mistaking the voice as capable of hearing
Hello?
Hello—
It’s good to see—
It’s me! Let me tell you about me.
Yes. It is you again.
Whom I meant to welcome.
Around whom I now cannot breathe.
Your voice filled the room before you entered.
Your stories, hungry as fire, asked to be fed.
I mistook the smoke for mystery.
Sometimes I miss the kind of silence
that didn’t need my attention
to exist.
who live beyond measure
If children are disappearing it does not seem like a stretch to wonder if some have decided that there is no place for them here. Most of us are made of something that does not innately know its place & must be welcomed into being.
Let’s do more of that & more to read them, and more conversing with—and much less of the poking, prodding, scrutinizing “temperature checks” that are supposed to pass for paying attention to their needs & wondering why they look away.
with remnants behind
what did you think this was then
with what slouches now to crest
the hill beneath a tired sun? birds
know it, fly off & i watch, heavy
with keeping watch & missing
the attention of first thoughts
how we would circle them
feathered & breathless
unknowing which of us
flapped whose wing
calling to attend
Bells break. Reminders back to something, another order. Which?
I break. Wanting to remember what once mattered, and how.
Break now. You are not this dull waste, but more. Who?
To sanctify or desecrate.
That meeting space, love, had once been consecrated by our belief in what it was. This is what it means, to sanctify. This power is shared. To make holy. And so, as it turns out, is the reverse. To take the sacred and use it thoughtlessly, out of mind, like any old tool. A resource ready for the taking. Of course, it always is, and any fool may come. But that flame will only continue through active attention. Its desecration is so often a quiet violence. But the effect is total. There you had been, once. Then you were not.
Suspensions in time.
Visit: to go and see. How casually we speak of the act, and yet. To see anything as it was before is to replace memory for presence. Some images have a way of offering reminders. For example, here is the edge of a sleeve, slightly frayed. Here a new scar. There, a cracked pot under a drain. I thought I knew this place, but where are these objects in time? I cannot place them, so I hold here, suspended.
When the veil thins.
A lit match in the dark and a family museum in flames. Removed of these objects to ground us, we start slipping from our assigned roles. Without the grain of a dated photograph, who will draw the borders between what happened half a century ago and what is in our midst, right now? At a certain age, it doesn’t matter; it’s all here again.
As the veil thins, she sees. The past was always right here, but it was too much for us to hold and still go on with the living. She’s releasing the burden now, and vision returns. Time to call the names of the ones no longer here and be moved by the volume of their answers.
In the end, we become our grandmothers, caring for our mothers, forgetting who is who as we walk in and out of one another’s dreams. Now, with the smoke in our eyes, we are singing.
***
Inspired by consideration of this announcement of Rea Tajiri’s film Wisdom Gone Wild, exploring themes of collective memory.
Notes on the hero artist.
We who knew him called him friend, and we did this with relief, in celebration. Look, we were saying, there are still some who make their own rules. It is still possible to live a dream.
No, he would say, it is not possible. Only necessary. As he saw it, this was the point.
Why would he spend so long, some wondered, in certain conversations? We could not pull him away, and all he had to say for himself was, it was all so interesting.
***
Adapted from comments made by Betsy Sussler in celebration of the life of Michael Goldberg, appearing in BOMB’s Summer 2008 feature, In Memoriam: Michael Goldberg.
These growing beyonds.
An old problem: how to phrase
the far-away steeples.
How to abandon a conversation
made of one part memory
and the other projection?
Which time is it now, the world
of memory or the procession
of days marching to the iron-fisted clock?
What grows beyond the window over there,
and who has a mirror?
Let’s shine it by the opening buds, a signal
to ourselves and our aboves:
Look, here.
***
The opening line references Marcel Proust’s recollection of the twin steeples of Martinville.
Studies in meticulous meditation.
So much depends on the scent in the air, the texture of ions, the nuance of birdsong. Add to this detailed considerations of ambient temperature, the auditory interference of nearby machines, and the possibility of mice. A lizard will do, perhaps. But perhaps not.
Where the dog will bound headfirst with nothing but blind enthusiasm for all that may be moving, anywhere and at any time, and the resident human might emerge easily, absent of mind before recalling some vague purpose, this one waits, a portrait of pure intention, poised.
The perennial questions of her forbears course through her consciousness, distilled in this moment, to a single one. In, or out?
She waits, leaning. Everything hangs in the balance. Suddenly, some inscrutable truth revealed, she pulls away. No, she decides. It is not time. Not yet.
Much remains to be seen. We wait here together.
***
Inspired by Buzz, the resident cat of many moods, who is begrudgingly teaching me the ancient ways––as long as I concede to a daily tithe of salmon feast for gravy lovers.
