Category: earthling

at the hour of the Angelus

after Leonora Carrington

Surely, I carry enough madness for the long voyage, having packed enough pieces, and left some, devilishly scattered about, to make for you a puzzle. From the railing, I scatter some upon the waves like fish bait. They rise and eat and I leave.

Immune to the affliction of telling anyone what I know, I know nothing except that I am a fuzzy form of human animal who will one day die.

For a time, I walked to and from walls of gray sandstone beneath birds of stone. The building is hollowed out now. Only the birds remain. If you approach, as I do sometimes, to paint from memory, they flit between the apertures.

No one is there but the birds, but whoever escapes the childhood home?

A giant goose commands the scene. A horned creature holds a broomstick. Three hooded figures at the table, one in dark glasses at the stove, the red-robed figure at her feet. Corn upon the metate to be ground and served with the fishes the nuns ride in upon.

At the hour of the Angelus, they sing the wild anemones from the woods. I go again to greet them.

undocumented gravities

what bends the fabric

One physicist told me: picture a bowling ball in the fabric,
the fabric caving in—why bodies fall toward one another,

spinning. How spacetime curves. My grandmother spoke of weight
in other ways: the hush between names in an unread ledger of losses.

I finger that line, the jagged edge of scab, the raw grain Ellison heard
scraping every blues. What do I do with this mass of memory

now bending every moment into its warp? She lost her mother
to fog-lung at nine, crossed alone to a house with chandeliers,

quiet corrections. Her eyes went dark when I asked about the war.
She kissed me once, called me her lost sister’s name,

then whispered into the rosary beads drawn from pocket to lips.
A song she didn’t teach me hums in my sleep.

Here is a shape made of silence. A dark bloom:
cells within cells, watched by a thousand quiet endings

spreading? Grief is such a mass, perhaps, when left unspoken:
a metastasis of memory in a land that names the stranger alien.

I am trying to reach mine, cannot find where it begins.
It arrived before language, encoded in the spiral of blood,

older than my name. Like starlight long gone, still arriving.
I squint into the most distant layer of stars: fine dust.

Some of it shines from bodies long dead,
their last emissions only now arriving

here. Their light arrives always without their names
like a jagged, cracked-open ledge,

this brief flesh against it,
struggling to sound.

*

This poem recently appeared in Sky Island Journal, Issue 35.

notes from any weekday afternoon

on arriving after the high point

Here comes a familiar question. So now what? It’s  the end of the long part of the day and the beginning of the part where I mean to redeem some of the best of me. But the glass is empty too soon, and here’s a challenge. If I don’t rush past it, a response waits. Saying, now you try to make. Something, but not today. Today I want to open the notebook, the laptop, the inbox and find it already made.

In the Mass, there was a moment after the bells and before communion that some called the High Point, where we said I am not worthy to receive, but say the word. It came after the part where my grandma would whisper, Lord, I believe. Heal my unbelief.

I return each evening in a diminished form, somehow. Determination is not the posture of prayer, but of the glossy ad. It makes demands, offers vapid encouragement, relentless goading on. Get yourself together, this part insists. How can you be finished if it isn’t even dark? How when others are just beginning, can you be done for the day?

True, this day started at four, and then came everything I will not list. I mean to get beyond all of this. Here comes Dante again, interrupting a line of thought with whispers of how the dark wood were better followed, translated. I am inclined to agree, but keep finding concrete corridors, fluorescent track lighting, deafening bells. The railings and the gates and the traffic keep me moving over leveled ground, but airless, crawling in this steady stream.  I eddy again among the bent ones, each of us shouldering the rest of the day forward until it turns on an eventual collapse, and comes back for us, again.

where we stood, watching

on those who mistook their heights for flight

Consider this, we tried—but held still when they raged. We were about to say babies, offer skillets, call on memory. We learned to hold our words, to stand instead, ever ready with arms at our sides, palms open. We held them through their nightmares and when they raged that we knew nothing of their wars.

They did not come toward us. Their bodies knew a direction, some center pointing, but they had trained themselves away from it.

