who leans to listen
Above a consecrated ground still wet with our new dead, a cloud of witnesses rise, beholding. What warnings, unheeded, echo now. They turn the earth again, by sighing wind, to find the moment’s tear and mend it back to here.
and the measure of art
Anything made in this space can neither reflect or embody the life it leans into, but may at best assemble images as instruments with voices of the dead, their players. Unknown concerts happen all the time, keeping time with each tree falling unheard in the distant forest. Now in the shaded alleyway, now at the bus stop, in the basement, the interior of an economy car in a strip mall parking lot. Is it that we cannot help ourselves, making what would call them out? It seems more likely that we would be paved easily enough by asphalt, by overwork, hunger, stress––and forget. I suspect it is the dead who can’t help themselves, reaching back to touch what lives the way we might have touched old photographs in another time, when there seemed more of it. To recollect by offering back the longing notes of these images, their edges sharpened to cut whatever they touch, to make it stranger, as a reminder: you do not know what this is. You do not know what you are.
Transmissions among us.
A day of midnights, and we wanted the endless blue. We waited for the bodies to walk from the graves and when they did, we saw them as flashes of what we could not explain, would not mention. We were watching for bands of jays. We wanted, walking at the lake’s edge, escape. Escape! we said. Wild, we said, Untamed! Aspirational declarations, we did not know their substances and heard the dead sometimes like voices between sleep and waking. They offered up secrets, but we had yet to learn their language, smug visitors that we were, proud of our rage, our escapes, our untamed hungers. The rest was late and deep and went on mostly unseen.
