notes from the preservation wing
how long the devoted
will look
toward the ersatz rendering
of vanished man
pretending vigilance
&
how long?
pretending
vigilance
will the vanished
render looking
toward the devoted
&
how vigilant
the keeper
of this pretense
&
how
look at me
his only prayer
and the measure of art
Anything made in this space can neither reflect or embody the life it leans into, but may at best assemble images as instruments with voices of the dead, their players. Unknown concerts happen all the time, keeping time with each tree falling unheard in the distant forest. Now in the shaded alleyway, now at the bus stop, in the basement, the interior of an economy car in a strip mall parking lot. Is it that we cannot help ourselves, making what would call them out? It seems more likely that we would be paved easily enough by asphalt, by overwork, hunger, stress––and forget. I suspect it is the dead who can’t help themselves, reaching back to touch what lives the way we might have touched old photographs in another time, when there seemed more of it. To recollect by offering back the longing notes of these images, their edges sharpened to cut whatever they touch, to make it stranger, as a reminder: you do not know what this is. You do not know what you are.
Our spectacles
Where are the bones to rattle? When the wind moves it may find only these trinkets we used for cheering the spectacle of the hour. C’mon, the saying went, lighten up, and we waved the shining tendrils of metallic-plated streamers at the end of plastic sticks to make our own wind. It did not cool us in the end. No one could stop to say it, but there were moments when those ribbons caught a light like something you might put out to bring a body home.
Those bones. That sound.
A recollection.
And then came the memory of someone who so loved the world that they could not stop highlighting her face, who at every turn of the gaze would find her silhouette made flesh and lean into its pliant give. Whose ear, tuned to eavesdrop on dream music, would lift a lucid pen and point it toward transcription of the tattered ends of her beloved robes.
Who kept flying home, crying home, and singing her back, the jazz ache of her grief’s webbed movements and polyphonic breaths keeping time with the ancients at the drums, past the trembling where words won’t go, these nested rolls yoked to something just beyond the reach of the given ear, where the pattern of beats becomes so dense that–––
it collapses,
absorbing our cries
back
to some original
sea.
To time’s music.
The wings are wet with oil, and yet.
Still here, we look. This alteration:
how many steps? How bright when
it becomes us, before the lens
takes its leave. I may have lost
mine already, but I remember.
How we had no use for silences
or speech. Neither was needed
to let the other be.
Imagining thirteen ways of being looked at by a blackbird.
They’re back.
What?
These blackbirds, see? They are looking at me. I just wanted to see these mountains. Out in the––
Snow?
Right. I’ve been––
Wallace Stevens again?
Well, sure. There were only three at first.
And where did you think you were going to find snow? Have you seen the––
Now this one. Listen. There is some innuendo in his tone.
His?
C’mon, you can tell. Now they’re at my feet.
Now they’re flying out of sight.
They’ll be back. All afternoon, it’s been night coming, and you can feel weather brewing, too.
Not snow, though. Fire, maybe. Or rain.
It’s a murder, right, when they come in a group like that?
No, that’s crows. Blackbirds are a choir. Except, I hate to tell you this.
What?
Look when they come back. Those are crows. You can tell by the beaks. Tails, too. Besides, have you been listening?
Caw, caw!
Exactly. Did you know that they hold funerals, crows do?
What?
One dies, they all come silent and look. They stand around. Then fly away again, quiet as they came.
Huh. I thought they were mostly mischief.
It’s the blackbirds that go from nest to nest. Crows mate for life. They don’t even kick the young out. They can stay in the nest ‘til they’re mating age, and even then, they’ll keep coming back.
The river’s moving again.
There they go.
Tell me you didn’t feel it, though.
Feel what?
They were looking at us.
That’s why they have a reputation.
For mischief?
For being messengers.
What’s this message, then?
How should I know? I don’t speak crow. Maybe they just wanted to mess with you.
For?
Getting enamored with that voice.
What voice?
That human one you love so much. Like from the Stevens poem. Where it’s always you––
Looking?
Right.
*This morning, I woke up with Wallace Stevens’ “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” in my mind, alongside a sense of mischief. I couldn’t help imagining the birds flipping the script.
