Category: Perception

What Counts

On seasonal records.

1.

I’d love to tell you, but the words become ghosts, choking intention. 

2.

Once, they showed their insides, breaking open. 

3.

Meaning tends to expand at the site of the cut.

4.

The next attempt reminds: what is necessary is also impossible.

5.

The space after time’s vanishing has a way of losing its contours.

6.

To compensate, you can try cross-mapping histories to create an architecture of memory.

7.

Now we are inside the stones, now we are their erosion.

8.

By exposing matter, you can revisit its secretive nature. Some colors don’t happen in paint.

9.

The synapses around a single sentence can curl a face into the face of another time.

10. 

We pierced the soft flesh of old monuments. 

11.

A child makes bricks of debris, each block a memory.

12.

If each of these haystacks is another time of day, seeing is what happens between them.

***

Inspired by Monet’s Haystacks.

Intimate Unknowns

A brief encounter.

It was a single date, but memorable.

Who wears a watch anymore? he quipped, except if you are trying to impress.

He was referring to the old watches that just did time. 

Laughing as they entered the restaurant, she removed her coat to reveal a dress made of old watches.

What is this? he asked. 

She had her reasons. It’s been a week of dark dreams, she told him, and she was done with fighting them off. They are creatures too, these memories. She supposed they just needed a home.

Now nervous, he tried to make light. So, do you have the time?

I have all the time in the world, she replied. Take your pick. Every watch was set to a different time.

Suddenly, he remembered something he had to do. There was no time to explain, he told her. Urgent business, he said. So sorry!

She waved as one does from upper deck of an ocean liner at departure, smiling.

What followed was a beautiful meal.

***

Inspired by an encounter with this reference to L. Mylott Manning’s Kiss the Dark.

Feats of Becoming

In mythic memory.

In the days when we knew forms were only provisional, you called Leap! at the sight of the next star. Our metamorphic world buzzed with a panorama of possible and the hours were a cyclic series of somersaults.

We read by the myth from inside its closed shell, unlike the heavy-headed beachcombers trying to recover something lost. From inside, we dissolved selves well enough to forget our tired, temporary names and donned instead originals of dark dimension. In these we splashed back to the undergrounds where the Mothers knew us, to restore the old tales to their first beginnings. We chased the slivering prints of angels’ bare feet to catch them only long enough that they would whisper again the small verse assigned to each of us. This one is yours to bring forth, they told us, one at a time.

In dawn’s purple flame, the branching capillaries of eons swelled our skins, and Time’s wild clowning made us know ourselves at once alive and dead, ending and beginning, never and again. By this light, the world’s creatures seemed to know us, looking back as though waiting to be named.

The Edge of Water

Pulled from the stream.

When the veil slips against this grip against the fire of high noon, and there’s no recourse but to take in the full face of a day’s madness, no words can help me bear it, each too round unto itself, biting its tail. 

I slipped into the stream again, dead weight at your shoulder, the nebulae of closed eyes until the saving tongue of salt lime chased my veins back into themselves and you shone me a remedy. 

The words go on biting their tails. None can help me bear this love, when only the living will do.

Tangles

To catch the breath.

Thinking I might better hold what I meant not to lose, I tried to secure the shadow, but there was life again, trying to occur. Like the memory of a dream. Like the dream that never happened. Like the bottomless past and the future’s ancient heart.

A small part of me is flesh. The rest is myth. The rest is webbed with the enfleshed stories of more others than I know. No, I do not know myself. Except that I am no one, and only when no one shows up, can anybody be here. The cat suggested this. She seems to understand these things, so I said to the cat, cat. will you elaborate? But she has yet to grant this request. Or perhaps she has been magnanimous and elaborated extensively, and I have missed it again. She has frequently suggested that I am missing most of what is happening at any given time.

So here I am, this knotted soul so tangled that pulling only draws it tighter, with the words flying off and these colors threatening to absorb me completely into their seas. I hear a sea now, but I cannot tell you which one it is. It is likely I could not stand such knowing, that it would break me back into shards of every becoming, and now is not the time for being able to stand any more of what catches in the narrow tributary of this full throat.

Weathers

Inside outs.

With exhaustion’s heavy fog rolling thick against the day, it is too much to find the lines of the perimeters I am expected to seal. Then comes a dovetail reversal. Fever burns a midday sun’s cruel brilliance, blinding against the snow. The long melt follows but still not the lines. Hands defy the premise of trespass, insisting. Here is no territory, but soil.

You ask where the time is going. I can’t answer. Someone calls, inside! I look to where we came from, and the door stands ajar, its half-open hesitancy hiding some threshold creature, looking back.

For whom I, on the other side of its pause, must be another threshold creature, looking back.

Only Keep Looking

For Santu Mofokeng.

In quiet devotion from within the crowd, you witness the sway of a collective in song, knowing this moment in transit a destination of its own, and call it Train Church. You seek out parallel moments, always from within. The stream crossing, the waiting line, the dancers, the cave. Outsiders wanted spectacle and you pushed back with ordinary life. The long looks of tired eyes over the horizon from the middle of a field, breaking from the labor of the day. The hanging clothes of late parents on a bare pole against a concrete wall. Shaded interior of a kitchen, ethereal light through pleated rayon curtains. The mist pushing against easy meaning, smoke against certainty, dust against the definition of forms. No, the magic won’t be captured, you insisted. Chasing shadows to witness, atmosphere to witness, sediments to witness––faces, in long attention, patient. Insisting, here is only the beginning of sight. Look again.

***

Inspired by the art and practice of Santu Mofokeng (1956-2020).

Camouflage Optics

Seen and unseen.

In response to the question of what any of this is, you offered an alternative. Forget all that, you said, and come inside. We moved among your impossible bodies. Stair spindles became towers of refuge, ventilation gates morphed into window frames. You took the leather skins of sacred texts and stitched one house at a time. You stitched a neighborhood of these, suspended from the ceiling. Welcome! You called. What you gave us was neither nature nor a matter of belief, but their shapeshifting beyonds. Here is an intricate network of colored glass, the view unbound by familiars.  That you may better see inside you, you offered, and out again.

***

Inspired by the work of mixed-media artist Chiffon Thomas.