Friday afternoon, late in the recession, there is a line at the pawnshop. The woman at the counter is selling her childhood earrings, the wedding coins sprinkled, so many years ago, over her and her new husband’s bowed heads. He is dead now, as is the child she used to be. The broker gives her one hundred and seventy-five dollars. She thanks him although it won’t get her through the week. Next, the broker calls, and the man in line empties the entire content of his pockets on the glass. The quarters scatter as if a tumble of jewels. American quarters, copper and nickel, and he has twenty of them. The broker smiles, kind considering the line. These are quarters sir, he says. The man nods; he is at a coin shop. OK, the broker says, for this one, the 1985 issue, I’ll give you twenty-five cents.
At the bottom of your purse is a one ounce gold coin your grandmother gave you. It is not an heirloom. It is a South African Kruger Rand from 1979, a year alight with bombs that, despite the laws, could not distinguish race and often killed whites and blacks alike. The Kruger Rand sells for thirteen hundred dollars. Seven times what it was purchased for. It is an easy exchange, a brilliant gold coin, heavy with oppression and the violence of extraction, and a check, thin paper striped blue and gray through which money is made formal, benign. You are not catholic, not even religious, but walking out of the shop you make the sign of the cross, ask god to forgive you. Two doors down, there is a bar crowded with happy hour revelers. With so many unemployed, the end of the work week merits a celebration of both its existence and its culmination. On the sidewalk out front are four or five people smoking next to a sign that tells them not to. There is a code to live by, you know, and yet you no longer are able to make out the words.
Wednesday, October 20, 2010
Saturday, October 2, 2010
Inheritance
The Watching
It was her job, she knew to watch the boy, her brother, her twin. And she did. But the afternoon came when she forgot. They were at the beach. It was not especially pretty, but it was close to the city and the ocean breeze brought some relief from the August heat.
They had learned to swim young, but like all things, she was better at it than he. Watch your brother, the mother said, then went to the concession stand for a drink. The mother returned a half hour later while the lifeguard was pulling him out of the water. Driving back into the city, the son curled into a ball like a small animal. The daughter, cried, said she was sorry. The mother said nothing.
Later the mother stopped drinking, but the son inherited both the desire and the disease. When he drank himself into terminal illness, the daughter flew across the country to stay with him. The other chair in the hospital room was empty; the mother could not be reached. That day at the beach, he said, I was only trying to catch up with you. She could feel him dying and a part of her dying too. It was me, she said, I forgot that we are one and the same.
Karma
Everyone has at least two, she said. She said a lot of things. I believed some of them, none of them. The last time she was just as beautiful, but more naïve. Like you, she said meaning whomever she was speaking to. When he left her for the blue expanse of ocean, she had thrown herself over the balustrade. Can you believe it, she said, I shattered and he simply sailed away.
She told me she had learned her lesson. She swore off men, romance, any elevated surface. That’s where I came in. Petite, I was catlike, ermine. She called me ocelot, then kissed me. Her lips were soft but my tongue got caught on the rail of broken teeth.
Narrative
She had a story that ran like an ant trail in her head. Sometimes, if she shook her head long enough, she was able to temporarily disperse the ants. Usually they just marched diligently on. She didn’t know the beginning of it; it was as if the ants had always been there and she had simply woken up to them midway in their journey.
Others had their own stories. She talked about them with friends from time to time. Their stories disoriented her, as if she was walking an unknown street in the dark. Her own were unwanted but familiar, like the constellation of moles on her back, the scar below her left eye.
One day she shook herself so hard that the story splintered; the ants moved outward as if marking the spokes on a wheel. At the center of it was a black hole, a vast emptiness in which she was finally free.
Resentment
To let go of it, she offered her palms to the sky, as if sky wanted such things: resentment, grief, the myriad of human attachments. Later the sky made its own offering, freezing rain that fell in perfectly round pellets of ice. She put a glass bowl down outside her front door to gather it. In the morning, she found a black dog peeing into the frozen, mush filled bowl.
Attachment to Form
He shit blood at the end, his head dropping into the red and brown mess of fluid. She was surprised at the violence of it, of life’s departure. And while it was his life, his boundless pleasure in it, that she loved, it was his body, in the end, that she had to attend to. First there was the matter of wrapping and moving it out of the sun into the dark storage shed. Then ice was required to keep it cool long enough for a postponed burial. Worried about mice, or other opportunistic creatures, she stayed up that night and through the day that followed, held a kind of private wake, keeping watch over the body until her ex would return and they could bury him. The afternoon the ex returned, they unwrapped his body, kissed his stiffened head. He was no longer there, she knew, and yet it was a hard idea to hold onto. The ex cooed his name, stroked the pattern of spotted fur. It took another day for the ex to agree to bury him, but by then she no longer believed the dead should be separated from the living, interned in the dark weight of earth.
Passing
When she was young she developed a cough that wouldn’t go away, some kind of lung thing which limited her mobility. Or at least that is the story her parents used to explain why she never really left the house until she was far too old to learn how to live among others. When she asked about the physical differences—the soft fur on her ears, the way her chin drew out rather than down—they waved their hands as if her concerns were flies bothering the air.
Now she is older and her parents are dead but she is still home, sitting in the window, looking out longingly at the open field and the road that winds like a river beyond. One day she packs a bag; she leaves, walking the curves of the asphalt bank until she reaches town. Entering the first open door she finds, she is surprised by the room of welcoming faces that greet her. Either she is passing as something they might love, or she was one of them all along.
