Category: earthling

Still Waters

With cat.

In the early morning, an hour for the dust, your altar, your black eye, long since healed, the ridge of the once-purpled nose still visible in certain lights. That weather is over now, moved elsewhere, but still you come to sit with it.

This morning’s sounds are birds and the laundry room just outside the door, and dogs after a passing truck. The phone rings at an odd hour and familiar panic crashes like a wave. But it is nothing, a pocket dial.

And yet, it means something to gather these nothings to the chest and hold. Either because unless I still do this, I am nothing––or because I am essentially nothing, and it is good to be among my kind. Probably both are true, but I don’t get to know.

So, I sit here with these nothings and now here the solid weight of this cat pouring herself into my lap, to hold and be held. She is someone, this cat. She won’t do this with anyone else. I think she likes that I am good at disappearing, too––into the bed, the chair, the book, the music, birdsong.  And, when interrupted––gone.

She is a great teacher the art of emptying the form, so that the liquid of something else may come in. I have spent enough time with the form itself, testing its limits to see what it will take. A lot, it turns out, but for what? When those limits finally cracked, I felt something else move in. It will not be named so it is nothing, and here we are now, these insubstantial breaths our sum, and the sum of us nothing, too.

Among Kings and Queens

Along the fortress walls

The game prize glowed with standard marble and a cartoon cupid peeped out to double the flames. An abundance of jewels decorated the assembly, the idea to catch more light, and more, to rise and rise to meet its source. 

It is not difficult to make a fetish of fearing dark, where those uncrowned and slippery forms tend to wind along walls as if to challenge their veracity, as if to challenge certain given truths, the self-evidence of status. Or of your life. 

That you see and know. That you remember what was. That what now shall be done is your will. That time is for your hurry, food for your teeth, your tongue, that these pills will do for fixing what ailments may come. That the night you feared might only be good where you wished it so when you went around saying good night and watching the walls.

To Watch

Our spectacles

Where are the bones to rattle? When the wind moves it may find only these trinkets we used for cheering the spectacle of the hour. C’mon, the saying went, lighten up, and we waved the shining tendrils of metallic-plated streamers at the end of plastic sticks to make our own wind. It did not cool us in the end. No one could stop to say it, but there were moments when those ribbons caught a light like something you might put out to bring a body home.

Those bones. That sound.

Impermanence

Time, space, heat, weather.

And I said, no, dear. Without any claims on infinity, I am only
here, threaded by vessels to this time where they river thick
until I don’t know when and many are broken but enough
keep on, motley constellation of us around aorta’s arch.
Much of what passes for memory whispers in that hush
with dawn’s birdsong of some impending rush––out, out!
It will run when that geography comes to catch in dust
or metal, the rust of us howling ––you can’t, you can’t!
we shrieked, catch me! and fast and faster than you
thought we were racing from that place but into it too
we were content to move in circles and knew nothing
of direction and content with little else but the chance
to spill the contents of ourselves those shrieks those
cries that liquid laughter out and out, nearer.

Before Sky

When a bird

How often I wish I could tell you about this exquisite bird in such a manner that you might know her, too. She was here before me, before the shattering. Bird is an inadequate word in this context, but I use it because it approximates a reference to a creature with a beak and feathers. She was much larger than I am but bowed her magnificent neck to meet me at eye level. I wanted to look into those eyes endlessly. This seemed like an indulgent and selfish response to such an offering, so instead I started numbering her feathers. I recognized that this was likely an impossible task, especially for someone of my limited intelligence who lacked training and had neither tools or methods beyond the steadfast attention that had long been a symptom of what my elders gravely suggested was a somewhat outsized and possibly obscene capacity for devotion. One, two, three. . . I was at 13,426 when abruptly interrupted. An official voice demanded to know, What are you doing? but I would not turn my head from those undulating wisps. I meant to keep my count. Other things were shouted but I ignored them, meaning to hang on.

That is not, the voice insisted, real. I heard a click of metal. 

What followed was not feathers, but sky. What ghosted through it has no pulse, no blood, no song. There is no after here and nothing to save by the counting. Only this continuance. I am rearranged inside it, but I cannot tell you how. I thought the words would appear at the end of that count and if it did not end that I would live inside the action of keeping it––forever, with no need for language beyond what was passing between the count and that vision in pieces. Now what. 

Living Here

Notes on form

You managed to learn instead of what they meant to teach you, the salvific possibility of carceral silence, to balance the weight of bird death and tree life, to sing love poems while exiled to the latrines. In this way, you taught the human form as a thing to be created, even and especially now.

Inspired by the lifework of Nazim Hikmet.

Exit mobile version
%%footer%%