as if the work could be finished

notes toward a twelfth labor

He arrives where the land has already been opened. He finds its emptiness arranged as a promise.

With the trees set back, the ground marked in faint lines where something will be placed, he stands there a moment longer than necessary, as if waiting to be recognized.

There is always a first task, though no one agrees what it is. In some tellings, it begins with a body—muscle against fur, breath against breath. In this one, it begins with a diagram. A way through.

He studies the problem until it yields its names. The lion appears as resistance. The hydra as recurrence. The hind moves just beyond permission, luminous and uncatchable, and so he follows. This is not about taking, he insists. He means to learn the pattern of this place. He keeps a careful distance. The distance defines this story.

There are places he is told not to enter, and yet. What kind of a hero would he be if he listened? He rebrands his defiance as a mark of nobility, enters gently.

The birds lift at his approach—metal, this time—circling back with images of what cannot be held at ground level. He watches himself from above, a figure moving through a field of tasks. It steadies him, this second vantage. It confirms the shape of his intention.

From here, the river is no body, but a solution. When it turns, when it carries what was meant to be cleared, he marks the success and looks away from where it goes.

There is a belt he must take without breaking what it binds. There are mares whose mouths open at the edge of hunger. There is a dog at a threshold that does not understand passage, only guarding. He speaks to it as if it might recognize him.

No, he is not cruel. This is what complicates things. He believes in the work, in the ordered sequence of steps and in the way each task, once named, can be approached and completed. He believes there is a version of himself at the end of it who will stand in a different light, having moved something essential.

Sometimes he imagines that figure: arms open, at a height just sufficient to prove ascent.

He does not imagine the fall, except briefly, as a flicker at the edge of his vision. By way of correction, he reviews the plan, turns to other images. These are readily available.  

Here is one now. A man in a doorway upends a table. Dust rises behind a horse. A voice intones surrender, means dominion. He carries these as permissions. He arranges them carefully, so they do not contradict. 

At night, the tasks loosen and the numbering slips. He finds himself back at the beginning, unclear how he returned. The land is less arranged now, and its studied lines have blurred. Something moves at the edge of sight, as if something had been here all along, waiting. Not a beast, exactly, but its presence implies some refusal of the entire project. 

He stands without instruction and for a moment nothing is named and he does not reach for a tool.

Then the light shifts, and he begins again.

where we stood, watching

on those who mistook their heights for flight

Consider this, we tried—but held still when they raged. We were about to say babies, offer skillets, call on memory. We learned to hold our words, to stand instead, ever ready with arms at our sides, palms open. We held them through their nightmares and when they raged that we knew nothing of their wars.

They did not come toward us. Their bodies knew a direction, some center pointing, but they had trained themselves away from it.

We waited for a decision that did not arrive. No more war at the threshold, or bringing it home, or calling its conquest flight. We held our tongues, tasting blood and what. We could not say. Stay, we pressed, a whisper. It was not a command, but a reminder of contact with the living. Here, we said, and offered skin. A reminder of how tender the flesh that holds us here, how barely.

Their systems grew intricate. Machineries of belief meant to lift them, and we grew tired of these heights, sensing the fall pre-written.

Milk leaked. Children cried to them—look, see me—but the angle was wrong. Too low. Sometimes they would lift a child as if testing the weight. We held our breath.

Our bodies became passage—grease for the next idea, pillows where their heads had been. We learned to move on. 

The next thing was the children. They wanted to fly, too, but we did not throw them. Not with one on each hip, a basket of laundry, onions cut open on the board.

Here is where they stepped in, who were here so briefly. To do the throwing. Up! They lifted. Up, up! they shouted. 

The children screamed. Again!

aerial view

aerial view of an edge

What is this cut––eye of churned earth,
a cyclone pattern, continuance replaced
by some other hand.

How am I seeing, at this height. To look from above
at the place where I might, in another version,
be standing instead.

To learn something from this
—as once, a child, dreaming of flight,
hovered above her mother

in the supermarket’s fluorescent hum,
watched her push the cart
through pale green heads of wrapped iceberg,

bright torpedoes of cucumber
& claw-tied lobsters in their tank.
Between her mother & the ceiling’s light,
she learned distance.

Capillary of shale, piled.
A filament around the iris, worn thin.
Closer down, something else.

A spine. Whose? The engineers arrive
to play king, to play prophet,
to name inheritance into being,

city of gold, encased behind glass.
The glass, compressed sand
the diggers come to move.

