Into being.
What comes when the search ends
and every purposeful intent, busily
attentive toward some known,
to crack the ice of time, when
being itself seems to reach
a hand?
*
Denial, so smitten by the rough
hand of progress, will insist
that this is the axis of a turn,
but nothing has changed.
*
In this sunlit absence, here
is a space again, and it––
or I, or both, sighs
an audible breath,
the hush of shoreline,
a lapping this, and it
glimmers at the edge
of language.
Against collapse.
A single wanderer creeps from a hollow to the wild purple bloom, the yellow cluster, to fall asleep, pollen-drunk in what I like to imagine as a kind of ecstasy. But I don’t know how long he has been at it, looking for the others, reading the air for the compass dance to bring him home.
Art of the possible.
It was a time of redreaming, of finding our way. The old compass was broken. We wanted to learn to make new. It is possible, we reminded one another, to do this.
Where mass death pervades, it contaminates the horizon of the possible. There is a very thin line, in these times, between rebirth and psychosis.
To be reborn in an age of mass death means that you will speak and act in ways not encouraged as you push against the killing, which has its way by silence.
***
These are notes made over a brilliant conversation between Amal Khalaf and Adelita Husni Bey, featured in the most recent issue of BOMB magazine. One point of particular interest to me involved discussion of the work of Italian anthropologist, Ernesto de Martino. The second paragraph is a paraphrase of de Martino.
The sign of life.
From this cocoon
I will burst one day
a healed woman
to carry the babies
inside a new dream.
We will walk
toward the seven
mountains again,
no longer in terror
of Time.
***
Inspired by Toni Morrison: “One looks to history for the feel of time or its purgative effects; one looks through art for its signs of renewal” (from “The Future of Time” in The Source of Self-Regard).
Calling with matters of life and death.
The round bird call was constant. Its audience would no sooner hush life than they would have thought to banish death. These creatures tended to hide when we approached, as some children are cautious after being abruptly silenced, in the crouching way that the banished will learn to move.
It was rare that we heard her full song, and just as rare to witness the extravagant leaps and turns of her dance, the revelation of her full plumage something she had learned to save for the shadows.
And yet she would emerge sometimes, with the upright carriage of a dancer, to find us in our own reflections at the water’s edge, barely listening, as was our custom. With a deft fingertip she would nudge the temples, saying look up.
Go, she would say. Go to the babies and hold them, for they are like us, too.
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.
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.
A recollection.
And then came the memory of someone who so loved the world that they could not stop highlighting her face, who at every turn of the gaze would find her silhouette made flesh and lean into its pliant give. Whose ear, tuned to eavesdrop on dream music, would lift a lucid pen and point it toward transcription of the tattered ends of her beloved robes.
Who kept flying home, crying home, and singing her back, the jazz ache of her grief’s webbed movements and polyphonic breaths keeping time with the ancients at the drums, past the trembling where words won’t go, these nested rolls yoked to something just beyond the reach of the given ear, where the pattern of beats becomes so dense that–––
it collapses,
absorbing our cries
back
to some original
sea.
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––
Happily after us.
. . . And then one day we were empty, depleted of selves, and when this happened, at first it was quiet all around, all of us stunned by the sudden vanishing of familiar noise.
Then came laughter. The babies started it. They seemed thrilled to find us suddenly without filters. Like them, we couldn’t help ourselves. It was hilarious. We went on for a long time.
We made a mess of our faces, a mess of our forums. The rooms exploded with an extravagance of sudden joy, and all decorum shattered at our feet. Leaking from our eyes, it washed us.
We looked around and we saw one another. The babies knew us.
