Category: Wonder

The Consultants

Moonlit expertise

There was a group we would see at night by the river. We wanted to know what they did there. If it was nothing good, as everyone said, we still wanted to know, but how? One night we went to see for ourselves. With blue-shadowed feet they danced the shores to pieces, and we woke in our beds and went back the next night to see why? and they explained that they were seeking out the marrow of the river stone and to our question on for what? they said to talk. There was a precision to their foolishness. This, we recognized.  These were definitely not the ones you called if you had a question about calculations having to do with variable rates but could tell you in the space of a single breath the minutes until daybreak or the number of feathers needed to make a heart on the ground the size of your head, and whether when you are done it will even fit, and how to go about attaching it. 

Nonsigns

And insignificances

I used to think that I might learn myself into some authority. With that, I might point, insisting look, look! In looping response to a constant call. This and this, on and on, beyond divisions or classifications, or orders of being, or causes as something other than effects. 

My natural response was to melt away from authority, preferring to drip into hollows and wells, to be among those strange strangers where the dominant discourse, such as it was, was guided by a compass of laughter, silence, body, and song.

What home was that, pulling our constant whirls back for mealtimes of melodic banter, brimming with every former and future self? It avoided our gaze while seeing us, into and through.

Among Kings and Queens

Along the fortress walls

The game prize glowed with standard marble and a cartoon cupid peeped out to double the flames. An abundance of jewels decorated the assembly, the idea to catch more light, and more, to rise and rise to meet its source. 

It is not difficult to make a fetish of fearing dark, where those uncrowned and slippery forms tend to wind along walls as if to challenge their veracity, as if to challenge certain given truths, the self-evidence of status. Or of your life. 

That you see and know. That you remember what was. That what now shall be done is your will. That time is for your hurry, food for your teeth, your tongue, that these pills will do for fixing what ailments may come. That the night you feared might only be good where you wished it so when you went around saying good night and watching the walls.

Prize

Beyond imagination

You think a foothold is what you want, but maybe not.
Who needs to hold when you can flash away, a fish?
Swimming off now. When I awaken, I will remember
but not flinch, still tired but able to follow but not as
solid, to do the next part in dream and here is one
where the pearl of a long illness rolls itself
into light.

Before Sky

When a bird

How often I wish I could tell you about this exquisite bird in such a manner that you might know her, too. She was here before me, before the shattering. Bird is an inadequate word in this context, but I use it because it approximates a reference to a creature with a beak and feathers. She was much larger than I am but bowed her magnificent neck to meet me at eye level. I wanted to look into those eyes endlessly. This seemed like an indulgent and selfish response to such an offering, so instead I started numbering her feathers. I recognized that this was likely an impossible task, especially for someone of my limited intelligence who lacked training and had neither tools or methods beyond the steadfast attention that had long been a symptom of what my elders gravely suggested was a somewhat outsized and possibly obscene capacity for devotion. One, two, three. . . I was at 13,426 when abruptly interrupted. An official voice demanded to know, What are you doing? but I would not turn my head from those undulating wisps. I meant to keep my count. Other things were shouted but I ignored them, meaning to hang on.

That is not, the voice insisted, real. I heard a click of metal. 

What followed was not feathers, but sky. What ghosted through it has no pulse, no blood, no song. There is no after here and nothing to save by the counting. Only this continuance. I am rearranged inside it, but I cannot tell you how. I thought the words would appear at the end of that count and if it did not end that I would live inside the action of keeping it––forever, with no need for language beyond what was passing between the count and that vision in pieces. Now what. 

Preservation

And remains

You could hear it, the echo of each in that fleet of arks, each meaning to save in the coming storm, but the rain did not come. Only this flood of arks, and the small ones crushed beneath the weight of them. Then there were arks at the speed of sound and now approaching light, the rate at which the saving reaches the cycle of completion, finally and fully invisible. Tell me, angel, do you still breathe under there? I want to hear you.

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