earthling Archives

More than Words

Pre-verbal meditations.

Before we thought we had any, there was no need for reminders back to what language occludes. We knew our names were clumsy, we felt the thud of them against surfaces and the weight of words blundering around us, knocking so much over in the effort to reach their objects, trampling entire worlds underfoot. We felt the cascading fall of us, trying to arrive, claiming at once home and this home is not mine. Disarmed, disobedient, dislocated, we could not saw what we were, and this was our best chance. The world was dizzy, and we met it on these terms, calling come out come out to one another, wherever you are.

Intimate Geometries

The lens turned inside out.

Some days it is clear upon waking that what follows will involve certain reminders. About how, for example, I am at any given time rarely more than half-open or half-closed. Even when I thought I was more than aware of being somewhat too dense for my imagination’s preference, I am now the weary stranger offering directions to the inquiring heart, wondering whether its own spiraling rhythm is moving toward the center, or out. Or else, a shadow cut from its source, floating around like a kite. And it’s unclear, from this wavering axis, whether the metaphor is the blunt object sending an atom of awareness out into a larger field, or a mat to cushion the impact.

The Unmapped

On what is good and lost.

One theory is that you know you have arrived when you can get yourself good and lost without worry over getting home. This assumes no one is waiting for your arrival, or the meal you would make, or the rent––difficult to pull off in a given day, and yet in the suspended space of making what we make, I suppose it happens all the time. But just as I am starting to think, here is something, I am back to thinking of the birds falling from the sky, whole flocks of them discovered in the aftermath––but also once a snowy owl, living, in a tree near the local library, and the punk defiance of the tiny nest that once appeared on the electrical box, and the lizard that looked back as we crouched to see him beneath the cabinet, the cat and I, and maybe the point is only to lose the trepidation over being fatally human––into a wider web, woven of strands this limited sight is still unable to detect.

The Possibility of Shelter

In the days of wind.

Who among us could assume security? The answer sat before us like a lump of cold flesh to be paid when the collectors came. Naturally, we learned to speak around it. We shared our alarm about the weather instead. By its whims we could admit something. It had to do with extremity. ––Of certain conditions and of a common need. But what for? Maybe some chance at grace.

Over time, something loosened the ties we had to some familiar arrangements of words while cementing others. Come here, we said to one another. In the makeshift camp where we had surrendered what little we could carry to some common fate, still to be determined. Tarp walls blew in the winds and we listened.

Sometimes we heard one another step outside to address something else. We all did this. One at a time, without ceremony, and alone. We were not ready to discuss these things. Not yet. But when the winds left, I could hear the others say to something just beyond the camp, Come here.

Sunsets

And other routines.

Sure, we had a habit of holding. All of us did. The sudden beauties we couldn’t keep from loving kept on doing what sudden beauties do. Don’t go, we said, but the plea sounded tinny in our ears. What resonated was the departure itself. We looked from a cliff, and with colors slanting words from us, we were gone before we left. Someone at the end of the horizon kept pulling back the sun. We had the sense of being the butt of the joke in this ritual play. The laughter was gentle, but we felt that it was something else, too. Sometimes.

Clay

Studies in form.

Now it’s a cocoon. Now a moth. Now it’s something else. What is that thing?

Now it’s beautiful. Now it can kill. Now it’s pure passion. Now it’s a study in precision, one-part formal event, another part emotive creature. Fluid and gorgeous, then stoically opaque.

It is delicate, backbreaking work. Now innocent, now disturbing. This heavy love.

***

Inspired by this interview with Kathy Butterly, which is my introduction to the sculptor’s work.

Waters

And the rest of us.

There is no resolution, is there? So much is lost in the archive, and what isn’t––of memory, and the rest of us––isn’t mild. Our warped genesis, we tried to keep it in the basement and when the floods started coming, we watched our photos. How they bounced in the underground lake, above the sediments of our boxed secrets, those dreams of all we might yet be.

Here is our foundation: sacrifice, or accident? The awe of it.

Mama. How are you breathing now? Someone said of your lungs, that it doesn’t look––still, I think of your waves. How we would throw ourselves into you to feel the rush of you tossing us back. Sometimes you would hold us in place for the space of the next breath we expected to take, so that we might know something. I’m still trying to know it. It has to do with fragility and strength, play and death, love, and the depths of some wounds. As if you are saying, feel this: all of me shifting with each pulse and the only one holding is you.

