Outside noise
The sound collector, tracking a distant river of birds, listens in fog, sitting for hours on a wet rock, returning explanations to no one. If someone should arrive to ask, what are you doing? the sound collector will reply, I am tuning my ears.
On any beginning
It’s like this with any beginning, isn’t it? This sick-sweet anticipatory dread. Sure, yes, I can. But really, can I? Show me. It is possible. Show me. Even now. Show me. An opening. Show me. Here? Yes, this bloom. Here? Almost.
Where assembly is required
Considering any set of assembled would-be actors in each scene, most of them go nameless. If the story is the frame, the names of those in this majority are a secret between the storyteller and those characters outside of it. Or between the storyteller and those too close to be named. The witness withholds so much of what is from the voice of the story. The process of getting anyone or anything born is so fraught there may be some wisdom in being cautious about who and when you name what parts. Which suggests something about wisdom, its necessary incompleteness. Which suggests I have accessed some, though I have not. I am just trying to write this thing.
Hello chaos, my old friend.
Say a tide is rising, and fast. At the shore this is a matter of life and death. But from a great distance there it is again, the same sea.
This morning, something tentative creeps in, a primal anxiety no doubt connected to next week’s return to school, and a sense of how quickly the pace and volume of everything will soon feel out of hand.
One learns early on to keep such observations to oneself in mixed company because if overheard by someone older or a man, this someone may feel compelled to remind you that you control the pace and if it feels out of hand you must simply set a new one. Often this admonishment is happening during a passing period bell, active shooter drill, or rush to use the bathroom between alarms.
At the onslaught of these regular doses of another’s “teachable moment” it is polite to nod as if this is the first time encountering such sage advice and sometimes when nodding while maintaining a facial expression of earnest seriousness, it is not uncommon to hear the voice of a student objecting, “They tryna gaslight you!” and feel awash in a mischievous joy that is not easy to describe.
When the inevitable updates come about who died, is dying, or has disappeared, one’s grief or concern must never publicly extend beyond the prescribed moment of silence. This understanding is critical to the choreography of this theatre. “Compartmentalize!” a principal urged us last year, in the wake of the most recent tragedy. He was one of the good ones so we returned with wan smiles of solidarity. He is gone now. March on, march on.
The Sea, the Sea: The title of the Iris Murdoch novel I am finishing in these final days, set in a landscape entirely different from this one––rocky coastline, weedy paths, long hours of solitude, and the drinking of imported claret at midday. And yet, with people arriving and leaving, whose unpredictable weathers nevertheless follow recognizable patterns.
Here are people who miss the quiet when it shatters, who want to remind others that they may take some of it with them, anytime. Who want to feel as though some measure of presumed authority has been earned. Who know better than to go around unsuspecting. Who are aware that part of what is happening in moments when one feels the rug tugging from beneath the feet involves some sleight of hand.
Who are nevertheless bewildered by it all, even as they walk back out there, pretending to have seen it all before.
Regarding the next breath
The artist did a series of spirals. I don’t know what she was thinking before she went down this road but begin somewhere is a familiar feeling. I am often haunted by this one. Anywhere will do, but where is still a pertinent question. You can start at the outside and dive in, in, in––follow the logic to the question of black holes and the possibility of the singularity and related questions about the connecting thread between dimensions, or universes, if you take as a fact the possibility of many in one. Or you could start at the center and spin yourself away, beyond the frame.
***
Inspired by the spirals of Louise Bourgeois.
Sight fishing lessons
The first thing to learn was forgetting well enough to dream a boat to help with crossing the night, its busy port thick with interdimensional commerce. The next was how to watch the anchor, watch the ropes, keep a pen and a lighthouse nearby to allow for return and remembrance.
Translation
Once when I was a mouth burned from the effort it took not to scream, something not me rose to walk that mouth to this stream where something not yet was beginning.
Life as story and the body of work
Test, label, claim. Lose again. Markings on a page. Carry on, eating through the next one, in bedraggled astonishment. Fold after fold, brain after the pattern of its existence. The brain a character in the story we tell. About ourselves. Every story we tell a story about ourselves. Or the brain is the story, depending on point of view.
Bodies. What problematic texts you are, with your endless contradictions and shifting parts. At every turn, you are at best barely contained and forever deconstructing your own perimeters to devour some other body in constant rewrite.
Shapes, shifting
In one account, she is the wine-dark carrier of iron-laden sons to strange shores of inscrutable speech. Often, she swallows them whole. In another, she is moved by strong wind through the night to become a wall. Then she falls and swallows them whole.
The yet-to-be swallowed write of dreaded creatures in her waters, of her treacherous subtlety, and speculate that what she is keeping from them is surely a clue to their deaths.
When they get like this, she sighs another tide and wonders with a bright bloom of red, if any of these can remember beyond the tales of monsters and bewitchers, how once she beheld him from below where he stood, looking, and offered back to him the shine of his own face.
Turning wheel
I swear it was an angel, said the captive near the end
who said that she said to him, this:
Are you thirsty, stranger? Has the road been long?
Come closer. Let me whisper of what is just beyond that bend.
They say there is a city of immortals somewhere, in celebration.
Who tells. Whose memory obeys command to speak.
What river, what other do you seek. All novelty, all knowledge, all oblivion.
Whose end, whose world. What immortality, and when.
Who is fluent in the customs of that place.
Who deserts before the spoiling.
Whose mother, what monsters, whose lips at that breast.
Who dazzled in what rays of that sun, when first.
Who from those shallow graves emerges to slake what thirst.
Whose prayer. What ear and when.
What ladder, whose wall, to what courtyard.
When joy, whose patience at the gates.
Where is the river that gives immortality and whose blood is in it,
and where is the empty canal that takes it away.
Whose will on what horse.
What labyrinth. Whose center. What well.
