Category: Wonders

The Edge of Water

Pulled from the stream.

When the veil slips against this grip against the fire of high noon, and there’s no recourse but to take in the full face of a day’s madness, no words can help me bear it, each too round unto itself, biting its tail. 

I slipped into the stream again, dead weight at your shoulder, the nebulae of closed eyes until the saving tongue of salt lime chased my veins back into themselves and you shone me a remedy. 

The words go on biting their tails. None can help me bear this love, when only the living will do.

Fevers

And springs.

Blame the rude lift of shaggy grasses in the hot breath of wind, or blame the running horses for allowing our approach, or the unknown forces hiding behind facades of lifelessness, the array of them unlimited as the wild of fallen feathers in the last song of the dreariness we pretended to know before the brooding effigies of childhood toys wept us forward to long-dormant animal screams, to be caught by the insouciant tongue of this luxuriant lush where bur clumps catch the skin and horseflies shine mad at midday against a chorus of swarms convulsing at the grate.

Blame this teasing glimpse of spring for returning these creatures to something more than what we were in our cold rooms of polite decorum, before our days shed silver scales to this teeming fever, to reveal the honeysweet fire of protuberant growth, dripping conduits of some fierce insistence too raw to submit to any address more refined than the primordial word for teasing us back into this unnamed all.

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.

Translations

Between worlds.

To move between the domestic and the otherworldly need not be some hero’s leap across some chasm, triumphant. We drifted back and forth, more gaze than choice. In this way, our tears translated to the pools of mermaid songs at bath time. Come, littles. Now the scalp, now the towels at our tails. Daylight done, lights out, out! The mystery had to do with its return in the morning, and we whispered, Tomorrow. Of the light and the pinecones, rabbits, and blue jays. They would. We would be there. We hoped tomorrow to put acorns in a pile, that the squirrels would see them and approve. That they would see us and know. We called our good nights to the moon. It was changing and we meant to see how. It pulled our gaze like tides, and we were out again.

Fly Notes

From a wall in a room with cosmologists.

It was an enviable position, according to some. To be what I was, a fly on the walls in which they met. I was hoping to get out, but made the best of my lot, listening. If I did escape, I was hoping to at least be able to share an uncommon view of the cosmos, but my findings were inconclusive. 

Surely you must have heard something.

Well. They know it’s big.

There’s a start. 

When it comes to origins, they can speculate as to when, but have no idea what, except hot. In recent decades, they have at least become aware that they are only seeing what’s observable to them. One thing that’s really got some of them worked up is about how the further away a galaxy is, the faster it is moving. Away. From what they can see. 

Hmm, and they don’t find this discouraging?

Nope. They are very persistent. It’s adorable, really. And they have all these little naming games and such and can’t help characterizing all the forces with various personalities. Like, they have this one saying they love to repeat. Let me see if I can get it. It goes: Space meeting Matter says, “Move like this!” and Matter, meeting Space, says, “No, curve!”

So now what are they onto?

Mostly a sense that they are missing something. That it’s right there, on the horizon.

In the part that’s moving away fast, or the slower part?

I don’t know. That’s when they finally opened a window. 

***

Inspired by this article. And by the work of  Georgi Gospodinov, which often features sentient flies.

Beyond Notice

A tribute to the unseen.

I can accept appearances without keeping them up, without submitting to your notions of their perpetual preeminence. Call me what you want––and this, too. I can absorb any label because I hold none with any pride. Some create awe, sure––like living, like mother, like still here––but this is an awe for what is given and just as easily removed, that I get to witness for the time being, this fleeting now, swelling in all of its fullness, even when the bulk of any presence, any matter, any one of us at any time––is entirely unseen.

Watchkeepers

Flight vigils.

We hoped our mothers would know flight and by extension, us. Each kept our imaginations of her wide wings in the same interiors where we had recorded her laughter. We hoped to read between the lines of her open face, a wild and raucous tale of our future histories, so unlike certain predictions and extensions of the moment. Done with those, we wanted a story for the ages we had yet to become. In secret, we wanted to become the ages––and the aged, eventually. Unsure how this could happen, we watched, guarding her worry, wondering what else she did not say.