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.
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.
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.
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.
Into being.
What comes when the search ends
and every purposeful intent, busily
attentive toward some known,
to crack the ice of time, when
being itself seems to reach
a hand?
*
Denial, so smitten by the rough
hand of progress, will insist
that this is the axis of a turn,
but nothing has changed.
*
In this sunlit absence, here
is a space again, and it––
or I, or both, sighs
an audible breath,
the hush of shoreline,
a lapping this, and it
glimmers at the edge
of language.
A next attempt.
To stay in a body and stay porous,
To maintain devout involvement
with the shattering senses.
To salvage in a moment
some rescue for the next,
when this––attendant?
riddled with punctures
and verging brittle
is needing renewal
again.
Overheard, between chases.
There you go again, Alice, with your rabbit. What now?
Let me guess. It’s the old question about time, and
why you can’t see it, exactly, even as it leaves traces
everywhere while this visible abundance of space makes
a mystery of itself by including the atmosphere
with no evidence to label: this. It cuts you.
You should eat something. Here. Apple slice?
This, at least, is visible. Maybe also at most.
See the lilac, its leaning posture even in rest.
Now the oak, raining leaves.
Will love save any of it? I can’t tell you, Alice.
I am not laughing at you. Okay, a little. Here,
have another slice. I know you want to know
if it’s enough, but what are you counting:
acres? Dollars?
Look, only a machine will move in reverse.
Your question is moot, muted by necessity
of movement between stations and the
fact that you are still hoping for a chance
to erupt from this constellation of endings
into a singular, magnificent bloom.
How much in shadow.
To resist the floodlight’s patrolling glare, its demands and agendas, its attendant megaphone, in favor of a posture of listening, a touch whispered enough to elicit shivers of recognition. This earned denial of easy access. The elegant strength, to hold a posture possessed of substance so rich that it will be perennially misunderstood in this landscape, resisting the impulse to break the pose of perfect opacity––to correct, as the saying goes, by shedding some light.
How else could you photograph sound?
Here is the wise light of the dark surface, opening,
in praise of the unknown, unnamed
here is a deft grammar of mystery.
How much to be,
how much to be imagined
in these shadows.
Look, do not look,
but see.
***
Inspired by the work of Roy DeCarava.
Starry notes.
Consider the ancient star’s strange courage and this large man, reading. Watch this spirit storm the walls, the transparent body trying to translate its former substance.
Most poets are too late and too soon, with too much of the world to rush forward, pulling back, having nothing but this cry for the occasion, a flash of voice calling keep you to what goes and come to what will not.
***
Opening lines nod to this verse from William Carlos Williams: “It’s a strange courage/ you give me ancient star:/ Shine alone in the sunrise/ toward which you lend no part!” (“El Hombre,” 1917).
Metaphor and unknowns.
The space between fiction and nonfiction is often a no-man’s land, but the artists know it. Which is to say, they have become accustomed to its strangeness. Which is to say, accustomed to not claiming to know anything about a space so wild.
Now it is dense to the point of opacity, now translucent. Now deep dives under desert waves, now a barren ocean. Now the weather is a cat.
We asked one, what is your work about? When they were done laughing, they told us. It is about encounters with other people, they said. And water. Also, the search. For water, and for the others. In some places, both are elusive.
***
Inspiration: While considering the work of Ivan Vladislavić, I came across this article: “Diving the Reef: Water Metaphors in the Work of Ivan Vladislavić” and today’s post sprouted from my notes.
