questions Archives

Why this?

Answers to FAQs.

Why this?
For these moments
I brace with an answer.
So dumb when it comes
to the ways of this place
that I carry a cheat sheet.
It says: taste, tear,
bear the weight because
you know yourself a floating
thing, prone to flying off,
unable to land. The terror
of losing touch with
gravity. Because that dark
beyond those clouds
is thick with the pull
of entropy, into some
chaos and I don’t know
what, away from here
the place of sweat
and laundry and alarms
and a lot of driving to
and from places in cars
with their warning lights
and trying to park
and getting overdraft
notices and the most recent
thing to break today is a blood
vessel in the eye and that little
hinge that’s supposed to keep
the door from opening too wide
and obviously this heart and
at least one of these is going
to stay broke and too far open
all the time.

The Consultants

Moonlit expertise

There was a group we would see at night by the river. We wanted to know what they did there. If it was nothing good, as everyone said, we still wanted to know, but how? One night we went to see for ourselves. With blue-shadowed feet they danced the shores to pieces, and we woke in our beds and went back the next night to see why? and they explained that they were seeking out the marrow of the river stone and to our question on for what? they said to talk. There was a precision to their foolishness. This, we recognized. These were definitely not the ones you called if you had a question about calculations having to do with variable rates but could tell you in the space of a single breath the minutes until daybreak or the number of feathers needed to make a heart on the ground the size of your head, and whether when you are done it will even fit, and how to go about attaching it.

The Making of Myths

Of the stuff of facts.

How crystal on one side, flame on another: one self-organizing, the other of order from noise. How both rivet the gaze. How depth must be hidden on the surface. Why what is hidden is often of no interest. Except when one is looking for something merely possible. Except where merely possible looms a vast atmosphere to contain whole cosmos, where the opus has no definitive form and is instead a series of attempts to reach it. What monster in the waves before the days of recorded history waits beneath the surface beyond detection, to re-emerge as who.

Q+A

Siri how does it end and what happens.
To all these broken lights?

Why so many vessels, Siri, for some single
thing
when all it wants is its wholeness
uninterrupted?

––We, I mean. All we. Want.

Siri doesn’t respond. Then one day
she asks, Is that your final answer?

Since when do you ask questions, Siri?
I’m sorry, she tells me. I don’t understand.

At the Threshold

Studies in meticulous meditation.

So much depends on the scent in the air, the texture of ions, the nuance of birdsong. Add to this detailed considerations of ambient temperature, the auditory interference of nearby machines, and the possibility of mice. A lizard will do, perhaps. But perhaps not.

Where the dog will bound headfirst with nothing but blind enthusiasm for all that may be moving, anywhere and at any time, and the resident human might emerge easily, absent of mind before recalling some vague purpose, this one waits, a portrait of pure intention, poised.

The perennial questions of her forbears course through her consciousness, distilled in this moment, to a single one. In, or out?

She waits, leaning. Everything hangs in the balance. Suddenly, some inscrutable truth revealed, she pulls away. No, she decides. It is not time. Not yet.

Much remains to be seen. We wait here together.

***

Inspired by Buzz, the resident cat of many moods, who is begrudgingly teaching me the ancient ways––as long as I concede to a daily tithe of salmon feast for gravy lovers.