Off the record.
Generosities of language emerge as dusk settles, erupting in dialects more prone to dismissing the manners of a given day. The shock of voices startled into screams, and the lingering pause that attends each, an unofficial record of anguish––which is, in its raw form, consistently resistant to official record.
Long gaze, rolled tight.
On occasion we would notice it was possible to feel nearer to the ancient untouchables of distant tongues, then know them out of reach. Was there a time when the myth did not begin with broken parts? We could not say, knowing only heroes against horizons, shells shattering into light then back to dust––but first, another genesis. And then, and then––
Head on bed of moss before battle. Song. Oceans rising into dream without rest, yet the eyes still lift. Up and out they go, flying off.
But it was possible to learn to wrap the long gaze tight in folds of worn cloth while folding what was freshly scorched from the machine, to bring them up again to sort among the boxes and all still left unsaid between unseen and seeing.
An interruption.
Listen, the wing somewhere upstairs.
The sound of a cry still seeking a mouth.
How it flails behind the closed doors
against tease of glass pane
trying for sky.
To say the word.
And you said to me, go back
and I returned where you told me
to myself, the soul’s eye looking.
The awe of it, and all of it unknown.
But I wanted solid things in space,
a place to own. I looked long and
it was true, then. There was no place
to rest this head.
You said the word and it left me
and I am locked away now, far
from that mother, that tongue.
Take me back.
***
Inspired by Augustine’s Confessions.
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.
To build what may be entered.
Enter this poem. Recognize its ladder. You know it from your grandmothers’ dreams. Here is a plush carpet of sound to somersault you into the dizzy end of the last hallway, hatching to bird.
Here is a poem to be pinched, swung from, picked like a lock, a cast-iron rhyme in the chest from which freshwater fish swim, unschooled, from the unheard, in a furred fury of feathered wings, erupting in collective bloom.
Here come the blue doves, announcing. When the new one is born, there will be change. There will be. Change. Their will.
Time is a baby in the belly of the whale, its new song of a frequency above us. And so, below. Climb into it. Here is a row of commas, hooks for the pulleys to lift us down, held fast to periods anchoring the lines of struck sentences whose ghosts fill the page, a waiting congregation. To be redeemed. Their histories.
Until.
***
Inspired by the architectural poems of Ry Nikonova.
Naming ceremonies.
When we went without counting, light shows played across our eyelid curtains, and language curled around us like cats, love-biting our hands, ears, toes–––inclined neither to obey or defy us. We would lick its back in turn. It would sleep on our bare chests. The water taught us flight. If the clock watched us then, we never met its gaze.
It was so, so, so.
[Much? Or little? Who thought to measure? Not us.]
We grew spaces from the back alleys of our breaths, filled them with song. Laughing, we spilled it everywhere, the new world baptized, each feeling a benediction.
Of seeing.
The moon world waking, you stretch sheer fabric over frame and paint a transparent scene, so that a witness seeing lighthouse, bird, and figure looking back, might also see the structure holding them in place. What does it mean to do this? You ask, of every painting, finding histories of art in every new work, the language being learned even as you look.
***
Inspired by Glasgow-based artist Merlin James. Italicized phrases come from this interview.
First music.
We left home, entered the moving current. A voice of flesh consumed us, and we were danced in her swells. Who is to be born now, we wondered, with all of this touched at once, her proud body immersing us in the music of first lessons and the rush of her in our ears like, This, this, this! She hushed the time for signs to show us. Unless this, no genesis, no catastrophe, no words.
***
Inspired by Hélène Cixous’s 1975 fiction “Souffles” (“Breaths”), which is the first of a series of texts in which she explores loss and rebirth in relation to the mother.
At a verge.
Let this body
of word grow
flesh enough to hold
at ample volume
an amniotic silence
to protect
what would die
with its
utterance.
