatures. Here was a drifting thing, like a cloud.

How long had I tried to pin her down? Or, when I couldn’t, solicit outside help. There are always people eager for this work — telling the unruly body of a woman (ethereal or enfleshed) how she should behave, ready to point her back toward some imagined vessel of herself.

Mine was always either pouring out or sponging in.

I told myself I would learn to regulate the leaking. To absorb less. To hold my shape. I may have been lying.

In defiance of common sense, I was more interested in the experiment. I kept testing it, again and again, in different ways: how much could I take, how much could I let flow away?

It had to do with boundaries. Mine were the kind cell walls have — osmotic. I wanted to know what that meant. I wanted to live it better than I had.

I knew this would make no sense, so I kept it to myself.

I spoke instead of love. And of endurance.

what learned to stop rising

On the Golden Toad (Incilius periglenes)

The year the rain didn’t come, the toads did not rise. This creature required conditions, resisted the rescue of cages. They lived most of the year underground, waiting for the world to signal conditions for their appearance.

When they emerged, they emerged together, bright as warning, an astonishing whole. A joyous display, observers said. It would not stand for translation. When the clouds changed and the pools would not hold, the pattern discontinued.

Their discovery and disappearance happened in quick succession. The last of it when I was eleven.

I knew nothing of the toads at the time. I was learning to read the atmosphere, to time emergence. How to translate the strange creature I was into more legible forms.

The process, I was learning, required aggressive taming. The first rule of living here was learning: one must not be too much. Too expressive, too taken by joy, eruption, wonder, body.

I never saw the toad. By the time I was old enough to take my own inventory of loss, she had long since lost the predictable rains she needed to appear, having entered the realm of beings named only after they are gone.

the speed of almost seeing

a poem of reaching

a poem whose seeds were birthed on this blog over the summer, out this week in Blue Earth Review, a publication of Minnesota State University.

I am in love with Minnesota, home of Minneapolis, the occupied city bravely resisting takeover by the goon squad of a fascist regime––with love and care, courage and grace.

what survives

On the Guam Kingfisher (Sihek) and the Preservation of Bodies

This is a story of extinction that appears as a continuance of life. In which the life in question persists in captivity. Where the life in question is removed from her presence in a world. This happens when the life in question has survived the loss of a world.

For what purpose, this silence? This heavy-handed saving. This bird. These brilliant blue wings. These heads of rusty cinnamon.

She of the long-ago understory of limestone forests, who birthed within the soft rot of trees left standing, of a wilderness allowed to age—until progress arrived.

Who needed darkness without predation to sing the day through her light.

Legends called her the loud woman bird. She of the bright fabrics—until.

This is a story of snakes who came in on cargo ships in the wake of the war, who raided the nests at night in forests raided by day, until the remaining canopies stopped speaking back, and presence became a memory.

This is how captivity preserves the body whose world has gone. The body whose world has gone goes on living, held in an unfinished until.

Context: I am working through some memoir material and it needs a larger container. So I’ve been researching species declared extinct in my formative years, and working toward understanding various connections between these stories and my own, which was largely dominated by a sense of horrors happening quietly without comment by anyone in my immediate environment. Considering each lost species in a space outside of these longer, more complicated essays-in-progress helps me to gradually understand the relationship. Thank you for reading with me.

there is nowhere else to go

a practice of staying

This is about craving stillness at a time when loud men go around insisting you are either chasing or being chased. This is what passes for insight around here, so I prefer silence. The other night I dreamed I was in Joyce Kilmer’s memorial forest in the Smoky Mountains, among the last contiguous old growth in these states. He who had lamented before he died, how he could only offer poems whereas trees were something else. I woke saddened to realize that the day ahead would take me elsewhere, so went on daydreaming about a future walk, in a rainforest up the coast behind the clouds, above the gray sand. I went after it in the nearest book and found the gray bark of redwood standing as the silent columns of a ruined temple; the sword ferns chest high, the air tasting of lemons. Someone is running up ahead. I am trying to hear the hermit thrush. The light here is an underwater light and the surface of this sea above this grove is in the sky and even the birds are quiet at this time. This is a leaning in. Here, years move in a circled dance. There is nowhere else to go.

