Tag: connection

Solute

To dissolve some absolution

Always wants. An attempt to loosen the fibers that seemed to contain the riddle of becoming. From that bonebound island I thought I knew what I was and knowing only wants, dreamed that if I were only more, I might hold those skies, that ocean, and swell to blooming so I could let it all go into the living. I used to imagine you a landscape I might photograph in pieces to print on transparencies, hold the light of you up to your light to translate for you this wonder at your nearness. I remember where we stood above the sea holding hands up into sunset as if to catch whatever heavens might finally rain.

But what do you want, always?
What does Always want?
I am impatient to know.
Please speak slowly.

I lack fluency and miss the nuance of your most important phrases.

The phrase “bonebound island” comes from The Notebooks of Dylan Thomas.

Limbic Linguistics

The architecture of beginnings

There is a dream of finding home inside a single, endless sentence––not one to be realized except intermittently, in fleeting sightings of the wonder it might become­­––not protection, but enactment of a dance in time with the chorus of the living, whose expansive breath would naturally include the dead, breathing into these and into me, too, and we would be where there is no there, only here, and we, laughing. Breaking open. Our faces to find behind them. A grammar that cannot be verified, made of a logic we may approach but never encode, only and ever–– 

Dreams of Us

In birdcall fields.

Sometimes I dream of following deer past abandoned gold mines on paths overgrown with oak and eucalyptus, with manzanita in bloom, in a dew-slick early morning where birdcall is so thick I can’t help laughing, calling back. Hi birds! And what is going on? as they continue and the widening thirst of this overstretched heart can’t help but hear what follows as a kind of answer, singing Us, us! Hey girl, look at us! Hubris, sure, but such is the lens most readily available to my kind. If I were someone wiser, an owl maybe, I would use sound to trace the silhouette of the tiniest among us as though to call it out, that form, from someplace just behind the center of an ancient hunger. Then I could stop asking what is going on because no answer could match my songsight. 

Invocation

Notes from another war.

What I meant to say was not what I said. But this: If death is certain, only timing unknown, will you wait for me where you are living, for I do not know what I am. Here where a child starts a sentence “When I was young . . .” and he is nine. Here where grass is fried in oil until the grass is gone and surgery happens by the light of cell phones.  How fragile, these bodies. In the rubble, you see a hand, reach for it. But where is the rest.

What I meant to say was not what I said, but this. If we met on the shore where I keep vigil, would you know me? Could we sing? Could we continue then, against the fire whose fuel is men and stones, women and children, water and the flesh of my flesh? Would we?

The End of Seeking

An arrival.

It’s fair enough to speak of perpetual mourning and mean it, and to wonder if keys were made for losing, but there is nothing of fairness, nothing deserved about finding at the end of any of these losses neither keys nor answers to any of the questions about where they went, but here this sudden hand, its open offering, the press of its continual pulse.

Final Offer

After the burn.

What do you call the records kept by those who escape from war with nothing but their lives and memories of the dead? Not History, but its adjacent double. The shrapnel in tissue when the bleeding learned to stop waiting for peace, to start saying this is the leg now, the cause going no further than the blast itself as if to say, here is the end of time as you knew it as if to blow into injury some reminder: this is the living now.

These fragments from the blast, this thread that bound us once so long in the weather and the sweat of my grip, past the point of being able to imagine an end or a beginning, love I only want to offer them to you, for keeping even after safe is gone.

Storm Surge

And a turning point.

In the waiting room, I wanted

to say–––something, because

such places, with their anxious hum

always seem to want relief. From

the pretense of containment,

or into song. But when it was time

I left and the hot wind hit

my eyes which slid across

folded falcon wings as if

to learn how my own hands

clutching plastic bags

might know that poise.

A nest nearby, its swallow

gone, a lilting plainsong

behind me. I turned, eyes

wide, to trace the mouth

of the storm’s long suggestion

in the ears as though to 

blow me empty. Howl,

I wanted then, as now, to 

share some sighting 

with another face.

Bread

And the heart of the matter.

They come to see us, hungry for our size.

Look at our faces. We tower. They dance.

One says, walk slower. One says, closer.

There are more of us now, as though prayers.

Into clouds. No command is needed from this height.

They sing us. A dirge, they sing for beloveds

and the birds call back. From their ovens,

the smell of bread. When they taste,

they will look. Up, they will see us,

our suspended faces

against sky. 

***

Inspired by a recent New York Times article about Peter Schumann’s Bread and Puppet Theater.

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