Category: memory

how to keep watch

a theology of attention

In 9th grade English, we had a fairy tale project.

My hero was the youngest of three princesses.
Unlike her sisters, she wasn’t especially smart, or strong, or beautiful.
She only knew how to look and wait.

The plain-looking, unremarkable princess found an egg one day,
by the banks of the stream where she used to go for long hours,
to breathe in wonder while she sat.

There was no nest nearby, as far as she could tell.
There was nothing so striking about the egg.
It was small and brown and plain—larger than a quail’s,
slightly smaller than those of the palace hens.

She picked it up, wrapped it in a handkerchief,
and walked it back, carefully cupped in her open hands.
She kept it warm, and it grew—into what, I can’t remember.
But it wasn’t a bird or a lizard or any of the predictable
reptilian-amphibian-avian creatures that come out of eggs.

It was beautiful when it hatched.
And what it revealed at the end was the power of her waiting gentleness,
so far removed from other attributes.

Since then, I’ve sometimes questioned if there might be
some pathology behind this sort of thinking—
but I was raised on fairy tales,
Hollywood rom coms,
and a worn copy of The Lives of the Saints.
So, it’s likely impossible for me to discern
with any reliable level of objectivity.

When it came to imagining the thing inside him
that was more or less invisible much of the time,
I liked to picture it as something almost too fragile
for survival in the wider world—
like an egg outside a nest,
or the tiny flame of a birthday candle.

Easy enough to snuff out,
but it’s all you need, really,
to start a blaze hot enough to roast a pig,
or scorch a hillside. Or to smelt iron—
which was the better metaphor, as far as I was concerned.
I’ve always been partial to the idea of love
and patience as shaping forces,
when applied with a deft hand.

“Dreams are like that,” I would tell the students.
I thought about calling them mine sometimes,
but in their lives they were their own selves—
which simply were, with or without
any influence I might or might not have
prayed toward or against, in weaker moments.

This is why you’ve got to keep watch all the time—
against wind, infection, suffocation.
They are always dying, losing face,
forgetting what they are
until they are nothing but trace whispers of light
in place of something that used to burn
a liquid dance.

Round with promise
like a wet pear.

one beginning

an original affirmation

Take it, I said again, and gave
this body to mirror you an origin
in chorus of looping yessss, as
susurrations waving shores
to where they waited, wanting
words to answer but I had only
one. It was yes and child
yes again, and there they
were yes child and here,
meaning all of it.

evening, late Nov.

in the year before it turned

Now comes the year of French cooking from a book purchased used outside the school penned by a woman who knew the old country before the war, the smell of its cows, soft hides furred and warm in the sun, how does someone get to be this woman? thinks our reader drawing toast and butter against visions of onion soup against hunger adding more salt to toast, who cannot get enough.

People on the screen after the fires and the floods announce plans to rebuild. Maybe it’s no good trying to interview those who won’t, who just stand there without words, waiting to accept. So the hopeful in the aftermath are a self-selecting group, at least onscreen.

The bones had to set when we broke them and we set them in the earth amid the burn, in the skeletons of former homes, still smoking to grow new cells.

Hold still, they told us, meaning faith but without work––it looked half dead in mirrors. We listened for wolves and saved the prints in boxes for someday sorting into proper displays. But what do you name the waters rising high enough to occasion a jump to the next roof, hoping it holds?

Hey Siri what do you know of shelter? It was something to do when knowing you had no service did not preclude the need to speak. We reached ready for the next ledge. She might have said you can wait until dark. Siri we might have answered: I believe, to heal our unbeliefs.

Ghosts before us pointed next and up ahead. We had begged to see it but one wing caught in the updraft was suspended in the act of looking back. It was the wreck we marched from. It looked away singing look away and it was possible to keep wishing merrily down a lane to the land of the dead.

Tracing its thread against honey-slick tongues we offered first milk to those bound close to us until the cold moon. When it came there would be blood and money enough to say we will be okay another year, until that time comes to pull it back again, sun of our sons.

big top

spectacle, witness, aftermath

The circus men came and went and we listened. As women, we had been raised to believe that some sanctity was possible in the sacrament of attention––that attention, once received, could be enough to transform its object.

