Saving in time.
As the weather changed, we noticed. Each wind carried voices. The thing to do was pretend not to hear what they whispered through slats of our thin plastic blinds. There were other things to do. We started with food. The impulse to offer. To the living. Vestigial? Maybe from a time when time was still immune to the clock and darker months meant scarcity and their coming meant harvest and the thing to do was save what had managed to stay living while it grew.
Something like memory.
We wanted Time the wound-dresser, but he lurked with a shiv in his sock teasing us from a dark corner, what is it now? of the hour. He bet by our faces, adding wouldn’t you like to know?
We were lying to know, nodding hard and he was anxious about maintaining the image of getting somewhere.
Space sucked her teeth, said I see you, but he needed his records and was always asking what we wanted to do. He meant to appreciate some facts of being here together, but needed an agenda to fill his reminders, warning this is what you need.
We lacked the right answers when he quizzed us but kept first-aid kits. He would demand these sometimes, just to check. We could be career knife-jugglers and not run out of gauze but then he caught us one day, with Hawking’s Brief History and insisted there was more to him than she thought. Meaning our mother.
I am not what they make me out to be, he insisted, pointing at her. I am no straight arrow, no line, and Space laughed, oh, we know, baby, we all know.
Inside this.
and so you look
for an edge so you can
press against it and find
the end of you
it was not war
or gravity
more like Jonah’s whale
or what left you
open-mouthed beneath
the sky the reverse
actor expunged
from the belly that held
you in the world and now
too small to take it back
inside you
Toad bones and other remedies.
Watch the stones. One bitten by a mad dog will sow discord when dropped inside a drink. If tongue of dog is set in shoe, the others will not approach. Look to the toads, too. To spit in the mouth of one and set it free will cure the sore throat and the bone of another cures cold, inspiring love. Also quarrels.
Your fate is in the stars but as fate would have it, these are beyond your reach. So, you work with what you can. Stamp the magic square on a silver plate when Jupiter rules. Let abundance follow. Some say it comes faster if you engrave coral.
An ounce of prevention against Saturn’s unrest is worth its weight in alchemical gold. With the string of heavens stretched taut to these lowlands, the instruments among you only wait to be tuned, that they may know the note by which to offer the music of forever, and if you hear it, you will know the cure for death. Grab this heart, this bone, this stone, this leaf. Watch the stars and hold.
***
Inspired by a recent feature in the Public Domain Review, on Agrippa’s encyclopedia of magic.
Interview with the artists in the aftermath of a first attempt.
How do I describe the place where we were? Birds of paradise guard the fortresses, holding still. A hushed place except for the machines. Between each fortress, you must not make a loud sound or have too much of laughter in one place if the place is below the window of a fortress because the people inside tend toward nervous conclusions, such as attack. Now we know, but we weren’t trying to scare anyone––not personally, anyway.
We were together, our company, because of the times, and the way we wanted to do something with our fear. It was going to be an opera. The working title was For the Scorched Earth. It accompanied an installation piece as well as a huge dance floor. This part was important, and nothing that any of us could fit in any place we lived, so we jumped at the chance to stage the event in a place with a large yard. Or really, any yard.
The lead character is an ancient god of the lunar eclipse who has lost his way. The idea was to dance him back home. We were going to invite the whole community! The point was also healing. But now we know that some ideas are too big for a given space. They shut us down.
But there’s no doubt we’ll try again. Reason being, we already have costumes and once people see themselves in those, no one can resist a grand entrance. We even had them for all the neighbors, too! These gorgeous birds of paradise pieces, all satin and taffeta. They were going to be stunning in the light. The mistake was not handing them out sooner.
In retrospect, that was a miscalculation. We were having fun with the element of surprise. It seemed so apropos, given our theme! But not everything translates across cultures. So now we know. The next space will be much bigger.
To change it.
When one day you know as you could not before
how you are going and this comes before you know how, how
do you save anything from something that no one will see
if one day the lights in the air
if one day the sounds behind the silent air
rears up if one day getting a grip is like
waking in the morning trying for a fist
how do you find a way if one day you decide
better to do something
than nothing at all.
How to bake bread.
How to remember
the names of all
the categories there are
for things that are and
still, nowhere––
Early lessons in looking.
Children reviewed scenarios. What to do when you are lost in a wilderness with no aid and no promise of its coming. A book might say if they found the right one, how to leave a trail by walking through what is soft. To stop at intervals to write HELP in the snow in the sand in the mud with an arrow pointing in the direction of the feet. How if the course is reversed. To travel back over the prints. To alert anyone who is looking, if anyone is looking, not to go beyond the tracks. To follow the lines of roads and rivers and listen well. If a party calls, they will use an unusual word. Three syllables. Internet! Coconut! Spaghetti! Leave personal items behind. But who has the book.
You can learn to look this way, scanning the horizon for smoke signals, for mirror flash, to train the ear to hear the distant cry. But how did you learn to meet it, children wondered, of the expectation that anyone grown would know where to go when it was time, and when? When the wind comes. Who ties it all down. They cut the books of questions into strips, folded each line into a basket. They would need more for the carrying.
After the burn.
What do you call the records kept by those who escape from war with nothing but their lives and memories of the dead? Not History, but its adjacent double. The shrapnel in tissue when the bleeding learned to stop waiting for peace, to start saying this is the leg now, the cause going no further than the blast itself as if to say, here is the end of time as you knew it as if to blow into injury some reminder: this is the living now.
These fragments from the blast, this thread that bound us once so long in the weather and the sweat of my grip, past the point of being able to imagine an end or a beginning, love I only want to offer them to you, for keeping even after safe is gone.
The hills in dreamland.
Mama, says the child, of another dream.
Of black smoke above the hillside, how it
rose against blue sky, the tide of us––
running and we don’t know. Where.
An alphabet of sorrows in the rubble
in the smoke. Punctuated by the bright
of a dropped stuffed duck, yellow fuzz
against the soot. Place the crosses
in the road against what rolls its
aim over caterpillar tracks, its
aim our end. Save us. From these
signs. We want to be saved from
what they call signs of the times.
Of the times that they call of the
end. Of the dream with the smoke
where we move in the tide and––
calling. Calling but the phones
when we press do not move.
Something moves with us and in
the shouting and there is no time––
These times, these times. None
of it for names.
But try, child. Name it.
Early exercises.
A memory. Of clouds. How they carried early poems. As if to illustrate some measure. It had to do with distances. The ones between language and aim. The ghosts were not deterred. They had seen it all. So long silent, they were done with all that, pushing out from the chest, up.
Like, Go.
Like, Stand.
Like, There.
