And time in pieces.
The woman we called Space because she held us was talking about how she managed to survive. “Performance, mostly,” she said. We were waiting for Time to get ready, but he was arguing with himself again under his breaths. “I’m no monolith!” he was saying, and then, “Hah! Whatever you say!” Watching himself through splayed fingers: now a bright hope, now gone; now horizon, now barrier, now blank. And what of tomorrow? And tomorrows.
Re-visioning histories.
We returned to touch, to reading texture to see what we could learn about thinking well and by well we meant in a different direction from the killing machines. To the speech of our bodies, to save them––ours, and any others still here.
And what resists containment.
Careful to note the care of the thrush at her nest, and her attendant song, we were determined to find joy in witness. Its light would not shine except in grief, and a long record of bird notes reveals that we could scarcely see their winged grace without noting everywhere the flights and visitations of our dead friends. The substance of our trembling was never so vivid as when it flowed from us.
And why: a rough outline.
It’s an ongoing project, this who. And the question why here, which necessarily brings its entourage of related questions: where is here, what is this trajectory. Why suffer. What beauty. What truth. Remember. Forget. Give it all up. Let it bowl you over again. Try other selves. Notice other suns. Wrestle angels. Demons, too. Hear the chorus. Then the individual breaths. Notice yours among these: now it is distinct, now it blends into the others, now it is missing, now it returns. The work is no good for finishing, but at least the company is lively. What an ensemble. At the end, death calls on each of us, ready or not. Until then, this is something to do.
Witness, washed.
You can’t bring anything back, so we do this other thing. We walk outside alone at different times. Look at the moon, we say in our heads. Then in a message. A photo in the message. See the moon. Its light a soft wash for the nests in upper branches, for the cliff’s edge, the canyon brush, the witness. There is work tomorrow, and this moment won’t be reversed. Look, we say, when the other prayers won’t come.
The day they carried me off.
Do you have a destination? One was saying, and I was an elegy to be written, then misplaced, then found again by a crow in the early morning light. Let me be part of your nest, crow. Your families tell the best stories, and I watched you pull the mist off the road like a blanket with your collective beaks. I was looking for notes, but the walls kept sliding. It’s true that reason never gets us there all the way. I looked for a better map like I looked for my notes but after the crows found me, I was home. I did nothing. I was carried and everyone was talking. My voice slid to my ears and my will beneath their weight. The musk of their feathers. It was all I ever wanted. I thought of all the times I had looked up to see them, watching as if working something out. What took you guys so long? I heard in my ears, the joke on me laughing.
To the missing.
Dawn, and time slides down the ache of long sight. Not blind, only blinding sometimes, having offered the eyes one at a time to visiting creatures while still unripe, like here, take it, finding relief at being done seeing what we thought we knew, finding in it only the too-muchness of what is not. But this is about how life when it grows will vine and bud around and through and within the spaces of our missing parts. So, sight returned, and our hands, holding as we walked back into this our lives, still unknown, on the unsteady limbs of newborn foals still wet with the flood of our birth.
Life among lichen.
To find the gnarled bend, its dripping hush, the moss-encrusted gathering space for unruly congregations of ferns, witches’ whiskers, and hazel gloves––and be enchanted to protect the wild, wet, crawling danger of this womb with hope only to be near it––and know that if there is anything here to be tamed, it is in you.
***
Inspired by the ongoing movement to protect the temperate rainforests of the UK and Ireland.
Ghosts of high noon.
In the long silence of morning, mourning, we built chapels of remains, and these became places of music. We moved through these, bone-bright and singing as the sun poured through our mothers, still unseen.