They call it dirt. They call it mud.
They handle what little they see,
then leave.

a field in which opposites attempt a body

after Hilma af Klint

Make of me a glass and through it this kiss. One bends her neck, blue-white into his, pale against the dark field above him, to pierce the edge of that night. Another, below her, reaches for where the light ends, the craning neck, the body a dark field beneath it. Wing tip.

The cold outside, the dark. Inside, these brightly colored forms. Swirl now. Spread. This is an opening. Now an egg petal. Now what are these shapes. Is this the moon? Whispers, how does it mean. Someone suggests religion. It is years before Kandinsky.

What radiates from this. What broke its wings for this landing. Say it is a swan. Say it is light. Dark. Say there is before this blue-footed white feathered swan, another. Say this other, black-feathered on yellow feet, is reaching. Up to pierce the light that shows his dark. That the other reaches down. That the tip of their wings touch, and their beaks. What night is this through which the white swan reaches.

One body running in paint. Show me the next. Another body. I have not cried. Yet this week. Cannot turn my head. Backache, shoulders pinioned in firelight. I lay this dark head on the ground. Then breathe. Watch my breathing. As though by watching I could move its hush to cool that sparking fire. Breathe, then. Turn the neck. Watch sparks click again.

I will give. This fire an offering to that swan. Present this fire as the site on which this body may be offered up. Take it, then. O light. What are you? Speak.

Now with another. Trace where she had been. Her body unfeathered now. The smooth wear of this skin. The jagged edges of old scars now striped into the wear lines. I want to change what I am seeing. I feel this next war changing me. I am wanting. To make some alterations first. What sky against what day. What body now in rubble. What in the decorated tomb. What body armed, who bleeds. What unmoved will make what of the body now seated with a pen. For tracing feathers on the wings of birds. Who listens now for birds in this silence. Over the machine, a high round melody. Looping. Something loose. In the machine where the bird might. See it.

***

Inspired by The Swan, No. 17 (1915)

ochild

notes toward a minor crossing

one day
I will tell you in music
what I mean

and show
by the curve
of my bowed back

this violin

and wait
while you remember

and say
by this instrument—

listen

I will show you
the sound a bird means

singing

above her heart
pounding

too fast
for you to follow

while alive

and I will say gently

try baby

and for a moment

you will

and you will
try baby

still alive

(meaning what?)

then
you will know
what I mean

enough
for us to leave

and be still again

the problem of shape

preliminary findings

The year I learned the war was inside me — even if some of its battles were without — I began rummaging through the wreckage, hoping to find more than detritus accumulated from years of warring. Around the mess: sky.

I had wanted to be a bespoke collection of formidable weight, but I was discovering I was one part bargain-basement yard sale, another part fairytale creatures — some feathered, some furred, some horned, some visible, many unseen.

And the last part of me was something else. It wasn’t the war exactly, or the yard sale, or any single one of these creatures. Here was a drifting thing, like a cloud.

How long had I tried to pin her down? Or, when I couldn’t, solicit outside help. There are always people eager for this work — telling the unruly body of a woman (ethereal or enfleshed) how she should behave, ready to point her back toward some imagined vessel of herself.

Mine was always either pouring out or sponging in.

I told myself I would learn to regulate the leaking. To absorb less. To hold my shape. I may have been lying.

In defiance of common sense, I was more interested in the experiment. I kept testing it, again and again, in different ways: how much could I take, how much could I let flow away?

It had to do with boundaries. Mine were the kind cell walls have — osmotic. I wanted to know what that meant. I wanted to live it better than I had.

I knew this would make no sense, so I kept it to myself.

I spoke instead of love. And of endurance.

ongoing

regarding capacities

A simmering discomfort persists. I live inside it, knocking softly at the limits of a body never quite mine. Often, I imagine shedding this skin of competence, of expected gestures, but time does not loosen it yet. Questions and requests arrive. I answer. The skin I mean to outgrow is made of small, capable acts. Sometimes I wish someone else would lift them. Once upon a time, when someone would say you do too much, my ears would perk up. Perhaps this ailing was only my stubbornness, refusing any other way? But then I’d look again, and there were lives set down everywhere, a scatter of need underfoot. So, I pick up what I can and carry on.  I dream sometimes of bearing witness to another carrier, who is too busy doing the work to announce themselves, whose very presence at my side would be a comfort, whose humor in the effort would be the best laugh I ever had in my life. 

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