creatures in wartime
After the war moved in, some went numb and never returned. Some emitted the atmosphere of carnival, others of tombs. Either way, what rattled was the shells of battle shocks, tiring over time while inside them the minds and lives of us where it rained fire and none could remove their boots, an endless waiting while covered in successive barrels of earth but not relief. We saw things and heard them, carrying on.
with filling fantasies
Some of us can remember when all the play of the boys in certain areas involved the phrase, Bang, you’re dead! on loop around fantasies of patrol over living targets, amid the wild promises of ending famine with flying cars. I remember the dizzy vertigo of sensing what I could not express, which might translate loosely into something like, there is too much future here. Sensibilities, such as they were, were overfilled water balloons, ready to be tossed, bang bang, you’re dead, except they were bombs. Wait your turn, said the adults to these boys, and take the bull by the horns, and you don’t know war, for you are soft. The boys couldn’t talk back, and you could hear their resolve, filling each balloon body one at a time. To prove them all wrong, one day.
In the underworld.
He came here looking for the blind prophet. Through a hole he came down from the living, from his way by which he and the ways of his men were lost, again. Not to admit any wrong, not to admit the penance due those who anger the gods, but I knew my son. His stubborn stance. I was there with the other dead mothers and our stance was reaching from where we waited below the land of the living beneath where they burned the false claims they would make in slaying other sons––and our daughters, too, in the name of their stakes and how high they made them, where the air thinned. I knew my son and I saw his desperation in that heat. See me, I called to him. He looked up and I saw it on his face. Mother, he said.
He still knew the word. Yes, I said. Now go, I said to him, from this fire while you still live.
It was too hot and too loud for him to hear more though I meant to remind him back to the life he knew before he knew to wave flags above the graves of other mothers. Where he was barefoot and fed before he thought to scorch the land he meant to take. To add, take this body, son, that I gave you, and return it to the living earth.
***
Anticlea is the mother of Odysseus, who encounters her son in the underworld where he has come to find the blind prophet, Tiresias, to tell him the way back home.
In the late days of long wars.
We wanted to mend, so kept company with our mothers’ ghosts. Our yesterdays were wounded and came to us until every bed was full.
O muse. Your song was bleeding out.
We brought cloths and went to you. We wrapped you tight and held against the flow. It entered then.
We are still, holding.
Regarding the ongoing restoration project.
And I watched another raging hero with the priest, disputing the last claim to spoils of war––at the end of another bloody year, another daughter’s ransom, and the muzzled prophet muted, and I know you sent your heralds, but their words were weak against the noise. You said I had to learn to let things be as they are, but who was I to untie myself of every assumption inherited at altitude? Even the clouds are flying now from the weight of this constellation of atoms, held fast while the widening day goes on, denying all assurances that tomorrow or tomorrow or tomorrow will return from the place where it flew off right now, to somewhere past the sight lines, out of reach.
In memoriam.
It has been said that the fade of memory is a symptom of decaying sense. One loses the outline, the detail, over time. Color washed into water, the old forms oceanic, and yet. A blurred thing may be as particular as anything sharp. For some of these, the blur itself was the essence: reflection on water, the texture of sky, your life. Don’t make this love a bullet or a blade, and I won’t reduce its music to a marching drum.
For some, all learning is the remembering of what was already present in a soul before the dark days of sharp derangement before our bodies spilled into the soil. My brother’s blood is not your warpaint and my mother’s cry is not a call to your next battle. Wait.
When sense becomes senseless, let me blur with you, brother, that I may learn your life in concert with my own. Let the blood-drenched soil bloom until some new music comes. We are all out of tune. Teach yourself to us, again.
Among the living.
Sometimes, when it was hiding in our homeland, we would feel its aftermaths in succession, running our fingers along the seams of cracked earth. Means for making meaning, ever mutating, make new forms where the formers are buried. We move soil to make room for our dead. Seedlings, too––even then.
We could not call it war until we survived it. In the meantime, it was living. It was diapers and babies, earaches and crackers and someone still had to milk the cows, walk the dogs, and soak the beans overnight.
What did you do? They will ask us later. Possibly we will forget by then, how we folded laundry and clipped toenails. How sometimes, even then, someone would show up with a cake, and someone else would find plates. We would pass slices one at a time, among the living.
An (expanded) video version of this post is available here.
For the love of seaweed.
There is the familiar arrangement of well-known symmetrical forms, the sort that draws comments of Cute, and Beautiful, exclamation mark. These are not that. Slick like raw meat, covered with film over knotty, bulbous appendages, they were dubbed the useless class of botanists. Perhaps it is the fate of things deemed useless, to be collected by fringe enthusiasts, who pressed them between paper, offered collections as gifts. They would sell them during the first world war, to raise money for wounded soldiers, and this is one of those things I can’t stop thinking: how when a continent was immersed in mechanized violence on a scale unprecedented in human history, some responded by collecting delicate specimens of fragile ocean life, to press between pages.
***
Inspired by Sasha Archibald’s Love and Longing in the Seaweed Album in the Public Domain Review.
Against other constants, and at random.
“Everything I ever thought to be a nightmare is nothing compared to what I am witnessing.”
Voice of Diana Berg, Mariupol Resident, in “No Water, No Electricity: Life Under Siege in Mariupol”
I wanted to tell you, when we spoke last week, about the child returned to the swing before the bombed-out building where he once lived, lifting his foot to the sky anyway, before he can know the word for resistance; and also about the the women gathered close in a kitchen, by the thin window before it broke, passing cake around on patterned plates with good silverware, saying to one another Here, here. Eat––
but the conversation followed another line, and then time was up, and now the shelling is constant and at random and I don’t think the child is swinging anymore, and I don’t know what happened to the women with the cake, if they got on a train the next day, or went underground, and I don’t want to end with this––
constant
––did you hear about the babies born in the basement of the Metro station? Yes, there were several and you could hear the mothers’ screams below against the shelling above, but it is said they are okay now, these babies not because they are at home––and where will that be–– the shelling constant
and at random
––when this is done,
when is this done? It is constant
but they are at their mother’s breasts and there is still milk even as the mothers are weeping, especially as the mothers are weeping, there is weeping constantly now and at random, and there are also the tiny fingers wrapped tight around a mother’s pointer finger, as if to hold her pointing in place
this
finger like a compass needle dotted with this row of little nails. Strong grip, people say, for some excuse to laugh, and everyone agrees, because this is here now, the grip of the newborn whose first days begin and end here, whose home is mother.
***
Inspired by the documentary mentioned above, featured in the New York Times, March 5, 2022 (Created by Masha Froliak, Ainara Tiefenthäler, Dmitri Khavin, and Sarah Kerr), in which Diana Berg also observes, “The shelling is constant and at random.” Also by stories like this, of births in the metro station. The title of this piece nods to Rebecca Solnit’s brilliant work, especially her Hope in The Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities.
In wartime.
If a dove should descend now,
through the smoke and the
flood, may someone stop
to witness, and hold us here
until it is clear
how the silence
––speaks, let
us witness
if a dove now
let it not be
the next body
collected, not
yet not before
––we.
Hear.
