I will.
I want––
For you, I do.
I want to will
––something, until
you know it is for you
and here –– hear
and will yourself –– and will you?
Child, take it.
Willing continuance.
I will.
I want––
For you, I do.
I want to will
––something, until
you know it is for you
and here –– hear
and will yourself –– and will you?
Child, take it.
Facing its faces.
The land before us
suggested as much
by gesture as by intensity
of gaze returned.
It was tempting
to call out, Hello?
and Who is here?
But we saw them
seeing us and
the grasses
spoke first.
***
Inspired by Osman Can Yerbaken’s description of the paintings of Ghanaian artist Gideon Appah, who as Yerbaken puts it, “commands the landscape genre as its own form of portraiture by depicting the emotionality of a place like the piercing immediacy of a face.”
On sacred ground.
We wondered too late if there was any other place to go, dry winds making rubble of our throats, their silence to echo the ruin we could not bear to see when it was yesterday and still only possible when other states were also possible and still, we will not say it, how we want the rain, as though to say nothing is to trick it back, as though language itself were only a game, no longer trusted to sing us forward, to call the heavens down and return the waters of our lives to our waiting tongues as we hide them in shame and will not say the word and it is true there has been a betrayal here for the word, too, can be trampled under feet too quick to march, who would not stop to meet the ground when it introduced itself, and asked to touch the naked soles
––of us.
With feathers.
See us, arms like feathers raised, we want to get it right––the angle, to hold it. For the time. For the wind. When it comes. There is so much we want. So much we want to get right.
And nobody’s wind.
It was the last evening of the break, and it was nothing.
How I loved it, remembering now.
The walks we took back and again to the car, checking
on things we forgot, returning empty-handed to share
our mutterings with the cat and laughter over
your particular socks and your ice cream
and the way you pretended not to sleep
and the show we watched was stupid
and we kept on repeating its lines
laugh-crying over nothing and I didn’t even write
a page, only opened a file and closed it
I could feel the time closing for this and now wonder
if it’s what’s left undone in a place that sanctifies.
I will miss this, the lack of pretense
that we were anything but here
breathing in it.
Return from Dreamland.
And approximately when will you be back,
do you imagine, from the beyond of
wherevers in which you have been off
sighting the next forever in the dappled branches
of those metaphorical trees in the woods
of your etceteras? Some of us are dying
to know.
All but fire, a natural history.
Then came the question of fire, its striking immediacy. It had to do with all that changes suddenly, but we were there to describe what was. A separate matter. It was decided.
When it came to outlining the real, we would omit this strange incandescence––unnatural, wasn’t it? ––to better focus on the unburning parts. Research hummed along after that, with machine-like efficiency, without distraction by the looping songs of grieving souls.
What is this? We would say, of each non-burning specimen. And where there was no name, we could invent one, and all of it fell under a single decision, and it was Progress and we went with it, marching.
To match the story.
Beyond seven rivers
o what there was
in the oldest of ages
upon a time
not now.
Tell us again
of that gratuitous evil,
its stank breath.
Its obvious malignance.
Give us that clarity,
take us back.
Possibilities for movement.
Something that is was just here. It has significance but will not fit any storyline. There was a grotesque beauty reveling. And then, and then. Every soul has its way of coming to terms with its containment in space, contending with death. It crowds the psyche, back against a wall. It has no end, and isn’t going anyplace. It’s always going on. And then, and still. Unlike the notion of story––something that, as they say, happened. The order of movements is crucial.
Decay as creative premise.
Nested in cordgrass, a master work sinks.
The artist smiles over its cracking disappearance.
Rubble is one of my primary interests, she tells us.
She imagines its rearrangement.
I mean, she adds, what might come?
There are good reasons, after all,
––and especially here, to reject nostalgia.
***
The title of this post comes from this installation by American artist Beverly Buchanan, which a recent New York Times article by Siddhartha Mitter describes as a vanishing masterpiece.