Inspired by recent readings: Richard Powers’ The Overstory, Richard Preston’s The Wild Trees, and Monica Gagliano‘s research into Plant Communication.

a practice of nearness

choreographies of skin and gravity

Love this like weather
that unmasks a gentle sky.

Do not name this trembling.
or hush what aches to bends her spine.

A need for collapse
can be a call to kneeling
in disguise.

What sways this cathedral of air
ringing bells at impossible altitude,
clouding windows with myths
of ascent, her scent lingers, low––

an invitation: after such dizzy heights,
what longing there is to kiss the earth,
to press mouth against cooled ash,
admit devotion.

What impossibility, to confess
this softness —this animal
obedience to soil, its churn.
How bones remember the
murmurs of earth.

Here, too, see how body mistakes
obliteration for grace, a silence
that bows but never
calls it prayer.

say there was a window

on the other side of the wall

For coral to take
the long-submerged chains,
something living
had to cling.

On the dry side of the wall,
someone asked
what the babies were eating.

No one answered.

Another question:
Did their eyes look back?

But who
are these
circled moments
in the widening arc?

Look.
Down.
What moves—
low,
ready?

A body bends
against sorrow,
unsure which world
it woke in.

The bars
held only flesh.
What else
we were sometimes
slipped through.

tremble text

field note over sacred break

here is a book before ink
one wind-creased page in rust of buckwheat
its grammar not plosive but drift
dropped by the trickster bird at night
an arrival in absence
heralded by rasp of the gnatcatcher
foretold in the bladderpod burst
all are gathered. some will listen
to the tremble of lyric for a fault line
over sacred break, a next wave of warnings
ignored

how to cross a river

riddles in time, space, and scale management

If you have a fox, a goose, and a bag of beans, what is the best way to cross a river?

In a year of desert driving, I played this question on loop. I wanted a mind for numbers, but seemed to retain only the set-up sequences of word problems.

With a tendency to wondering and feeling too much at once, and with enough sky to lose myself in, I thought mathematical thinking might ground me.

One recurring problem was this: by a fire, under stars, I would go dizzy looking for the farthest ones until my vision blurred.

By then, I did not remember most equations, only the premises for which they were needed. If two trains x miles apart are traveling in opposite directions at different speeds, how much time until they meet? If Jack has eleven pieces of fruit and five are bananas, how many apples for Jill?

The antidote to dizziness, I was trying to learn, had something to do with overriding my first response, which was to be knocked off my feet by the size of it. The sky, that is. And, when it came to math, it was that fact that someone thought like this, imagined a way to sort a world such that these considerations, one parcel at a time, were all. The brilliance.

If a pie and so many guests, cut pieces. Not everyone will want the pie. To calculate circumference, use the number pi. An irrational number to spin the head, but if you knew how to use it, it could help you figure some finite amount of pie, stones, or tire tread.

In the passenger’s seat, I looked through glass and could not take it in. The riddle at least was a smooth and solid thing I could turn in my pocket like a river stone. The river was part of the set up. Mr. Stone was my teacher.

If you have to get across a river by boat. . . the set up went. How do you do it so the fox does not eat the goose, and the goose does not eat the beans?

What relief. To hold one thing at a time, solidly. I wanted a valve for my mind, some pacing for the flow. One challenge. Then another. A way to stop and then go. At that point, the flooding was out of control. My perception far exceeded my abilities to make any sense.

The answer to the riddle was: start with the goose. Mr. Stone told us why. But I was back in the river by then. Where to now, goose?

Who do you think you are? This was a challenge that frightened me some, because it tended to come at critical moments with a tone of authority, as if the person voicing it knew exactly what time Train A would cross Train B, how many apples on each, and whether or not the geese should be eating the beans. If I could focus on one thing at a time, perhaps I would start to see it coming? And have a few answers ready, just in case?

I thought string beans would create less disturbance in the goose. But my mind tended toward the pintos I would buy in five-pound bags from Wal-Mart, which I would scatter in batches over a plate every time I prepared to soak them, checking for rocks. To find one was good. Here was a solid thing I could remove.

Who do you think you are? When these demands came, I would experience the full force of new awareness of the errors of my ways, in dizzying magnification. I meant to apply this force to finding some solution, but I had none. Which river? Which goose, fox, season? Is anyone else on the boat with me? Am I allowed to touch the goose? Are there eggs to come?

