Category: memory

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.

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