Perception Archives

notes on getting grown

with monsters

One of the scariest parts about turning from child to older is the expectation that you will know where you are going. One monster leaves her legs behind before flying. Another can be kept from finding itself again by a sprinkle of salt.

Spend long enough studying these things and eventually you stop asking whether they’re real and start asking different questions.

Where is the nearest river?
How much water is left?
Where are the birds going now?

The Vetala prefers fresh bodies because they still know how to speak.
Fill the bathtub before the water pressure drops.
Kelpies cry before storms.
If lost, leave footprints in mud or snow.

Distress signals come in threes.
Most demons look ordinary.
Emergency flashlights are hanging from the shower hooks.

Turn your ears toward distant sounds like a cat.
Three syllable words work best.
Project your voice:

Internet.
Coconut.
Spaghetti.

bodies of the storytelling kind

every beginning inherits an aftermath

We do not make of ourselves clean lines, nor do we tend to follow them. When we do, it is accident or anomaly. Some call it miracle, but what if the real miracle is how we bulge and bleed, leak and tear? The ways we absorb more than we should be able to hold. If we were ideals, we would not be this way. If we were ideas, we would not be this way. But this is the thing with being bodies. We are made of so much stuff, until we aren’t anymore. To keep growing, we have to leave parts of ourselves behind. We are here to collect ourselves. This beginning is also an aftermath. We gather ourselves in pieces, and then we let them fly.

wild fools

beyond the towers where the guards stand waiting

Oh, you are a writer? Give us a hero story, then! We’ll get the popcorn, let’s go.

I am not very interested in the hero story.

Tell us about the dragon! How it was slain and everything is safe again!
I cannot. I have no faith in the premise.

I have always loved dragons. Imagined ones, metaphorical ones. Besides, I tend to talk to lizards when I walk.

I tire of the way the story must always be about the hero, or those waiting for the hero, or those tending the hero, or those preparing the world for the hero’s return. I want to know who kept the living going while all these heroes were off on their quests. I would like to hear the lizard tell what happened.

It is curious how often the dragon dies only for its guarded fortune to change hands. The gold. The virgins. Another castle.

I have become suspicious of people who can state what they are about. Perhaps this is required now. A mission statement. A brand. A clean line of purpose. Meanwhile the shadow goes about its work.

I know only that my blind spots arrive in multitudes. So, I keep watch instead. I make little shelters. It’s much more bird feeder than monument.

Hi, birds.

There you are.

Take what you need.

I have no illusion that I am feeding you.

You are feeding me.

Language feels this way, too. I’m not climbing Jacob’s ladder or pulling a sword from a stone. I am near a hearth, tending a loaf. I keep making the same loaf, because wherever I am, there are always hungry mouths. Take what you need.

Hi, birds. There you are again. Beyond the towers, where the guards are waiting, the gardens have begun again without the hero. Come eat.

a short history of subtraction

with misunderstandings re: freedom

First attentions focused on survival, and survival appeared to require a truth. It would be singular. Properly applied, it was supposed to offer liberation. Instead, it invoked additional struggle.

Then came another approach: disappearance. Stones managed it, and certain fish. Entire civilizations, even. With so little remaining after the act, results are inconclusive.

Some seek security by sharing every feeling. Others store provisions in hidden rooms. One strategy involves carrying everything. Another takes nothing at all. No method proved universally reliable.

On the other hand, there are many ways to die. Neglect remains popular. Repeated transplantation has produced mixed outcomes. It is possible to survive by developing shallower roots.

The gliders seemed promising. They moved across the water without disturbing it, attended by doubles made entirely of light. From a distance, the arrangement appeared effortless.

Several years were devoted to the study of reflection. Several more to subtraction. One working hypothesis suggested that freedom might consist of becoming lighter. This hypothesis eventually collapsed.

The way of the ray turned out not to be available. It could pass through what those of earth were required to carry. Below: buried bodies, hidden boons, forgotten names, and other dense materials.

At first this seemed tragic. Later, less so.

The discovery arrived gradually, as weather does. By accumulation. Particles gathering at altitude, suspended in vapor, waiting to rain.

By then many necessary pieces had already been removed. They remained scattered across the hills. Under the pink moon, they resembled sleeping animals.

Recovery efforts continue.

Minutes from the Society of Dirt

where attendance is consistently excellent

I am not the subject, but the background against which he performs himself.

For example, I can be a receptive audience, pliant and agreeable. A receptive audience is always preferable to a resistant one. I am neither, and also both. But these details are irrelevant to our subject, who insists upon unity of vision.

Pulling this off successfully—and it is always a great feat, isn’t it, when everything comes together? —requires a total alignment of the environment. All parts separate, each in its place.

It takes a great deal of effort.

The parts of me that refuse taming learn to separate when needed, as a lizard separates from a caught tail. So I go around leaving tails everywhere, little souvenirs for whoever comes looking.

