Anchoring breath to breath.
If time is the rhythm of a group, breathing, consider the befores an inhalation. When tomorrow comes, we will exhale; and again, and again.
How different this is than the model of the pointed arrow, to pierce the next flesh of its landing.
If time is the rhythm, it is now, an anchor point that moves nowhere, holding the beat of our breath.
A still, small voice.
My grandmother used to say something about the darkness of hope. How it bears fruit in the light of wisdom. By watching her when she was living and listening after her death, I knew Grace. This was her name.
Revolt against death, she would say, by remembering the dead; the next breath a reminder that it was their breath before a final exhalation. Knowing this, breathe full and long. To forget is to die a little.
There were pages and pages behind these reminders. I read them as survival manuals for creatures of flesh. They said, be poor. Go down. Be despised, love anyway. Serve instead of demanding service.
There were maps too, but no territories. They said only: Look––in hunger and thirst, through long nights and vast deserts. There you will find company with the soul of all souls. You will hear the heartbeat and what follows will be the first song of the world.
You will know it, child. Go down.
To sing, chirp, breathe.
What do you call a spring without birdsong? Carson wondered and the answer was dying. Without this symphony, sentience itself is suspect. Sing, shriek. Chirp. The people who knew before genocide called what moved here holy wind. All breath, all spirit, all soul.
It is something, isn’t it, to live when a common descriptor of our common malaise involves the need to get away and breathe. Where is away, then? When everyone’s chest is aching, there is a silent agreement: don’t mention it. Is it true that a wolf can smell a body’s feelings, or is it only fear that scents?
If we were the gods of the people who once listened, we could turn ourselves into wolves and know. Take the flight of raptors, stretching our sights. Assume the bodies of dolphins and realize our depths. We could hear an octopus cry, taste its tears, dance with urchins, and let the lamprey finish our sentences.
Then we might know breath again, the word meaning life. Meaning, duration of a moment; a short time; a movement of free air. Air, meaning the invisible everywhere, ether of arias, current of hymns.
We didn’t think about squandering, then,
and it never once occurred to us to save.
Remember when we shot our breaths
out of ourselves, laughing
at the last loud fart? We couldn’t stop
And we sprayed gasping iridescent drops
into the air like water from the spray
nozzle of a garden hose, just for dancing.
We played chase like being hunted was a game,
like capture was a cartoon scene, we fell down
laughing. Wait, we said, I need to catch ––
like it was slow feathers falling from the sky
to be cupped in our open hands
––And remember, how we painted with it, too?
We blew our canvasses across car windows,
fingertips tracing: here a smile, now a cat,
heart.
And sometimes it was smacked from us, as when we
fell back off a ladder or a swing, but the trick
to waiting was knowing the metaphor and trusting
that if the next breath could be knocked out
like a ball from a basket, it could also come
swishing back at the next run up the court,
catching nothing but the nets of our wide-stretched
throats.
We didn’t think about squandering, then,
and it never once occurred to us to save
any of what we spent so freely, those fortunes
that we took for our inheritance. We had no way
of knowing, then, how easily they could go. Really,
it takes only a certain amount of pressure,
applied across a certain length of time,
but how could we have begun to measure
what we had yet to grow the strength
to apply?
We couldn’t, not when
time was what we flew threw,
roaring our laughs
like lions
until they ran out.
Consider this breath, the sound
behind it; consider the open mouth, the next note.
If a scream erupts in a forest, and no one hears it
—or if none of the hearers can connect
the substance of the scream to the face
of the wounded, whether because
these hearers are out of sight or otherwise unable
to perceive how a body nearby could be capable
of keening like that, or because the hearers are not
in the habit of connecting the nuanced arrangement
of particular human features to the nuanced arrangement
of particular human sounds, when considering a
particular cry of distress after shutting eyes tight
against any witness— did it happen?
Same question may be posed
with other variants. If the cry was piercing
and potentially recognizable but muffled
by the presence of a sudden hand
against an open mouth, does it count?
If the moment of the cry coincides
with the collapse of the known world
and the known world in question
was once synonymous with the depths
of the forest, did a cry even happen,
if the place that it would have
poured into was suddenly gone?
Now consider other variables.
If access is granted, but no one is told,
does the person at the gates no one was trying
to approach after years of denial get to shrug,
raised eyebrows, and claim innocence––based
on, well, I didn’t say they couldn’t. . .
Get to: what does this even mean? A body gets
to do what it will do until acted upon by an opposing
force. Except in the case of survival. Except in the case
of protection of children. A body will persist until
it can’t, and in persisting, adapt to certain givens
for the sake of survival. As in, this door is locked,
this knob will burn your hand, this exit will get you
shot. If someone on the other side unlocks the door
quietly in the middle of the night, hides the key
and leaves it closed, is it to be considered open?
Define: cry. Which sounds are included?
Define: pains. Which count?
Define: life. Which forms are we talking about here,
who is screaming––and who has stopped?
Where do these faces go when they leave us?
Here’s a better question: why do we keep
insisting that they are ours?
If someone shuts their eyes against some
never-ending light, can they be considered
a witness? If someone builds a dam across a river
of time, can it be stopped, and what is the name
for the resulting body? And if someone removes
a dam and the river moves again, now altered
in shape, is the dam still real, or has it been erased?
If eyes trained on sky notice wild promises in stars,
do these vows have any bearing once obscured
by the light pollution of the empire’s cities?
If breath denied fails to void the depth
of inhalation, what do you call the sound that follows?
The rising, leaning, lilting unsparing hallelujahs of
nobody knows, the forever-present notes that no hand
grants and no thief can steal, reaching back to some original
promise, in the first splitting of atoms, when it was
discovered that the matter they contained was mostly
open spaces for the vibration of shimmering notes,
haunting the seeming solids behind the spectral gates; what is this?
Consider moving. Listen. Consider this breath, the sound
behind it; consider the open mouth, the next note.
Sing.
About the artist: Alma Woodsey Thomas, now a renowned figure of African-American art history, had her debut showing at the age of seventy-five, after a thirty-five year career of teaching art to D.C. junior high school students.
