Rites of passage.
This is a sacrament called undoing.
There, rank.
There, form.
There, plot.
Return.
Not the way you came.
That way is also undone.
Go where
movement will unravel, too.
To find a beginning.
It is not what you remember, not yet.
And the problem of meaning to make it.
If I were really up to something, you would think I would have an answer to the question of where any of this starts, but no. It’s just this ledge again, and gravity, and my desperate grip. Meaning not to forget to remember, I stretch the web of impressions, meaning to stick somewhere. But whatever I am made of mostly slides, and sliding, what tends to stick to me is never quite the stated destination, but everything beneath its arcing aim. What tends to stick rarely unsticks and I do not forget it. And yet, I still mean to reach what I hope to remember.
Except for the weight of this form.
When you found me, I had been waiting, writing, for some time. Writing, I had been waiting behind that wall where the things that pulse at my neck are not what I tell because they are not the sort of thing that, as the saying goes, are up for discussion. One learns, as so many have, not to draw attention to what pulses, beats, flushes in speech or laughter, passion, or tears. My face gives me away. My troubling body gives me away, pouring me through the crack in this voice. I meant to be a formed thing, smoothed and polished for an admiring public, as instructed. The purpose of my upbringing, as far as I could tell, was for this, but in this I have utterly failed. I am instead a porous constellation of trembling orifices, dripping with overflow, and all of it is always too much, and as long as I have been, I cannot remember being otherwise. Perhaps there was a time when it was not too much, when I was a child not yet girl, not yet future woman, not yet in training. But it seems that the knowledge of girl came hand in hand with the knowledge of self and I cannot retrieve my prehistory so long as I am one, even if I would like to lay down the heavy weight of being anyone in particular. The atmospheric particle, absorbing, can collect moisture while continuing to float in the company of other atmospheric particles, until it is time to be rain.
Torrent.
Living in several places at once
between time and the rain, our names
would escape us and the rain none can know
to find the embers of a memory doused in the rain
glowing in the winds and our faces where we let it come.
Words of the unseen world of an unrecognized people.
This morning, I am careful in the hours before I am ready to be awake, when I am still in the first sips of coffee, and still with a full week ahead, where I let my eyes rest when I click open the morning paper. As one learns to be, depending on the day, calculating the risk of sliding into an abyss. Head at an angle, I slid my eyes quickly to the fringes like someone sneaking into a room, and down the right column, to rest on the image of a living face. He smiles, but not in the way people smile when they learn to leverage the image for gain. He smiles with puzzled amusement, like he is looking for the face behind the lens. His face, deeply contoured above the caverns at his neck, is a landscape unto itself, framed by an old man’s large ears.
His name is his language means dog without an owner. Dog in his language means something other than an insult. He is in his late eighties when he writes it at the table with his daughter, as his mother taught him. His mother was a memory keeper.
The language his mother taught him was the language of her grandparents and it was long considered extinct. It is the language of a people who had lost the land they lived on but not the words by which they had loved her.
We had learned over time, Jaime explains, not to speak to those who could not hear. But I exist, he says. I am here.
***
Inspired by Natalie Alcoba’s New York Times article about Blas Omar Jaime of Paraná, Argentina, who recently decided to speak Chaná, the language his mother had taught him, which had long been considered lost.
Remember the ancient tragedies.
Careful, hero. You are sometimes too sure. It may be said that your ancient predecessors, the ones you often mock for their backwardness, were in fact possessed of virtues you have yet to learn to recognize, glutted as you are on delusions of progress. These knew at least––or learned to see (sometimes after the eyes were gone) in the (tragic) end––the danger of confusing what would save with what would destroy. They understood that they were understudies to passions, the lead actors preceding their entrances and following their exits––and how none of the worst crimes could have happened unless they were believed to be good. To go on acting anyway, without becoming paralyzed, in full knowledge of blindness, leaning into doubt well enough to hold loves close. For protection, and to protect.
Ghosts of high noon.
In the long silence of morning, mourning, we built chapels of remains, and these became places of music. We moved through these, bone-bright and singing as the sun poured through our mothers, still unseen.
Flights in warland.
Our fathers, when we saw them, were haunted. They would haunt us later, but we knew better than to pretend we hadn’t learned: here is the world of ghosts, begotten not made, one in being with our forebears. We learned––and learned to catch ourselves. Ghosting, we called it. Are you okay? we called and Just checking? and sometimes we wondered all of it at once: how and who they were and where but mostly we did what children did as they grew, we acted roles in response. We wanted to know for ourselves what it was to disappear, too. Or else we wanted to make our disappearances known to those who took our heads for granted as anchors to this world. I’ll fly away, we sang under our breaths at the sink, and meant it.
Strangers on the porch.
After the brimstone men were gone marching, the women gathered on porches and in kitchens near us as we played, and sometimes we would sit at their feet and in their laps, pretending not to listen to the stories they told as they rocked back and forth, pretending not to wait with any hunger for the moments when they would break into laughter, and song.
***
Inspired partially by Rhiannon Giddens.
In memory of.
They would appear every year around this time, a few weeks after first frost, when skies turned uncertain, and evening began to flood our afternoons. Some caution enters with the season, attended by its sidekick, mischief, daring to betray all reminders to take care where it’s cold, where it’s dark. To watch out.
They appeared as other seasonal creatures did, the kind that inspire axioms administered to students. As in, watch the squirrel gather acorns for winter, watch the leaves turn and fall, the geese flying south (as they once did with more note, in greater numbers). But no one of the sort inclined toward neat lesson would mention these other creatures, except with some comment about fools. Who catch their death of cold––that or eternal fire, for lack of modesty.
They were always young men at the age of terror and anticipation. A few years, some young women joined, but these were a different sort of spectacle, the sort you had to take care not to see. The ran across the clearing, naked except for boots, laughing with hoots and shrieks, with pumping arms and wild faces. A few wore hats. They appeared suddenly and were gone. After, no one could ever be sure who it was, unless someone bragged about it later. It seemed best not to know. There go the streakers, someone would say. And then it would be quiet again, as the evening continued, and the cold.