This is a preferred mode of movement in the subject’s realm. He runs a tight ship, and I am made of whatever collapses an edge. Now solid, now not.

I reject the purity tests, the display cages of possibility, the passion for classification. But I accept these as intractable features of the environment, like leaf blowers and occasional dogpiles.

Poor subject. He exists inside a fiction mediated by others. He notices them primarily as objects requiring arrangement.

He cannot account for the resistance because the resistance is made of teeming earth. By definition, it refuses purity.

He calls us dirt.

From below, we teem here, a laughing rumble at his feet.

where we stood, watching

on those who mistook their heights for flight

Consider this, we tried—but held still when they raged. We were about to say babies, offer skillets, call on memory. We learned to hold our words, to stand instead, ever ready with arms at our sides, palms open. We held them through their nightmares and when they raged that we knew nothing of their wars.

They did not come toward us. Their bodies knew a direction, some center pointing, but they had trained themselves away from it.

We waited for a decision that did not arrive. No more war at the threshold, or bringing it home, or calling its conquest flight. We held our tongues, tasting blood and what. We could not say. Stay, we pressed, a whisper. It was not a command, but a reminder of contact with the living. Here, we said, and offered skin. A reminder of how tender the flesh that holds us here, how barely.

Their systems grew intricate. Machineries of belief meant to lift them, and we grew tired of these heights, sensing the fall pre-written.

Milk leaked. Children cried to them—look, see me—but the angle was wrong. Too low. Sometimes they would lift a child as if testing the weight. We held our breath.

Our bodies became passage—grease for the next idea, pillows where their heads had been. We learned to move on.

The next thing was the children. They wanted to fly, too, but we did not throw them. Not with one on each hip, a basket of laundry, onions cut open on the board.

Here is where they stepped in, who were here so briefly. To do the throwing. Up! They lifted. Up, up! they shouted.

The children screamed. Again!

aerial view

aerial view of an edge

What is this cut––eye of churned earth,
a cyclone pattern, continuance replaced
by some other hand.

How am I seeing, at this height. To look from above
at the place where I might, in another version,
be standing instead.

To learn something from this
—as once, a child, dreaming of flight,
hovered above her mother

in the supermarket’s fluorescent hum,
watched her push the cart
through pale green heads of wrapped iceberg,

bright torpedoes of cucumber
& claw-tied lobsters in their tank.
Between her mother & the ceiling’s light,
she learned distance.

Capillary of shale, piled.
A filament around the iris, worn thin.
Closer down, something else.

A spine. Whose? The engineers arrive
to play king, to play prophet,
to name inheritance into being,

city of gold, encased behind glass.
The glass, compressed sand
the diggers come to move.

They call it dirt. They call it mud.
They handle what little they see,
then leave.

the problem of shape

preliminary findings

The year I learned the war was inside me — even if some of its battles were without — I began rummaging through the wreckage, hoping to find more than detritus accumulated from years of warring. Around the mess: sky.

I had wanted to be a bespoke collection of formidable weight, but I was discovering I was one part bargain-basement yard sale, another part fairytale creatures — some feathered, some furred, some horned, some visible, many unseen.

And the last part of me was something else. It wasn’t the war exactly, or the yard sale, or any single one of these creatures. Here was a drifting thing, like a cloud.

How long had I tried to pin her down? Or, when I couldn’t, solicit outside help. There are always people eager for this work — telling the unruly body of a woman (ethereal or enfleshed) how she should behave, ready to point her back toward some imagined vessel of herself.

Mine was always either pouring out or sponging in.

I told myself I would learn to regulate the leaking. To absorb less. To hold my shape. I may have been lying.

In defiance of common sense, I was more interested in the experiment. I kept testing it, again and again, in different ways: how much could I take, how much could I let flow away?

It had to do with boundaries. Mine were the kind cell walls have — osmotic. I wanted to know what that meant. I wanted to live it better than I had.

I knew this would make no sense, so I kept it to myself.

I spoke instead of love. And of endurance.

loose change for the shallows

toward a voice before sense

Love, try again
now with the weight of
your tomb set down.

Only air on your shoulders
this time—then water,
a constant motion.

Tonight, plant a crab in the sky,
then the archer. Notice the bull
looking back into a gazing frog.
Make them glow. The tide—dive
after these phosphorescent fish,
recklessly forgetting the rattle
of old sense, tossing it back
to these shallows, loose change
to echo your other name,
the one you knew when language
moved in shining schools between
surface and depth,
where you flashed your multitudes
through bathwater, laughing—
vessel, your eye, your mouth.

o child
the whole of you
a single sound

yes

lament in winter

flood paths, faultiness

to weep over this huddled form
may in the end be an antidote
to the current of grief, that
––force
[o time]
where to meet head on
and survive
[o mother]
demands surrender to its coming
[o you ]
left behind too for the onward march
[you, too]
and nearly disappeared

[and yet. and yet]

save now
us our mothers
this time
our sense of any
o god but
these blind barons’
blaring horns