First steps.
In the language I am learning, I can only falter, halting between words. I move from one syllabic rock to the next with unsure steps, their surface shining, wet, and try not to slip into the stream of all I imagine possible to say, if only I knew more of these words, how to handle their music well enough that they would hold we, floating like a pair of otters under skies that would still defy naming yet welcome the earnest try.
Beneath surfaces.
For the poet, it came down to a single wish: growth. Can you tell me how? She asked, bare against the elements. There was singing by the burial ground, and she remembered the childhood friends that spoke of immortality––one by one and then were gone. Just before they fell, they imagined themselves suns.
Later, she went to the school of omission. It is possible in a dream to be a guest in the land of the dead. There, she met a blind woman on a low bench, chewing. You are much better company than the ones who think themselves gods, she said, and they wrote for a long time together, there by the light of the axe.
In memoriam.
It has been said that the fade of memory is a symptom of decaying sense. One loses the outline, the detail, over time. Color washed into water, the old forms oceanic, and yet. A blurred thing may be as particular as anything sharp. For some of these, the blur itself was the essence: reflection on water, the texture of sky, your life. Don’t make this love a bullet or a blade, and I won’t reduce its music to a marching drum.
For some, all learning is the remembering of what was already present in a soul before the dark days of sharp derangement before our bodies spilled into the soil. My brother’s blood is not your warpaint and my mother’s cry is not a call to your next battle. Wait.
When sense becomes senseless, let me blur with you, brother, that I may learn your life in concert with my own. Let the blood-drenched soil bloom until some new music comes. We are all out of tune. Teach yourself to us, again.
