& whose word
strange unseen dark of this body
heartbeating unto her first word
and it was good
and it was listen
all this before the hour of tower lights
and high walls blaring admonitions
ripe for falling from and that followed
and with it the word forbidden and us
tumbling after
& now is a good time to remember
how in the beginning
before the word
was her hearing
like come
efforts in pieces
the shock of being
upends the bowl of
me again to shard
and I have only a
net of words to
collect me back
to seeming whole
extremity
what is the word for what
happens when a mouth
opens wide with cry so great
it makes no sound?
from one into another
at a crossing it is possible
to notice
how one emerging
from the echoic shadows
beyond the edges of this rush
is a creature
who understands
time through a listening
body & one
pauses now
sinew of back, legs, neck
all stretched to hear––
that graceful leap before
that pause, the pointed look
––one eye
& i witness
through shatterproof glass
blink
& then she moves
again the leaping
wave of herself
across road & into
an opposite dark.
Time in Space
We need to talk
about time
& to talk with Time
eventually
instead of scheming
how to use it
to make the most
to have a good one
to have the best
to name its price
as with any commodity
any resource
as opposed to Source
to spend instead
recklessly &
listening for language
& other creatures
is to be folded inside
embraced by layered
fabrics of Time & their
attendant creatures
in
immersive intimacies
of waters, skies
where each breath
comes to carry the
next, yet uncaught.
& resonance
why not make a map of us, then––?
all reflection & non-linear equations,
light upon light to play on a practice
of not sleeping but holding
as marrowed minerals in bones
whisper another kind of living
light only the trembling know.
this place at this time
maybe it’s a story about being a body in this world
in an age of destruction on the verge of
remembering her collective life
despite the current bluster
i cannot be alone
in having have felt it creeping all of mine
while regularly and inexplicably injured
by the force worked so aggressively to stifle
that still, small voice that has always been
all i ever wanted to hear until nodding
in response to this thing
David Wagoner wrote, which I paraphrase
regularly in my thoughts
as Here is the place where you are,
and you must treat it like
a powerful stranger.
so here we go again––
Hello, strange stranger, you are
all of us now, and i can’t keep from
dreaming some possible arrival
even here
even now
of our dendritic sensibilities
what sort of creature is this
i
?
bound to the dark
fascia of time & energy
in the image of a constant
unfolding possibility
and why does she still
hear so many here
claiming intelligence
as a thing to be grown
outside the source
code of genetic material
that makes the material
of our bodies essential
and essentially made
of stuff so similar to
what still grows in the soil
or flies, or swims, to be
fished, felled, uprooted
to death by agendas
of progress fueled
by forgetting our bodies
already know unchecked
growth as cancer
& we know where its
progress inevitably
ends & know that
with treatment in
time we can reverse
these growths we can
prevent we can protect
the living if we will––
what comes in whispers
The problem is always remembering, but some have none of that. They are the sort to wonder out loud where the time went. Those of us who remember well enough to be pierced every time by how thoroughly everything goes when it goes, cannot do this. But some are so convinced of their centrality that they wonder aloud about the interpretations of dreams, as if a congregation of gods had gathered to watch them sleep, leaving little dream notes to their chosen one. The rest of us went around, pulsing with the leaving of it when it had been so close. Interpretation was the enemy to that sort of charge. What it was wouldn’t stand for being caught in a goblet for drinking; at best it could be absorbed like mist into skin, to leave you feeling chapped whenever you walked anywhere drier than a cloud. Meanwhile it galloped before you, a herd of wilds never to be saddled, running the secret that would lose its legs in the telling. Hush child, intimates the dust in that wake––not a direct address, mind you. Only by not understanding may you receive anything worth knowing, even by thirds. It is like that most of the time, except for the moments when it isn’t. Being entirely unprepared for those, these tended to floor me. The way it comes sometimes, that vegetal speech cracking in husks, and me too dumb to leave my fascination. What? I’ll be asking, as it all goes dark again.
on what passes for sacred and current events
It only happened here––margarine, that is (though counterfeits like this are obviously too common to detail)––and the dye that went into it. And the marketing. The cigarette doctors spread it thick on Wonder Bread, and it was indeed a wonder. As was so much in the age of suspended belief––or disbelief, depending on the lens.
Flying cars were coming soon, so the age of advancement seemed like as good a time as ever to learn about the quaint past, like how Abe chopped down the cherry tree and Paul Bunyan sang a song and one of them had an ox, and there are those who will argue with apparent conviction, No, no it was George who did the chopping as though this is a crucial distinction––but it’s easy enough to concede, maybe he was harvesting vital wood for his teeth, and as anyone who spent any time in a grade-school classroom in the U.S. of a certain era can tell you, poor George had no business eating apples in any form but mashed, and that the careful preparation of these was a sensible act and arguably the lovingest thing to do for the man to whom you wish to offer something sweet without increasing the risk of your beloved incurring any variety of deadly oral infection most likely to spread to the brain in rapid time.
And yet, it doesn’t follow that whole histories––or even the accounts of current events, which by a certain logic are one and the same, depending on the extant understanding of the movement of time––should be treated this way, boiled and mashed into easily digestible baby food, unless the point is to hide the crushed contents of the arsenic pill that no one would swallow if they saw it whole.
