Category: Wonders

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.

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.

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.