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).
To frame what moves.
The bend of years is partial, a pockmarked continuum of dropped stitches against the fast-forward spit of a seventh-inning pitcher known for curves.
This made us cling: to the bodies of pets, lovers, the photos of children––ours, the ones we had been, the ones we never knew, could not remember, and the new dead.
We could not name our joys, only the pause between days in which we called our exiled silences back home to hang them on loops of the threads we meant to weave back into place, somehow.
My daughter is sleeping, and I want to cup my hands around her face, to frame for a moment what won’t be kept, to hold inside the curve the stillness of an original praise song, the only one with any bearing and still it won’t quite hold. Look at you. There you are. Come here.
What trembles.
Consider all this a precursor, the artist was saying, to work in another medium. I wanted to begin with some questions, she told us. I was talking to a friend, she said, as I am now––and the friend, these friends, had certain questions. These questions encouraged me, she told us. To keep looking, you know. With these hands.
I was trying to make something, to see it. There is a way to thread a map of layered memories so that knots are formed at the points of collision. There is a way to see the knots as what hold the web together.
Of course, they won’t hold still, so it is not clear yet, but I can see how the tendrils of these maps might thread together, suspended in ropy intricacy as though in branches above us. How we might assemble beneath the canopy, looking up.
It would be so much that we would have no choice but to return to a preverbal state with sounds and textures and smells and a sense of being in one place expanding out and then back between carryings, and no one can ever describe what happens in this state, when the tremble of memory is soul.
Our tumbled shards.
sounds called what we would not say
until the shadows in our ears besieged
our remainders we screamed
for their release but they stayed
laughing into our wet faces
we could not see them
or our faces where we stayed
the stank breath of death rot
creeping through our breaths
stopping the songs
we meant to sing
of how we flew
after scratching our snakeskins
we were removed and outside
we could not hear the songs
in the street as the dragon still
spread the photos called
our monsters out
to hush them back
Time ran off
we had the babies’
toothless mouths looking back
lining their faces in half-moons
on our beds and with them looking back
we kited from the cells anchored
by the buds of lost mothers in our teeth
to one day fit ourselves back
into homes we had once carried
on our backs before we left
the sea
before the after
we left it
back there for the
sea
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.
On the real work.
At the end of a long day in a long month, I read a hiring notice: Professional Cub Snuggler! it says, and I think, this is something. The work is to wrap baby bears in blankets, hold them in a coat while the mother gets a checkup.
Now I can’t stop wishing that this was a model for some other things, the practice of stopping in the work week, no matter the job, for the most important work of the week. Time to hold the babies! everyone would say, and the babies would be held, and there would be enough hands so that the ones who had been caring for more babies than they had hands for could take a break and tend to other things, knowing the babies were okay.
There is a trick the handlers use, for getting the orphaned bears accepted. They cover the bark of a tree with a scented goo, and after the birth babies and the orphan run through it, back to mama, they all smell the same. And there’s something in this model, too.
***
Inspired by this notice: “Dream Job Alert: Michigan DNR is Hiring Bear Cub Cuddlers.”
Pulled from the stream.
When the veil slips against this grip against the fire of high noon, and there’s no recourse but to take in the full face of a day’s madness, no words can help me bear it, each too round unto itself, biting its tail.
I slipped into the stream again, dead weight at your shoulder, the nebulae of closed eyes until the saving tongue of salt lime chased my veins back into themselves and you shone me a remedy.
The words go on biting their tails. None can help me bear this love, when only the living will do.
A reunion.
I found you where we were children, and you found a way to bend a certain recipe toward the collection crowding my pockets, slowing my chase. In surrender, I removed the lot of it in pieces and placed each on the table. Tell me, love, I asked you. What is it?
You took a stamp and sewed it to your shirt, held a button to your reflection, and the shard of a mirror you pressed into an album to save the memory of someone looking back. We chased to catch ourselves back to running from what teased our terrors, tempting catch me! and you can’t!
I feared the years would fell me first, but you did, and from the rest of what is saved if you wait I can still make you a meal and we will raise a glass to the hour of these signs, from this shelter of broken time.
For Santu Mofokeng.
In quiet devotion from within the crowd, you witness the sway of a collective in song, knowing this moment in transit a destination of its own, and call it Train Church. You seek out parallel moments, always from within. The stream crossing, the waiting line, the dancers, the cave. Outsiders wanted spectacle and you pushed back with ordinary life. The long looks of tired eyes over the horizon from the middle of a field, breaking from the labor of the day. The hanging clothes of late parents on a bare pole against a concrete wall. Shaded interior of a kitchen, ethereal light through pleated rayon curtains. The mist pushing against easy meaning, smoke against certainty, dust against the definition of forms. No, the magic won’t be captured, you insisted. Chasing shadows to witness, atmosphere to witness, sediments to witness––faces, in long attention, patient. Insisting, here is only the beginning of sight. Look again.
***
Inspired by the art and practice of Santu Mofokeng (1956-2020).
Dust over time.
There’s an idea that water was inherited from a cloud that long preceded the sun, that the cloud evolved from the heat around each newborn star, that the heat so melted the gases and dusts around it that they became something else, and that this something else floated out there in the vast dark for entire forevers, without even a name; that before it was known to us as oceans, and rivers, as life itself, it was just drifting between the other bodies, neither planet or star, comet or asteroid, silently evolving rains and ablutions, storms and sailors, mermaids and the notes we’d pass in bottles overseas, wondering and telling no one; swelling with the fluid of waiting cells and someday wombs, gilled figures and baptisms, rebirths and ritual baths and wild slaps of newborn hands against its sudden surfaces, but what does it take to wait eons, drifting and holding these potentials under a veil of vast nothing, until the moment comes for surrounding a single body in a single time, that will remain for many more eons unnamed, that will remain for many more eons no time at all, in the vast void before the beginning, and be so moved by the body and the moment that you let it all go, everything you are, the body dissolving the last of itself to make the first rain?
