Tag: patience

without the use of now

after an unlived hour

She lived in the hour. He kept it for later.

The body learns. At first by leaning—tentative, offering its small faith in the moment, then less so.

The mouth that hungers for bread learns the shape of waiting. How to soften the edge of asking. What it means to accept how he forgot—not by cruelty, but by being nowhere at all when it mattered.

When it mattered: paper towels, toilet paper, the coffee gone. The latch he knew needed fixing, leaving someone to know they were still at risk while he knew it, did nothing. This is how absence accumulates: a field of what must be thought of by someone.

He is many things, most of them possible. In the end, he is not that someone. Not careless—that would imply contact. Something else. Drawn again into the bright perimeter of what might be.

No idea so good as the next idea. No plan like the one untried. No life like the one he has yet to begin—this one, finally, worthy of him.

Meanwhile, she begins to sort what can be carried; what must be thrown away; what cannot be asked for again. The body keeps score even when the mind refuses.

At the water, he is something else again. Watch how he rides the wave cleanly, beautiful in it, held by the same force that could take a life. He does not look back—not by choice, but because the frame does not include it.

Behind him, outside the shot, someone learns the cost of air.

Later, he will say it was a good day and mean it. Tomorrow, he announces, will come. The other day he speaks of is always the one that has the best of him.

Never this one. Never the hour that asks to be met.

Here, he is a maker of atmosphere. A summoner of possibility. He can speak a future into near belief. Who would not follow that voice. Who would not, once or twice, be pulled back into its hold.

He kept himself intact for a future unveiling. Called this becoming.

She lived among the opened things: torn roll, empty shelf, the latch that would not catch. Her body learned how not to lean.

He did not think himself absent. Where he lived, the hours gathered for his arrival. Nothing began until he did.

Her questions thinned, then fell away. In their place: the work. The hour, arriving whether held or not, asked to be lived by someone.

Years passed. From time to time, he spoke again of beginning.

She, already inside the life of daily flesh, did not answer.

give me a web

to reject another tired hero’s story

Yes, I see those stories, too, all around me. The location and abundance of which some will exclaim, “are everywhere!” 

No matter where I go, the one that interests me most is not a story, for it is made of what would not be recognized as such. It tends to feature a non-hero whose non-feats go unnoticed by being what they are–– more constant labors, and no less common than the fact of the web appearing between the branches of the fig tree overnight. 

Many of those who  proclaim most loudly that stories are everywhere! are in fact looking for the same story––as anyone armed with hammers for hands, might learn to see only nails. This much-sought-after tale is another version of the hero with his labors, slaying or banging on whatever he can’t pick up. 

Lately I have grown very tired of its droning echo, and I do not think I am alone. This one, I think, has gone far enough. Give me more spider, more web, more patience, less noise. 

Lately, I think, give me no more of these old stories, only quiet tending: of the careful meal, the clean floor, fresh sheets, attentive care. 

It is possible I live at the beginning of the end of the age of an old story. As someone still alive inside it, I lack the perspective I would need to confirm or refute this suspicion with any presumption of accuracy.  

Finding the ability to make those quiet and non-storied, daily events happen is the only narrative I can find valuable right now. This is partially because I could use some help with these things and also because I have grown very tired of that other clamor. 

I am also weary of those who make, as a habit, a racket to entertain. These are different from those who make an entertaining noise for reasons they have not intended. I am weary of those who throw plastic affirmations when it is clear that all their expression can do is reproduce the old pain. 

The makers of these pseudo-joys, in an effort to to capitalize on the coin of the realm, regularly add to daily misery by their steadfast commitment to cellophane-wrapped optimisms. 

Meanwhile, so many dead. And also, so many able but unwilling bodies, who have made their non-decisions with brilliant sheens of glamour, who feel justified in their non-decisions to leave unwashed those dirty sheets, who unprepare the careful meal whether or not they will eat it, or to remember what hour of what day it is, now.

wilding

to go forth, into seed, carrying on

If one day when finally tone-deaf I should walk guffawing into the solemn halls, swishing gauze skirts to knock stolid bishops over wooden kings while laughing too loud and blowing smoke rings, it may be observed, by anyone still living who knew me when I was more mild in manner and patient in my time, that she had been a patient woman, once.