The floods keep coming. Still, we collect. A song starts and catches in the back of the throat. Wade in––

And, Then

Light in broken glass.

During the crisis, we rehearsed everything we knew, sending ambiguous signs and vague symbols––an ongoing SOS maybe, to some beyond––and watched the play of light, how it obscured the boundaries between surface and space. Which were we, anyway?

It rained and the bombing continued and so did the ads for flawless skin in seconds and the promise of a good night’s sleep, an end to mildew, air fryers. The campaigns were one-note, not unlike the bombs; some spoke of distraction, but who had the time? The babies were needing. The list was endless. It was never done. There were only so many of us, to hold them.

Horizons blurred, then sharpened. We looked and gave up looking. The crisis would splash across our faces. We stopped sometimes to wash them, turning away from it, sometimes into each another, and everyone had a story of a sighting, the something they would never forget. Bodies looked for somewhere to rest. Where? we asked each other. When?

Which is to say, I cannot remember where the bits went in the last blast, or what they were. I don’t remember what or if I was holding at the time, only that I felt it fly from me, scattering in every direction.

It wasn’t a sign or a symbol. I retrace my steps, rehearse everything. But it won’t take. Someone calls, help me. I almost recognize the voice.

Untitled Chorus

Notes from the days of wind.

In a season when the atmospheric pressures seemed to be in more dramatic flux than any of us could remember, herds of winds would gallop across the ceiling, rattling the furniture. It was the babies I listened for. Everyone was going around shaking their heads. These kids, they said.

There was a painter I loved. He knew how to look when he was painting. When he stopped was where the trouble started. Amid the noisy striving and the sales pitches, the ideologues and the masses of our families clamoring to avoid being ditched with the rest of the wreckage of the hour, it seemed like the babies––so quiet, some worried, is anyone there? ––might be waiting for someone to finally get around to mentioning this other thing. The painter dared to depict it. He didn’t call it anything, and some called it dangerously close to Nothing, but anyone looking to see it could tell you that what it evoked was the opposite of nothing.

It was a verge, and he was pulling the center to the edge of where the babies would sit, unsure whether or how they will stand. He wouldn’t live to see them.

In the season of high winds, the babies cocooned themselves in blankets of ambient noise. Those who thought of silences as nothing more than the punctuation between events, and not the main event, did not know what to make of whatever those babies were doing inside those cocoons.

They never seem to be listening, many remarked. But watch. Relax your eyes. It’s like one of those magic eye paintings where the apparent forms are only a pretext. See the weight of noise that has been heaped on them since birth. It becomes hard not to suspect that they have found some other way to manage what is pulsing nearby, while appearing not to listen at all, like the artist who pretends to paint nothing.

Wait, someone said eventually, of these paintings. I see it. The painter didn’t make it in the end, but the works became chapels unto themselves. The works were gathered in a chapel. The babies would show up, alone and in pairs, looking. They would seem to care nothing for what they saw.

Many of these wouldn’t make it, either. But some would. And when they waited in the chapel long enough to hear something other than wind, they would notice a sound more sonorous than their most immersive dream. Eventually, they would know it knew them. That it had waited as they had, for this time. They would sing.

Anyway, Love

While we are here.

No, there isn’t a map, but you’ve heard this before. That isn’t what you’re after, is it? When you speak of what you never knew.

So much is obscured by the fog of empire. Maybe if it blew into the thin air of the last mountaintop at the exact moment of your arrival, still living, at its narrow peak––then you’d be able to see your way down. But maybe not.

Fair enough. How much blood in the veins of the earth, gathered from these wrecks and battles across time? The waste of it we call history and imagine this a map to what we used to be, that the discovery of this might involve some ancient key, glowing like the last fifteen minutes of a quest film, to lead us forward from our stadium seats, into the light.

But I don’t know, except for being here in the dirt, with clouds all week, and now mud from the rains, and here comes the wind again and those questions about what it might blow away or into us. I am here with these others; we’re tethered for now, and so there’s nowhere to go, is there, if they are here, too? Nowhere better but the staying while they are here, too, even as most of them are strangers by official standards. For which I have little use.

This morning, I was reading the words of five poets I’ve only ever known by the flesh of their words, and I knew I loved them for the way each sang of someday, when I learn to love––

***

Inspired when I chanced upon this Dean Rader poem, which echoes poems by Nâzim Hikmet, Roger Reeves, Ocean Vuong, and Frank O’Hara. What a stunning chorus across time.