Perception Archives

The Skins of Us

Keeping on.

Like the flecked bark of bent birch, so long scarred that scars and skin have blended, old wounds match birthmarks now, and this seems right–– to mirror fate and accident, deliberate and unknown. Once, to see it would break my heart. And did, I think. I can’t remember how. Only that at some point I knew it to be a thing of too many shards to be considered whole by any stretch, no matter how careful the mending. Not that I was so careful with the mending. But here she is anyway––of a piece, in a manner of speaking, nodding along with the head over the tattered skins of arms, as the head remarks: How fitting, for any occasion.

Acts of the Flesh

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.

Seafarers

At the cliff from which this land begins to slide.

Harpooned by grief, time comes to cut the line
of this dogged continuance and admit the map
language won’t translate. Birds enter water
after fish and we stop to absorb the impact
of what they are doing out there, almost
all of it unknown. We would circle and bow
if we could reach them. Now, we think, is time
to map another language for where has never
been a destination, taking boats that take on
water to pull us into her countenance, that we
will know that we have only ever been a
people of unmarked territories, our names
unwritten where they still against the gums
of uncut teeth.

Lost Time

With Space and the babies.

She was Space herself, the first room to which we could attach any signs. All other places were rearrangements of this first order. And Time, as we knew him where she held us, never marched. As our teachers tried to tell us he was doing.

“Where would he go?” she said, “It’s all here.”

“Yes, but where is Time?” we would insist, suspecting that he had walked off with one of our toys in his pocket again.

“Well,” Space would sigh, “where did you see him last? Go there. You know how he repeats himself.”

“But I was just there!”

“Child. He’s been doing it forever. Now go back there and wait.”

“But we have!”

“Yes, and?”

“Well, what time is it now?”

She would wait a perfect beat and then look up like she was squinting at the weather. “Looks like eternity to me.”

“You always say that!”

We wanted Real Time. “You know,” we tried to tell her, “Departure! Progression, Arrival!” The Time of History.

“Whelp. I don’t know about that.” She had a way of raising an eyebrow whenever she caught us saying something lamentably predictable. “But I do know there’s a surprise happening.”

“When?!”

“What do you mean, when? It’s here now. I set it down when you were pestering me about progress. Now, help me look!”

The Cutting Edge

And its disappearance.

It is fashionable to have a single mind. It matches the single head. The presence of multiple heads tends to suggest the storybook monster. One possessed of multiple minds has to learn to keep them contained if they are going to get by. As I do, as does anyone I know with this condition. The only problem is the turbulence. The incessant wave keeps knocking the minds against each other. Without this constant friction, I think one of mine might manage to grow some edge I could point to, and with. Then I could announce to the world, Look at me and my cutting edge! But no such announcement seems forthcoming in this lifetime. The constant wave and its tides turn my minds over one another until whatever they are is nothing that anyone would mistake for sharp.

What Might Otherwise Fly

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.

Pleas

And tidal shifts.

But how, though. We wanted to know. Do we get there?

The old woman laughed. What you get in this current is changed, she said, by surrender of known wants to unknown tides, your time no longer free but bound with shining threads of taut infinities.

Time Being

In language.

What tongue I may have inherited has long since dissolved upon landing. So now the constant challenge is naming while conjugating past and present at once. To walk naked into this astonishing force, a mind not mine from which I am nevertheless breathed among all others––this congregation of dreams, any number of which may condense under pressure, returning to rain a new forecast.

Garden Note

From the dark.

Who now? From these soils, what buried visions. Who knew. Move now. As a memory reaching for the threshold of remembrance. The veins of earth strain. Who is the salve and the wound. Of daughters who learn to flee men. Who buried seven days in earth up to their necks learned to wait. O mother of men. Return.

Art Walk

And historical research.

The artist told us how he carried questions as he traveled. He had worked with sound before this, but now he was into light. He was documenting dances and the history of time and space––and color, and the thing he was noticing about color is that it has a lot to say. Some called him a walking antenna. He showed us a work he had just finished. He called it Life in Rainbow. “I thought it would stop talking when I was done,” he said, “but it’s still going.” We listened. “I’m an explorer,” he explained. That sounded good to us, so we followed. Even though we had the wrong shoes and forgot to pack any food, it was a great trip.

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Inspired by Alteronce Gumby.