Tag: care

without the use of now

after an unlived hour

She lived in the hour. He kept it for later.

The body learns. At first by leaning—tentative, offering its small faith in the moment, then less so.

The mouth that hungers for bread learns the shape of waiting. How to soften the edge of asking. What it means to accept how he forgot—not by cruelty, but by being nowhere at all when it mattered.

When it mattered: paper towels, toilet paper, the coffee gone. The latch he knew needed fixing, leaving someone to know they were still at risk while he knew it, did nothing. This is how absence accumulates: a field of what must be thought of by someone.

He is many things, most of them possible. In the end, he is not that someone. Not careless—that would imply contact. Something else. Drawn again into the bright perimeter of what might be.

No idea so good as the next idea. No plan like the one untried. No life like the one he has yet to begin—this one, finally, worthy of him.

Meanwhile, she begins to sort what can be carried; what must be thrown away; what cannot be asked for again. The body keeps score even when the mind refuses.

At the water, he is something else again. Watch how he rides the wave cleanly, beautiful in it, held by the same force that could take a life. He does not look back—not by choice, but because the frame does not include it.

Behind him, outside the shot, someone learns the cost of air.

Later, he will say it was a good day and mean it. Tomorrow, he announces, will come. The other day he speaks of is always the one that has the best of him.

Never this one. Never the hour that asks to be met.

Here, he is a maker of atmosphere. A summoner of possibility. He can speak a future into near belief. Who would not follow that voice. Who would not, once or twice, be pulled back into its hold.

He kept himself intact for a future unveiling. Called this becoming.

She lived among the opened things: torn roll, empty shelf, the latch that would not catch. Her body learned how not to lean.

He did not think himself absent. Where he lived, the hours gathered for his arrival. Nothing began until he did.

Her questions thinned, then fell away. In their place: the work. The hour, arriving whether held or not, asked to be lived by someone.

Years passed. From time to time, he spoke again of beginning.

She, already inside the life of daily flesh, did not answer.

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!

evening, late Nov.

in the year before it turned

Now comes the year of French cooking from a book purchased used outside the school penned by a woman who knew the old country before the war, the smell of its cows, soft hides furred and warm in the sun, how does someone get to be this woman? thinks our reader drawing toast and butter against visions of onion soup against hunger adding more salt to toast, who cannot get enough.

People on the screen after the fires and the floods announce plans to rebuild. Maybe it’s no good trying to interview those who won’t, who just stand there without words, waiting to accept. So the hopeful in the aftermath are a self-selecting group, at least onscreen.

The bones had to set when we broke them and we set them in the earth amid the burn, in the skeletons of former homes, still smoking to grow new cells.

Hold still, they told us, meaning faith but without work––it looked half dead in mirrors. We listened for wolves and saved the prints in boxes for someday sorting into proper displays. But what do you name the waters rising high enough to occasion a jump to the next roof, hoping it holds?

Hey Siri what do you know of shelter? It was something to do when knowing you had no service did not preclude the need to speak. We reached ready for the next ledge. She might have said you can wait until dark. Siri we might have answered: I believe, to heal our unbeliefs.

Ghosts before us pointed next and up ahead. We had begged to see it but one wing caught in the updraft was suspended in the act of looking back. It was the wreck we marched from. It looked away singing look away and it was possible to keep wishing merrily down a lane to the land of the dead.

Tracing its thread against honey-slick tongues we offered first milk to those bound close to us until the cold moon. When it came there would be blood and money enough to say we will be okay another year, until that time comes to pull it back again, sun of our sons.

chaos and waste

in the fields

Know the killers by their words. They use too many, and invert them. They speak a language of chaos to stir confusion. Once frothed to full foment, they descend from their towers to feed and grow fat on the blood of lambs. By morning, they have disappeared to clean themselves and then reappear above the carnage, lamenting. This mess, this mess, they say. For shame, they say, and lob another theory into the crowd, the usual balloons of enhanced security and maximum efficiency. These float on the raised hands of the assembled, who cheer.  The speakers smile, digesting last night’s feast. Tonight, repeat.

Meanwhile, a haggard band of constant shepherds gather under cover of remaining trees, to tremble before the lives remaining, and abide.

daughter

in the morning dark

only care now.
only open hands
in tremors.

you are still asleep
and I remember.

how

I carried you to the shore
before

you could walk and we
sat there watching. you
collected grains of sand.
between your palms
to feel them.
trembling

and then to the sea
to meet with open hand
her power and know her
press against your own.

the slapping sound,
the open palm,
your laugh––

remember.

To Break a Wall

Notes from Crete.

There is a certain pitch to plans made in prison, not

like the half-baked dreams of anywhere else. The wings

as real as the wax, and the sun, the son the sum of the

parts you gave, dreaming him. There are flowered

children elsewhere in a field that never knew walls

except on set and you cannot blame them for the

glow of their faces how they won’t age it takes

absorption to do that but to these it’s all water

rolling, the waves        the waves        the duck’s

back                all joy              and fun            except

for the highlights        the chase scenes         so

good for ratings          so good for saying       watch

look what I did. No sense explaining to the scions

of such gentle suns how yours will kill you, quick.

Offer anyway what you have of shelter and an

ear to the running stream of tears. They roll

off the backs of them              stop looking for

logic    they roll because        those backs are

the backs of                the sons of the sun, 

o child

how I wish                    to pretend.

Custodians in Transit

Group on the road.

Warm a face, toast a fool, repeat. 

One more time. 

Everyone. 

Here is water. Drink. No, I mean it. We have plenty. 

Check the score. Later, stress how little it matters. 

Say, who cares about the score? Say, that isn’t what

this is about. Say we are getting close and here we go.

What time is it? How much. How long this is.

Here you go. Make it better. Do you need.

Do you need? Can I bring you. You should

come with. I can bring you. We have.

We have. We have. Take it, someone.

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