Envy
Every day comes a new thing to covet. When you were younger, it was always things that money brought. Later, you began to covet things you once had, beauty, youth, boundless enthusiasm. It is easy to get lost in the yearning, running back and forth, caught in a juniper hedged path of longing. One day you stop, part the dense foliage and peer through. On the other side is another pathway, another person racing from one end to the other. But it is clear from the way she moves that she is nothing like you. Her strides are shorter, her hands claw the air.
The Waiting
We have all done it, spent our time someplace we did not choose for a duration that we could not stand. We share this, even in the moments of it, when our awareness of another’s frustration makes our own dislike of them, their presence, their need that prolongs the satiation of our own, impossible to bear. For this moment occurs precisely when we are already burdened with it, our own discomfort.
This is one of those times, when to wait is to die a little, as all time, the passing of it, is a movement toward and away. That we are someplace filled with dying, as all places are, and yet also with living, makes both seem without consequence and yet it is here, waiting, that we are most fully aware of their significance.
And so it is morning, in this year of war and disease, in this hallway of this office, in a country that is and is not our home, that we share something, an orange, taking it apart slowly, one wedge at a time. It is here, so many years after we decided what it means to be of and from, that we find ourselves marveling at the sweet juice beneath the skin. The parting of lips, the glistening of saliva, the shocking pink of tongue.
Love
She had been known by other names, but Love was the one that stuck. It may have been as simple as the shape of her face, which most closely resembled a silphium seed, a vulva, the flesh of her own buttocks. Such are the possible sources of the symbolic image of the heart. As metaphor, the heart has been home to the divine and she was, or so her lover said, until the day when she was not. The name, however, remained.
The Oldest One At the Pig Roast
It is hard to know for sure the age of anyone in the dark. The pig, fully grown and fattened with hormones, could not be more than 10 months old. The others, the ones drinking around the fire pit, are probably closer to twenty-five. This would make her the chaperone, but she is drinking too, heavily like they are, drinking vodka and whatever mixture of juice was on the table next to it. She can smell the pig cooking, the scent of it roasting in its own juices, and she knows that she will not be able to remain quietly among them. It is not just age, or the generations of wealth they wear as if a second skin. It is that she finally understands that without her, without the exception of her presence, the series of accessible achievements that mark their lives would seem privilege. But she is here, a member of the not-disappeared, presencing a people who were not counted as individuals in the national census until 1930. And so, their success can be narrated differently. It is a meritocracy after all. The rest is just history. She drinks two more drinks, says a blessing for the slaughtered pig, and begins the dance that centuries ago someone mistook for a welcome. It is not. It is what her people danced when it is was time for the gichi-mookomaanag to sail back home.
It was her job, she knew to watch the boy, her brother, her twin. And she did. But the afternoon came when she forgot. They were at the beach. It was not especially pretty, but it was close to the city and the ocean breeze brought some relief from the August heat.
They had learned to swim young, but like all things, she was better at it than he. Watch your brother, the mother said, then went to the concession stand for a drink. The mother returned a half hour later while the lifeguard was pulling him out of the water. Driving back into the city, the son curled into a ball like a small animal. The daughter, cried, said she was sorry. The mother said nothing.
Later the mother stopped drinking, but the son inherited both the desire and the disease. When he drank himself into terminal illness, the daughter flew across the country to stay with him. The other chair in the hospital room was empty; the mother could not be reached. That day at the beach, he said, I was only trying to catch up with you. She could feel him dying and a part of her dying too. It was me, she said, I forgot that we are one and the same.
Karma
Everyone has at least two, she said. She said a lot of things. I believed some of them, none of them. The last time she was just as beautiful, but more naïve. Like you, she said meaning whomever she was speaking to. When he left her for the blue expanse of ocean, she had thrown herself over the balustrade. Can you believe it, she said, I shattered and he simply sailed away.
She told me she had learned her lesson. She swore off men, romance, any elevated surface. That’s where I came in. Petite, I was catlike, ermine. She called me ocelot, then kissed me. Her lips were soft but my tongue got caught on the rail of broken teeth.
Narrative
She had a story that ran like an ant trail in her head. Sometimes, if she shook her head long enough, she was able to temporarily disperse the ants. Usually they just marched diligently on. She didn’t know the beginning of it; it was as if the ants had always been there and she had simply woken up to them midway in their journey.
Others had their own stories. She talked about them with friends from time to time. Their stories disoriented her, as if she was walking an unknown street in the dark. Her own were unwanted but familiar, like the constellation of moles on her back, the scar below her left eye.
One day she shook herself so hard that the story splintered; the ants moved outward as if marking the spokes on a wheel. At the center of it was a black hole, a vast emptiness in which she was finally free.
Resentment
To let go of it, she offered her palms to the sky, as if sky wanted such things: resentment, grief, the myriad of human attachments. Later the sky made its own offering, freezing rain that fell in perfectly round pellets of ice. She put a glass bowl down outside her front door to gather it. In the morning, she found a black dog peeing into the frozen, mush filled bowl.
Attachment to Form
He shit blood at the end, his head dropping into the red and brown mess of fluid. She was surprised at the violence of it, of life’s departure. And while it was his life, his boundless pleasure in it, that she loved, it was his body, in the end, that she had to attend to. First there was the matter of wrapping and moving it out of the sun into the dark storage shed. Then ice was required to keep it cool long enough for a postponed burial. Worried about mice, or other opportunistic creatures, she stayed up that night and through the day that followed, held a kind of private wake, keeping watch over the body until her ex would return and they could bury him. The afternoon the ex returned, they unwrapped his body, kissed his stiffened head. He was no longer there, she knew, and yet it was a hard idea to hold onto. The ex cooed his name, stroked the pattern of spotted fur. It took another day for the ex to agree to bury him, but by then she no longer believed the dead should be separated from the living, interned in the dark weight of earth.
