Sometimes I write notes and then find them later with something near gratitude. For an ability to forget to have the common sense to keep these things close. The finding sometimes happens when I am trying to remember what sort of self I ever was and if it matters whether I can answer.
It would be a stretch to call this feeling glad. I am not so mindful that I regularly feel glad to find my next breath. But here I am, needing one to come. And then this funny note from a strange stranger, and we fumble on in the dark.
To calm the sphere through which the train still barrels on at reckless speed, this Space continues to insist on her arrival, as gossamer vapor to swaddle Time.
Three weeks ago, I met a daughter, just out of rehab, tattoos on her face.
You don’t get tattoos on your face so young and so beautiful unless. You don’t get those without knowing what it means to be taken from all knowing and collapsed into container for taking the pain as it comes from the strangers who come from a place from which memory has long been erased and every effort made to replace its former volume with desperate force. It doesn’t take so much imagination to understand what happens to girls in desperate places.
She was gentle and frightened and I sat with her in solemn awe, I see you, daughter, and now––here. I could offer only space and calm (no, I didn’t have the wifi code, none of us did) and said what I could about the possibility of story, to take the stuff of before and bring it before the fire of pen on page, fingertips on keyboard, voice taking stage before the formerly silent self, to sing brokenness back into being. “I like this,” she said, “I need more of this.”
It was days between losing and marking the loss to a system of regulations in the name of keeping safe and I nodded my acceptance when they told me as I imagine she may have, eventually, after they took her away––even through boiling rage against another senseless day in the wake of so long breaking–––meaning to maintain devotion to the hope for an ordering hand, coming where waiting feels like a looping prayer, Say the Word.
When they came for the silence of our sacred hiding weapons behind badges, the guards by way of greeting, shouted Speed! planting flags in the flesh of our flesh
When I passed, I saw where you had waited beneath those windows, hunted bodies, and our light along those points of fracture where it shattered before cracks from our seeming solids in the dark went –––where everywhere we look there we are in pieces––
Palms behind us, trembling–––shadows across carpet past our feet and the racket of the voices absorbing those parties of projections, leaking to and from.
And after the cries stopped, we held our gaze.
***
Adapted fromFlight Songs (2024, Finishing Line Press)
If from the blackening leaves of the desecrated tree at the center of a wounded land of murdered angels and blind kings it is possible for new growth to arrive, may it come soon, protected from poison, from burn, from the heavy tread of killing machines. May we learn at this end to be shields for another beginning.
And since it was no good sitting like that, choking in the sweltering attempt at stillness, the youngest among us started crying and the rest joined in. It was wondrous! Lamentations get short shrift in a culture of bucking up and keeping calm but look where that’s got us. We wept until we exploded with laughter and then we wept some more until we were singing. No one had the notes or the words and no one could remember them later. But in that moment, we all knew––by heart, as the saying goes, without faltering. The wingbeat of that hour dawned an owl in the heart of us, to call who? Who? and howl, and the only way to keep on listening was to call back, and we did.
One wonders about official days of remembrance sometimes, to what extent any one of them might serve as convenient cover for a miasma of forgetting that is, if not enforced exactly, afforded by numerous conditions, one of which is the immediacy of other disasters, collecting in such a swarm that they naturally imply a single organism, a looming and shapeshifting singular catastrophe, foreclosing belief in tomorrows.
And yet. Afraid for the living––all of us, I want to remember. The admission feels like a prayer from when my grandparents were living and the top of my head reached only their waists, and there was much to worry about but I had yet to come into full awareness of the idea that the moment at hand was one where the systematic extinguishing of living beings was as common and transactional an operation as real-estate sales. I am not worthy, the prayer went, but say the word and I shall be healed. Adjacent to another prayer, I believe. Heal my unbelief, and both came before the commercially-manufactured wafer was transubstantiated into the body that made all tomorrows possible for everyone, however few so long as we are gathered in that faith, however wavering.
I suppose I remember this now because I am aware that such a day of remembrance suggests celebration but also a sense of something hanging in the balance yet to be resolved. A call, perhaps? To which I may respond or stand in silent defiance, doubting its veracity. My favorite writer on these matters, Richard Rohr, reminds me that “The opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty.”
By this spirit, I am compelled to hope against despair, aware that I am not alone in wanting to remember in a room with a vast table from which none will be excluded. In this spirit, I want to remember every tomorrow, especially those newborn flames in danger of being snuffed out for lack of oxygen. To each tentative baby flame I want to whisper, I see you, and this of course is not selflessness but a symptom of hunger, for I am a wretched specimen of a so-called species (I mistrust taxonomies of the living) which after all may undeserving of persistence, and yet I am also a baby flame, not yet fire but not yet gone.
It is summer and I have a break from teaching so I read with the thirst of someone who is crossing an arid region in a heat wave. As so many are. And to what end? I cannot answer but this morning it is Paul Celan’s “The Dead Man,” an early poem written while his parents were being extinguished in the death camps of the last century. I nod my heavy head into its image of a passing wind, considering this life the kite that depends upon it, which can fly only as long as the wind persists and a hand other than its own holds at the other end. The speaker witnessing the poppies near the man’s wormy body, face down in the dirt, notes how they scrape blood from him, urging, kneel now, and drink it in!
Such is the posture that is now. To kneel, cupped hands, amid the collected bodies of this impossible moment as the machine drones on. And yet, the eyes before the single body still blink. The hands in anticipation yet hold. The word, does it come? Even now, can it be said? Perhaps I only move my pen to reenact the waiting for the moment when the body becomes. Tomorrow and tomorrow, heal my unbelief and breathe. Baby flame of we, ignite.
Even this pot-bellied prayer, who staggers to the altar half-drunk with delusion, and the other half hungover with optimistic excess, leaning now into despair, even in blindness, in these neglected robes, stinking and torn in all the wrong places, with potatoes growing where hearing might breathe, who can’t carry a tune to save a life, who can’t even start by saving the one they have, who will forget this morning’s penitence at the next chance to scheme some way ahead––even this one here is greeted with the warmth of a loving parent just now seeing a beloved child for the first time after so long away that anyone with any sense would have declared them lost, a hopeless case, too far gone.
These new ones, just arrived, kept coming to be washed. We tried. To know that river, hear her birds, those faithful attendants hidden behind the leaves of endless pages, the pulse of bees beyond the labyrinth of things that destroy in the name of saving. We try again.
