Category: writing

What Spills

Chasing Time.

Hurried notes claimed our footsteps, dancing us to the next moment.

Quick, the chorus called, Time is running. We, ever after it, had never known stillness. Do you mean, we wanted to ask, that once we stayed, and Time with us? What would that be like, we wondered, to climb the craggy rungs of his beard, tethered between once and will? Instead, we spilled into Space––into spaces, flooding.

Something was off, or all of it. If stillness came again, we meant to ask. We thought we knew the flood story: an ark, the saving rainbow, dove of peace, but in an age on the run the known ones would not hold. How could we be the flood, the water itself, the coming storm? What did this mean for the rainbow, the dove, no longer of us?

Who floats, then, into the next dawn––or what?

The Wait

Art etiquette.

To look long and listen to the stone before making any alteration, so that the sculpture that follows may be a collaboration. To follow paint over surface and sense its wants. Above all, to hear an eloquent silence before it moves to speak, and resist the impulse to offer the first word, even in greeting, for the customs of this world are something else, and care nothing for any pilgrim’s feeble attempts at making pleasant forays toward the familiar.

Study of Forms

Incandescent immersion.

Unless some energy comes to haunt, there is no movement in these words. But where does it come from? Things remembered, things observed, the contents of a collector’s shelf, or some displacement. A long drive will find it sometimes, the quick flash of wild creature crossing the road. Other times, it’s a matter of grim execution. Always the question of how much to push in the effort to grow a nascent being without killing it with overwork. We all move between the given language and the first, this waiting muscle bared and tense, all attention.

Hatching Plans

From the nest.

We watched the nest with time nodding in our direction, like Wait for it and our mothers said Don’t touch. We kept a holy vigil, peeping. They hatched when we were at school and we missed it. There they were: fuzzed heads, open beaks, waiting mouths. Their cheeping. We stood there, beholding our capacity for a reverence so raw, suspicious already that it would expire.

We missed their first flight, too, and their last day in the nest. One day we came home, and it was empty. Just like that. Later, it was gone.

There were things we wanted to know about birds––no, that’s not right. We found these lessons dull: rapid hearts and hollow bones, we nodded, watching the clock for dismissal. What I mean is that there were things we wanted to know as birds, of flight and how you would go about doing it for the first time. And how to land––anywhere, really. As opposed to floating off like forgotten balloons. And how did a body manage to break its shell, the boundary between almost living and now? To say Go! and mean it, beyond the race, the mere game. If we were birds, we would know we were real.

When one landed, the grandmothers knew it as the dead returning. When one came inside a room, it was a warning, desperate wings and beak sirening against the windows. We called for someone grown to help it out.

A warning about what? We wanted to know. But they only said that something is coming.

We meant to keep watch, but we kept missing the moment for the secret. We meant to bird ourselves up and out, far from the shadows that held us, to get to the part in living where we could cast our own––long and wide, over everything.

Voice of the Age

A study in fragments.

The voice of the age is a fragment, still jealous of fireflies, starlight; still confused about the first dead goldfish on a stage stripped of shadows, where shadow itself is barred, where the bars themselves leave no shadow, erased by floodlights on every side.

There are more words for the heart and what’s in it, for the world and what’s in it––and more still, maybe, for what isn’t anymore, but they keep getting disappeared in the moments for their imagined entrances in the rest of the sentences we keep starting by these ghost-limbed reflexes to word what we meant to declare, or ask, or exclaim with a full-throated yell.

Subjects lose their organizing action, and the actions continue, amputated from memory centers, and wherever the suspended would-be actors are, it must be somewhere and not the opposite of somewhere. As in, nowhere. As in, everywhere. As in, here.

Speaking of which, is another fragment. Who is here? Who breathes? Or what.

***

The opening phrase (“The voice of the age is a fragment“) comes from Brenda Hillman’s ‘[to the voice of the age]’.

Soils

Of intentions and nourishment.

Born carried away, of a desire that will neither die nor introduce itself by name to a stranger, it becomes obvious that I am that, too. So taken––from every place and the self, too––I cannot arrive.

At the end of everything, when the flow continues, so does this singular insistence. Bleed.

Hand opens soil to hide these delicate hopes, even at the end and especially then. Flower? Maybe. Of course, they will be trampled, as lives are. And yet. They will live, too. There is no certainty in this, but there it goes, happening.

Wayfarers

Moving to stop.

A long way from their destination, the travelers continued for a very long time. After the last of their maps was lost in the wind, they kept on. They had enough provisions, but nothing of visible progress. Eventually, one among them said, “we’re not getting anywhere.” No one objected.

That night, there was a great celebration. Food and drink were passed around. They joked and argued, cried and laughed, danced and loved. Eventually, everyone slept until it was time to move again. The group continued, arriving nowhere, and spirits were vastly improved. 

Another Invitation

To a dear poet.

To inscribe passion, make of it a history, burning with love and regret, holding posture ever toward the mortal crowd at the gates, immersed in time’s noise, still listening, long after Eden, for the miracle, knowing any journey can be a stand-in for all journeys, ever, the constant flight to another life: the dying, recalling; the oblivion, searching.

But what is this moving at the bottom of loss? It won’t be sold another scandal when it’s time to gather signs. I will lose myself and go again.

One day, when the barbed-wire walls are down, I hope you will come and see me in this bird-painted room. We will sit here together, watching the light move with the cat.

Diving in the Desert

Metaphor and unknowns.

The space between fiction and nonfiction is often a no-man’s land, but the artists know it. Which is to say, they have become accustomed to its strangeness. Which is to say, accustomed to not claiming to know anything about a space so wild. 

Now it is dense to the point of opacity, now translucent. Now deep dives under desert waves, now a barren ocean. Now the weather is a cat. 

We asked one, what is your work about? When they were done laughing, they told us. It is about encounters with other people, they said. And water. Also, the search. For water, and for the others. In some places, both are elusive.

***

Inspiration: While considering the work of Ivan Vladislavić,  I came across this article: “Diving the Reef: Water Metaphors in the Work of Ivan Vladislavić” and today’s post sprouted from my notes.