Passing
When she was young she developed a cough that wouldn’t go away, some kind of lung thing which limited her mobility. Or at least that is the story her parents used to explain why she never really left the house until she was far too old to learn how to live among others. When she asked about the physical differences—the soft fur on her ears, the way her chin drew out rather than down—they waved their hands as if her concerns were flies bothering the air.
Now she is older and her parents are dead but she is still home, sitting in the window, looking out longingly at the open field and the road that winds like a river beyond. One day she packs a bag; she leaves, walking the curves of the asphalt bank until she reaches town. Entering the first open door she finds, she is surprised by the room of welcoming faces that greet her. Either she is passing as something they might love, or she was one of them all along.
Envy
Every day comes a new thing to covet. When you were younger, it was always things that money brought. Later, you began to covet things you once had, beauty, youth, boundless enthusiasm. It is easy to get lost in the yearning, running back and forth, caught in a juniper hedged path of longing. One day you stop, part the dense foliage and peer through. On the other side is another pathway, another person racing from one end to the other. But it is clear from the way she moves that she is nothing like you. Her strides are shorter, her hands claw the air.
The Waiting
We have all done it, spent our time someplace we did not choose for a duration that we could not stand. We share this, even in the moments of it, when our awareness of another’s frustration makes our own dislike of them, their presence, their need that prolongs the satiation of our own, impossible to bear. For this moment occurs precisely when we are already burdened with it, our own discomfort.
This is one of those times, when to wait is to die a little, as all time, the passing of it, is a movement toward and away. That we are someplace filled with dying, as all places are, and yet also with living, makes both seem without consequence and yet it is here, waiting, that we are most fully aware of their significance.
And so it is morning, in this year of war and disease, in this hallway of this office, in a country that is and is not our home, that we share something, an orange, taking it apart slowly, one wedge at a time. It is here, so many years after we decided what it means to be of and from, that we find ourselves marveling at the sweet juice beneath the skin. The parting of lips, the glistening of saliva, the shocking pink of tongue.
Love
She had been known by other names, but Love was the one that stuck. It may have been as simple as the shape of her face, which most closely resembled a silphium seed, a vulva, the flesh of her own buttocks. Such are the possible sources of the symbolic image of the heart. As metaphor, the heart has been home to the divine and she was, or so her lover said, until the day when she was not. The name, however, remained.
The Oldest One At the Pig Roast
It is hard to know for sure the age of anyone in the dark. The pig, fully grown and fattened with hormones, could not be more than 10 months old. The others, the ones drinking around the fire pit, are probably closer to twenty-five. This would make her the chaperone, but she is drinking too, heavily like they are, drinking vodka and whatever mixture of juice was on the table next to it. She can smell the pig cooking, the scent of it roasting in its own juices, and she knows that she will not be able to remain quietly among them. It is not just age, or the generations of wealth they wear as if a second skin. It is that she finally understands that without her, without the exception of her presence, the series of accessible achievements that mark their lives would seem privilege. But she is here, a member of the not-disappeared, presencing a people who were not counted as individuals in the national census until 1930. And so, their success can be narrated differently. It is a meritocracy after all. The rest is just history. She drinks two more drinks, says a blessing for the slaughtered pig, and begins the dance that centuries ago someone mistook for a welcome. It is not. It is what her people danced when it is was time for the gichi-mookomaanag to sail back home.
Wednesday, April 7, 2010
Emerging from the Muck
if they say we have come from
oceanic witnesses
then who am i to differ
we who are land and battle
no longer remember
white caps, the pelagic suffering
...
say goodbye to the fog and smoke
this lingering sadness of lung
not say and want to mean it
even the tundra blossoms
seeds blanketed in ice
like you, a tiny frozen thing
the wind carves into days
makes a stab at the heart
this thrush
sea foam and asphalt
...
there is a silicon pouch where my heart used to be
i call her bitch to show her i don’t miss her
she calls me things too terrible to mention
i do not want to talk myself out of this or any other
calamity i warn the sand crabs about
such linguistic solutions the way my father
warned me but he was oceanographic and I know
that sailors are not easily lured
by tongue scratchy barnacle
that remote
...
the source of our malice for sea life is clear
if you remember the turbulence of amniotic fluid
even the otter has questionable ethics
you can’t trust anything that eats on its back
either in or out of water it is hard
to imagine humans surviving much of anything
go ahead, submerge your hands in the black water of the spillway
to feel any affection for that which no longer reaches the sea
...
the competition between salt and sky cannot dazzle
hawk or dissuade us from our battles with atmosphere
the nuclear cloud of memory is prehistoric knowledge, is deep water
we surface by burning prairie grass and pygmy rabbit
drawing the smoke up into ourselves
when night falls we are still damp from hatching
the crickets warn of the moon’s entanglements
a towering monument overshadowing rock and river
we are woman and ox, our legs a muscular paradise of blue
...
to cross time is not
to mark its curvature
but its scales
the crepuscular death
of iridescent things opening
in this moment which has happened
has not happened
not exactly brilliant but lingering
we make months of ourselves
weeks take days call it luck or sarsaparilla
the past has no referent but scent
sweet is not unlike bitter when you bite down on it
a hummingbird is such a femme thing
but she can hurt you too
...