We waited for a decision that did not arrive. No more war at the threshold, or bringing it home, or calling its conquest flight. We held our tongues, tasting blood and what. We could not say. Stay, we pressed, a whisper. It was not a command, but a reminder of contact with the living. Here, we said, and offered skin. A reminder of how tender the flesh that holds us here, how barely.

Their systems grew intricate. Machineries of belief meant to lift them, and we grew tired of these heights, sensing the fall pre-written.

Milk leaked. Children cried to them—look, see me—but the angle was wrong. Too low. Sometimes they would lift a child as if testing the weight. We held our breath.

Our bodies became passage—grease for the next idea, pillows where their heads had been. We learned to move on. 

The next thing was the children. They wanted to fly, too, but we did not throw them. Not with one on each hip, a basket of laundry, onions cut open on the board.

Here is where they stepped in, who were here so briefly. To do the throwing. Up! They lifted. Up, up! they shouted. 

The children screamed. Again!

a field in which opposites attempt a body

after Hilma af Klint

Make of me a glass and through it this kiss. One bends her neck, blue-white into his, pale against the dark field above him, to pierce the edge of that night. Another, below her, reaches for where the light ends, the craning neck, the body a dark field beneath it. Wing tip.

The cold outside, the dark. Inside, these brightly colored forms. Swirl now. Spread. This is an opening. Now an egg petal. Now what are these shapes. Is this the moon? Whispers, how does it mean. Someone suggests religion. It is years before Kandinsky.

What radiates from this. What broke its wings for this landing. Say it is a swan. Say it is light. Dark. Say there is before this blue-footed white feathered swan, another. Say this other, black-feathered on yellow feet, is reaching. Up to pierce the light that shows his dark. That the other reaches down. That the tip of their wings touch, and their beaks. What night is this through which the white swan reaches.

One body running in paint. Show me the next. Another body. I have not cried. Yet this week. Cannot turn my head. Backache, shoulders pinioned in firelight. I lay this dark head on the ground. Then breathe. Watch my breathing. As though by watching I could move its hush to cool that sparking fire. Breathe, then. Turn the neck. Watch sparks click again.

I will give. This fire an offering to that swan. Present this fire as the site on which this body may be offered up. Take it, then. O light. What are you? Speak.

Now with another. Trace where she had been. Her body unfeathered now. The smooth wear of this skin. The jagged edges of old scars now striped into the wear lines. I want to change what I am seeing. I feel this next war changing me. I am wanting. To make some alterations first. What sky against what day. What body now in rubble. What in the decorated tomb. What body armed, who bleeds. What unmoved will make what of the body now seated with a pen. For tracing feathers on the wings of birds. Who listens now for birds in this silence. Over the machine, a high round melody. Looping. Something loose. In the machine where the bird might. See it.

***

Inspired by The Swan, No. 17 (1915)

ochild

notes toward a minor crossing

one day
I will tell you in music
what I mean

and show
by the curve
of my bowed back

this violin

and wait
while you remember

and say
by this instrument—

listen

I will show you
the sound a bird means

singing

above her heart
pounding

too fast
for you to follow

while alive

and I will say gently

try baby

and for a moment

you will

and you will
try baby

still alive

(meaning what?)

then
you will know
what I mean

enough
for us to leave

and be still again

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.

ongoing

regarding capacities

A simmering discomfort persists. I live inside it, knocking softly at the limits of a body never quite mine. Often, I imagine shedding this skin of competence, of expected gestures, but time does not loosen it yet. Questions and requests arrive. I answer. The skin I mean to outgrow is made of small, capable acts. Sometimes I wish someone else would lift them. Once upon a time, when someone would say you do too much, my ears would perk up. Perhaps this ailing was only my stubbornness, refusing any other way? But then I’d look again, and there were lives set down everywhere, a scatter of need underfoot. So, I pick up what I can and carry on.  I dream sometimes of bearing witness to another carrier, who is too busy doing the work to announce themselves, whose very presence at my side would be a comfort, whose humor in the effort would be the best laugh I ever had in my life. 

Exit mobile version
%%footer%%