love Archives

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.

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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 End of Seeking

An arrival.

It’s fair enough to speak of perpetual mourning and mean it, and to wonder if keys were made for losing, but there is nothing of fairness, nothing deserved about finding at the end of any of these losses neither keys nor answers to any of the questions about where they went, but here this sudden hand, its open offering, the press of its continual pulse.

What Dawn May Bring

To the missing.

Dawn, and time slides down the ache of long sight. Not blind, only blinding sometimes, having offered the eyes one at a time to visiting creatures while still unripe, like here, take it, finding relief at being done seeing what we thought we knew, finding in it only the too-muchness of what is not. But this is about how life when it grows will vine and bud around and through and within the spaces of our missing parts. So, sight returned, and our hands, holding as we walked back into this our lives, still unknown, on the unsteady limbs of newborn foals still wet with the flood of our birth.

Birth, Rites

The breadth of our breath.

I suppose something like this–––?
must have carved and sanded the long
lines of my grandmother’s gaze
to the texture of skin, its paper-thin drape
like gift wrapping nearly off,
the long dissonance of ambient noise
resolved in the music of her
late laughter.

Overlay

Ghosts of high noon.

In the long silence of morning, mourning, we built chapels of remains, and these became places of music. We moved through these, bone-bright and singing as the sun poured through our mothers, still unseen.

what evades

not to be captured

How does the question of how a world ends find any answer except in its continuance? And how does anyone describe its substance except to note how something once familiar may at once become an entirely different thing. Backyard toolshed now an abattoir, hillside flower now fanged beast. The ground beneath the next step melts and we keep on posting notes to show we are either fine or having the sort of periodic collapse that indicates a belief in non-collapse as the default. It’s the rest that’s concerning, but anybody capable of noting this knows better than to mention it. O love, why do you leave us like this? I asked her and she said Yes.

For Child

On being here.

Plant the crab in the sky. You must do this regularly, every season. Now the archer. Pay attention to the bull looking back and follow the gaze of the frog. Notice the tide. Tonight, it glows in full bloom and the cat snake dives gold into wormhole. Follow the fish where it echoes you back. Give recklessly of your abundance and hold fast only to your name. May it tether you to what may never be pronounced. May this be what keeps you, always.

Homecoming Song

Notes for an ensemble.

Whatever you do, keep coming home. And I will keep singing for you. And when you get here, we can talk about these instruments that I keep finding in the garage, such as this mallet, which is delightfully resonant against that flimsy pot we were going to throw out, with the burn marks still on the bottom from the popcorn. I am blinding my way into some magic here and could use some help. Plus, what if I forget my name? I may need you to say it for me.

So now I am making you a song with this mallet-pot combination, and when you get here, the rolling pin is all yours. It will be good to see you and to hear you say what I mean to remember. And to sing.

The Moment and the Hand

Point of contact.

Closer. Lens moves over hillside, black with ash from the last burn. Find the fire poppies above the road. Where are they and the first call when it comes is a reminder: check the nightstand lock the doors.

Who is safe is a not a question. She holds it. Describe the sound of water eroding a mountain. With the cold moon come hungry dogs to howl night.

Father seeking son, without the right address. Where do you send the words to tell him, Son I am thinking. To tell him what. To tell him finally. Of you and mean it. And imagine that he reads.

But if the numbers are wrong you cannot deliver. We cannot be delivered without the right numbers and until they come every stranger looks like a prayer almost answered and only a few of these look up.

Take notice when looking for a son and see one there on his knees beside the shoulder where it’s time to look and look again. When no movement follows call but the wind of passing cars in roadside sage then call again and wait.

Hold the name against your tongue. Against the soft skin of the roof of your mouth. Of the son with no roof to shield his head. Don’t say it. Closer, calling hey and are you to the stranger and alright and how does anyone answer this now except to say yes except to indicate the pulse that means still living but it’s the rising blooms from the ash you need now.

Move the lens. This distance from the burn will yield nothing. Go in.

Final Offer

After the burn.

What do you call the records kept by those who escape from war with nothing but their lives and memories of the dead? Not History, but its adjacent double. The shrapnel in tissue when the bleeding learned to stop waiting for peace, to start saying this is the leg now, the cause going no further than the blast itself as if to say, here is the end of time as you knew it as if to blow into injury some reminder: this is the living now.

These fragments from the blast, this thread that bound us once so long in the weather and the sweat of my grip, past the point of being able to imagine an end or a beginning, love I only want to offer them to you, for keeping even after safe is gone.