some say writing is thinking and others call it sinking into not action as if thought and action were disassociated, as if ex lovers at a party who can’t even smile across the room at each other nine years of fighting and sex, studying the drama of each other’s family and now they are caught in a crowded room and despite their knowledge that each has lost, they will not speak, neither will, because the lesson they learned most clearly, if anyone bothered to ask, is we are fish out of water this cannot be solved by thought or action or the pretense of either, this story which asks you to do something for god sake, or is it think something and maybe that will be enough
...
the sea is such longing for
its young, dawn, that pocked beauty
we have switched our alliance
made family out of desert
desiccant, this relative of
thirsty enough to swallow
our rage, her mouth, spitting out
cactus and scree, impervious to the hunger
wrinkled sheaths of skin
...
one way to explain it is the tree
those skinny roots stabbing into volcanic rock
the first thing to grow isn’t always pretty
the limbs are barren sticks
there are no flowers or fragrant music
it is simply phloem and xylem
emerging from the crust
an igneous womb
...
this morning is not the witch’s tit that you spoke of. so many disastrous women or so the story goes. there are others who claim not to notice the circumstance of sex. I call them liars but I know enough never to do this to their face. the earth as mother is a tragedy of subjugation and resistance. twenty miles away dawn is met by a concrete freeway overpass where she wakes, her body some broken antique toy. some parts move noisily. the others time has frozen in place. go ask her what woman means, mother or pleasure or garbage strewn contiguously so that no one place is either landfill or pristine. not containment or contaminant but that which bears the brunt of it, some dark once furry place between her legs.
...
in the beginning people said all kinds of things
which later someone took for religion
but the first words were not about god but food
then sex i know because i’ve been hungry
god has nothing to do with it
when the ocean comes and reclaims us
a few will survive, they will eat and make babies
this is my story and god is not allowed
only tangerines and sailor girls
there will be no more babies either
oceanic witnesses
then who am i to differ
we who are land and battle
no longer remember
white caps, the pelagic suffering
...
say goodbye to the fog and smoke
this lingering sadness of lung
not say and want to mean it
even the tundra blossoms
seeds blanketed in ice
like you, a tiny frozen thing
the wind carves into days
makes a stab at the heart
this thrush
sea foam and asphalt
...
there is a silicon pouch where my heart used to be
i call her bitch to show her i don’t miss her
she calls me things too terrible to mention
i do not want to talk myself out of this or any other
calamity i warn the sand crabs about
such linguistic solutions the way my father
warned me but he was oceanographic and I know
that sailors are not easily lured
by tongue scratchy barnacle
that remote
...
the source of our malice for sea life is clear
if you remember the turbulence of amniotic fluid
even the otter has questionable ethics
you can’t trust anything that eats on its back
either in or out of water it is hard
to imagine humans surviving much of anything
go ahead, submerge your hands in the black water of the spillway
to feel any affection for that which no longer reaches the sea
...
the competition between salt and sky cannot dazzle
hawk or dissuade us from our battles with atmosphere
the nuclear cloud of memory is prehistoric knowledge, is deep water
we surface by burning prairie grass and pygmy rabbit
drawing the smoke up into ourselves
when night falls we are still damp from hatching
the crickets warn of the moon’s entanglements
a towering monument overshadowing rock and river
we are woman and ox, our legs a muscular paradise of blue
...
to cross time is not
to mark its curvature
but its scales
the crepuscular death
of iridescent things opening
in this moment which has happened
has not happened
not exactly brilliant but lingering
we make months of ourselves
weeks take days call it luck or sarsaparilla
the past has no referent but scent
sweet is not unlike bitter when you bite down on it
a hummingbird is such a femme thing
but she can hurt you too
...
some say writing is thinking and others call it sinking into not action as if thought and action were disassociated, as if ex lovers at a party who can’t even smile across the room at each other nine years of fighting and sex, studying the drama of each other’s family and now they are caught in a crowded room and despite their knowledge that each has lost, they will not speak, neither will, because the lesson they learned most clearly, if anyone bothered to ask, is we are fish out of water this cannot be solved by thought or action or the pretense of either, this story which asks you to do something for god sake, or is it think something and maybe that will be enough
...
the sea is such longing for
its young, dawn, that pocked beauty
we have switched our alliance
made family out of desert
desiccant, this relative of
thirsty enough to swallow
our rage, her mouth, spitting out
cactus and scree, impervious to the hunger
wrinkled sheaths of skin
...
one way to explain it is the tree
those skinny roots stabbing into volcanic rock
the first thing to grow isn’t always pretty
the limbs are barren sticks
there are no flowers or fragrant music
it is simply phloem and xylem
emerging from the crust
an igneous womb
...
this morning is not the witch’s tit that you spoke of. so many disastrous women or so the story goes. there are others who claim not to notice the circumstance of sex. I call them liars but I know enough never to do this to their face. the earth as mother is a tragedy of subjugation and resistance. twenty miles away dawn is met by a concrete freeway overpass where she wakes, her body some broken antique toy. some parts move noisily. the others time has frozen in place. go ask her what woman means, mother or pleasure or garbage strewn contiguously so that no one place is either landfill or pristine. not containment or contaminant but that which bears the brunt of it, some dark once furry place between her legs.
