Category: Wonders

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. 

Morning Tide

The arc of a reach.

After inhaling doubts baked in a furnace with a hint of daylilies, 

after the rhino leaps the river, tracing the shadow of the ark 

below vapor currents tailing the new doves behind the sun, 

its palpable flare a rising mirror of sublimated hopes, someone 

at the other side of the banks dares to stretch wide palms––up,

and again, as if to touch the hem of a garment and be healed.

Small Wonders

Faith and humility.

When you are small, she said, you can move around and between what the big ones cannot. You will never carry much you call your own and can be easily lifted. Whatever comes your way will only be found, and you will not confuse it with something earned.

No hope is real comfort when you will often have to go without it. Same for inspiration, same for confidence. What you want to keep, she said, is what is left when hope and confidence and self-respect are gone. When all the rest collapses, notice: what is here, still breathing?

Accept its life and protect its breath. It is not distinct from your own, only infinitely more vast.

Waters

In the intertidal zone.

After time and weather have eroded a vision to sand, its attendant body may be found standing with wet feet in the remains, facing the invisible tide. There is substance here, too, but no name. We pour our loaded attempts to define it into the sea and she absorbs them, one after another metaphor, including this one now, until it becomes possible to say that the one with their feet at the edge of a lapping wave is actually long gone, adrift––waving, or not, and we hold cupped hands above our eyes, saying back and forth, Look, look out there, squinting.

The Magic of it All

Hanging on.

The cliff’s edge flays the skyline and Gaia spills toward the shore where the lilted heads of the waiting drop like buds. Nothing happens but the holding in a place like this, for what. One of the cliff bodies calls and the sea roars back dear life, crashing in.

***

The title of this post comes from Clare Rojas’s ongoing show now in LA.  Her painting, I’ll always Have this Little Movie in My Head inspired these lines.

Dust in the Wind

Ecodrama with hero.

It’s a long road from dust to dust, and our restless hero, so often distracted by the next extraction, so quickly forgets. Besides, it’s not extraction, he would say, but acceptance of what is freely given––to those with the knowhow to harvest. And what fun, what wonder, what delight!  And he’s not forgetting, not really, when there was nothing to remember in the first place, nothing he saw or knew beyond his shadow, how dramatically it would drape across the hills as the sun moved west, as if to affirm the fated nature of his progress, manifesting a destiny of unquestioned portent. 

How often destruction looks like nothing more than the repetition of what is easy and familiar, especially with a hero onstage. How often the bodies long buried, though silent in their active vigil, are missed, such that if anyone were to ask about the presence of a place, an answer, if there were one, might be simply, nothing.

Not until it is dust again, or desert, will the dramatic music cue his memory back to what he always knew, himself at the center of so many adventures––and then to take his place in the most dramatic lighting, on the craggiest-looking rock it is still possible to sit on comfortably, elbows on knees and head in hands, to emit the hero’s cry, ragged with disbelief at such sudden and terrible misfortune.

Sounding Love

Loud and fabulous.

You invited the children to make nametags with your childhood art teacher. You gathered seven thousand and assembled them to read, love thy neighbor.

You responded to requests that had been conditioned out of us when we were younger than these children. Such as, let me wear more sequins, doilies––dolls, too! Such as, why can’t my Tuesday skin be a pelt of dyed furs? Such as, I want to put that gramophone on my head! And tomorrow, may I wear only living birds.

Let the wild things out, you implored, let’s have a rumpus! Then, you dressed your dancers with the care and intention of the samurai preparing for battle.

When you called us together, I thought I loved my neighbor well enough, but my gestures were anemic. I only knew this when you dressed me in a costume of inflatable lawn ornaments, and my neighbor in a rainbow of Fraggle Rock fur, and invited us to dance. 

You amplified the drums and brought others in, and we threw our arms wider in our spinning, to compensate for the weight and momentum of our fabulous suits.

Love louder, you sing, louder now––all in!

***

Inspired by the purpose-driven work of Chicago-based artist Nick Cave, who is best known for his soundsuits.