With amazement.
Speak to me of ongoingness, of the atmospheric nature of objects, of astonishment; of the vertigo of finding yourself in an image with no context or memory of the moment. Let the speech of the hour open with Stop, let us weep. Let the ruins of the moment leave us pierced, undone with memory. Let the past cut a deluge into now, not to be consoled. That we remember.
Where is the horse? And the rider. And that time. When we plunged into the cold sea, ready to lose ourselves.
And why: a rough outline.
It’s an ongoing project, this who. And the question why here, which necessarily brings its entourage of related questions: where is here, what is this trajectory. Why suffer. What beauty. What truth. Remember. Forget. Give it all up. Let it bowl you over again. Try other selves. Notice other suns. Wrestle angels. Demons, too. Hear the chorus. Then the individual breaths. Notice yours among these: now it is distinct, now it blends into the others, now it is missing, now it returns. The work is no good for finishing, but at least the company is lively. What an ensemble. At the end, death calls on each of us, ready or not. Until then, this is something to do.
The weight of what survives.
What air. What hollow light. What weeps in shadow. What receives. What mind slouches forward to be born a new god? Whatsoever is loosed here will be loosed above. What art, then? Whose? What thunder. What fire. What wrath.
[May this not end on wrath. As it does for–how many now? The count will not hold. Of these, how many too young to pronounce the word.]
What rage, what grief. Whose ears? Whoever has them, what do you hear?
Against progress.
Sometimes I arrive but not now. Sometimes now is mostly reckoning. Often, I do neither. The machine takes more. I want to hear music. I can’t hear it over these droning gears, the constant engine, the alarms. An announcement loops, Look! We are getting somewhere now! I don’t want to look at whatever it is highlighting for display. I miss song, and safety. Yesterday I read a word denoting longing for a state never experienced, useless and vivid. I did not write it down. I could not stop to write the word for the longing to be away from the machine. I know machine learning makes it possible to look up the words we forget. I could do this now. But what I want is not to use the machine to find what I have lost. I want instead to be returned to a state––not of wholeness (I am not entirely unreasonable), but less rapid losing, less accumulated loss. I am wholly aware of the uselessness of such longing. It is mine.
Witness, washed.
You can’t bring anything back, so we do this other thing. We walk outside alone at different times. Look at the moon, we say in our heads. Then in a message. A photo in the message. See the moon. Its light a soft wash for the nests in upper branches, for the cliff’s edge, the canyon brush, the witness. There is work tomorrow, and this moment won’t be reversed. Look, we say, when the other prayers won’t come.
Salts of the earth.
Where did you go? Where we went was once a sea, but the sea was gone. Hulks of ships cast shadows on the sand. It’s these and the saxaul, dust, and the red sun.
The face of this, being. The radiance of this alarm.
The sea of before had fed surrounding towns: sturgeon, flounder, caviar. Now tourists come, for pictures. We are among them.
What matters more, the beginning or the end?
Sand blows. Moments sweep past us.
Now would be the time for a hawk overhead. There are none. We are the birds of prey, clipping our wings, the dream and death of flights of sons. The sun.
***
A Giant Inland Sea is Now a Desert, And a Warning for Humanity, in The New York Times.
An arrival.
It’s fair enough to speak of perpetual mourning and mean it, and to wonder if keys were made for losing, but there is nothing of fairness, nothing deserved about finding at the end of any of these losses neither keys nor answers to any of the questions about where they went, but here this sudden hand, its open offering, the press of its continual pulse.
Life among lichen.
To find the gnarled bend, its dripping hush, the moss-encrusted gathering space for unruly congregations of ferns, witches’ whiskers, and hazel gloves––and be enchanted to protect the wild, wet, crawling danger of this womb with hope only to be near it––and know that if there is anything here to be tamed, it is in you.
***
Inspired by the ongoing movement to protect the temperate rainforests of the UK and Ireland.
Riding fault lines.
Consider the weight of water after rains against fault lines and the weight of our collected lives, how it takes not so many earthquake memories to learn that it is a matter of time until the next one, but this is the land of billboards training the witness into submission to a hunger that drives on to speed out branching interstate miles into state route highways flying toward the next bite, flesh riding the wind of the last win into the next investment cheered by a chorus calling Act Fast, Act Now, Don’t Miss. Out. It’s coming, they told us, the screens our suns in constant revolution around us, projecting new worlds of pleasure and war. Something rumbled and we caught each other’s eyes, looking up. What is that? one of us asked, and the voice of an invisible speaker said Now.
And flight.
I look up from a page where I am working out this thing about the flying men that came and went, and find Buzz, the resident cat, with that look. Like, what about you? where is it you fly off to?
My secret I suspect has to do with being a creature of ritual, prone to long bouts of longing for ecstatic states. I move a pen across the lines of a page, as a younger me used to move feet over miles and miles of sidewalk concrete
road / trails / following
something––
I knew I wouldn’t reach it, but I would reach the end of an attempt at being in its presence, and I knew there was worth in the attempt alone and it was worth more than any I –––
At the time I would have called what I was after a better time but secretly I called it a synonym for light, some word I didn’t have yet. I still don’t have it, don’t think that I would say it if I did. It was for this luminous something I could almost see near the end, and I knew it––
to be worth collapsing
for I wanted it to
take me from my body that I may know something––
just beyond its reach––
