Tag: unknowing

perennial questions

in muddy waters

Everybody always asks me these questions, the writer was saying. Hah, like I know! For me, it’s all about the desperate questions, you know? Like, what’s the matter?

But then, he said, everything is like that, my whole life––you gotta stay close to hell, and also to joy. And somehow manage not to melt. Maybe that’s what it is for me, why I also stay so close to water. People are always asking me about the water, he said. I guess it’s the eternal quality about it, and that savage beauty, where everything is eating each other.

We were eating beer and catfish at a party in his honor. Someone asked him how he kept things fresh. He laughed and said, people don’t know how interesting they are! Then he invoked Beckett, who said nothing was funnier than unhappiness.

At this point, we were interrupted by a mutual friend, younger. How’s the work now? The friend was asking and the writer made a face. It’s going, he said, but who knows where?

Soundings

and wave

What is the opposite of the way we floated in that space, where it held us in that singing silence, drifting to and from? I don’t want to say it. Only that when we approached near enough, we gave names to one another. It was a way to hold and pass between us, all that reflection and depth. Later came a noise to shatter that silence, and we stopped passing names. I may forget my own, soon. Or the one that held me floating, more than mine. I make this feeble note, unsure if I can sound it anymore. It is the scrap of a decimated raft. I hold it, something between here and that endless down.

Lover’s Prayer

The art of doing nothing

In the silence of satisfied (although perhaps guarded) anticipation of victorious arrival, one spoke. Wait, said the one. Let us be sure that we know what we are doing. Many laughed.

In the deepest dark, a body will not recognize its own fall. This is protective. Who wants to know when they are downer than they seem? What follows is total upheaval. An eye opens.

one day, birds

arriving to address the assembly

i can’t believe this, you say again,
& keep on. as though to sing
that song of yours in strange words
we do not know. despite myself
you say––

[or in spite of?]

[to spite. the blast]

against scattering & by way of explanation
of why you ––anything. we are skeptics
of this logic & think you are creatures
who do not know what you are
perhaps because you insist on asking
what is this & why

[scatter. return]

we think maybe this is your only song
we think you want help with the singing.
we have seen you watching so we came
for we are the ones who come & go.

Mist Opportunities

And related cravings

We knew its texture even as it was always escaping us. Like how you can hold the child but not the whole life. Or bear daily witness to the setting sun and be daily reminded how impossible it is to see. The thing so often had to do with finding the question that went with the answer the dream was giving. Naturally, many tried to turn this mystery into a theoretical challenge. Which was something different than entering its all.

Solute

To dissolve some absolution

Always wants. An attempt to loosen the fibers that seemed to contain the riddle of becoming. From that bonebound island I thought I knew what I was and knowing only wants, dreamed that if I were only more, I might hold those skies, that ocean, and swell to blooming so I could let it all go into the living. I used to imagine you a landscape I might photograph in pieces to print on transparencies, hold the light of you up to your light to translate for you this wonder at your nearness. I remember where we stood above the sea holding hands up into sunset as if to catch whatever heavens might finally rain.

But what do you want, always?
What does Always want?
I am impatient to know.
Please speak slowly.

I lack fluency and miss the nuance of your most important phrases.

The phrase “bonebound island” comes from The Notebooks of Dylan Thomas.

Still Waters

With cat.

In the early morning, an hour for the dust, your altar, your black eye, long since healed, the ridge of the once-purpled nose still visible in certain lights. That weather is over now, moved elsewhere, but still you come to sit with it.

This morning’s sounds are birds and the laundry room just outside the door, and dogs after a passing truck. The phone rings at an odd hour and familiar panic crashes like a wave. But it is nothing, a pocket dial.

And yet, it means something to gather these nothings to the chest and hold. Either because unless I still do this, I am nothing––or because I am essentially nothing, and it is good to be among my kind. Probably both are true, but I don’t get to know.

So, I sit here with these nothings and now here the solid weight of this cat pouring herself into my lap, to hold and be held. She is someone, this cat. She won’t do this with anyone else. I think she likes that I am good at disappearing, too––into the bed, the chair, the book, the music, birdsong.  And, when interrupted––gone.

She is a great teacher the art of emptying the form, so that the liquid of something else may come in. I have spent enough time with the form itself, testing its limits to see what it will take. A lot, it turns out, but for what? When those limits finally cracked, I felt something else move in. It will not be named so it is nothing, and here we are now, these insubstantial breaths our sum, and the sum of us nothing, too.

Among Kings and Queens

Along the fortress walls

The game prize glowed with standard marble and a cartoon cupid peeped out to double the flames. An abundance of jewels decorated the assembly, the idea to catch more light, and more, to rise and rise to meet its source. 

It is not difficult to make a fetish of fearing dark, where those uncrowned and slippery forms tend to wind along walls as if to challenge their veracity, as if to challenge certain given truths, the self-evidence of status. Or of your life. 

That you see and know. That you remember what was. That what now shall be done is your will. That time is for your hurry, food for your teeth, your tongue, that these pills will do for fixing what ailments may come. That the night you feared might only be good where you wished it so when you went around saying good night and watching the walls.

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