Aural imagery
I saw a sound. It rattled the bones of the last days of a time. That time of frayed signposts. Or times. The time was current. The time moved past futures. The time was possible, and all of us at stake. Now I watch for it everywhere, in hope of hearing. It is everywhere, but my eyes are not so good, having been too thoroughly trained by all that would erase her appearance.
And a language of love
I was reading Paul Celan in the season of coming into awareness of a need for glasses but not yet seeing the full picture (!) so I kept having these delightful misreadings which were less graceful than what he said but somehow more intimate, like the poetry of glances between secret lovers in a crowded room while everyone else is speaking in very matter-of-fact tones. Instead of cavity awake, I read sanity sneakers, and not heartstorm but heartstream, and not blessed but bleeded, and in a sentence about libraries, I saw beaks, not books, like Oh Paul, you imp, I see you, winking back, and then when I got the glasses there was a moment of trepidation before I opened his collection, because maybe after all that winking and innuendo of double meanings in a room crowded with strangers we would find ourselves alone with frank expressions and nothing much to say, like how he looks on the cover with eyes that seem to be daring the would-be speaker to break the silence of that pause, and it turns out that the words I’ve been reading as whispers have been in larger letters all along, not whispers at all but a normal tone like two people sitting in a room full of space and regular furniture even though everyone knows about the bodies interred in the cellar walls and when that happens what do you even talk about anyway that can do any justice to the naked fact of being the only other person in a room and all that human baggage? This is why it is no small relief to see, in a line about hands, that the speaker still calls what he is doing arrowing with you. (!) And why I close the book and stop there for the day and hold the thought like Oh Paul. How did you–––?
Peripheral flash.
Learning to wait by passing rays to harvest the seeping cellar of the weeping sun as candle end drips to wet the waiting lips.
When a bird
How often I wish I could tell you about this exquisite bird in such a manner that you might know her, too. She was here before me, before the shattering. Bird is an inadequate word in this context, but I use it because it approximates a reference to a creature with a beak and feathers. She was much larger than I am but bowed her magnificent neck to meet me at eye level. I wanted to look into those eyes endlessly. This seemed like an indulgent and selfish response to such an offering, so instead I started numbering her feathers. I recognized that this was likely an impossible task, especially for someone of my limited intelligence who lacked training and had neither tools or methods beyond the steadfast attention that had long been a symptom of what my elders gravely suggested was a somewhat outsized and possibly obscene capacity for devotion. One, two, three. . . I was at 13,426 when abruptly interrupted. An official voice demanded to know, What are you doing? but I would not turn my head from those undulating wisps. I meant to keep my count. Other things were shouted but I ignored them, meaning to hang on.
That is not, the voice insisted, real. I heard a click of metal.
What followed was not feathers, but sky. What ghosted through it has no pulse, no blood, no song. There is no after here and nothing to save by the counting. Only this continuance. I am rearranged inside it, but I cannot tell you how. I thought the words would appear at the end of that count and if it did not end that I would live inside the action of keeping it––forever, with no need for language beyond what was passing between the count and that vision in pieces. Now what.
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.
The practice of weaving
Call it afterlife, our dispossession from what once entwined us in the body of a vast and complete mind for the wholes of the whole of our woven kinds when we still knew the limited range of certain words and the expansiveness of others when we felt them on a breeze. I want to mend this dream back to a time before a given good became the tear in the veil of sky, before the settled weight of a single image bowed the rooves above us against our nightly returns.
Still life with axial shift.
Something low and lithe creeps around the edges of a dream that has me pushing hands away so I can get my face into breathable air. A passing thing, it leaves the lasting mark of its metaphor, this lens. It won’t be replaced. Like that, the body told back to its life, her silenced hunger now a howl. What blessing can hold at a table like this, quaking above the groan of this rumbling earth? One of us notices. The other is primed to accept whatever comes as naturally granted, another gift for losing before it is opened. There is no sense to what is shown with no figuring and nothing to explain. Nothing, I will say, if anyone asks. Go back to sleep.
Sea and seeing.
It was the black boxes that haunted you at first. Now you tell stories with mirrors, some of which transform into windows. It’s never clear which is which. What pulled you was the possibilities for world building, the hypnotic vastness. Your mind was drawn to portals, the potential thresholds lurking at the edges of the ordinary. You wonder what happens when sight turns into a nightmare, and no one notices. As an antidote, you watch the sea. It reminds you of an invitation to return somewhere. You hope it is. You hope it may return you to seeing.
***
Inspired by, and with borrowed phrases from Krish Raghav’s interview with Josh Riedel (BOMB magazine), on Riedel’s novel, Please Report Your Bug Here.
For Andrey Tarkovsky.
A common impulse: to return to the comforting womb, but you offer alternatives, where opposites swap places: the dream is waking; the old, young. After the before, a whisper: Watch the rain inside.
In your gaze, apocalypse becomes a monochrome street, disappearing into sky. You vanish the expected plot, the comfortable heroic character, show a living man instead, and the others we know well in secret: those mystics, depressives, and recluses that rarely join the table.
Everywhere these pools and puddles, reflecting. All this silence, its maker unrepentant. In this layered universe, no part of nature is ever fixed. Emerging from earth and water, leaning toward air and fire.
There is no need to return, after all. There are no opposites here.
Self; not self. You learn to stop wondering about which is which like you learn to accept how it is customary to call the thing you have: one life. How strange, the way that this phrase is stressed, as if it’s a limit.
There’s a moment, and it goes so quickly that it’s easy to miss, when you think you know who you are. The reason, looking back, was that you were not thinking about it at all. You simply were there, doing what you did in the manner that you did things. For example, drinking from a garden hose in your underwear, or writing a five-act musical for Rocky, the elementary school janitor, on the occasion of his retirement. Or showing up on the blacktop before the bell rang for the start of a third-grade day, after any break longer than two weeks, wearing an accent you had acquired on some imaginary voyage to a distant land. Here a brogue, now a drawl, now something approximating the outback.
Around the age of blood, this changes, and it is no longer considered sufficient to simply make things up as you go; one must have acquired something distant, something not already possessed. You’re not sure what it is, but you understand that the time has come to go out looking and stop pretending that you know what you need. The point, it seems, is to listen. Others know exactly what you need, especially men, who have no shortage of ideas as to what you ought to do. It will be decades before you learn to categorize such professions of wise-seeming advice into the file of “Men explain things to me” (Thank you Rebecca Solnit, Sheila Heti).
But it’s not just that. It’s in the way you look, like you’re practically begging the world to explain something to you.
Sometimes you stop, staring, and think, “Here is something.” You think this because you are wondering and because whatever you are looking at is indeed something. It’s enough anyway, to remind you back in the direction of something that you almost thought you knew. But it isn’t that, not exactly.
The nuns had a saying for missing things. “St Anthony, St. Anthony, come around,” they chanted, over the lost items. It gave the frantic seekers something to do while they looked.
Self; not self. You learn to stop wondering about which is which like you learn to accept how it is customary to call the thing you have: one life. How strange, the way that this phrase is stressed, as if it’s a limit.
One lives.
