Wonder Archives

One Way

Into the beyonds.

To set off, advancing, arms folded over stems: tulip, iris, gladioli, desert rose–– down a path of forking tongues, the question ever which branch, now? ––and be content to dance around an emptiness and never satisfied, to be always on the way and getting nowhere, arms scratched with low branches, thorns; ankles bitten with flying questions, the bloodsuckers biting a frenzy, each new itch auguring branches to come, and know this is happening now, the meaning, it is happening all over you, and never try to catch its supple forms in feeble nets, knowing each tool too insignificant to hold any single marvel, capable only of taking a wandering body––just as scratched and bitten––from its true glory, the act of moving out and out, beyond itself.

Deluge

Surviving loss.

Shoveling silence over buried forms, brush the night with dark lashes. Wait. The memory of suffering suffers the memory of love. And yet, it will make you drunk on the idea of losing what was never yours.

Make yourself a deer. Run a bright flash of sinew over wet grass, until you get to the shore of the day where you witness a rising wave and the sound of a whispered I am. Find that you still hold a glowing flame, tiny and quivering, at the back of a breath.

Even now.

***

Notes while reading an excerpt from “Deluge” as it appears in The Hélène Cixous Reader.

The New World

Naming ceremonies.

When we went without counting, light shows played across our eyelid curtains, and language curled around us like cats, love-biting our hands, ears, toes–––inclined neither to obey or defy us. We would lick its back in turn. It would sleep on our bare chests. The water taught us flight. If the clock watched us then, we never met its gaze.

It was so, so, so.

[Much? Or little? Who thought to measure? Not us.]

We grew spaces from the back alleys of our breaths, filled them with song. Laughing, we spilled it everywhere, the new world baptized, each feeling a benediction.

Means

Of seeing.

The moon world waking, you stretch sheer fabric over frame and paint a transparent scene, so that a witness seeing lighthouse, bird, and figure looking back, might also see the structure holding them in place. What does it mean to do this? You ask, of every painting, finding histories of art in every new work, the language being learned even as you look.

***

Inspired by Glasgow-based artist Merlin James. Italicized phrases come from this interview.

To Hold in Space

This early awe.

I remember a wooded womb with a smooth sitting rock in the center, the dappled light of its dirt floor, where I watched pill bugs. May I not squander those astonishments that would come so often, visitors in shadow and shine––the laughing leaves, the squirrel’s knowing look. The kiss of ladybug against spring sweat in the hiding pause after here I come, with a seeker in full force, not yet arriving.

***

Inspired by Jorie Graham’s Cagnes-Sur-Mer 1950: “May I not squander the astonishments.”

Ghost Lights

In the after.

Then, the light moved from us, and with it, those familiar unknown bodies that used to catch and dance with it, and the water went dark. Then we wondered, but there was no one to ask. Why had we made an audience of these creatures, when we might have gathered sooner to witness? What they were.

Unknown Quantities

What breaks from silence.

What many called danger, often sickness, was her resistance. What she resisted was death, and so became known for the trouble she made.

Torrents of unnamed elements suffused her. They referred to these––when they spoke of her at all––as her darkness.

Warn the children. Don’t enter the forest. The little boys especially, at risk of being cooked in her hearth. These are early lessons. They are called stories and not executions. The most effective captors work invisibly.

Between Falls

Field notes from the ground.

Once I ached to mature into a kind of effervescent grace of quiet luminosity, but it is something else to recognize that I am still the child on the floor, stacking pieces from a pile of scattered blocks like some aftermath. My hands have traded their dimples for veins, having somehow passed straight through elegance without so much as a pause, in their haste to build some appeal, but to what?

Perhaps to a continuance of the possibility of making anything, especially when it has become so obvious to go without saying (but, clumsy as I am, I’ll note it here): so much ends with falling. Or perhaps to this insistence: because it always falls in the end, I will build.

It will not last. It is a double-edged marvel, the not lasting and the way it sometimes holds just long enough to find a witness. Once, I felt the brush of the toddler’s eyelash at my cheek. One day, before the next fall, it still seems possible to climb some crumbling arrangement of dream fragments––and leap.

From the Lighthouse

Watching for time.

At night we watched the water, but her depths revealed nothing of themselves, all reflection and tides and unknowns. But once we looked and like a jumping fish it showed itself. We gasped to see Time. You! We almost said, but he was gone again.

What could we do with that? Dark and cold, she would neither be caressed nor worshipped, features afforded by our creatures, mountains, monuments. The mirror of her, looking back, knew us, and she held what we had meant to catch.

It was hard to face, our faces. We went back to carving our names. We carved them in stones that looked solid enough to hold them. To last, as the saying went, the test.

What test? We wondered, and the answer was Time. But time was submerged again, and the sea, seeming to see us, had always been more than we could take in. Now it was more still, and rising.

Dust Before Dawn

In low light.

I walk between these low lamps as you sleep, the poorwill’s circled notes outside, inviting recollection of endings that preceded this one, and the sound of this space is a single note, sustained in the once noble ruins of this ribbed house of song and sacrament. The stained glass windows that once made a miracle of your face are now clotted with the dust of a decade of storms, and it may be true that there is never time to clean them, but also that I fear the glass has worn to the point that only the dust holds it here, or perhaps that whoever this is, still waiting for the mass, will shatter if those beams should suddenly descend. Again.