Tag: interconnection

considering context

this solution an unknown substance, dissolving

No, meaning is not the cat’s pajamas. I think but cannot tell you how. Neither is it the bees’ knees. Do these dream in flower? I can only imagine. It isn’t exactly remembrance or having the same nightmare as the night before. This morning’s visitor wonders whether deer think in words without knowing it, so now I wonder whether I might read in flower, unaware as one who by the swallowing presence of an atmospheric mind, can write herd even when alone, and smell the wild prairie poem, recited in honeybee. 

***

Inspired by Bernadette Meyer.

Shoreline Notes

On nearness

I kept meaning to see it, and the intention throbbed like impending heartbreak. To chronicle the residents, for example, of a hot afternoon lakeshore: the stained-glass wings of dragonfly in cattail, then open space, beach-like; blankets, sunbathers. Where a child laughs, running, and the rooftops beyond the green with gulls above these and the trees and how peace is the word of the day, so peaceful, the sunbathers say. You cannot see the killings from here. Or how somewhere an old soul is returning and a new one, not yet known in this place, is being born, formed like a new star from the compression of elements over time. And of compassion, that ache of the imagination. And the nearness of death and our proximities to one another in the face of an unnamed annihilation, and of this we know nothing so go on remembering––to a point. These layers of time assembled and striated on our shelves, against nature which prefers the susurrations of breath and heartbeat, waves––those notes that only come in wholes. Now the ritual. Bread, wine, hands. Forgive me sister, stranger, friend. Forgive me, child, for I know not what I am beyond that glass. So I stare into it in this silence, trying to sing.

In Magnetic Fields

Movements of a charged particle.

What strange gravity is this, which won’t be understood by common measurements––of time, or distance, mass or reason––against which I have been trained to measure and describe what I am? Against (or within) this, I am a particle at a level beneath the body, beneath even what I took to be the building blocks of any body, and I am charged before I am, without an after, circling in exchange with other bodies, perpendicular to the threads of a vast web I cannot see, and I do not know myself.

In the Grasses

In the deep

Do I live? The question a reaction to certain ideas of the empire, on really living, as the saying goes. As promoted by the feathered peacocks, the shining kings, the swaggering killers. To whom the fieldmouse is prey or pest, and the whale is a mythical metaphor, a catalyst for the next heroic quest. But these sisters listen low to the ground, tending the dens where the babies wait, and swim beyond the senses of the sonars. Here are lessons in the art of going missing for entire seasons, keeping the camouflage close, and the beloveds closer, in the shadows of the seizing empire, feeding the budding bodies of the dens and depths beyond detection.

Life is something separate from announcements. And yet, what else are these words penned in the quiet (for now, it is early) room with the sleeping cat and the waking birds outside, in the moments before its time to give it all over to the tending of the mouths that come and go, the littles and the broken, the invisibles. Sometimes they are unsure if they live or will keep living. Sometimes I want to announce for them, into each: Live, live, live! These eyes get weary sometimes of the announcing I.

And yet, we live.

Before Towers

And how we called us once

When I lived here before, I had many names because the pretense of sticking to one had yet to be invented. I can bet you did, too. But of course, that was another here, and we never thought to set it all down for the record or posterity because those habits didn’t come until the static names, weighted to set into stones and books and badges. At first, we were excited to carry these like weights in our pockets. They kept us, as the saying went, grounded. 

Before, I had names for the birds and the ones they called me, the grasses and what they whispered back; the suggestions of skies–––and not one of these was ever wrong.

Perhaps wrongness came later, too, or at least the modern form of it––the looming concrete tower with eyes on every side, ready to fire, that leaden shadow draping its weight over all the places where our names used to breathe. 

Camouflage Optics

Seen and unseen.

In response to the question of what any of this is, you offered an alternative. Forget all that, you said, and come inside. We moved among your impossible bodies. Stair spindles became towers of refuge, ventilation gates morphed into window frames. You took the leather skins of sacred texts and stitched one house at a time. You stitched a neighborhood of these, suspended from the ceiling. Welcome! You called. What you gave us was neither nature nor a matter of belief, but their shapeshifting beyonds. Here is an intricate network of colored glass, the view unbound by familiars.  That you may better see inside you, you offered, and out again.

***

Inspired by the work of mixed-media artist Chiffon Thomas.

Sound Painting

Holding beyond reach.

Near the end, you explained that something strange was happening. You had grown accustomed to a powerful presence. One day, without explanation, it left. What followed had more force but no face. You called it sound.

Later, people wondered if you were letting go or just beginning something new. But even when a body means to hold, so much of what happens slips through. 

Before you left, you painted reminders. You pulled us into its rough color. You said, listen.

***

Inspired by the sound paintings of Anne Truitt.

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