loss Archives

Marooned

At another shore

At the impasse
beside this night,
bodies arrive
to be washed
and the hour returns
to botched rites:
incomplete burials,
baptismal fonts gone dry,
the hands and their memory
opening to waters opened
by a perfect vessel
at the peak of its wake
having only ever wanted
to be released, explained.

Now a scorched earth
flames a storm
to absolve the eyes
for turning away
and now what
to do with this
wreck but watch
for the strange fish
to find it, for the
coral to collect
to begin again
that cycle of
looking to be
fed.

Considering Defilement

To sanctify or desecrate.

That meeting space, love, had once been consecrated by our belief in what it was. This is what it means, to sanctify. This power is shared. To make holy. And so, as it turns out, is the reverse. To take the sacred and use it thoughtlessly, out of mind, like any old tool. A resource ready for the taking. Of course, it always is, and any fool may come. But that flame will only continue through active attention. Its desecration is so often a quiet violence. But the effect is total. There you had been, once. Then you were not.

Before Sky

When a bird

How often I wish I could tell you about this exquisite bird in such a manner that you might know her, too. She was here before me, before the shattering. Bird is an inadequate word in this context, but I use it because it approximates a reference to a creature with a beak and feathers. She was much larger than I am but bowed her magnificent neck to meet me at eye level. I wanted to look into those eyes endlessly. This seemed like an indulgent and selfish response to such an offering, so instead I started numbering her feathers. I recognized that this was likely an impossible task, especially for someone of my limited intelligence who lacked training and had neither tools or methods beyond the steadfast attention that had long been a symptom of what my elders gravely suggested was a somewhat outsized and possibly obscene capacity for devotion. One, two, three. . . I was at 13,426 when abruptly interrupted. An official voice demanded to know, What are you doing? but I would not turn my head from those undulating wisps. I meant to keep my count. Other things were shouted but I ignored them, meaning to hang on.

That is not, the voice insisted, real. I heard a click of metal.

What followed was not feathers, but sky. What ghosted through it has no pulse, no blood, no song. There is no after here and nothing to save by the counting. Only this continuance. I am rearranged inside it, but I cannot tell you how. I thought the words would appear at the end of that count and if it did not end that I would live inside the action of keeping it––forever, with no need for language beyond what was passing between the count and that vision in pieces. Now what.

Cloudfaces

Metamorphoses

It may have been that fearful hope, moved by agony, that caused a slippage of the faces we had taken for protection, flimsy as they were. Then we became something cloudlike, breathing, and the sound of us was music. The music of us was made of what we had known in the time before we knew faces. We could hear much when we were nothing and no one.

Lonesome George

Sounds of a moment.

I don’t like to think about Lonesome George, the last of his species wandering his island home, about the baleful way he must have looked through those ancient eyes and whether he made a sound in the hopes that another of his kind would hear it. They took him into a center in the end and studied him until he died.

But here I am anyway, perhaps because of how often I see a certain kind of look, the way its eagerness seems haunted by a particular fear, the way so much of the moment seems to be wandering, making sounds.

***

Before his death in 2012, Lonesome George was considered the rarest creature in the world.

The Name

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.

Deluge

Surviving loss.

Shoveling silence over buried forms, brush the night with dark lashes. Wait. The memory of suffering suffers the memory of love. And yet, it will make you drunk on the idea of losing what was never yours.

Make yourself a deer. Run a bright flash of sinew over wet grass, until you get to the shore of the day where you witness a rising wave and the sound of a whispered I am. Find that you still hold a glowing flame, tiny and quivering, at the back of a breath.

Even now.

***

Notes while reading an excerpt from “Deluge” as it appears in The Hélène Cixous Reader.

Soils

Of intentions and nourishment.

Born carried away, of a desire that will neither die nor introduce itself by name to a stranger, it becomes obvious that I am that, too. So taken––from every place and the self, too––I cannot arrive.

At the end of everything, when the flow continues, so does this singular insistence. Bleed.

Hand opens soil to hide these delicate hopes, even at the end and especially then. Flower? Maybe. Of course, they will be trampled, as lives are. And yet. They will live, too. There is no certainty in this, but there it goes, happening.

And, Then

Light in broken glass.

During the crisis, we rehearsed everything we knew, sending ambiguous signs and vague symbols––an ongoing SOS maybe, to some beyond––and watched the play of light, how it obscured the boundaries between surface and space. Which were we, anyway?

It rained and the bombing continued and so did the ads for flawless skin in seconds and the promise of a good night’s sleep, an end to mildew, air fryers. The campaigns were one-note, not unlike the bombs; some spoke of distraction, but who had the time? The babies were needing. The list was endless. It was never done. There were only so many of us, to hold them.

Horizons blurred, then sharpened. We looked and gave up looking. The crisis would splash across our faces. We stopped sometimes to wash them, turning away from it, sometimes into each another, and everyone had a story of a sighting, the something they would never forget. Bodies looked for somewhere to rest. Where? we asked each other. When?

Which is to say, I cannot remember where the bits went in the last blast, or what they were. I don’t remember what or if I was holding at the time, only that I felt it fly from me, scattering in every direction.

It wasn’t a sign or a symbol. I retrace my steps, rehearse everything. But it won’t take. Someone calls, help me. I almost recognize the voice.

After the Words Ran Off

The rewilding of language and hearing.

After the long racket, there was a time when the words loosed their ties and harnesses, freed their necks from collars, and jumped the fences one by one in an unrelenting tide, away from us.

Once freed, they made their own music and removed the delicate garments we had been dressing them in. Once feral, they refused our concerted efforts at domestication. They would think and move for themselves and no longer in our tight throats. They were done with our agendas, our probing scrutiny, the various tinctures we administered at prescribed times, and especially the bells.

We spent our frustrations banging against the broken fences and ringing the redundant bells, and then grew silent with a sense of everything to say and no way to do it. In this time, we became aware that the next occasion for speech would announce itself only by the rising hairs at the backs of our necks, and this was the beginning of our listening.