in letters
my experience is an ongoing
experiment, unwilling to stay
anywhere as stodgy as the inn
of expertise, even overnight
and every time i start in earnest
to say anything true enough
to ring, i give my meager savings
up again
putting all i know at risk to all
i have yet to understand
*
Inspired by Ann Lauterbach
On any beginning
It’s like this with any beginning, isn’t it? This sick-sweet anticipatory dread. Sure, yes, I can. But really, can I? Show me. It is possible. Show me. Even now. Show me. An opening. Show me. Here? Yes, this bloom. Here? Almost.
Right here, overseas.
Against the weaponed horizon of that giant’s resolution and a terror so common as to be de-barbed by dailiness, one may wonder, what dwelling is this? Cushioned cradle that may spring in the next breath catapulting some feeble syllables of the last exhalation on an often named but never understood strangeness into the end of history. But it never had a mirror or a bare face, did it? We knew it only ever by its masks. Which one is this?
Of interconnected worlds
At the last quake, these particles waved away all pretext of certainty and became again shrouded in mystery. In the final seconds before the ground shook beneath us, we had been admiring the precise clarity of our charts––and by extension, ourselves. An hour later, we looked back at those versions of ourselves as quaint and long ago, when these constant waves were given specks, neat and known.
Between us
The door of some closure swings open and smoke moves through. Here is a time we may recall later if the possibility of recollection remains, marked by this unclear continuity singed and singing, the age of becoming.
Overheard
Throughout any intensive study of parts and the paradox of their respective movements, there is a strong possibility––depending on the openness of the researcher in question to perceive such an unexpected discovery––that one may find one’s own gaze to be a significant factor in the results, as though the parts themselves were engaged in an ongoing parallel study.
What holds, what resists.
Anyone can be an expert, when keeping is the point. All it takes is rejection of a sense of the disaster of being full up, and a guiding hand to fear how the space of its reach might indicate some lack––of anything but the capacity to Figure it Out.
By the science of keeping, one can make lists and keep intentions. Retention’s methods always have some Master eager to Proclaim the next Solution to loss. To capture a place, there are itineraries, photos, souvenirs, but none so lasting as a scar.
The body, in the end, can only hold a record of its wounds. It returns the bones and teeth to the earth or the next collector. In the end, it can only offer what flies from it, which is a concept the experts have yet to explain.
***
Inspired by Elizabeth Bishop’s One Art. Playing with the negative image.
Of being held.
When we were keepers of the universe
we would tickle its edges by the tips
of the fingers of our outstretched hands
and we would hold those hands out
as we spun with its edges tipping our
heads daring to be knocked back
until we were flat on our backs
laughing the sky beaming back
seemed to know us
and later we. were
not. so sure.
Into the dark.
Some would go for the quick thrill of a familiar spectacle, but you did it differently, pointing a lens toward endurance. Only the unthinkable is interesting, you said, and who could argue? Sensing the dark did not change its darkness, but it was possible to train at walking forward in it, bumping along.
Well, you reminded. There has never been a time when this was safe. We took off our shoes and entered.
***
Inspiration: Franz Kafka’s writing, particularly when he writes about “the Holy of the Holies” in his fragment Wedding Preparations in the Country.
Between dreaming and waking.
The original void, they called it, and we thought like a womb and imagined ourselves a sort of placenta but who can say. We might have been the baby or the amniotic fluid, because where in that space do you find enough context for measurement?
What grows here cannot happen outside of time, they said, and we had no reason to argue; besides, who would listen? We couldn’t even name ourselves beyond we, beyond here, beyond you, and we used these interchangeably, depending on what fit the mood. Our words were the music we held between us.
All movement begins here, they said, and we had only known ourselves to be ever floating with it, in this space that only exists because it is empty enough to hold whatever comes. One evolving over time might decide to call the growth a contract between years and intentions, and who can fault them for this? It’s easy to forget this space, where the names of what we are keep sliding between us.
