Category: Wonder

Shoreline Notes

On nearness

I kept meaning to see it, and the intention throbbed like impending heartbreak. To chronicle the residents, for example, of a hot afternoon lakeshore: the stained-glass wings of dragonfly in cattail, then open space, beach-like; blankets, sunbathers. Where a child laughs, running, and the rooftops beyond the green with gulls above these and the trees and how peace is the word of the day, so peaceful, the sunbathers say. You cannot see the killings from here. Or how somewhere an old soul is returning and a new one, not yet known in this place, is being born, formed like a new star from the compression of elements over time. And of compassion, that ache of the imagination. And the nearness of death and our proximities to one another in the face of an unnamed annihilation, and of this we know nothing so go on remembering––to a point. These layers of time assembled and striated on our shelves, against nature which prefers the susurrations of breath and heartbeat, waves––those notes that only come in wholes. Now the ritual. Bread, wine, hands. Forgive me sister, stranger, friend. Forgive me, child, for I know not what I am beyond that glass. So I stare into it in this silence, trying to sing.

In Magnetic Fields

Movements of a charged particle.

What strange gravity is this, which won’t be understood by common measurements––of time, or distance, mass or reason––against which I have been trained to measure and describe what I am? Against (or within) this, I am a particle at a level beneath the body, beneath even what I took to be the building blocks of any body, and I am charged before I am, without an after, circling in exchange with other bodies, perpendicular to the threads of a vast web I cannot see, and I do not know myself.

Stone Unturned

The weight of being

. . . Okay, but here is a warning. I am no machine, so you will not make me faster or more efficient by dismantling my parts and addressing them one at a time. I will not be fixed.  Repair, on the other hand, is a process I welcome. Now I am seas against shores and now I am a single battered rock and next thing you know I will be washed up, waiting, smooth and gleaming at a shore, unnoticed tide after tide until one day there is someone walking low to the ground on uncertain feet to find the wonder of the moment, the smooth weight of so much wear, round and solid in her toddler’s hand.  

Song

Tracing elements

How frequently I am reminded, by calligraphies beyond my reach, that I have come from nothing and will return. Blood has its own cadence, impatient with vastness. It will only sing against the fabric of its containment and we, these imperfect vessels––hold, dancing at the edge of a dark pit. There is gravity to it, pulling. What resists will not name itself in a language I can recognize. Meanwhile, this music.

Incant

The open mouth

If it gets so dark
that singing seems
to stop
like a final answer
to that constant question
would you find me
where I wait
in silent suspension
open mouthed or tight-lipped
and remind me back
to music
one faltering note
at a time
to the beginning of the first
song?
Would I know
what lives
at the bottom
of the first
breath to rhyme
with the heights
of the last?
Would it know
me? Could it
enter, even
then?

Wink

Witness standing

Stars throb against the rim of what I see, and my reaching hands hold like waving a signal to the departed, We’re over here! Come join!

And in their winking response I glimpse the humor of their restraint before my limits. I always think the thing to bear is longing and never consider arrival, or the unspoken answer to the questions I’ve begged. 

And where do you think we’ve gone off to? And which of us is missing, now?

Mother, Tongue

First steps.

In the language I am learning, I can only falter, halting between words. I move from one syllabic rock to the next with unsure steps, their surface shining, wet, and try not to slip into the stream of all I imagine possible to say, if only I knew more of these words, how to handle their music well enough that they would hold we, floating like a pair of otters under skies that would still defy naming yet welcome the earnest try.