Before recorded time
You don’t have a name for what you are in until you’re leaving it. Sometimes, to move, you have to try to give it words even when the blasts keep interrupting, even when the words you have fail to satisfy the genre of official record.
Spectacles of progress
Notice its efficiency,
the ease with which
this machine can
separate the living
from the life.
Answers to FAQs.
Why this?
For these moments
I brace with an answer.
So dumb when it comes
to the ways of this place
that I carry a cheat sheet.
It says: taste, tear,
bear the weight because
you know yourself a floating
thing, prone to flying off,
unable to land. The terror
of losing touch with
gravity. Because that dark
beyond those clouds
is thick with the pull
of entropy, into some
chaos and I don’t know
what, away from here
the place of sweat
and laundry and alarms
and a lot of driving to
and from places in cars
with their warning lights
and trying to park
and getting overdraft
notices and the most recent
thing to break today is a blood
vessel in the eye and that little
hinge that’s supposed to keep
the door from opening too wide
and obviously this heart and
at least one of these is going
to stay broke and too far open
all the time.
And lovers
How much depends
on the timing of a tear
in the fabric of wing?
How much on the drip
of wax?
How much on the hunger
of an eye, craving reunion
with the nearest star.
The telling
Tell me about it, we say, nodding at the most recent lament before us––in the chair, at the table, with the tired voice; in passing in the wild rush. Tell me, we repeat, like shaking a clean sheet to fold it before stacking with the others, who whisper in chorus at this gesture and its countless kin, constantly throughout each day, a plea for a home not quite remembered or fully left. Tell me about it. Tell me about that place I can always remember, ever almost. Whisper to me of this collective hush again, what I need to hear against the sirens.
Selected moments
The bowed wave, well-timed
arrow of bird piercing sunset
sky swelling wind gusting up
just in time to meet the sigh
of almost prayer: a sign, we
say, and mine.
On any beginning
It’s like this with any beginning, isn’t it? This sick-sweet anticipatory dread. Sure, yes, I can. But really, can I? Show me. It is possible. Show me. Even now. Show me. An opening. Show me. Here? Yes, this bloom. Here? Almost.
Trail note
Lacking, wretched, miserable, I set out to search, found nothing, and now there is only this to adore, in astonishment.
Here
If most of what is, is invisible
I will place my hope in the unseen
to be nurtured in that dark.
To dissolve some absolution
Always wants. An attempt to loosen the fibers that seemed to contain the riddle of becoming. From that bonebound island I thought I knew what I was and knowing only wants, dreamed that if I were only more, I might hold those skies, that ocean, and swell to blooming so I could let it all go into the living. I used to imagine you a landscape I might photograph in pieces to print on transparencies, hold the light of you up to your light to translate for you this wonder at your nearness. I remember where we stood above the sea holding hands up into sunset as if to catch whatever heavens might finally rain.
But what do you want, always?
What does Always want?
I am impatient to know.
Please speak slowly.
I lack fluency and miss the nuance of your most important phrases.
The phrase “bonebound island” comes from The Notebooks of Dylan Thomas.
