on the other side of the wall
For coral to take
the long-submerged chains,
something living
had to cling.
On the dry side of the wall,
someone asked
what the babies were eating.
No one answered.
Another question:
Did their eyes look back?
But who
are these
circled moments
in the widening arc?
Look.
Down.
What moves—
low,
ready?
A body bends
against sorrow,
unsure which world
it woke in.
The bars
held only flesh.
What else
we were sometimes
slipped through.
to learn
Teach me
by your presence and your song.
I am too full right now to take
anymore of answers. I have been
here all day sampling those & now
i am overfull and still malnourished.
I cannot be alone in this. I won’t.
Let us sit here together awhile,
friend, attending
a concert of
shared breaths, our resounding
amens.
re: undelivered message
What I came here for was a thing for the moment. Ancient and entirely present.
Ready? You called, with so much enthusiasm, I thought you understood.
You know? I called back, amazed. Now retrace the original sin.
I do know! you shouted, and Now is the time! I took your slogans for sincerity. That was a long time ago. Now you repeat yourself. Sure, there’s a wolf somewhere, but when?
You don’t know time. We joke that you are it, given the terms of your world. In which you are all but your saving and still the sun. No other imaginable constant, and so not ready when the real one comes.
I am not sure to what extent the joke is mutual, but laughter is a means of survival in transit. Destination? Return to sender, we suppose. I have nowhere else I was planning to go. But here––
Okay, if you want, I say. Be louder. Wear more feathers. I don’t know what you think you are doing with any of that but they say it works somewhere.
Many love it––you constantly remind me, and anyone listening, of this truth. Your sacred red herring.
Go ahead. Offer it up again and again. Confess without words, how you love how they love it, even as they hold the alternative like a knife to your throat.
I don’t want to lead you into a frightening place, you smile. And wink, for the camera, again. Recasting illness as forbidden fruit, infestation as the alluring dragon guarding your treasures, your gilded selves.
What does an old bird say to something like this? With a sigh I assure you, I am not afraid. But for you.
You can lead a horse to water but there’s nothing to do for the one who keeps sending the cart far ahead of himself and away from her banks, to collect.
Okay then, friend. Carry on. It is easy to misread a moment. There is enough here to distract you from presence, and in a moment, I go, to carry back with me an awareness that most of yourselves will never know.
and mirror shadows
The writer, aware that the telling of certain stories in the third person might, by another writer, be handled effectively as neat confessionals, sometimes laments. It would be good if she could walk into the world naked, saying “I am that I am!” like some deity.
Having lost belief in selves as focal points some time ago, now she can only watch what happens to her body with uncertain degrees of remove. Having also lost allegiances to what she once might have considered a certain landform of facts like a single continent against a singular ocean, she now thinks that it does her no good to try to figure where any of these went.
Now that any nascent sense of would-be self is gone, memory can also be recognized at some distance, for the fiction it is. Her old ways would never admit such heresy. Once, she tried to say things like “I did,” and “I went” and “this is how it was.”
She is no longer convinced that she has been anyone, anywhere, ever. However, given various expectations of the current milieu, this emerging understanding is going to continue to present certain problems. For now, the writer may decide to ignore these, keeping vigil in this bed in this underground shelter where this pen over this notebook continues to move.
*
First published in Exist Otherwise, January 2023
yet here
To calm the sphere through which the train still barrels on at reckless speed, this Space continues to insist on her arrival, as gossamer vapor to swaddle Time.
Between the living
Until rest
Until I can answer
Until I can do better
Until quiet
Until time
and presence erupts
against our absence.
Translation
Once when I was a mouth burned from the effort it took not to scream, something not me rose to walk that mouth to this stream where something not yet was beginning.
To see here
No One and No Thing
kneading this
incanting this
soul-bright bloom
above the thorn.
Language and reach
What blots out its name to carry on with you?
I meant to make amends with her. For her.
Yes, pen, I want to remember. No less or more than myself.
What comes drifting to stand soul and clear?
They say I have or had a self.
Yes, pen, I believed them.
Yes, pen. When I said believed I meant I tried.
I mean I meant to try. To believe them.
About this they would call self, but something resisted.
Pen, do you think that resistance might be a sort of self?
What breath rose from here?
No, pen, I cannot point to her. I cannot tell you where she is.
But here, I think, yes.
What could we make and know as well as any name?
I meant to offer her up to you and you could trace her, bless her in this basement altar.
I meant to descend low enough through caves and cellars to find.
Her, or the altar, or you.
That we could meet.
The first two questions are adapted from lines by Paul Celan.
Care and feeding of arrival
I am using pointed understatement when I tell you, this was not the moment I had in mind. I mean, who ever does? When it arrives, the thing to say is something about how no one asks for these things, they just happen. It’s part of the deal of living, blah blah, and moments like this come and–––eventually, go, so. . . hang in there! Except that in my case, it could be argued that I had asked for it, in a way. After all, no one had forced me to be the first to raise my hand at that candlelit conference in the lavender-scented room where the host on high tossed a question so airy it was almost irresistible. “Who is ready” the host asked, in fluttering words like diaphanous silk, “to start cherishing every moment of your life?”
