Category: Wonder

Heritage

Dust over time.

There’s an idea that water was inherited from a cloud that long preceded the sun, that the cloud evolved from the heat around each newborn star, that the heat so melted the gases and dusts around it that they became something else, and that this something else floated out there in the vast dark for entire forevers, without even a name; that before it was known to us as oceans, and rivers, as life itself, it was just drifting between the other bodies, neither planet or star, comet or asteroid, silently evolving rains and ablutions, storms and sailors, mermaids and the notes we’d pass in bottles overseas, wondering and telling no one; swelling with the fluid of waiting cells and someday wombs, gilled figures and baptisms, rebirths and ritual baths and wild slaps of newborn hands against its sudden surfaces, but what does it take to wait eons, drifting and holding these potentials under a veil of vast nothing, until the moment comes for surrounding a single body in a single time, that will remain for many more eons unnamed, that will remain for many more eons no time at all, in the vast void before the beginning, and be so moved by the body and the moment that you let it all go, everything you are, the body dissolving the last of itself to make the first rain?

More than Words

Pre-verbal meditations.

Before we thought we had any, there was no need for reminders back to what language occludes. We knew our names were clumsy, we felt the thud of them against surfaces and the weight of words blundering around us, knocking so much over in the effort to reach their objects, trampling entire worlds underfoot. We felt the cascading fall of us, trying to arrive, claiming at once home and this home is not mine. Disarmed, disobedient, dislocated, we could not saw what we were, and this was our best chance. The world was dizzy, and we met it on these terms, calling come out come out to one another, wherever you are.

The Unmapped

On what is good and lost.

One theory is that you know you have arrived when you can get yourself good and lost without worry over getting home. This assumes no one is waiting for your arrival, or the meal you would make, or the rent––difficult to pull off in a given day, and yet in the suspended space of making what we make, I suppose it happens all the time. But just as I am starting to think, here is something, I am back to thinking of the birds falling from the sky, whole flocks of them discovered in the aftermath––but also once a snowy owl, living, in a tree near the local library, and the punk defiance of the tiny nest that once appeared on the electrical box, and the lizard that looked back as we crouched to see him beneath the cabinet, the cat and I, and maybe the point is only to lose the trepidation over being fatally human––into a wider web, woven of strands this limited sight is still unable to detect. 

Sunsets

And other routines.

Sure, we had a habit of holding. All of us did. The sudden beauties we couldn’t keep from loving kept on doing what sudden beauties do. Don’t go, we said, but the plea sounded tinny in our ears. What resonated was the departure itself. We looked from a cliff, and with colors slanting words from us, we were gone before we left. Someone at the end of the horizon kept pulling back the sun. We had the sense of being the butt of the joke in this ritual play. The laughter was gentle, but we felt that it was something else, too. Sometimes.

Drumroll

A recollection.

And then came the memory of someone who so loved the world that they could not stop highlighting her face, who at every turn of the gaze would find her silhouette made flesh and lean into its pliant give. Whose ear, tuned to eavesdrop on dream music, would lift a lucid pen and point it toward transcription of the tattered ends of her beloved robes. 

Who kept flying home, crying home, and singing her back, the jazz ache of her grief’s webbed movements and polyphonic breaths keeping time with the ancients at the drums, past the trembling where words won’t go, these nested rolls yoked to something just beyond the reach of the given ear, where the pattern of beats becomes so dense that–––

 it collapses, 

absorbing our cries 

back 

to some original 

sea.

Coda

Happily after us.

 . . . And then one day we were empty, depleted of selves, and when this happened, at first it was quiet all around, all of us stunned by the sudden vanishing of familiar noise. 

Then came laughter. The babies started it. They seemed thrilled to find us suddenly without filters. Like them, we couldn’t help ourselves. It was hilarious. We went on for a long time.

We made a mess of our faces, a mess of our forums. The rooms exploded with an extravagance of sudden joy, and all decorum shattered at our feet. Leaking from our eyes, it washed us.

We looked around and we saw one another. The babies knew us.

Pictures

From the floating world.

Paper or stone; water or fire? When in doubt, we played tic-tac-toe and hoped for the best. We were in love with broken things: hiccupping wheels, chipped teacups, the wings of fallen sparrows and the lines of our own teeth. Here it comes, we would announce, pulling the next one loose. You wanted a cast so people could lean in and leave their names.

Empty rooms were magnificent halls to be witnessed from a corner on the bare floor. It was the light that did it, granting some significance to everything it touched. We watched it come and go. It moved like it knew its way around, like it knew us.

***

Inspired when I chanced upon this image from Barbara Bloom’s Pictures from the Floating World.

In the Mesh

A visitor to the abstractionists.

There was a visitor. The visitor had some questions but didn’t give a name. 

The visitor inquired. Let me ask you this: why did you bother with a trip to the moon if all you found were pleasant pictures to remind you back to the optimism of the intellect that got you here?

Writing in light is a matter of stage management, the visitor told us. And it’s worth asking how you got from the beginning word to this endless buffet of utopian manifestos made manifest by your co-opting of the lens. 

We didn’t know what to say. There’s a start, the visitor nodded. Try abandoning confidence.

One of us moved to speak.

Shh, the visitor said. Look around. Consider, for example, this net of records. You keep trying to close it, to capture its contents. But it will not be closed, and you are in it. Debt, in the end, will have no satisfaction.

The visitor was silent, then. One among us asked, what are you thinking?

Nothing.

Nothing? we pressed.

Here’s a cipher: zero. Without it, no algorithm: 00101001 . . ., and so on. You were so excited when you made that a starting point, for calculating the value of a loaf of bread against the cost of making it, the weight of fish against the trouble of going out; the power of, say, the atom bomb. But as the net only grows more intricate, cutting blood off at the wrists, are you any closer to seeing, as you say, The Big Picture? 

Abstraction always does this, and only the abstractionists have the stolen luxury of negating particulars. This junco, this scarred back, these soiled diapers, this afternoon, that baby’s pink sock in the middle of the road. Even subtle omissions in the particulars of birdsong make it impossible for one to be recognized as a member of its own kind.

So, we asked the visitor. Um, how are you, anyway?

Great. Fine. Take your pick among the abstractions you prefer. Each is a substitute for the here before you, a zero to add to or take from. 

An old saying: the devil in the details. As if to negate the trope of the killer in disguise.

But where does the time go? As it runs through your splayed fingers and you still forget to drink, too distracted by your reflecting pool of questions of who you are and the meaning of it all and the big nothings of what now and when, forgetting the bodies right here––one, and one, and one––preferring the salvation of nowhere.

We wanted the visitor to elaborate, but the visitor turned, saying someone needs to check the buds, the eggs, the dishes and the tiny nests, and the waters, while you orbit around your zeroes and keep on deciding there are not enough fish.

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