Before leaving
Part of preparing to go anywhere else always involves collecting to yourself those things that you think you may need. It doesn’t matter whether the mind doing the collecting is the conscious one––the type to make a list––or signing from an underground, unseen but essential.
The lens turned inside out.
Some days it is clear upon waking that what follows will involve certain reminders. About how, for example, I am at any given time rarely more than half-open or half-closed. Even when I thought I was more than aware of being somewhat too dense for my imagination’s preference, I am now the weary stranger offering directions to the inquiring heart, wondering whether its own spiraling rhythm is moving toward the center, or out. Or else, a shadow cut from its source, floating around like a kite. And it’s unclear, from this wavering axis, whether the metaphor is the blunt object sending an atom of awareness out into a larger field, or a mat to cushion the impact.
Going to meet the dead.
May we remember to visit our dead,
that we won’t stop knowing them.
May we remember our place,
finding theirs.
Romantics, they say, have a reality problem
but I don’t know what it is. Maybe the dead
will have some ideas.
Mortality is such a threat to continuity
––at least of culture, at least of certain
things we used to know,
they say.
***
Inspired by William Goodwin’s Essay on Sepulchres (1809).
