Desolation, interrupted.
They were so long in it that they had begun to suspect the wilderness eternal. Then came a surprise. Against extinction and total loss, a sudden stream of fluid resistance. What was this viscous nectar, freely offered? To be received, and never had.
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.
To time’s music.
The wings are wet with oil, and yet.
Still here, we look. This alteration:
how many steps? How bright when
it becomes us, before the lens
takes its leave. I may have lost
mine already, but I remember.
How we had no use for silences
or speech. Neither was needed
to let the other be.
Detail work and scope.
How often one of us says––of some work or other, whether as protector or caretaker; builder, custodian, healer, organizer, artist––we didn’t know the half of what was coming our way when we started. If we had known, we could not have begun. We wouldn’t have been up for it, yet.
My mom says this about the new puppy. She loves the new puppy. The laundry is endless. Lovers say this sometimes, and parents. People who go all in for the old home, even though it “needs a little TLC.”
On a related note, I am now remembering that the thing I think I am working on is almost never the main work, and that the main project is always some other, still hidden thing I’ve started, or taken up with, or allowed to start me. I wonder what I am doing now, and I have a strong suspicion that I lack the perspective I would need to see it.
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.
Humming it close.
There was a river in the hymns that the grandmas kept under their breath. It wound across the landscape and in and out of alleyways and dark rooms, poised to wash a crossing body of its fears. Dip a hand in as often as you like, one told us, it will be a new river every time. They hummed it over dishes, over laundry, in the car, when looking past the window, unable to speak.
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––
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.
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.
A visitor to the abstractionists.
There was a visitor. The visitor had some questions but didn’t give a name.
The visitor inquired. Let me ask you this: why did you bother with a trip to the moon if all you found were pleasant pictures to remind you back to the optimism of the intellect that got you here?
Writing in light is a matter of stage management, the visitor told us. And it’s worth asking how you got from the beginning word to this endless buffet of utopian manifestos made manifest by your co-opting of the lens.
We didn’t know what to say. There’s a start, the visitor nodded. Try abandoning confidence.
One of us moved to speak.
Shh, the visitor said. Look around. Consider, for example, this net of records. You keep trying to close it, to capture its contents. But it will not be closed, and you are in it. Debt, in the end, will have no satisfaction.
The visitor was silent, then. One among us asked, what are you thinking?
Nothing.
Nothing? we pressed.
Here’s a cipher: zero. Without it, no algorithm: 00101001 . . ., and so on. You were so excited when you made that a starting point, for calculating the value of a loaf of bread against the cost of making it, the weight of fish against the trouble of going out; the power of, say, the atom bomb. But as the net only grows more intricate, cutting blood off at the wrists, are you any closer to seeing, as you say, The Big Picture?
Abstraction always does this, and only the abstractionists have the stolen luxury of negating particulars. This junco, this scarred back, these soiled diapers, this afternoon, that baby’s pink sock in the middle of the road. Even subtle omissions in the particulars of birdsong make it impossible for one to be recognized as a member of its own kind.
So, we asked the visitor. Um, how are you, anyway?
Great. Fine. Take your pick among the abstractions you prefer. Each is a substitute for the here before you, a zero to add to or take from.
An old saying: the devil in the details. As if to negate the trope of the killer in disguise.
But where does the time go? As it runs through your splayed fingers and you still forget to drink, too distracted by your reflecting pool of questions of who you are and the meaning of it all and the big nothings of what now and when, forgetting the bodies right here––one, and one, and one––preferring the salvation of nowhere.
We wanted the visitor to elaborate, but the visitor turned, saying someone needs to check the buds, the eggs, the dishes and the tiny nests, and the waters, while you orbit around your zeroes and keep on deciding there are not enough fish.