They thought we were applauding the show. We were only waiting for them to drop it. The babies were coming with open mouths.

My grandmother taught by example, how even if it hadn’t quite happened in our lifetimes––yet––it might be possible to pull them from themselves by sheer force of love. They had spectacles to offer and we watched. The point, she taught me, was not to feed their illusions but to draw them away from what deluded them, like pulling the host away from the poison to salvage what you can when it becomes clear that the poison has become the central mass. The power of the constant gaze could do this, she believed.

My grandfather was full of wind and she loved into him; it was wartime and every would-be flying man was still charging toward the sun. The war disappointed, but not the rewards that came after if you managed to come out alive; annual parades guaranteed a lifetime supply of empty praise and then with a home of his own and her inside to keep it, he sold used cars, telling stories again and again. She held on and listened, placing his vitamins in a plastic case, ordered by days of the week. 

She listened until she died of a rot too long ignored. She had held it in her gut for years, in silence as we do when we know this is no ways good but knew first to keep looking in love. Not for something coming, but as an orientation. Hope is a posture. Hers never slouched. 

Dammit Bob, she used to say, and I thought the rest of the sentence had something to do with how she wanted him to live already and cut the crap. His best, when he managed to pull it together, was still so much less than she saw in him. He walked around with his toolbox measuring to no end and schooling any woman within earshot on the importance of the level. A child on each hip, she waited until he left to patch the holes in the walls and mend whatever needed repair after he was through fixing, and she nursed the babies and until she died, repeated, don’t get caught up in ideas, they take you nowhere in the end. She was on morphine in the end. 

They said she went peacefully, for living had taught her nothing if not to die well and full of grace. He didn’t last long after his Grace was gone, with no one left to wait for him to come around to living. Then he gave up the ghost of his self-importance and he followed after. What remains are the shadows of a collection of statues, looming. He never grew into them. They are still here.

aftermath

in flight

As the babies lost their cries,
keening women gathered them
to chests to gallop them over hills
past the shadowed valley,
snipers at the gates.

What else would a dragon keep
but these? Against theft
of treasures it could not
know the golden virgins:
the pose of the hour
was vigilance

against the useless piles,
and it curled at our ankles,
holding us to their warnings
against loss.

Eyes of every witness burned
and through tiny speakers
in our ears, the guards at the gate
said go home; the curators
of spectacle insisted, there’s nothing

and only the crazy and the sentenced
kept on and the angels at the floor
with the mops, and the dead.

Open casket equals open door
to enter the theater of mourning
then came hawks and the hawkers
went the blind mice Now run,
someone said, and we did then
the farmer’s wife.

Admission was free to the public,
see how they––

History was removed by the surgeons.
They held efficient needles to our lips,
we were the crimes against their progress
to be sentenced, but our eyes were burning
from the gas, and our faces wet

you fell three times
along the road
and we with you

even now
the guards feared.

*
From Flight Songs

daughter

in the morning dark

only care now.
only open hands
in tremors.

you are still asleep
and I remember.

how

I carried you to the shore
before

you could walk and we
sat there watching. you
collected grains of sand.
between your palms
to feel them.
trembling

and then to the sea
to meet with open hand
her power and know her
press against your own.

the slapping sound,
the open palm,
your laugh––

remember.

saudade

with filling fantasies

Some of us can remember when all the play of the boys in certain areas involved the phrase, Bang, you’re dead! on loop around fantasies of patrol over living targets, amid the wild promises of ending famine with flying cars. I remember the dizzy vertigo of sensing what I could not express, which might translate loosely into something like, there is too much future here. Sensibilities, such as they were, were overfilled water balloons, ready to be tossed, bang bang, you’re dead, except they were bombs. Wait your turn, said the adults to these boys, and take the bull by the horns, and you don’t know war, for you are soft. The boys couldn’t talk back, and you could hear their resolve, filling each balloon body one at a time. To prove them all wrong, one day.

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