The image of trains hurtling in opposite directions calls to mind rail spine, the nervous condition that did not appear until the advent of railroad travel, caused by the feeling of hurtling through space at speeds disconcerting to a body familiar with horse and foot travel. Not to mention the related and perhaps equally anxiety-producing imposition of standard time.

I had once seen a fox while running on a horse trail in lower New York. Much of the trail ran adjacent to the Hutchinson River Parkway, but certain parts meandered into woods and along lakes such that the roar of cars was more muted, the way crashing surf may be if you are several blocks away.

Perhaps if I had gone beyond 12th grade calculus, I would have developed a more familiar and integrated symbolic language with which to explore the interference effect of a series of infinite variables on a given problem and been more erudite in my explanations about baseline insecurities. But I hadn’t at the time and was still young enough to believe that eventually I might, If I focused harder, see with greater clarity.

The river, between then and now, has continued to flood me. But the goose is still on it, and the fox, and the bag of beans. They rest at the banks, where the goose and the fox appear to wear bemused expressions, waving. I don’t know why it is this way, or where the boat has gone, but here I am, waving back.

***

This riddle, which I encountered decades ago, is one of those earworms that shows up again and again. I love the setup, the characters, the play, and the mystery. If, in a given year, I scratch 1,000 pages across several notebooks, an estimated 9.5 of them will feature this goose. Who knows why? Rarely do I publish these, but sometimes it happens. Prior to today, I think the most recent iteration of these creatures in a published work happened in The Closed Eye Open, Issue 10, Fall 2023, under the title Mathematical Goose.

on making

what we mean to remember

I have been meaning to write a note here for almost a week now. It is Memorial Day in the states, which might occasion a purposeful message of solemn remembrance to honor those who lost their lives in service. A day for remembering fallen soldiers, visiting cemeteries, offering commemorative words. Mine would be inadequate today, so I refrain.

Also in the states, this is the holiday weekend that traditionally marks the opening of summer––barbecues, beach trips, and quite a few celebrations. My love’s birthday, my daughter’s close-friend’s quinceañera, and my brother’s wedding. In preparation for the wedding, I spent some time extracting stills from a video slideshow of my grandfather, who died of old age over a decade ago. Several of these photos featured him as a smiling young man in his WWII-era Army attire, complete with wool coat. The photos I had were all black and white. But for him, those moments happened in color.

The federal holiday means schools, government offices, and many other locations are closed today, so for me it’s the first moment I’ve had in almost a week to catch my thoughts in any meaningful way. It’s a chance to nurse a cold in bed instead of rushing to work jacked up on caffeine and Sudafed. And, now that the festivities are behind us, to try to remember what was happening on other planes.

I opened Nelle Morton’s book of essays to a dog-eared page from “A Word We Cannot Yet Speak” to find this line: As fire is known in the burning, not in the ashes, sight is known in the seeing, not in the eyes. This feels relevant in ways I am trying to access through my stuffy head. The essay is about bodily understanding, the kind often maligned for being associated with women and other creatures outside the traditional loci of Western power systems.

When I opened my notes this morning, I had a sense of wanting to have something to say, but feeling only a dull, achy buzz. Buzz is the name of our cat who has been suffering an ailment that has been mysterious and worrisome in recent days on top of everything else. This morning’s online vet visit offers hope, which is much better than enhanced concern and nothing.

And yet. I have no meaningful note. All pain, all ache. As it was in the days leading up to the weekend’s events, in no particular way other than how it is sometimes, except that it was time to focus on joy and gratitude for beloveds and friends, for family and love, enthusiasm for the occasion to celebrate together, laughing and sweating and spinning on the dance floor, all I love you! and Don’t go! and You have to stay! until eventual hard-crashing, headache-nursing, morning-after commentary, limpid with excess, a time to acknowledge the sore throat and sneezes are not, as I was claiming earlier, from laughing so hard while responding to insistent protests of, Stay, stay! Don’t you dare leave!

Now it’s quiet. I try to collect things. I make a list. Back to work tomorrow. Try to remember. I follow the cat with a warm washcloth, apologizing between bouts of treatment. What was I doing before? With such urgency? So close to something I was meaning to carry through. I was thinking, just a little longer, stay, before it went.