...
in the beginning people said all kinds of things
which later someone took for religion
but the first words were not about god but food
then sex i know because i’ve been hungry
god has nothing to do with it
when the ocean comes and reclaims us
a few will survive, they will eat and make babies
this is my story and god is not allowed
only tangerines and sailor girls
there will be no more babies either
Tuesday, December 22, 2009
Ornithology
...
like a bird that
invisibly wakens
and feeds its
unborn young
at midnight
when no one can
know whether things
as they are
go on
-Inger Christensen, Alphabet
...
collection
i told you everything once, everything that i knew. it was winter then. it is winter now. this weak earth year in which i put my head on your lap and found birdsong. a nesting of.
you woven tendon by tendon. crepuscular. shouldering one hemisphere.
what love is bough then horizon. this love is. this love.
fledgling. wing. onomatopoeia. the flight of you.
everything spoken. then nothing to speak of.
fog reminds me of you. dawn does. every shimmering of night.
the first opening is exhausting. then torn and scabbed over. there is no pliancy to the flesh. there is no flesh to. this bird is a wounding. this bird is no bird at all.
distribution
to cull sky. to cull anything. this misapprehension of.
there is a white stubbornness to daylight. to winter. to migratory sight. i flew across an indefinite expanse. i drew myself proximate to you.
the field is brown grass, rotted fruit, a haze of light. the field is filled with longing. every field. every page. every season. nostalgic for.
speciation
parapatric. to be adjascent. narrowly so. there are days when i have a glimpse of. the angularity of your clavicle. your radius. the featherless hues.
it takes immense force to distance species. to differentiate. it takes the earth’s shifting plates. it takes a lifetime to.
phylogeography
strewn across and through. these bits of birchbark and willow. these remnants of. what was once nest and nesting is wind and desertification. the genetic drift of you.
everywhere there are markers. mitochondria. the matrilineal evolution.
what can be told and retold. what can mean only in past tense. how we are splintered and shaped. the vicariance event.
i would narrate everything according to geologic shifts. the ferocity of a sudden river. the brutish thrust of mountain range. but we are distanced by nothing other than cacophony. neither isolate nor contiguous. a flurry of birds.
like a bird that
invisibly wakens
and feeds its
unborn young
at midnight
when no one can
know whether things
as they are
go on
-Inger Christensen, Alphabet
...
collection
i told you everything once, everything that i knew. it was winter then. it is winter now. this weak earth year in which i put my head on your lap and found birdsong. a nesting of.
you woven tendon by tendon. crepuscular. shouldering one hemisphere.
what love is bough then horizon. this love is. this love.
fledgling. wing. onomatopoeia. the flight of you.
everything spoken. then nothing to speak of.
fog reminds me of you. dawn does. every shimmering of night.
the first opening is exhausting. then torn and scabbed over. there is no pliancy to the flesh. there is no flesh to. this bird is a wounding. this bird is no bird at all.
distribution
to cull sky. to cull anything. this misapprehension of.
there is a white stubbornness to daylight. to winter. to migratory sight. i flew across an indefinite expanse. i drew myself proximate to you.
the field is brown grass, rotted fruit, a haze of light. the field is filled with longing. every field. every page. every season. nostalgic for.
speciation
parapatric. to be adjascent. narrowly so. there are days when i have a glimpse of. the angularity of your clavicle. your radius. the featherless hues.
it takes immense force to distance species. to differentiate. it takes the earth’s shifting plates. it takes a lifetime to.
phylogeography
strewn across and through. these bits of birchbark and willow. these remnants of. what was once nest and nesting is wind and desertification. the genetic drift of you.
everywhere there are markers. mitochondria. the matrilineal evolution.
what can be told and retold. what can mean only in past tense. how we are splintered and shaped. the vicariance event.
i would narrate everything according to geologic shifts. the ferocity of a sudden river. the brutish thrust of mountain range. but we are distanced by nothing other than cacophony. neither isolate nor contiguous. a flurry of birds.
Thursday, December 10, 2009
too human to sit still for the endless rotation
a room full of bodies who
crave the interiority of every space
the birds burrow under wings
heat themselves in the sparse leaves of winter
if not windows then what to call the exterior
your face so strange and yet this familiar skin
we live so many lives simultaneously
who can discern known from unknown
calling everything by names learned at birth
make your palm a sword
severe the illusionary umbilical
breach the sheath of this world
a room full of bodies who
crave the interiority of every space
the birds burrow under wings
heat themselves in the sparse leaves of winter
if not windows then what to call the exterior
your face so strange and yet this familiar skin
we live so many lives simultaneously
who can discern known from unknown
calling everything by names learned at birth
make your palm a sword
severe the illusionary umbilical
breach the sheath of this world
Sunday, November 8, 2009
the body is diurnal. or it is supposed to be.
all night he labors to breathe, to vomit, to flip over.
it is impossible to sleep while the lungs fill, while every cavity
of the body is drowning.
i lie beside him on the floor
holding his paw in my own.
the night crawls, some miserable
inchworm, forward.
in the morning, every extremity is cold.
his tongue is grey, folding backward.
and still he struggles. to breathe. to not breathe.
i have no idea how to ease his passage. to lessen the suffering.
panting beside him, i welcome each drop of morphine
the sickening sweetness of it on our tongue.
all night he labors to breathe, to vomit, to flip over.
it is impossible to sleep while the lungs fill, while every cavity
of the body is drowning.
i lie beside him on the floor
holding his paw in my own.
the night crawls, some miserable
inchworm, forward.
in the morning, every extremity is cold.
his tongue is grey, folding backward.
and still he struggles. to breathe. to not breathe.
i have no idea how to ease his passage. to lessen the suffering.
panting beside him, i welcome each drop of morphine
the sickening sweetness of it on our tongue.
