Category: love

Wayfaring Strangers

Subway meditation.

That this feeling might be bottled and passed like emergency water. How to describe the taste of this sacrament. It has something to do with the shared steam of this space between stops, thigh to thigh, hand over hand even with the gentle deference of strangers; the false metaphor of personal space, how easy it is to hold at a distance, but impossible here. Whatever territory there might be is no island but an occasional bubble in this sea and we dive from this common reef and back again, open doors take these bodies given up with a nod to this passage, and in between stops none of us are anywhere but here. This is no epiphany, it would not be so bold, it only strains the suggestion of one incubating in the chest, but holding back, too humble to intrude on the next inhalation. Who needs another revelation now? There is only the weight of our bodies, this body, the man in scrubs sleeping on his feet with his hand on the bar above, we know what this is, but Shh. There are meals to make, knots to pray out of, debts that will never be paid, and let’s not get into all that right now, not here. Only hold.

Arrivals

In-flight reminders.

Having the kind of travel experience that offers certain reminders. Such as: how likely it is that whatever the itinerary, it will be subverted; whatever the projected arrival time, it is probably just a theory; that a theory will continue to be offered, because we like to have one, even if we know it will probably fall through; that whatever belongings we thought we would have with us may not arrive. 

And yet, here we are, and we have yet to need the emergency exits or the inflatable vests. And we sleep, eventually and somewhere. Our carefully made plans and carefully packed items can be replaced. But not this one, sleeping. Her quiet breath. I used to wake in the middle of the night to check for it. May I remember this. And know that if we are anywhere with nothing but these breaths, the stunning abundance when they continue to arrive in time.

The Long Look

Window, lens, hand, soul.

You appeared on a certain corner every evening with your camera, to enact a ministry of light. Recalling childhood, you arrived in the circle’s fullness each time. Former strangers worked with you. You created each image together. This is how you said, I know you. 

Every moment was a breath of spirit. In this world of surface illusion, you reached your illuminating hand, your goal always, touch me, touching you. 

By devotion to the details of flesh and fracture, shadow and shade, the drape of traffic lights over wet pavement, each frame became a reminder: look at us here, in the same image. 

Those birds are one creature. Those ants are one creature. Gathered on the corner in the glow of wet streetlights, one creature. And you took it all in, and said, we are here to work out our fear of being.

***

Inspired by the work and spirit of Khalik Allah, as generously shared in an interview with J. P. Sniadecki in BOMB.

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. 

Dust Before Dawn

In low light.

I walk between these low lamps as you sleep, the poorwill’s circled notes outside, inviting recollection of endings that preceded this one, and the sound of this space is a single note, sustained in the once noble ruins of this ribbed house of song and sacrament. The stained glass windows that once made a miracle of your face are now clotted with the dust of a decade of storms, and it may be true that there is never time to clean them, but also that I fear the glass has worn to the point that only the dust holds it here, or perhaps that whoever this is, still waiting for the mass, will shatter if those beams should suddenly descend. Again.

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