Our storage.
It was time, after all. Of this to admit to waiting space with delicate apprehension of open book not yet read or gone. Something breathing in the boxes we kept and time to look so we opened to see what we were holding, and it was parts of us everywhere in pieces.
lightly
where are we
thin paper in breeze
under arches of feet
when to hold
us is to hold
not speak
A long return.
You have to keep imagining layers of stars at night, fold after fold the inverted brain, its witness a single synapse. But then what. Do you do? With these hands but set them over knees to breathe as wave rolls over back.
The air, its sudden stillness, its small voice, and the long watch just above its range and the watcher shrouded in a role too big for such a tight fit. In these clothes, this body, this moment, the incessant shout of it, ongoing. What is the sound of a call from nowhere and who is this approaching, calling back?
So little returns in time. Cause to wonder which of us is out. But certain patterns predict their own change. Watch the angle. Velocity hinges on this. Admit it now, how often you are carried across sky seeing bodies in it like a child still unable to crawl or follow without the appearance of other hands.
Long gaze, rolled tight.
On occasion we would notice it was possible to feel nearer to the ancient untouchables of distant tongues, then know them out of reach. Was there a time when the myth did not begin with broken parts? We could not say, knowing only heroes against horizons, shells shattering into light then back to dust––but first, another genesis. And then, and then––
Head on bed of moss before battle. Song. Oceans rising into dream without rest, yet the eyes still lift. Up and out they go, flying off.
But it was possible to learn to wrap the long gaze tight in folds of worn cloth while folding what was freshly scorched from the machine, to bring them up again to sort among the boxes and all still left unsaid between unseen and seeing.
Sounds between us.
When I asked how, she told me, too. To find the tree to hear its sound and the sound of shaded earth beside it. To find the water, sounding water. To notice the call and response between them and listen for your cue.
This. Morning.
Sunday morning sky
and spotted details
of the last blast
photo of plush toy
bright against rubble
these folded cat paws
beside me the careful
soft of fur and the babies
and the sound of no sound
when questions about next
are done
dawn / what seed is this
what bird
what howls
A triptych.
Morning light dissolves the purple of early clouds still pliant with possibility. There the dog, there the hand on the head of the dog, the other gripping Styrofoam cup. Sip as the steam moves through. A ship comes in. Another is loaded. Voice from the dock: thirty minutes.
Later, past the southeastern hills, screen door rattles over porch over wet grass under grey-white sky. The flies start early. Your creaking chair. The freeway hush constant as ocean now, and this used to be horse country.
Down to the park, child in grass to feel a spinning planet at her back, trying to imagine the sight of us and all of this at a distance. Up and up, here is time and here is space but where do they connect? Shiver of sudden pulse at the small of her back. Her mother calls, Baby. She calls, it is time.
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