Wednesday, July 8, 2009
How to be an Adult
Chapter 1
He googled trust and she did what those who forgot such things often did. She lifted her leg and peed on it, yellowing the grass, marking her turn at things. The light caught the blades of grass, the wetness of her waste, shocking in its beauty. He took the diagnostic assessment. A score below twelve meant an array of interventions. What can be done alone. What cannot. Several evenings dedicated to this. She refused the premise. Who can trust anyone, anything? Who cannot? The effect on the vegetation was alarming. The salvia bloomed a violent russet. The sage died. A mourning dove landed on the metal railing of the fire escape, cooed, then left. Mornings offered greater possibility. She tried again.
Chapter 2
By dusk they were both similarly situated. The sky exhibited its own sense of things, spreading its puffs of clouds, then darkening. She called him to say what exactly? That she was alone, afraid. He read her the results of. Fear of intimacy. Fear of being eclipsed. The sun did such things. Shamelessly. This unstoppable desire to. No one blamed it. She held onto her ancient thread. There were others who asked for less, demanded less. Who were they really? The city flickered. She went through her drawer of hidden books, the damaged child, difficult communication, loving freely. Honestly, who would read such things? She had, or tried to. He did. The earth shifted, belched. She cried. She often did. He focused on the future and worked his way back. It provided some ease.
Chapter 3
She finds it exhausting. The wind. The trees. Trying to think through the fog’s wet white coat. The child on the other side of things puts on her parka and walks out the door. Each day moving toward it. Her life. Her future. This attempt to.
Chapter 4
Everywhere, it seems, there are lovers. At the café, the women touch hands across the table, tentatively as if some dart may be hidden within the other’s fingertips. The band is all strings and heart songs. Beside her a couple slips into one another’s skin. As if to be separate, to feel the edge between self and air—a misunderstanding to be sure, but still to feel it—as if to feel it, is simply too much. To not feel it. Well that is difficult too.
Chapter 5
The question becomes eventually who to believe. There is always yourself, a person known to be untrustworthy. There is the therapist you pay to be reliable who has instructed you on several occasions to lie. There is the lover, or the object of, who cannot or does but intermittently, unwillingly, angrily. There is your sister who advises with the decisiveness of a prosecuting attorney. But how can she know so absolutely what should and should not be done? Perhaps it is living in the east, her proximity to dawn, the day’s clearest intent. You are in the west where endings are the only thing definitive. You listens to all of them, none of them. There is an echo inside the eerie quiet of you that suggests you should bend, always bend. And you do, half way over until your mouth is swallowing your foot, choking on it. This is what it means to.
Chapter 6
There is a story about a crow who tried over and over again to change his color. The raven laughed at him, told crow black is the most beautiful color. But crow was completely taken hold by his desire. He befriended other birds, borrowed their feathers, used a paste of honey and mud to adhere the colorful plumage to his breast. This is a story about compassion. When the feathers fell crow became angry. All he wanted was a bit of color. Who could begrudge him that? Everyone it seemed. So crow began taking things, plucking the brightest feathers from the parrot’s wings. The birds gathered together to discuss crow, envy, the dissolution of self. They decided to make crow a perch of wildflowers tied to the branch of a maple tree. Each day one of the birds brought new flowers for crow’s roost. This isn’t a story about crow, who never let go of his dream of colorful plumage. You can hear him now in the tree complaining. This is a story about you, about desire, the force of it. Even now, you want more than this lovely little nest.
Chapter 7
She has relearned everything. Lived the same lesson so many times it is landscape. One morning she forgets to look down when crossing the street and finds herself without ground beneath her. It had only been her relentless belief in the earth that had held it there. Somehow in the repetition she had forgot to hold still her imagination. This is the predicament, the necessary prerequisite to. She does not fall down or through but onto something new. Everywhere there are solid, non-solids. She is not solid although she experiences herself as such. Even now on the back of another cartilaginous shell, she is dreaming of objects that by their very nature have fixed positions in space. Is it only once she notices that the particles are vibrating, humming a monotone but surprisingly pleasant tune, that she sees the turtle’s beak could just as easily be the moon.
Chapter 8
Everyone has an opinion. On the corner, there is a man carrying his life on his back. When you pass, he tells you, “silence is golden.” He has been instructed to. Everywhere there are lessons. Another man with less belongings but more rage tells you who is to blame, an entire population connected by nothing other than the color of their skin. Days later you have grown accustom to hearing these strange proclamations, these demands that the complications of life, the deep suffering, be lessoned. You are not surprised when a man pushing his belongings as if a sled across the tundra begins shouting “cunt.” You tell yourself he is talking to one of his ghosts. We all are. You hold this thought until he describes her, the cunt in the blue sweatshirt with long dark hair, and it is you. You look back, shrug, you’ve been called worse. You make some internal gesture of compassion but can only manifest pity. That is until he shouts “that cunt there is having an abortion.” Something inside you stops, shuts off completely. To be named in the street by someone you do not know, cannot know, and yet he knows you. Or the ghost of you. That girl who at nineteen called herself a demon for ending what she could not begin. Twenty years later it is still your deepest shame. He crosses the street, but does not stop his recriminations. “That right,” he says, “you’re a cunt.” You do not seem able to move. Standing on the street corner, flayed open, utterly exposed.
Chapter 9
She dines on guilt or is it rage while he practices his gender, getting the inflection, walk, misogyny just right. Anger is something they both do well. It is satisfying to be able to shout what is unspeakable at a lower decibel. They circle the kitchen, enacting some inherited ritual. Everything they’ve been taught to. She grabs the reddest apple, takes a bite. He spits out the bitter wax of skin. There are so many egos in the room their appendages have become entangled. When she tries to leave, his palm is still caught in the pit of her arm. She takes the paring knife and begins to peel the newly haired surface of him. Beneath is not the girl she loved but the man who cares about nothing other than the possibility of what he can become.