But, as these things go, by the time the cork is good and gone, so are the ones with any memory of milder times. So, I will have to be ready when I finally go, to enter with full conviction into the role, because patience, however much a virtue, will only do until the time for waiting has run out, and after so much of that one has to decide to give up the temporary shelter that comes of waiting and dive in full and fast to what certain strangers will describe as the antics of an eccentric elder at fashionable parties, who, after all was just relentless with her offhand remarks, head back and laughing the whole time.

Not It

And the posture of reaching.

Once it was declared that we were playing hide-and-seek, the first thing to do was call “Not It!” but I tended to be late when it came to calling anything. So now I am out here still looking even though it is way past dinnertime and the others have most likely all gone home. Is this it? I persist, but it isn’t. The words are still all wrong. As consolation, I might aspire to the endurance of the dark star, of sloths and tortoises and the legends of creatures rarely seen in the wild, of the dancer’s posture of reaching for something not yet grasped, of the sense of having not yet arrived. At what, no one will say. The point is that whatever this is, it is not yet, as they say, it.

Study of Forms

Incandescent immersion.

Unless some energy comes to haunt, there is no movement in these words. But where does it come from? Things remembered, things observed, the contents of a collector’s shelf, or some displacement. A long drive will find it sometimes, the quick flash of wild creature crossing the road. Other times, it’s a matter of grim execution. Always the question of how much to push in the effort to grow a nascent being without killing it with overwork. We all move between the given language and the first, this waiting muscle bared and tense, all attention.

Acrobats

Playing chase.

We knew better than to argue but we couldn’t help resisting certain distinctions between the sublime and the ridiculous, laughter and horror. Awe and dread. It was all of these and everywhere at once, and they scolded us for laughing at the wrong times.

When was the right time? we wondered. But it was always not yet. So much applause everywhere for the questing hero, but our supple forms learned something else in those years. How accepting and bearing what may come might be wild acts of giving. It was impossible to wait, but we loved our mothers.

Ashes, ashes we were all arcs and curves, falling down and back again, swinging between force and grace, dance and non-dance, gravestones and oleander, the bright horizon, and the way it shattered in the spray. Rose quartz and granite, sand. You, and your eyes. We played at not blinking until we lost again, shouting I won!

Careful, the greybeards would say as we ran back out into the cold. You’ll catch your death. But it was our lives we were after and death was the feathered brush at the base of the spine, coming hard and we could hear it at our backs. We played at tagging it into a temporary pause but then it would turn, and we knew.

Run! We called back and forth to each other when the only response was fast as you can.

Descent

Moonlight on the water.

What is it, to come down from the highlands of his mother’s lullabies where the first blessings held him by the light of a single candle in the bedroom, where the sun was his father, the moon his mother, and for little sisters, he had the stars––to the sea that fed him, clothed him, to live in communion with the gulls peering into its vast and unfamiliar depths, to hold a single hope by the light of the shore? Teach me, he whispers, learning time by the tides.

***

Inspired by lingering images from Lorry Salcedo Mitrani’s short film, “Guzman and the Sea.”

At the Shore

A conversation in the interim.

With the tides coming and going, finding the hidden treasure is often a matter of patience.

Which ocean?

This mind, or whatever you call it. There’s something I am trying to recover.

So now what?

Now I wait.

Hmm. It doesn’t look like you are doing anything.

Yeah. But remember those seeds we planted?

I love those trees! It’s amazing how they went from––

Yeah, but before all that, remember? After we planted, it looked like nothing. Root growth always does. But the tree won’t take if it doesn’t happen.

Wait. Is this about the ocean, or tree growth?

I’m mixing metaphors. It’s about learning to wait when you are trying to make a thing happen.

Got it. What’s happening now?