Of being
Given the common knowledge that some plants emit sounds inaudible to the human ear, it is no stretch to imagine how these might consider the two-legged marchers on the road of progress: mute, mindless, mechanistic creatures, incapable of understanding story, with no sense of how meaning is made.
Beyond sight
O weak faith,
what do you call
this, then––?
crowding the air
with those eyes?
On nearness
I kept meaning to see it, and the intention throbbed like impending heartbreak. To chronicle the residents, for example, of a hot afternoon lakeshore: the stained-glass wings of dragonfly in cattail, then open space, beach-like; blankets, sunbathers. Where a child laughs, running, and the rooftops beyond the green with gulls above these and the trees and how peace is the word of the day, so peaceful, the sunbathers say. You cannot see the killings from here. Or how somewhere an old soul is returning and a new one, not yet known in this place, is being born, formed like a new star from the compression of elements over time. And of compassion, that ache of the imagination. And the nearness of death and our proximities to one another in the face of an unnamed annihilation, and of this we know nothing so go on remembering––to a point. These layers of time assembled and striated on our shelves, against nature which prefers the susurrations of breath and heartbeat, waves––those notes that only come in wholes. Now the ritual. Bread, wine, hands. Forgive me sister, stranger, friend. Forgive me, child, for I know not what I am beyond that glass. So I stare into it in this silence, trying to sing.
The architecture of beginnings
There is a dream of finding home inside a single, endless sentence––not one to be realized except intermittently, in fleeting sightings of the wonder it might become––not protection, but enactment of a dance in time with the chorus of the living, whose expansive breath would naturally include the dead, breathing into these and into me, too, and we would be where there is no there, only here, and we, laughing. Breaking open. Our faces to find behind them. A grammar that cannot be verified, made of a logic we may approach but never encode, only and ever––
Tracing elements
How frequently I am reminded, by calligraphies beyond my reach, that I have come from nothing and will return. Blood has its own cadence, impatient with vastness. It will only sing against the fabric of its containment and we, these imperfect vessels––hold, dancing at the edge of a dark pit. There is gravity to it, pulling. What resists will not name itself in a language I can recognize. Meanwhile, this music.
Witness standing
Stars throb against the rim of what I see, and my reaching hands hold like waving a signal to the departed, We’re over here! Come join!
And in their winking response I glimpse the humor of their restraint before my limits. I always think the thing to bear is longing and never consider arrival, or the unspoken answer to the questions I’ve begged.
And where do you think we’ve gone off to? And which of us is missing, now?
In birdcall fields.
Sometimes I dream of following deer past abandoned gold mines on paths overgrown with oak and eucalyptus, with manzanita in bloom, in a dew-slick early morning where birdcall is so thick I can’t help laughing, calling back. Hi birds! And what is going on? as they continue and the widening thirst of this overstretched heart can’t help but hear what follows as a kind of answer, singing Us, us! Hey girl, look at us! Hubris, sure, but such is the lens most readily available to my kind. If I were someone wiser, an owl maybe, I would use sound to trace the silhouette of the tiniest among us as though to call it out, that form, from someplace just behind the center of an ancient hunger. Then I could stop asking what is going on because no answer could match my songsight.
First steps.
In the language I am learning, I can only falter, halting between words. I move from one syllabic rock to the next with unsure steps, their surface shining, wet, and try not to slip into the stream of all I imagine possible to say, if only I knew more of these words, how to handle their music well enough that they would hold we, floating like a pair of otters under skies that would still defy naming yet welcome the earnest try.
Before expression.
To hear, I wanted you, the language that lingers on the tongue long before a word is spoken, pulsing reverb in the throat.
Masked
That starry filament
the membrane of something
& no telling what.