Chapter 10
There is story about a crab who grows tired of his claws, the enormous weight of them. He asks seagull to bite them off with her sharp beak. Seagull loves to slip the world into her mouth. She snaps his claw between her beak, cracking the shell, but not severing the flesh beneath. Ouch cries crab, withdrawing his mangled claw. Crab decides that it was not his claws but his shell, the entire exoskeleton that he wished to be free of. This presents a greater challenge. How to become something else entirely. Crab crawls back into the crook of rock he calls his home. Using all the magic he has scavenged over the years, crab drinks a concoction of herbs, buries himself in ointment soaked wraps. For months he sings songs he learned from the ocean, birthing songs, songs of death. When he grows too big for his cave he moves farther inland, toward the mountains, toward milk secreting mammae. The earth turns slowly around the flame. It is hard to say how long it takes to become. One morning he simply wakes to himself, a grey and white spotted horse, his right front hoof cracked in two.
Chapter 11
It has become a national obsession, adulthood, realism, prudence. Even the hummingbird has stilled its wings. She doesn’t notice when the vegetation begins to mute its colors; she is too busy practicing her circumlocution. The daily parade of boys thins out. He is often alone in the street, holding one side of the gender line. A child of loneliness, he does not notice the absences. It is too intoxicating, this becoming. Too change everything and nothing, as if slipping off the dressing of skin only to be wrapped in another. When she leaves, he will replace her with pornography. Girls on girls, boys on girls, boys on boys, everyone on everything, dildos, dicks, pussies galore. This should carry him through her departure. Adulthood is trying enough, she knows, but being a chaperone, intolerable.
Chapter 12
When she leaves one room she moves into another. This is a platitude. Being obvious does not make anything less so. She is as predicable as any other member of the species. The door to the first room had been partially closed, only a fraction of the interior lit. She stumbled around in the darkness, smacked her shin against the chair. Who wouldn’t be frustrated by such difficulty? She slammed the door shut despite the body, the boy waiting in the bed. The hallway affords a kind of transition, too short to reside in. She moves toward the next room, which is larger, better appointed. Or at least she can see the furniture, the dresser covered in photographs, the trunk with its history tucked neatly beside the bed. This does not make the navigation any less treacherous. Obstacles are often intangible, but she bumps up against them again and again. The door is open, the hallway precarious. Does it really matter in which direction anybody heads?
Chapter 13
Holidays are the perfect occasion on which to celebrate the heartbreak of repetition. To wake one morning beside someone new only to feel that old sense of. Outside is the meadow, creek, morning sun bright against the slope of trees. Inside is the self with its circular narration. The laws of physics, as least the classic ones, are derived from a similar addiction to dependencies. It is how we recognize the objects around us. Is it how we know ourselves. This makes future difficult. We can move toward it, but with all of our belongings, it looks quite similar to what is being left behind. The woman beside you is not like any of the woman who came before, and yet she is eerily familiar. Another broken person. Someone who knows love as fleetingly as the winged tip of the robin flying past.
Chapter 14
If it seems as if nothing works, is it true that nothing does? Or perhaps everything works but the one thing you keep trying over and over. You should get a new hobby. Something simple, something that occupies your hands. Perhaps knitting or assembling model airplanes. Perhaps sniffing glue. Your pantomimes have produced little understanding. Maybe it is the discontinuity between your mouth and hands. You’ve always had difficulty with alignment. When the guests arrive, you hide yourself in the back of the room, the couch swallowing every limb in its blue cloud. “Where is so and so?” somebody says. A woman steps forward. She is not so and so but what does it matter? There are breasts, a medium length of nondescript hair, some lipstick. “Oh,” says somebody, surprised but not unhappily. At least there is alcohol, you think, or perhaps somebody else says, under her breath, and you believe that you have thought it. It is not a party but there are many gathering. It is not a gathering but some kind of collective act of desperation. “We matter,” the MC says. Everyone nods. So much easier to prove when there are multiple occurrences of.
Chapter 15
What is being investigated is not who or why but what. What does it mean to? She is clearly old enough to know. Should know. Isn’t that the reason for all those years seated in a small wooden chair? So much nomenclature and chronology to memorize. Even now she remembers the names of things for which she no longer holds an image. The igneous crust. Hominidae, Lucy, that brittle ancestor. Everyone knows how to live: one foot planted firmly after the other. But what if only one foot? What if the earth is not soil but water? She smashes the wooden chair into pieces. She is angry yes, but productively so. The wood can be used to craft a makeshift boat. Her hair can be used to tie the oars. Her skin, she finds, makes an excellent sail.
Chapter 16
She has come to the place in the script where she finds herself waking to her grief, a pig roasting on a spit. The meat is gritty with ash. This too had been predicted. To repeat, to compound, is carcinogenic. To interfere with a cell’s natural death. She should put the pig in a casket, say the necessary eulogy and be done with it. But it is hard to let go of the companionship of its remains. Perhaps cremation. Or a funeral pyre. Such devotion to the suffering of. She wonders if emotional excess offends god, or the collective sentience often described as such. Probably not. We all seemed to be made from the same stubborn clay. If she were to hold a wake others would bring their carcasses too. She should just get on with it, somehow lift herself from the bed. It is possible to be simultaneously both alive and dead. To dress and leave the apartment, to find oneself on the corner with no idea of which way to go. As an experiment, she covers her eyes and walks into the street, into the damp skin of fog. She can hear the cars but cannot see them. There is nothing to fear, she knows; the vehicles are filled with people just like her.
