Category: memory

Spiral

Regarding the next breath

The artist did a series of spirals. I don’t know what she was thinking before she went down this road but begin somewhere is a familiar feeling. I am often haunted by this one. Anywhere will do, but where is still a pertinent question. You can start at the outside and dive in, in, in––follow the logic to the question of black holes and the possibility of the singularity and related questions about the connecting thread between dimensions, or universes, if you take as a fact the possibility of many in one. Or you could start at the center and spin yourself away, beyond the frame. 

***

Inspired by the spirals of Louise Bourgeois.

Impermanence

Time, space, heat, weather.

And I said, no, dear. Without any claims on infinity, I am only
here, threaded by vessels to this time where they river thick
until I don’t know when and many are broken but enough
keep on, motley constellation of us around aorta’s arch.
Much of what passes for memory whispers in that hush
with dawn’s birdsong of some impending rush––out, out!
It will run when that geography comes to catch in dust
or metal, the rust of us howling ––you can’t, you can’t!
we shrieked, catch me! and fast and faster than you
thought we were racing from that place but into it too
we were content to move in circles and knew nothing
of direction and content with little else but the chance
to spill the contents of ourselves those shrieks those
cries that liquid laughter out and out, nearer.

Cloudfaces

Metamorphoses

It may have been that fearful hope, moved by agony, that caused a slippage of the faces we had taken for protection, flimsy as they were. Then we became something cloudlike, breathing, and the sound of us was music. The music of us was made of what we had known in the time before we knew faces. We could hear much when we were nothing and no one.

Before Towers

And how we called us once

When I lived here before, I had many names because the pretense of sticking to one had yet to be invented. I can bet you did, too. But of course, that was another here, and we never thought to set it all down for the record or posterity because those habits didn’t come until the static names, weighted to set into stones and books and badges. At first, we were excited to carry these like weights in our pockets. They kept us, as the saying went, grounded. 

Before, I had names for the birds and the ones they called me, the grasses and what they whispered back; the suggestions of skies–––and not one of these was ever wrong.

Perhaps wrongness came later, too, or at least the modern form of it––the looming concrete tower with eyes on every side, ready to fire, that leaden shadow draping its weight over all the places where our names used to breathe. 

Psychosis

Of civilizations

Under pretense of we a community is founded as defense against an unspoken fear, and that horror is transferred to the abject other, now negated––not people, but the walking dead.

Where those ties might bind you get knotted pathologies instead, twisted clusters of defensive narcissisms woven into founding myths. Birth of a nation. The flags of fathers. The fathers dead, now get the children. Act fast.

What compulsion. Repeat, loop, repeat. A regression to psychotic repression defined by disconnection from reality.

With each return of this plague, the hold on the symbols that held us slips away and the virus turns inward, consuming its host.

We remember. But. What is memory? One asks and soon forgets again, each verse of a poem emerging from the fertile black lines it erases rising anyway to sing from beneath the feet of us gathered at the burial grounds, of this what of those we never––did

what we
would
not––
yet

***

Informed by the work of Noelle McAfee

Solids

And substance

Sometimes I think I remember being something like light. How simple that may have been, with nothing to claim, not even memory––waving unfettered across eons of space, all shine and no substance. Mass is another experience, a potential that varies depending on the energy patterns of its particles which move more rapidly in confinement, and the context of their reactions to an outside force, unknown until

until

To Say the Word

In time.

What bears the clock’s repeating to fold a blanket again, soft on the back of the chair where yours just was, what names the length of time to your return? I was and I remember once collecting names and meaning it my mission to hold every noun of a single tongue. I wrote them one by one on cards. How young then with so little time for waiting. Did the project last a year, three weeks, a day? Not until I ran out of cards, I can tell you but you can say I am still at it, minus the cards, minus the gathering––and I’ve slowed. I spend so much more time repeating, turning over the few I have: tongue, memory, hand, fold. Collection, I––You. What bears the name’s repeating, to fold its vowels between lips and hold them as if to absorb a promise till it takes. What names the way a body learns that name is just the first sound of the word that holds the door open for a moment where the flesh of form may enter folding body over threshold to bear time by letting go to gather names as leaves of leavings and the word was to begin and the what was folded wing and when it opened it revealed a new name for the next place not yet known–– I go

Dream Melt

From the last ice age.

the imagination is where it rains paint onto frescoes
of figures to crowd the divine comedy clubs where we
come and go every evening, no ID, no cover at the door

carrying our huddled masses of memory on backs
crunching shells of peanuts and empires on the floor
the strobe light pulsars keeping time with unborn stars

first wears the crown––it is the chicken or the egg,
but who can say is on the mic now, to proclaim
in a language unknown to whomever has ears

no tears need translation and what is the time?
it is lost and what is the point? only a moment
and where did it begin? in the beginning

was the word and the word rained down where
we gathered here to catch it back to the mouths
of us speaking all at once in the land where

the constant rain is coming
from the vision at the bottom
of the iceberg where it

melts

Lakebeds

And the life of water.

I rode a bus in the desert and the woman beside me had plastic bags on her lap and must in her coat. My face turned toward the window taking it in––the pleasure of being a passenger, carried. It was a drought year. We passed the scar of a long-gone lake and then the gash of a former stream and she gave a little huff, rustling the bags. Yep, she said, me too. I was too tired to ask, so only nodded. Then I looked out the window again, wondering about the water before it was gone, the lives it must have held until it couldn’t anymore before it gave itself up, back to sky. 

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