For breadth
I am sometimes permitted to return as a single filament of root hair on an ancient tree, and stretch toward the hair of another nearby, who is not yet tree and not yet anything visible because all its life, for now, is happening underground.
With cat.
In the early morning, an hour for the dust, your altar, your black eye, long since healed, the ridge of the once-purpled nose still visible in certain lights. That weather is over now, moved elsewhere, but still you come to sit with it.
This morning’s sounds are birds and the laundry room just outside the door, and dogs after a passing truck. The phone rings at an odd hour and familiar panic crashes like a wave. But it is nothing, a pocket dial.
And yet, it means something to gather these nothings to the chest and hold. Either because unless I still do this, I am nothing––or because I am essentially nothing, and it is good to be among my kind. Probably both are true, but I don’t get to know.
So, I sit here with these nothings and now here the solid weight of this cat pouring herself into my lap, to hold and be held. She is someone, this cat. She won’t do this with anyone else. I think she likes that I am good at disappearing, too––into the bed, the chair, the book, the music, birdsong. And, when interrupted––gone.
She is a great teacher the art of emptying the form, so that the liquid of something else may come in. I have spent enough time with the form itself, testing its limits to see what it will take. A lot, it turns out, but for what? When those limits finally cracked, I felt something else move in. It will not be named so it is nothing, and here we are now, these insubstantial breaths our sum, and the sum of us nothing, too.
Among leaves
These new ones, just arrived, kept coming to be washed. We tried. To know that river, hear her birds, those faithful attendants hidden behind the leaves of endless pages, the pulse of bees beyond the labyrinth of things that destroy in the name of saving. We try again.
And process.
The work lacked boundaries and you could feel the struggle and pressure of its raw force as soon as you entered its space. It seemed to press from the frame. We wanted to know how, so asked the artist about her process. She said, there’s a long time between nothing and something.
***
Inspired by the opening page of an interview I hope to return to, with Marwa Abdul-Rahman.
Treading here
But the road keeps accepting these steps as willing partner and guides uncertain footing to some uncultivated grace, to bloom against the shattered scene and move against the shattering.
Language in liminal space.
If you look hard, it is a process
of falling from a tear in the sky
where the fist of a new star
broke night into some arrival
to tumble down
a spiral staircase
of syllables, dispossessed
and never thinking to own––
not the looking, not the sight
of any of it, not the words,
not the threaded gravities
tugging its light
into them.
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.
Notes from the grandmothers.
Hold in the mind the feathered whisper of something almost touched, but not. Resist the urge to offer up a salve to stop the itch. And let her volume erupt, and stay while she splits her seams, threatening to tear each hemisphere from the other. Don’t bind. Don’t apply ice to stop the swelling. What do you expect can be born otherwise? These are wonders. It’s when these terrible discomforts leave, and the mind rests sated and full of itself that the subject is really in trouble.
Heart on display.
How much I aspire to be cool and collected, contained. But this skin is too thin. She barely holds me in. Sometimes I wonder if she even tries. I think she’s up to something else sometimes, conspiring with my aching knee and the way I bleed. And bleed. And with this shaking hand. To this tentative form I might complain, why do you betray me? But while I am mostly dumb, even I can recognize the wrong in that note. Of all her acts, betrayal of my life has never been one. She’s like an excited child with something just made and far from ready to be displayed to any standards of the moment, but she doesn’t know this like she doesn’t know sleek or cool or style or mood she is tone deaf to the codes of any given art and she only wants to give me––
to give me away
like the child with construction-paper hearts, fresh cut in love and decorated with such glee that the glue hasn’t even dried yet and the glitter is falling all over the carpet, and she wants to to pair these with flowers she found on the side of the neighbor’s apartment, the ones she doesn’t know enough to call weeds––and she is so eager to give them away––
like she is eager to give me away
to anyone who is
near, like Here!
Like, Take this! It’s for you!
And I sit here, cool only when I keep her from the assembly she wants to give me to, in love––the hot, messy, extra, weedy, bleeding abundance of this embarrassing form–– knowing that as soon as we go out there she is going to try it again.
And I hear.
The cost of admission.
You asked about colleges attended, your hulking mass above us, blocking the light. We knew the move for what it was, a banal violence. Hello, wolf, we thought, noting the borrowed sheepskins. How many others had used it to move us from the pits where we waited for the musicians, our kin, to begin? Tickets please. Tickets. The announcement punctuated by the swing of some blunt instrument pulled from a holster at the hip. And on the train where we rode to visit our mother who was dying for lack of credentials to prove she was worthy of the care needed to live. Tickets, please.
When you asked me about colleges attended, I was seated among others on the ground. We were sharing blankets. Many of us were children, some old enough to have acne; others to have the scars of acne and miscellaneous burns; still others had creaking bones and the tired eyes of the old. When you came to ask me for university credentials––tickets, please––you did not notice. How we had removed our shoes, each of us, recognizing holy ground. This was our school where we sat in the dirt on shared blankets at the feet of dead poets.
It is impossible to argue the exile from certain states of being, but we knew to listen for the music of a torquing tongue arched at just the right angle to halt the bone-crunching gears. It was only a moment, but it was long enough to notice the sound for what it was when it resumed. Your question, too. And we laughed with the ghosts when you left us, and went back to school, and you continued to mutter under your breath about the ignorance of some people, and we waved.
