Tag: life

vegetable mineral

animal sounds

I arrive in middle age at a beginning, so now I write and speak. I do these acts to correct some learned habits of believing I must know where I will end before I open my mouth to say anything. Such learned habits, I see now, have conditioned my seeming docility. 

Fortunately, I have no ends. Better yet, I see this now. So here is as good a place as any, to begin.

This is a small act of defiance, against the idea that the purpose of saying anything is to make a point and that the point is to mean something. Some perspective is afforded now, from witness. To the urgency of the kings of the world, to end this life. (To be clear, some make the point more subtly than others, but to be a prize is a kind of end, and it is possible to spend a life chasing this state, only to learn to see it for the burial it is.)

This affords some confidence to say that one approach that many take when confronted with the impossible fact of a life, is to bring it to a point. Some end to justify the means and all of that. Very Machiavellian. Such notions are rampant now.  Knowing this moves me, too.

Nothing I mean to say is so abstract that it may be extracted, like oil from my flesh. Oil, biologically speaking, is the accumulation of bodies under pressure over time. I am nowhere near the age of oil, as I am still alive. The fact of being so is what I mean to value now. 

Also, my connection to the dead. This, I treasure. How would I continue, I wonder, without their excellent company? The dead have always been around me, speaking. These and the not yet born have much to say, and little of their ripe and blooming abundance has anything to do with points. The dead, as you may imagine, often have a sense of humor when it comes to ends, as this affords their carrying on. The not-yet-born are young enough to laugh with full bellies of air, at the absurdity, of aiming for a point in the midst of all of this.

lump

of clay

You go around putting on the necessary faces at the appropriate times, hiding the other mess in the back spaces of any given place or moment. In conversation you might allude in an offhand manner to the messes waiting in the wings but you know not to break certain taboos. One of these being an admission that you live entirely in the wings, just flying around in the shadows keeping company with the discarded stuff that has always been your kind. 

Then you are going about the motions of your seemingly appropriate life and then there is this urgent material flopping over and beyond the edges of every shut closet door, every drawer. One day, during a vigorous cleaning, you decide to collect the stuff. You throw out lots of things, but this stuff is something else, you set it aside. It waits, being regularly looked at, appearing to pose a question about handling. 

Yes, you tell it. Yes. I hear you.  Maybe it hears you, maybe not. You touch it. It holds the indent of your finger. It holds space, a malleable and formless lump. One moment it is magnificent in its strangeness, luminous in soft light, and another moment it looks like something a dog left on the sidewalk, and you wonder who does this?

One day, you pose  a series of related partial questions to the lump. Will you? And pull. Reveal to me? Knead. Something? And you spend time just holding the cool, lumpy mass of it in a hand, warming. 

Its formlessness is part of the appeal, and so is its willingness to bend to any form but precisely.

You handle it. Set it down. It now has a spot on the bedside table, beside the lamp, the pile of books, the coffee cup. The cat approaches, sniffs it, turns, sits beside the lump, then moves away.

Will you? You ask the lump. Show me? You mean your whole life but are embarrassed to say this aloud. You are not yet ready to admit to yourself what you are hearing when the lump whispers back.

You are sleeping, dreaming, or otherwise away when it talks. The cat, who listens with more experience and a more advanced sense of time and purpose,  gives you a pointed look when you return. You carry on, leaving, prodding, kneading, arranging, and setting it down. Then you sleep. 

Here I am, the lump whispers while you dream. Your whole life.

mud & muck

on being embodied

it is not enough
to tell you i think
by way of begging
some acknowledgement
of being for doing this
would mean sidling up
to Descartes who despite
apparent cognitive prowess
managed to decide it was
appropriate to electrocute
dogs who he thought did
not think enough to feel
maybe it was their eyes
the naked love of them
that scared him into
such denial &
despite my best efforts
toward intelligence i tend
to love like a dog
prone to run
with sweet baby Jane’s
moonlit bodies stomping
muddy prints in the surf
at the shore in the light
of the moon
that excess
our all

What, Counting

in this space before what goes

In this time among these machines that want nothing, that take and absorb the images and sounds and other residues of our lives, their harvest, I want. But am so often dulled among their droning that I may not name it. 

What, then? Has that been also reaped? I am counting before it goes, wanting to say. Something but the taint of those scythes is in the words, too.

Let us count before we go, some other way. The machine will not know to measure waiting by the heartbeat, ear pressed to beloved chest, the rasp of final breaths or by the caw-caw-caw across the sky outside this window in the still of midafternoon, above and beyond the droning, beeping whirr of them, indifferent to the stretched stillness, pulled taut until the next caws back. 

Living Here

Notes on form

You managed to learn instead of what they meant to teach you, the salvific possibility of carceral silence, to balance the weight of bird death and tree life, to sing love poems while exiled to the latrines. In this way, you taught the human form as a thing to be created, even and especially now.

Inspired by the lifework of Nazim Hikmet.

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.

Seaglasses

Our tumbled shards.

sounds called what we would not say 

until the shadows in our ears besieged 

our remainders we screamed 

for their release but they stayed 

laughing into our wet faces 

we could not see them 

or our faces where we stayed

the stank breath of death rot 

creeping through our breaths

stopping the songs

we meant to sing

of how we flew

after scratching our snakeskins

we were removed and outside 

we could not hear the songs 

in the street as the dragon still 

spread the photos called 

our monsters out 

to hush them back

Time ran off 

we had the babies’ 

toothless mouths looking back

lining their faces in half-moons 

on our beds and with them looking back 

we kited from the cells anchored 

by the buds of lost mothers in our teeth 

to one day fit ourselves back 

into homes we had once carried 

on our backs before we left 

the sea 

before the after 

we left it

back there for the 

sea

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