Tag: time

first teachers

toward remembrance

This week I have made useful things: calendars, notebooks, discussion protocols, pages students will soon fill with questions I hope matter. By Friday my eyes are bloodshot, nerves down my arm burning again. Every note in my notebook begins, “Remember to make…” And yet. In the stillness of the rare breath, a returning question reminds me: remember what first taught you, love. To look. 

I have had a touch-and-go relationship with standing inside my own truth. Whatever I was as a child seemed to make for easy killing. I wanted not to die. I wanted to become better at living.

My teachers were shorelines & trees; stones & beneath them; beyond the beyonds, where whales surfaced & disappeared again. I followed the tracks of dead writers, looking for clues. 

This week, Heschel offers three things I need. He says, Always we are chasing. And then: Recollection is a holy act. He uses the phrase “Sublime grandeur…” & I cannot remember the rest.

I write each into the margin beside reminders to photocopy poems & order hanging file folders. Also, ear drops for the cat. I do not think she is drinking enough water.

Imagine the composer whose music, too long for the market, sings just long enough for strays to inhabit. Whose reviewers ask politely, must it be like this? 

Thank you, love. For running ahead, then stopping. Waiting until the rest of us catch up. I chase you, passing wooden bodies behind bars. I wait with them, my mirrored selves. Whose arms reach where our trunks may not follow. At the terminal, a woman waits half inside shadow. Maybe to board, or else forever.  To leave this furniture-piece of the self.

To return to the humiliating glory of flesh. Tomorrow the bells will ring again, and my eyes will return to their watering ache. To close & listen to morning birds. Somewhere beneath asphalt, distant roots will continue their epistolary. Further still, whales carrying songs. The stubborn composer refuses to hurry. A sculpture continues waiting in her cage. I follow behind these, in their tracks. To walk as I wait.

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.

keeping time

on holding and release

Before going anywhere
we collect signs
from underground,
unseen but necessary.

I am interested in time,
but I will lose the clock
and I will lose the body,
still bearing the world.

branching with her
into other bodies—
bird, whale, tree
who collect me as
bower bird gathers blue—
glass, feather, button—
by arrangement.
I am tethered this way,
then let go.

But made for keeping,
I draw it close again,
marry it to breath,
to release what flies
from limb to future
limb, by losing

the thread—another
way to keep the fabric
as it thins.

Goodbye, we call
to the silhouettes
that shimmer past
what light it leaks
like ink in water,
blooming.

Zeno’s moon

notes from where the tortoise wins

Moon, don’t go. I have been too much in the sun with the golden people smiling fun. Listen, moon. I know what I am and I consent to this distance. If it connects me to you, let me trace the pads of my fingers along its lines. For nearly as long as I can remember, I have been reminded by the golden summer titans that my movement, whatever it was, failed to count as well as Time’s. The jolly clock-faced father-god. Time, they told me, bowing as they shushed my complaint against their rush, was fast and I had to keep up.  I did, blaspheming. 

Zeno had point about the arrow. If at any moment it was at rest in one position, in a time made of moments, how can it ever move? No, Achilles does not catch the tortoise. To do this he would have to reach where the tortoise began, by which time the tortoise would have moved on.

Fortunately, after this pause, the golden people have all gone to chase the sun, and it’s just us again, with the tortoise, stitching moments with no roundly sure clock face in sight.  I’m glad you’re here, moon. I know you won’t be, always. But I won’t go chasing all those not-yets, not while I’m drunk on the wave of your fragmentary diamond lights, winking into seas to kiss the shore, and me.

art and artists

opening notes of a survey

you can see us in Goya where
cannibal Time eats his children
hooded sisters pointing

to the door, bodies swallowed
by earth as if by probing black
in earnest, he would find

courage to move the brush
Rothko called them performers
Lorca waited on a ghost

to let it harness him by words

& when nowhere stood still we
gathered in twos and threes
hoping to hear the heart

of one living beat hard time
into heat where a mind’s
nerve breaks

a call or cry we wanted
to respond & drummed
an ache the tenderness

of those faces spectacular
& then it was late
all eyelids and moons

o death how

you insinuate

gone with

the tide

Then we came to the lamp, singing. What fun there was in those moments was not to be had, but had us. Then, stopping just short of being stretched to taffy with laughter, we parted. Time to go. The only way to hear was as an outcast. Inside, the ears get stopped by the noise of building fortress walls. Goodbye, each called, to find us again in waters, blooming.

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.

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