writing Archives

In the Time of the Story

Rituals of nourishment.

Time had his moods, his sizes, colors, shapes, and volumes––depending on the story that held him. When he was out, Space and the other mothers and grandmothers had an expression. “Stories take no time,” they said while skipping over whole months, years. By this logic, a journey spanning continents and decades might happen in the span of a cup of coffee in the midafternoon, light slicing through the blinds across a table to rest on the crown of one or more children at breasts. One might begin here is a story where someone tells a story in which someone tells of someone telling what they heard from another, and so on. By this ritual, the storyteller was saving her life. By this ritual, they nursed the children until Time returned.

Phantom Lines

Writing with zombies.

Am trying to remember something of weight, but there is too much memory and not enough mass in me to hold it down. It has always been like this. A landscape to echo with ghosts. I chase the unborn story to gap the river where I run from where form became content and then the content of a drawer, then a server somewhere. In this temporary light I’d like to trace a moment well enough to land the flight of contents back to form. I crave order too, but pretense angers. Same with heads in the sands of running time and the cloying sweet of certain seeming niceties, which from where I stand tend to have the effect of sticking to the otherwise transparent bodies of ghosts around here until they are ghosting around looking gaudy and ridiculous in candy pinks with spun-sugar hair and sequined eyes. I would prefer that the ghosts at least could retain some seriousness, some biting awareness of chasm between life and death even as they blur through them. Ghosts are fine company when not costumed undead.

Now and When

The long look.

It is an act of devotion, the artist told us. To what we wondered, and she replied only looking. Which, she clarified, is of a different kind than spectating. To look long and well, as she did, was an exercise in love. She watched the neighborhood, noticed what changed. She kept the ancestors at her desk. They watched her and she looked back. They kept up a running conversation in her workspace. She watched the water, announced: it’s coming. It crept up our shores and she watched the water and watched the birds. They came and went, not unlike the visitors at her desk. She looked long and well. She was working out responses to the questions the children would ask, about how to live here now. With these, she went to the water, the ancestors, the birds. And to the other artists she knew. We need each other, I know that much, she said. We stayed with her as the water made its way.

***

Inspired by a recent BOMB interview by Wendy S. Walters with writer Emily Raboteau.

Husks

Acts of care and grieving.

I have no time to wonder about the purpose of anything, all of which seems beside the point where doing is demanded and I have working hands. No, I never have writer’s block. I love too hard. No time for questions about the rank of the thing, any more than I would ask, are these clean dishes good? This laundry? The fact of dinner or driving to and from? What is necessary for living must happen or else there is death. And when the little deaths of a day accumulate, I carry the husks in a little pouch. If I ever do start asking why, I can take them out, study the way the little exoskeletons catch the light. If I lean back long enough to notice, I will fall asleep within minutes, until the next alarm. Siri, does this count, this constant caretaking? Siri, is this poetry? Siri, I am so tired. I wish something would stick in the gears again and make it stop. But no, that would mean some calamity. Siri, why is it only calamity that can do this and what are we becoming? Where is that pouch, those tiny husks of living forms? I need to see them now, to notice how they still catch the light. These will be dust soon, but there will be more.

The Mountain and the Door

With Jean Valentine.

No, I don’t want to do it this week, any of it. So this morning I linger here, taking in the well-kept secret of you, hiding in plain sight. You worked with what you could not understand. Your work was translation. You threw most of it away, keeping only what continued to kick after the scratching out. You moved a lot. Said later, it was probably preparation. For what others called your tough strangeness. Of Dickinson, you remarked: Happy are those who can choose their refusals and survive. Considering Plath, you wondered over the thin line between the subversively unconventional and despairing state. How close you were to the edge. You feared its pull, that you might leap, but your friend, a nun, understood what you were, reminding you back. Write every day, she told you. That is your prayer, your health, your everything.

***

I have been spending time with Jean Valentine’s Door in the Mountain (New and Collected Poems, 1965-2003), and this morning I read Amy Newman’s 2008 profile of the poet in Ploughshares. Today’s post is assembled with phrases from Newman’s article, which includes quotes by Valentine.

I Would Stop

Treading here

But the road keeps accepting these steps as willing partner and guides uncertain footing to some uncultivated grace, to bloom against the shattered scene and move against the shattering.

Gymnastic Grammars

Language in liminal space.

If you look hard, it is a process
of falling from a tear in the sky
where the fist of a new star
broke night into some arrival
to tumble down
a spiral staircase
of syllables, dispossessed
and never thinking to own––
not the looking, not the sight
of any of it, not the words,
not the threaded gravities
tugging its light
into them.

Since You Asked

The poet, meaning to learn.

Well, if you really want to know, the poet sighed, then laughed, adding, join the club. Find ways to introduce these forms whose names are unsayable. No, you may not know them; only feel, then translate. Invent instead some healing. Do not. Repeat. This will not be understood. What do you mean, these shadows? They are your companions. No, you may not lock them in a room of symbol and lose the metaphorical key. You need to take this out eventually, what is still dripping. Into sun.

Between Stations

Call and response.

Editing a manuscript but the voice will not hold until I see it. Who must be the unborn who decided to save a life by delaying the opening. In the meantime, the weight of eyelids shutters the shores of lost continents and the priest repeats: You must. Be ground like wheat until. And I cannot leave this body even as its pilgrimage in other lights seems just beginning, and there is a voice caught in the throat and she is in a running dance after the sauntering river until she stops. Again, that sense of waiting for the lens to adjust. But into what? Then the thick sound of hawk lifting behind my head––off now, that circling cry.

To the Well

From the lighthouse.

––And then, an invitation. To reread certain silences in the context of a long tradition of expression among the artists whose work was protection. The practice demanded resistance of revelation, to cloak certain as-yet-unknowns in protective veils to keep them from the probing instruments and hungry hands of the doctors of discourse. Serious students of the art learn to absent themselves in certain company. Once fluent in silence, they can breach the perimeters of the well-trodden and overgrazed pastures in which they would be kept, to run wild through unsayable fields. Here is where the well of patience nurtures an impetuous and vibrant life in abiding resistance.