earthling 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.

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.

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.

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.

as though another world

whispers at the pressure points

The ever-present door announces itself in heavy traffic, a portal thrumming its private gravity. Brake lights bloom a red procession, hearts drum another time, to feel what stirs beneath these sheets of asphalt riverbed, muscling out of hibernation.

Some say a black star can drink whole worlds from miles away— a terror, until the thought turns inside-out and the void becomes a turning point, its axis hidden between one state and the next. Old icons taught endurance, bright wounds, the lift of leaving.

Danger is expected here. A greater peril looms, by devotion to denial of an elsewhere, in those who swear allegiance to a knotted net, its stinking mesh, even as something ancient and unseen exhales a boggy breath to press against these seams.

echo map

report from a peripheral field

even in plaster
these fragments pulse
into cracked surface

where something answers
dendrite of a distant star
light
on metal shard
to flicker

paired
neurons
deciding whether to fire
or fall

apart it remembers
two hands:
one small
one trembling

a torn scrap of paper lists
three fears, stalls before
the fourth, its wall
an open synapse

during solar storms,
a choral hum
rises

two heartbeats caught
between collision,
orbit

before an empty case
where vision loosens
arriving in periphery

into the nearest
next
away

bones of the suns

view from the updraft, suspended

The bones had to set when we broke them—
we set them in ash after each burn,

beside skeletons of former homes, still smoking.
We needed new cells to grow. Hold still, they said,

teaching how to manage the waiting period.
They meant faith—but without the work

it looked half-dead in our mirrors. We listened
for wolves. We saved their prints in boxes

for someday—for sorting, for display. But what
do you name the waters rising high enough to jump

to the next roof, hoping that one holds? Other questions
scratched outside us. Siri, what do you know of shelter?

It was something to do; knowing you had no service
didn’t stop the need to speak. We reached ready

for the next ledge, and she might have said, You can wait
until dark. Siri, we might have answered—I believe,

to heal our unbeliefs. The ghosts before us pointed next
and up ahead. We had begged to see it. But one wing,

caught in the updraft, suspended—still looking back—
It was the wreck we marched from. It looked away.

We looked away. It was possible, then, to keep wishing—
merrily down a lane to the land of the dead.

Tracing its thread against honey-slick tongues, we offered
first milk. Some kept their breasts bound for harvest moon.

And when it came, there would be blood, and money—
enough to say: we’ll be okay another year

until time
comes to pull it back again— the sun

of our once
and future sons.

notes from proclamation season

“One must not be too romantic about stability.” – Simone Weil

I sought stability, to make it out of love.
Which I did, and continue to do.
While the ones who never knew

its substance, or how to make
any of it for themselves, come
barging in on missions and leave
a mess. I clean again, then rest,
and breathe relief.

One of these warriors, gone off
again now, would make better
company if he were ever here
or anywhere close to here
or now.

Who still keeps proclaiming how
he means to make it his next mission
to care for me. If there’s one thing
I don’t need to be, it’s another man’s
mission toward eternity.

He’ll return to see he’s made
another mess of another failure
of grand proclamation.

This is why I prefer the cat’s company,
her present immediacy, attention.
Who teaches me in her steady gaze
that I am not yet half as grounded
as I mean to be, as I keep being
pulled away.

at the tree stump

in a loud forest at a new cut

Kneel, then, upon these roots, listening before the offered body, to the language of this ancient tree, cut now, far from canopy and now a waiting map of exposed flesh, etched with the record of seasons. The wound may sprout a new tree from inside the cracks of her severed body if the roots are intact, if disease does not kill what would.

give me a web

to reject another tired hero’s story

Yes, I see those stories, too, all around me. The location and abundance of which some will exclaim, “are everywhere!”

No matter where I go, the one that interests me most is not a story, for it is made of what would not be recognized as such. It tends to feature a non-hero whose non-feats go unnoticed by being what they are–– more constant labors, and no less common than the fact of the web appearing between the branches of the fig tree overnight.

Many of those who proclaim most loudly that stories are everywhere! are in fact looking for the same story––as anyone armed with hammers for hands, might learn to see only nails. This much-sought-after tale is another version of the hero with his labors, slaying or banging on whatever he can’t pick up.

Lately I have grown very tired of its droning echo, and I do not think I am alone. This one, I think, has gone far enough. Give me more spider, more web, more patience, less noise.

Lately, I think, give me no more of these old stories, only quiet tending: of the careful meal, the clean floor, fresh sheets, attentive care.

It is possible I live at the beginning of the end of the age of an old story. As someone still alive inside it, I lack the perspective I would need to confirm or refute this suspicion with any presumption of accuracy.

Finding the ability to make those quiet and non-storied, daily events happen is the only narrative I can find valuable right now. This is partially because I could use some help with these things and also because I have grown very tired of that other clamor.

I am also weary of those who make, as a habit, a racket to entertain. These are different from those who make an entertaining noise for reasons they have not intended. I am weary of those who throw plastic affirmations when it is clear that all their expression can do is reproduce the old pain.

The makers of these pseudo-joys, in an effort to to capitalize on the coin of the realm, regularly add to daily misery by their steadfast commitment to cellophane-wrapped optimisms.

Meanwhile, so many dead. And also, so many able but unwilling bodies, who have made their non-decisions with brilliant sheens of glamour, who feel justified in their non-decisions to leave unwashed those dirty sheets, who unprepare the careful meal whether or not they will eat it, or to remember what hour of what day it is, now.