At reunions.
Note the irregular pattern of the veins running to and from the mother tongue in jubilant slide of dream-substrates––to read a world through glass in fog of morning, the edge of bliss so sharp it cuts the taste of iron in the mouth––the bite of dying life to living ends, running to sudden thunder, the wicked warmth of hot irreverence, its backslap pummeling affection.
Is that you? When were we?
Are we the only two here?
Hello, friend. It is so good.
To read you again.
Of flesh and earth.
Here comes another to be named,
where naming will not capture
her back. This is some other place now,
where the mountaintop froze above
its consecrated ground, above
these walls, their trumpets,
our removal.
Alice wakes, weeping snowmelt.
How easily we reason, but
this sight may come too late.
Blind mice run from the knife.
and here is our mirror-girl again,
after the rabbit. Heralds, run.
The gaze is silver. Its illuminating fire
now spent.
We figure one another out of living,
from a dream not remembered.
Take off your shoes, daughter.
Drip tears into ash. Time leaks
a sermon from the eyes
of its messengers where words
are impossible, back into the open
mouth.
In the underworld.
He came here looking for the blind prophet. Through a hole he came down from the living, from his way by which he and the ways of his men were lost, again. Not to admit any wrong, not to admit the penance due those who anger the gods, but I knew my son. His stubborn stance. I was there with the other dead mothers and our stance was reaching from where we waited below the land of the living beneath where they burned the false claims they would make in slaying other sons––and our daughters, too, in the name of their stakes and how high they made them, where the air thinned. I knew my son and I saw his desperation in that heat. See me, I called to him. He looked up and I saw it on his face. Mother, he said.
He still knew the word. Yes, I said. Now go, I said to him, from this fire while you still live.
It was too hot and too loud for him to hear more though I meant to remind him back to the life he knew before he knew to wave flags above the graves of other mothers. Where he was barefoot and fed before he thought to scorch the land he meant to take. To add, take this body, son, that I gave you, and return it to the living earth.
***
Anticlea is the mother of Odysseus, who encounters her son in the underworld where he has come to find the blind prophet, Tiresias, to tell him the way back home.
With Space and the babies.
She was Space herself, the first room to which we could attach any signs. All other places were rearrangements of this first order. And Time, as we knew him where she held us, never marched. As our teachers tried to tell us he was doing.
“Where would he go?” she said, “It’s all here.”
“Yes, but where is Time?” we would insist, suspecting that he had walked off with one of our toys in his pocket again.
“Well,” Space would sigh, “where did you see him last? Go there. You know how he repeats himself.”
“But I was just there!”
“Child. He’s been doing it forever. Now go back there and wait.”
“But we have!”
“Yes, and?”
“Well, what time is it now?”
She would wait a perfect beat and then look up like she was squinting at the weather. “Looks like eternity to me.”
“You always say that!”
We wanted Real Time. “You know,” we tried to tell her, “Departure! Progression, Arrival!” The Time of History.
“Whelp. I don’t know about that.” She had a way of raising an eyebrow whenever she caught us saying something lamentably predictable. “But I do know there’s a surprise happening.”
“When?!”
“What do you mean, when? It’s here now. I set it down when you were pestering me about progress. Now, help me look!”
Text as body of bliss.
To hear the text as living, breathing being, not to be measured against the normative strictures of the machine, and know its will to bliss. To find a text on which you can never comment, because you may only speak inside it. As, whispering, you might say into it: mysterious stranger, remove me from my common notions; remember me back into elsweheres that I may be lost in the constant introduction to what may never be written.
***
Notes while reading Roland Barthes’ The Pleasure of the Text (trans. Richard Miller).
Except for the weight of this form.
When you found me, I had been waiting, writing, for some time. Writing, I had been waiting behind that wall where the things that pulse at my neck are not what I tell because they are not the sort of thing that, as the saying goes, are up for discussion. One learns, as so many have, not to draw attention to what pulses, beats, flushes in speech or laughter, passion, or tears. My face gives me away. My troubling body gives me away, pouring me through the crack in this voice. I meant to be a formed thing, smoothed and polished for an admiring public, as instructed. The purpose of my upbringing, as far as I could tell, was for this, but in this I have utterly failed. I am instead a porous constellation of trembling orifices, dripping with overflow, and all of it is always too much, and as long as I have been, I cannot remember being otherwise. Perhaps there was a time when it was not too much, when I was a child not yet girl, not yet future woman, not yet in training. But it seems that the knowledge of girl came hand in hand with the knowledge of self and I cannot retrieve my prehistory so long as I am one, even if I would like to lay down the heavy weight of being anyone in particular. The atmospheric particle, absorbing, can collect moisture while continuing to float in the company of other atmospheric particles, until it is time to be rain.
Notes from the grandmothers.
Hold in the mind the feathered whisper of something almost touched, but not. Resist the urge to offer up a salve to stop the itch. And let her volume erupt, and stay while she splits her seams, threatening to tear each hemisphere from the other. Don’t bind. Don’t apply ice to stop the swelling. What do you expect can be born otherwise? These are wonders. It’s when these terrible discomforts leave, and the mind rests sated and full of itself that the subject is really in trouble.
Beyond words, in dreamland.
In one dream, I am warmly welcomed by a sizable group of friendly people. Various sounds and gestures indicate that I am being invited to introduce myself to the assembled. An expectant hush. My turn. It does not occur to me to use any language I know, since none of these are like what I have been hearing. So instead of words, I stand there waving, opening my face wide, making certain gestures of love and gratitude before I bow slightly to indicate that I have finished my introduction. I am received with warm murmurs and a few confused nods. Only later do I think, I wish I had said something.
Torrent.
Living in several places at once
between time and the rain, our names
would escape us and the rain none can know
to find the embers of a memory doused in the rain
glowing in the winds and our faces where we let it come.
And the reach.
What desperate ecology makes possible what will to be done between humans unto and for each imagined soul. The massive width of this creature, what is it? That would eat its own. Fight long enough and some bond is forged. Of what? What god is defeated here only to find another solitary rebirth, untended in the wilds of a bombed-out house of worship? The ancient scream begins again, as though to tire the mind of its presumptions of fire, its thick overgrowth ever ready to ignite. The distance between in and out of this place as thin as skin. How dare anyone still contained think to speak for a trembling fragility so infinitely fused to these light dappled nerves, the terrible brilliance of insistent renewal. Poses the one at the page naked but for words and yet reaching.
