May wind seed a lullaby to dive us from this race and faces fall from ourselves and their constant choreography into another current, its fluid wing of night bird, to sing the hour’s next beginning.
Night Hope
In winter.
Category: faith
In Waiting
Penelope’s labor.
At the place of undoing
the weave of story lifts
from its loom by her hand,
time undone. Becoming
something outside it
all.
Creature
And creator.
It lives
by the distraction
it makes
before it dies
at the insides
only to emerge
as task: one sole
task given me
out of time.
Here I am again
afraid of running
to enact the small
body of infinite
infinitesimal
purpose given
to each, a creature
alive, scratching
for release
from suffocation
by a world yet
to know how
it breathes.
Hope at Midnight
A song for dark times.
To whisper in music of this abiding sorrow, to braid longing
with abundance, a near-ecstatic mourning
into unborn tomorrows.
Grace
Approaching.
When the saints go silent, and the church doors are shut,
and the hum soaks up your hearing and the minutes
you meant for keeping spill a mess at your feet,
as the engine grinds another skull––
When something floats a hand from the hollows
of the day’s drift, may you reach for it.
Note to Selves
Quickening reminders.
Remember to leave room for the winds. Of our ghosts to sing. Inside the stories we tell ourselves. In order to live.
Neither Happy nor––
But here, happening how.
What would it mean to suspend belief in happiness as universal will? My allegiance is to the wretched, so I stand with the stranger, the exile, the banished. The despicable, the miserable. The sorrowful. And weep in defiance of the engine that would equate my fitness with an ability to maintain a distracted removal of my body from its cares. Let us weep together, and then. Let us join the children that they may not lose their capacities to be awed by the wonders and joys that will nevertheless persist, and must, for our continuance. In these we may delight often in concert with our griefs, as the salt of tears returns to laughing mouths. The range of this chorus of connection will not be boxed, packaged, sold, or theorized into anyone’s ten steps. None of these will hold. Only love. This is not the love of salvation by removal from pain. This is the love of immersion: in shit, and grief, and the stink of bodies, the relentlessness of our collective need, and the tedium and immensity of tending well.
***
The italicized opening line comes from Sara Ahmed, and has echoes across time and geographies, in Audre Lorde, Frantz Fanon, and throughout the Gospels.
The Hearing Shell
Leaning in.
Sheltering at the end of the last song, fingers splayed as weather comes but I want to remember radiance and rescue and first this question: what city is this and if I reach for her hand will she know me? If my mind would return to the gapped flesh of my flesh to mend itself, how far until the next note and will there be room enough? Inside us, to hold it.
To Begin
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.
What Now
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?