And what resists containment.
Careful to note the care of the thrush at her nest, and her attendant song, we were determined to find joy in witness. Its light would not shine except in grief, and a long record of bird notes reveals that we could scarcely see their winged grace without noting everywhere the flights and visitations of our dead friends. The substance of our trembling was never so vivid as when it flowed from us.
With amazement.
Speak to me of ongoingness, of the atmospheric nature of objects, of astonishment; of the vertigo of finding yourself in an image with no context or memory of the moment. Let the speech of the hour open with Stop, let us weep. Let the ruins of the moment leave us pierced, undone with memory. Let the past cut a deluge into now, not to be consoled. That we remember.
Where is the horse? And the rider. And that time. When we plunged into the cold sea, ready to lose ourselves.
In the late days of long wars.
We wanted to mend, so kept company with our mothers’ ghosts. Our yesterdays were wounded and came to us until every bed was full.
O muse. Your song was bleeding out.
We brought cloths and went to you. We wrapped you tight and held against the flow. It entered then.
We are still, holding.
Grief and costume.
Sometimes when my words are hiding in some corner refusing to come out when called, I wonder what is really going on, and then have to admit that I can’t blame them for being fed up with me. So much of the use of syllables in daily life involves costuming their original forms in these ridiculous get-ups, the sort we raged against as children, the sort I would never dream of inflicting on the cat.
To even mention the appropriateness of abandoning sentences for a full-throated scream at a time like this is cliché by now, inviting memories of scolds: only dullards state the obvious, and with these, cringing recollections of times when I did not consider what was and was not obvious when speaking with––as the tired saying went, a full heart––because the whole point was to know what was new and raw, thrilling at the cut of it, the constant overflow, I could not keep my fingers from a scab and if someone had pressed me to define what this was, exactly, I might have gushed Everything!––and of course it was.
It’s not like I didn’t know of death, not that I didn’t see it, dream it, smell it under the porch, only that I had yet to discover how I carried it in such devastating abundance, or why people costumed and embalmed it to such great lengths for ceremonial viewing. I had yet to understand why the truly devastated, those who have wept long enough to feel irritated by the uselessness of solemnity, will sometimes scream in wild laughter at a wake.
Over what perches.
The feathered chest-dweller
coughs. We cannot hear
her song. We gather
at the ribbed rafters,
a motley congregation
of morose faces, to wait,
sensing her watch.
Perhaps she wants
something now,
but there isn’t a crumb
among us.
Then comes a low hum,
spreading through the nave
of our assembly until
our mouths drop the lines
that seal them.
Opened, we pour out
syllables of grief
too sharp to speak,
that she may absorb
enough to form
an echo.
***
Responding to Dickinson.
These dazzling portraits.
When the artist came to visit, we were moved by the shining colors in attendance.
We had questions. One was, how would you describe the world you are building?
There are all these characters, see? Part divine and part human, all in a state of transformation. During each metamorphosis, a being glows these wild colors. It’s magical.
Are these self-portraits?
A lot of them are, partly. Also, part fiction, part archetype.
Can you talk about your materials?
They are loaded. They appear to be surface-level decorations. And yet, the objects themselves emerge from grief. So many people were dying. I was thinking of memorials, how decorative they are. And then I had all these sequins, and was like, I know what to do with those!
Because people are so much, you know? All these glittering layers, and then when they are gone, you have all this extra sometimes, this overflowing sense of all you see, all you wanted to say, all that they were beyond the simple obit.
It wasn’t long after I started down this path that I was like, I am going to need a lot more sequins.
***
Inspired by the work of Devan Shimoyama. The title of this post comes from one of Shimoyama’s paintings.
After the sorting.
The mirror world seems dangerous, you observed. You went in anyway. Some creatures are carried by feeling. Later you made decisions. Such as, breathe when needed. Later, you thought, something needs to be done. About these masks and their attendant griefs. You began to sort through them. It became clear in the sorting, which of these you could leave behind.
Someone asked what you were doing. You said, making room. To see something new, you would need more space. To dance fully inside it, you would need to put down what you carried. Of the dance, you said, it feels a lot like falling.
***
Inspired by the art of Pace Taylor. Italicized phrases are adapted from titles of the artist’s work.
Subtle bodies in flight.
An old fantasy: the flying man. Faust would die for it. The better to study stars, he said. After all, he reasoned, weren’t the heavens more suitable for study by the dead than the living? If a bird may, why not a man? They kept trying.
For some of the women, long trained in the art of dying, flight was one of those things you simply didn’t discuss, like the daily deaths or predawn dreams. Who was asking?
I think my grandmother knew how, as the grandmothers before her also did. It was one of those things that came with death. In certain situations, learning how to die was just another one of those things that one did, for the living.
A time to grieve.
Bodies again, but no words.
The point was our speechlessness.
Terror: when the body flees to survive.
Horror: parted lips, frozen and immobile, a spectacle of power. It almost always goes by another name, or none.
State: a verb for the creation of complicity.
The method: consistent spectacle.
What heals, then?
The opposite of spectacle is suffering. To suffer is to return from horror with a voice.
Blessed are they who––
Cry against the silence, throw shattered voices into it.
The opposite of order, this is language like broken windows.
The opposite of calm, this is babbling, wild-haired, full-bodied.
The opposite of isolation, grief demands recognition of our common breaks. Its substance is our connective tissue. It flows with the blood of a common wound.
Grief is a voice, and it sounds like the inverse of okay,
which sounds like the reverse of an answer.
Consider this moment. Against the hum of this machine, let us launch
a shattering cry. Now is the time.
Break.
***
Inspired by Christina Rivera Garza’s Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country and by Adriana Cavarero’s Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence, translated by William McCuaig.
What moved you, manatee?
This morning, when I wake tense against the noise of the coming day, knowing I’ll need to retreat from it so I can hear, I am thinking of the manatee. Of the fingernails on its flippers from when they walked on land.
I am wondering, what moved you, manatee?
Legend has it you were a young woman, bathing at the river’s edge. Then came a hunter and you knew: better to throw your body into the water than to risk staying where you were. Since then, they watched after you, puzzled after your retreating form–– comparing it, I imagine, to their memories of other women, gone.
They call you sea cow, but watch your fluent dance: now alone, now a pair, now an aggregation, all after the same dying grasses. It’s the algae, they say, fed by runoff, blocking the light.
The mothers when the calves are born, lift them to the surface, to breathe. You will wait to breathe when needed. You will wait to breathe, when sleeping. You will not wait forever.
Your curiosity draws you to the nets. Your hunger draws you to the grasses, entanglement in fishing line. Your calves would feed beneath your flipper, except when the line chokes your milk, and they say your name comes from the word for breast.
When you can’t get warm, there are lesions on your flippers like frostbite. On the surface of the water, you sigh rather than breathe. Do you whisper, too? You must have known the hunter once. How else could you know when to leave the land?
What did you know, daughter of the river, before you entered, and where are we supposed to go now?
