With winged hero.
Hello, messenger. You are no good at flying but faithful in your attempts.
Pranked again by your devices, you can’t resist the dime store crown, the glitter-wrapped wand to go with it, even as it leaves you short one palm to break the fall. What resistance you have, you spend against gravity.
A study in wreckage, your devotion. There you go again to the height of the last wall in the next fallen fortress, to meet the updraft, that it may lift you backward into the hour at your open hand.
With human.
Hover, ghost of
half animals
and clock plants,
leave these with
me, still with this
thirst, doubting,
still of unknown
orbs packed in
fiber of distress.
Still ugly. All
nervous unrest
promising to the last:
death, I will sleight
your hand first.
Long view from well bottom.
Reminder: you will not be always in this gnawing gut at the center of your terror, and you will laugh again, and love someone who smiles back at you still. Even as you look away now, afraid to push your luck when it comes to what may be saved, you are raised to take less than anyone’s idea of deserving and that face tastes like the last memory you need. To hold that gaze from this deep a vantage for finding still this little light. A want to yell, Go, and keep them in it.
At the bottom of the lens.
Where is the story to account for waves of squirrel over branch, or this ache reminding there is no way sometimes it seems to reckon with (to recognize?) the way things are and when the fall and the hawk and the fire–––?
No. Look. Stop this.
I am looking. It’s the seeing that won’t come. I remember when sight was like a vision, the undulating body of it, ripe with equal parts recognition and want. Now this spinning, keeping watch, shapeshifting dark. It knows me. But I want to remember the other one. Who laughed and meant it.
Time for vigilance.
Then comes a big day. The kind suspended in stop-motion with a sound in the ears like the high notes of a distant organ, with bird quaking in chest and stomach sliding sick-slick with anticipation against the ribs. For saying Okay and Breathe and Please. For hyper-awareness of need, for the moment to respond to events already in motion. To accept all offers to be carried, prayed over, protected where you go alone. These big ones have a way of reminding what a day is. The others are no smaller, only less well known.
Subway meditation.
That this feeling might be bottled and passed like emergency water. How to describe the taste of this sacrament. It has something to do with the shared steam of this space between stops, thigh to thigh, hand over hand even with the gentle deference of strangers; the false metaphor of personal space, how easy it is to hold at a distance, but impossible here. Whatever territory there might be is no island but an occasional bubble in this sea and we dive from this common reef and back again, open doors take these bodies given up with a nod to this passage, and in between stops none of us are anywhere but here. This is no epiphany, it would not be so bold, it only strains the suggestion of one incubating in the chest, but holding back, too humble to intrude on the next inhalation. Who needs another revelation now? There is only the weight of our bodies, this body, the man in scrubs sleeping on his feet with his hand on the bar above, we know what this is, but Shh. There are meals to make, knots to pray out of, debts that will never be paid, and let’s not get into all that right now, not here. Only hold.
Home and away.
In the lens of this longing reach, the soft give of fabric draping over a mother’s head, breast, shoulders––squeezes the chest-bird home like, yes, you will again––someday, even if. Ever.
And the light kiss into bowed bodies in sea, these water-slick skins, fog bedding of hilltops, as if to cushion the fall.
There was––there it was, had been.
You will be––the chest bird strains against its skeleton, not to be kept from that acacia on the hill, blue green in the sunset that is too bright already to be anything you know, and how do you explain this except that it must be all.
***
Inspired by the photography of Ismali Folaranmi Odetola, whose “Necessary Departure” I recently encountered in an airport.
In-flight reminders.
Having the kind of travel experience that offers certain reminders. Such as: how likely it is that whatever the itinerary, it will be subverted; whatever the projected arrival time, it is probably just a theory; that a theory will continue to be offered, because we like to have one, even if we know it will probably fall through; that whatever belongings we thought we would have with us may not arrive.
And yet, here we are, and we have yet to need the emergency exits or the inflatable vests. And we sleep, eventually and somewhere. Our carefully made plans and carefully packed items can be replaced. But not this one, sleeping. Her quiet breath. I used to wake in the middle of the night to check for it. May I remember this. And know that if we are anywhere with nothing but these breaths, the stunning abundance when they continue to arrive in time.
Beneath signs.
City of the sun, salve my sins and give me second skins in half-off drive-thru plastic packets with a color for every fluorescent mood, forget the shadow. Food’s first rush shakes the rattle, hard- fisted billboards of it banging now, now, now at the table. One day I’d like to meet someone––city, are you listening your eyes in every limb the undulating spread of you––someone across the table draped in shade, can you imagine in the radiant quiet of those hands, another pulse?
Grief and costume.
Sometimes when my words are hiding in some corner refusing to come out when called, I wonder what is really going on, and then have to admit that I can’t blame them for being fed up with me. So much of the use of syllables in daily life involves costuming their original forms in these ridiculous get-ups, the sort we raged against as children, the sort I would never dream of inflicting on the cat.
To even mention the appropriateness of abandoning sentences for a full-throated scream at a time like this is cliché by now, inviting memories of scolds: only dullards state the obvious, and with these, cringing recollections of times when I did not consider what was and was not obvious when speaking with––as the tired saying went, a full heart––because the whole point was to know what was new and raw, thrilling at the cut of it, the constant overflow, I could not keep my fingers from a scab and if someone had pressed me to define what this was, exactly, I might have gushed Everything!––and of course it was.
It’s not like I didn’t know of death, not that I didn’t see it, dream it, smell it under the porch, only that I had yet to discover how I carried it in such devastating abundance, or why people costumed and embalmed it to such great lengths for ceremonial viewing. I had yet to understand why the truly devastated, those who have wept long enough to feel irritated by the uselessness of solemnity, will sometimes scream in wild laughter at a wake.
