healing Archives

Unburied Sounds

In radiant remembrance.

Wolf, you have taken another pelt and I can’t bear to calculate who is the next of our missing to provide it, and now you enter the herd. But I can see the space between your first and second skins and it smells like tainted meat. How weary we are of these poisons. Muscles ache with fatigue. It won’t be long before another surrenders, too tired to keep standing in it.

And yet. Here is an artist whose medium is bombshells. He changes them by touch and attention. This one is a flowerpot, this one a vase. He makes a mobile from the casings. From one that could have killed everyone assembled, he makes a temple bell.

This is no disguise, but an undoing. Here is an invitation to the living, to hear another sound, to repurpose the old husk, to offer instead of obscure. Even to you, wolf. You can take off your cloak, unstop your ears. The bodies you left are still sounding, each a bell.

***

Inspired by the work of Tuan Andrew Nguyen, as presented in a New York Times article I read this morning. The title of this post comes from the centerpiece of an exhibition set to open at the end of the month, at New York City’s New Museum.

Whisper Like a Magnet

Wonders of slow work.

Worry faces, worry rug, worry gesture of hand, furrow of brow, the expression of the weary in love. Wonder the ritual, the circle, the bared breast, and mythic flight. Stitch these stories of threads from what the weather tore open. Your arrival is an act of mending, of repair, the slow work of hands and thread, returning and returning to worry a single line into light. How like the handling of a body, where each fiber has a mind of its own. How all-consuming to do, how uninteresting to watch. How unlike the heroic arrival of the vanquisher with the sword. How unlike the swift rescue, the problem solved, the fix.

***

Inspired by the astonishing work of Sophia Narrett, interviewed by Colm Tóibín in the most recent issue of BOMB. The title of this post comes from one of Narrett’s works.

From the Harp

A prayer to the wind.

I am, in the end––and each beginning––no more or less than a hollow vessel strung with sympathetic strings. If awareness is a matter of tuning, subject to interference, all that happens is a matter of sound, sounding. Each new life, each cataclysm is what vibrates through a given string, to wind through the echoic box and out again. Now I am symphony, now grass, now a spool of thread; now current, now whale, now cresting foam over wave. No part may translate itself.

Withdrawing even from myself, I am none of these parts, but all of them, and the handler breathing somewhere in the rupture between what is and what appears. In this state like dormancy, pregnant with possibility, I have never been an adequate expression, beyond this whispered invocation into wind, water, and this lover’s touch––

––calling, sound me, that I may remember. Heal my unbelief.

***

Adapted from An Object-Oriented Defense of Poetry in which philosopher Timothy Morton expands upon Percy Bysshe Shelley’s idea that all humans are like aeolian harps.

Beyond Translation

At the eye of the storm.

To the one proclaiming, without irony, I want to listen, after so long in the role of violent storm, how does a hearer begin the act of translation?

With pronounced suspicion, scanning the horizon. Can a storm hear itself? Perhaps this offered ear is only the eye. The I, ever central, rider of the galloping present, trampling presence, only reminds the embryo at the center further into the liquid dark of the labyrinth with no thread. There is a life that never stops bursting into unheard shouts of life, into lives.

Passage

What crosses the page.

How is it that we move from first love to loss so completely, and what makes the new state as real as the first? The world has a way of calling out the will to speak, to wrap some form around the formless, to create horizons at the edges of a given space, from which to trace the arrivals and departures of the sun. Or suns. I do not know which. The poem is passage, not discourse, the endurance as much as the cocoon.

The Use of Mirrors

As a shield.

Long studies in endurance make it possible to hold a placid gaze, to make these eyes a mirror, returning only light. Vanity is so often the lead horse, its reliable prance quick to assert the next happy ending: Victory, victory! I watch the riders pass, their contented flag billowing bright.

Behind these mirrored shields, the smoke of a homeland rises over blackened hills, the devastation nearly total. Except for this singing silence, the trace of oiled fingers around the surviving glass bowl. How did they miss this? Protect it. The mirrors are here so that the pillagers may not see what is left for the taking, highlighted against the scorched earth. Hold and wait until they are out of sight.

Vigil

Over what perches.

The feathered chest-dweller

coughs. We cannot hear

her song. We gather

at the ribbed rafters,

a motley congregation

of morose faces, to wait,

sensing her watch.

Perhaps she wants

something now,

but there isn’t a crumb

among us.

Then comes a low hum,

spreading through the nave

of our assembly until

our mouths drop the lines

that seal them.

Opened, we pour out

syllables of grief

too sharp to speak,

that she may absorb

enough to form

an echo.

***

Responding to Dickinson.

Our T.

Life between aftermaths.

Tornado. The word strikes fear in most people, but when you live in a region that sees a lot of them, you learn. Outsiders already thought us ignorant for staying, so we didn’t have anything to lose by giving ours a nickname. “Our T,” we called him.

You learn to adapt. Go underground, wait. Come up when it’s over. Survey the damage. Rebuild. Expect the pattern to repeat. Mama said you can’t expect a creature to be anything other than what it is. “Our T’s just wind,” she said, “can’t help himself.”

He had only touched down three times while we lived there. Mama remembered a few more. “Where is he now?” we would ask, under the open sky of the former living room.

“Beats me,” she said. “Greener pastures, maybe. Stratosphere.” We rebuilt the roof, went back to our lives, most of which involved restoring or maintaining a semblance of order until the next strike.

Our T. had a sense of humor, though. In between visits, he’d drop these notes in our mailbox: That was fun, wasn’t it? And how is everyone? Peaceful, I hope! We’d roll our eyes at the old one-liners, but we had to laugh.

“Atmospheric systems don’t have a word for aftermath,” Mama would remind us. That was something only the grounded knew, especially those of us in the habit of staying. “Now bring me that hammer,” she would add, pointing with her chin to a corner, “and that box of nails.”

Nadir

Where a voice.

Once, certain attentions were considered advancement, conditioned as we were to equate the sense of nascent excitement with progress, and to make of this a god, and we did not recognize the beginning of a fall, into an agony long as life. Neither anguish nor inertia could resist its pressure.

Only by taking absence back from silence can anyone be protected.

Here, a voice. It says, Come, says Now.

You are not condemned. Rise. It is time for another birth. You can scratch a way into life again, from memories still unlearned.

Unknown Quantities

What breaks from silence.

What many called danger, often sickness, was her resistance. What she resisted was death, and so became known for the trouble she made.

Torrents of unnamed elements suffused her. They referred to these––when they spoke of her at all––as her darkness.

Warn the children. Don’t enter the forest. The little boys especially, at risk of being cooked in her hearth. These are early lessons. They are called stories and not executions. The most effective captors work invisibly.