“Me!” I cried out. I mean, what had I been doing, anyway? Time for a new chapter, right?! Carpe diem.
I should explain to you a little about the place I am calling “room” here. It was an unusual space. The arrangement was series of level stages, and beneath each stage was a level for audience, assembled in interlocking parts like a staircase. No matter where you sat, the variant lighting remained focused on the speaker directly above, while in the shadows behind this speaker was another audience, turned up to a yet higher stage, focused on a single speaker, who was in turn at the perimeter of another audience, looking up to the next, and so on. Likewise, although I felt myself to be invisible and anonymous, I was, to those at the perimeter of this series of stages, a body on a stage. When I raised my hand, I had announced for all to see, “I am ready! Yes, yes! Every moment!”
Now the conference was over, and so was the vast space, the candlelit room, fine clothing, complimentary Prosecco, and the lavender scent emanating from air ducts. I was back to the version of being commonly referred to as “normal” and strenuously meaning not to waste any of the insights of my inspired enlightenment. Sure, it was clear I had some cleaning to do. Floors, shelves, litter box, but what was important––I made a note with my pen––was to reject the complacency of terms like “normal” as the aberrations they were, preventing commitments like the one I had just made to the wonder of every moment.
That’s when my moment showed up. I was not yet done with my coffee, but no matter! As the speaker had enthusiastically encouraged, you had to “be ready to take life as it comes!” and “Cherish every single one!”
“Hello,” I said to the moment arriving. It was a large moment, limping. It resembled one of those Jim Henson monsters, but with a less hygienic look. It was covered in a thick brown fur, some of which was matted in coarse ropes. It moved with a limp on two legs, shedding some sort of wet and silvery debris with each step, grunting. With each grunting step, the moment emitted a draft of hot air from its mouth. The smell reminded me of the steam that would rise in thick plumes from a manhole cover that I learned to strenuously avoid on my walk back to an apartment I rented as an undergrad.
“Finally,” the moment said, pausing. Perhaps to indicate some arrival.
“Well,” I said. There was plenty I did not say. I did not ask the moment what sort of moment it thought it was or berate it with snide comments. I kept to myself the thought I had about this moment really being a poor representative of its kind. There was no need to insult the moment, who could possibly not help what it was, at least at this point. Who for all I knew may have been a witness to my enthusiasm the other night and decided I would be just the right host for the cherishing of its life. Which I had to assume was as fundamentally precious as any other, even though what is fundamental, when it comes to the living, is not necessarily welcome. For example, death, decay, the emission of various sounds and substances at inopportune times––and whatever this moment was.
As we stood there facing each other, I noticed that the moment could qualify for a whole ecosystem unto itself. There were various organisms crawling through, writhing in, and flying to and from the shadows in its dense fur. From its undercarriage, it dripped a dark, viscous liquid onto the floor. I would need a mop for this moment, and perhaps some absorbent towels.
The cat blinked from her perch on the windowsill, regarding the moment with apparent interest before turning to reposition herself, closing her eyes again. The moment rumbled a loud noise. Was that––a fart? I wondered, then checked myself. It was important not to jump to conclusions about this moment. Then a smell more thick and powerful than anything the cat had ever done suddenly emanated throughout the entire room. The cat startled as if a firework had gone off. She jumped from the window to the desk below her and quickly left the room.
“Well, Moment,” I said, when my cough subsided. “It’s just us. Now that you’re here, let’s get you settled.”
I was realizing that I was much less prepared than I had wanted to be for any moment. Also, that I might have avoided this if I had passed on the third round of Prosecco, but, Oh! The candles! The soft music! When in Rome. But now was a whole different setting and my instincts fluctuated between crying, raging, and wanting to disappear after a large dose of something strong and annihilating.
Really, I had never seen a moment like this. But I had met some bad characters in my time, some of which had really thrown me off, and if there was one thing I had learned it was that it was better to stick to those routines that you knew, when it came to getting through a day, rather than spin around and hope to grow some new ones to launch you out of it. I might not be very enlightened, after all, but I never let anyone sit hungry in my presence if I could help it.
“Have you eaten?” I asked the moment. As the moment lumbered closer, I sensed that a faint might be imminent and tried to position my back to the bed. It took considerable effort to resist the impulse to cross my arms or hold out an elbow in defense against this moment.
Now the moment was sniffing my ear, my neck, and a few other places. I tried to hold still. Then it sniffed the air and followed its nose to the cat food, then outside to the pantry shelves, and finally to the refrigerator. An hour later, the moment slept on the bed, having effectively resisted my efforts to coax it onto a makeshift pile of old towels on the floor. The moment was snoring. The cat returned, pausing to sniff the hairy, clawed foot of the moment, which was dangling off the edge of the bed. Then she resumed her spot at the window, pausing briefly to note her empty bowl with a pointed look in my direction.
I made a grocery list. It was hard to tell what I was going to need or how long this moment would be staying. It was so much larger than I expected a moment to be. If I stayed there, I would have to sleep in the chair or on the towel bed. But there I went again, projecting my own concerns into the future of this moment.
Right, then. Food first. I grabbed my wallet, keys, list. “Okay,” I said to the cat and my new moment, “I’ll be back.”
