a tribute to the moment, and this place
Yes child, maybe one day,
in another world, the horse arrives,
its rider gallant and able. But now
is not that world
and this is not that time. Now he
spins, having lost both horse and will
to ride–– and besides, has never learned.
You are alone–– yet, look around.
Find the company of everyone before
you who has ever learned the same.
There is no more now
to do than there was before, only
less illusion. Carry on. Chin up.
Giddy-up. You are the horse
and the rider. Go on.
With cat.
In the early morning, an hour for the dust, your altar, your black eye, long since healed, the ridge of the once-purpled nose still visible in certain lights. That weather is over now, moved elsewhere, but still you come to sit with it.
This morning’s sounds are birds and the laundry room just outside the door, and dogs after a passing truck. The phone rings at an odd hour and familiar panic crashes like a wave. But it is nothing, a pocket dial.
And yet, it means something to gather these nothings to the chest and hold. Either because unless I still do this, I am nothing––or because I am essentially nothing, and it is good to be among my kind. Probably both are true, but I don’t get to know.
So, I sit here with these nothings and now here the solid weight of this cat pouring herself into my lap, to hold and be held. She is someone, this cat. She won’t do this with anyone else. I think she likes that I am good at disappearing, too––into the bed, the chair, the book, the music, birdsong. And, when interrupted––gone.
She is a great teacher the art of emptying the form, so that the liquid of something else may come in. I have spent enough time with the form itself, testing its limits to see what it will take. A lot, it turns out, but for what? When those limits finally cracked, I felt something else move in. It will not be named so it is nothing, and here we are now, these insubstantial breaths our sum, and the sum of us nothing, too.
Of intentions and nourishment.
Born carried away, of a desire that will neither die nor introduce itself by name to a stranger, it becomes obvious that I am that, too. So taken––from every place and the self, too––I cannot arrive.
At the end of everything, when the flow continues, so does this singular insistence. Bleed.
Hand opens soil to hide these delicate hopes, even at the end and especially then. Flower? Maybe. Of course, they will be trampled, as lives are. And yet. They will live, too. There is no certainty in this, but there it goes, happening.
First lessons in deep time.
Look at you, powerful danger, witness to our end and our continuance. Cipher of memory, speak into the borders of this condition.
The first body––of nature, will vanish soon. But the second goes slowly. A creature of culture does not exit so quickly from its binding web. There are decisions to make about the coming journey, and in these we find fiber enough to weave the net.
We ease them gently from us and continue to invite them back. We live with them, and they know us. Gone is too easy a word; if it were complete, wouldn’t the loss have less weight?
This is something else, a presence without assurance, a radical rupture, reminding what the soil takes back. No, we have never been clean.
But if not gone, then where? Here is the beginning of hope, thirteen ways of looking at a moldering body. What else could it be, these first lessons in seeing the invisible?
***
I was considering the presence of deep time in the work of artist Alfredo Arreguin when I came across a Social Research article by Thomas W. Laqueur called “The Deep Time of The Dead,” which inspired this post.
