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.
And the watch
But who guards that language, nourished by fairy tales and fastened to swinging vines of the monster’s rough hair, enough to clear the hungry bog when the timing and the wind is right––and who only barely makes the crossing, for now?
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
Attached to trees
Caterpillar, rest. This is a blinking of the lights, a look beneath the hood of this machine beneath the metal sheen made to mask both barbarism and the wound within the hour of a common cry against its edge. After so long looking, eat the leaves of this knowing tree, spin a temporary shroud to wrap you tight against the ripening of your untried wings, their still untested flight. Behind them, may you sleep once fully through a night.
Overheard
Throughout any intensive study of parts and the paradox of their respective movements, there is a strong possibility––depending on the openness of the researcher in question to perceive such an unexpected discovery––that one may find one’s own gaze to be a significant factor in the results, as though the parts themselves were engaged in an ongoing parallel study.
Toward another now
At a critical time, the high priests of progress were called in to advise, and it was expected that their minds would point ever forward, that new horizons would be proclaimed sacred and new wine drunk before its time while the sacrifice was made offstage. They did and it was. Aftermaths appeared much later on the new horizon, and eventually the aftermath was now.
Lords of the land
The only problem with that forward gaze was its original intent, to moor a land to an immature idea of the body she cradled while the cradled one, standing just past infancy, assumed dominion before he learned the force of a grown body, bowed––to stunning ignorance––as he kept his shoes on, surveying with proprietary gaze while making speeches, deaf to the winding hymns in currents past his plugged ears and blind to the ancient eyes perched just above, and forgetting the feel of her soils in his hands where once he kneeled.
Beat drop
The fabric that had held us had been thinning for several seasons. When it gave way, the rhythm changed, and we dropped. We had moved into another time, adjacent to the one we had been in. No one said, we are in another time now. It just happened. One layer pulls back, revealing something of an entirely different texture contained within the form. Neither did we ask, are we something else now, too? But of course, we were. As creatures of time, we felt its shifts within us, in our blood attuned to each one, the waves and tides of us, keeping what held us until it did not.
Of the stuff of facts.
How crystal on one side, flame on another: one self-organizing, the other of order from noise. How both rivet the gaze. How depth must be hidden on the surface. Why what is hidden is often of no interest. Except when one is looking for something merely possible. Except where merely possible looms a vast atmosphere to contain whole cosmos, where the opus has no definitive form and is instead a series of attempts to reach it. What monster in the waves before the days of recorded history waits beneath the surface beyond detection, to re-emerge as who.
Rituals of nourishment.
Time had his moods, his sizes, colors, shapes, and volumes––depending on the story that held him. When he was out, Space and the other mothers and grandmothers had an expression. “Stories take no time,” they said while skipping over whole months, years. By this logic, a journey spanning continents and decades might happen in the span of a cup of coffee in the midafternoon, light slicing through the blinds across a table to rest on the crown of one or more children at breasts. One might begin here is a story where someone tells a story in which someone tells of someone telling what they heard from another, and so on. By this ritual, the storyteller was saving her life. By this ritual, they nursed the children until Time returned.