Chapter 17
There is a story about a fox who grew a multitude of tails, one for every calamity she survived. At first she was pleased with the density of plumage, but eventually she grew tired of holding so many tails up in the air. When muskrat asked her how he too could be so luxuriously appendaged, fox told him to put his nose into the fire, catch his paw in a metal trap. Muskrat being naïve, and perhaps a little dumb, did exactly that. And while his injuries were serious, his tail remained the same. Fox, however, grew two more tails, each thicker and more richly hued than the next.
Chapter 18
There are the predictable weather patterns: wind, rain, a potential flood. By dusk, the birds have bedded down in the trees and the boats have come home to roost. Despite the warnings, she swims out past the buoy, past all calls for self-protection. To be broken is to have lost the memory of. If she finds herself here, there, anywhere, then she is meant to. Or so says everything she has come to believe. She finds herself empty-handed, having lost something specific but vaguely rendered. Having found something that looks nothing like what she thought it would. Back to this place, this bay, waking or having woken to. Back to location and everything it provides. She dives down, grabs a rock, a cuttlefish. She scrapes the shell against her palm, drawing her life across its tenderness. There are plants that die at the slightest touch. She was meant to. Or no one was, but somehow she learned to wither in proximity. Proximate. This desire to.
Chapter 19
The simplest agreement can be made between two people, one predicated on common gestures and locutions. Here is an example: Subject A has concerns about Subject B, or the loss of him; Subject B has concerns about Subject A, or her capacity to. But they play the mating game nonetheless. This is their accord, to always choose the make-believe. Sometimes she slips, can’t remember that the toy should be as desirous as the boy who is holding it. Sometimes he lets go of everything he pretends to be. The agreement cannot withstand such forgetfulness, every word, every touch becomes a breach. She agreed to love him, the man he was intent on becoming. He agreed to let her, to love the person he wished her to be in return. She does, in bits and spurts. He has the predictable seizures. It should be easy enough to tear up the agreement. They have tried repeatedly. But the paper is pulp and glue. It has been difficult to wash it completely from their hands.
Chapter 20
Every dawn, there is another one. She wakes and tells herself she will no longer. She makes it partially through the day. To arrive again at the some point in the story. There is a kind of presence to it, to self-aggrandizement, self-hatred. She wonders if there is not even some comfort, the dilemma so perfectly ensconcing her. When she thinks of her mind, it is not possible to picture anything beyond the spelling of it, its alphabet of despair. She has learned to tell herself that it is only her mind, a simple malfunction. It should be easy enough to repair. She crawls out the window onto the fire escape. Despite the asphalt, the birds are all she can hear. She thinks often of her amputated wings, missing the heft of them. There is no reason, she says, to believe this body is any different than the previous one. She is alone, speaking to herself, but the sound of her voice is birdsong, nonsensical, sweet to her ears. There is no reason to believe this mind and its endless narration. She grabs the railing with both hands and swings herself over the metal bars. It is not far really to the ground, but she has no intention of landing there. She leaps out, diving, no flying, flapping her phantom wings.
Chapter 21
It has become abundantly clear that she has no idea how to be an adult. Maybe next go around, she says, hearing the familiar howl. She has taken to walking long stretches of the city, the perimeters of it, as if circling an invisible pen. Some animals live longer in captivity; wolves gain an additional six to ten years. There is the obvious issue of quality versus quantity but on that subject the wolf has not yet spoken. The wolf’s relationship to captivity has been clearly expressed. Unpredictable, untamable, the wolf will challenge the dominance of its captor. The wolf, in fact, will never submit. She has proven to be less resilient. Although bored by him, his unspoken demands, she has been seen, on occasion, licking the master’s hand.
He googled trust and she did what those who forgot such things often did. She lifted her leg and peed on it, yellowing the grass, marking her turn at things. The light caught the blades of grass, the wetness of her waste, shocking in its beauty. He took the diagnostic assessment. A score below twelve meant an array of interventions. What can be done alone. What cannot. Several evenings dedicated to this. She refused the premise. Who can trust anyone, anything? Who cannot? The effect on the vegetation was alarming. The salvia bloomed a violent russet. The sage died. A mourning dove landed on the metal railing of the fire escape, cooed, then left. Mornings offered greater possibility. She tried again.
Chapter 2
By dusk they were both similarly situated. The sky exhibited its own sense of things, spreading its puffs of clouds, then darkening. She called him to say what exactly? That she was alone, afraid. He read her the results of. Fear of intimacy. Fear of being eclipsed. The sun did such things. Shamelessly. This unstoppable desire to. No one blamed it. She held onto her ancient thread. There were others who asked for less, demanded less. Who were they really? The city flickered. She went through her drawer of hidden books, the damaged child, difficult communication, loving freely. Honestly, who would read such things? She had, or tried to. He did. The earth shifted, belched. She cried. She often did. He focused on the future and worked his way back. It provided some ease.
Chapter 3
She finds it exhausting. The wind. The trees. Trying to think through the fog’s wet white coat. The child on the other side of things puts on her parka and walks out the door. Each day moving toward it. Her life. Her future. This attempt to.
Chapter 4
Everywhere, it seems, there are lovers. At the café, the women touch hands across the table, tentatively as if some dart may be hidden within the other’s fingertips. The band is all strings and heart songs. Beside her a couple slips into one another’s skin. As if to be separate, to feel the edge between self and air—a misunderstanding to be sure, but still to feel it—as if to feel it, is simply too much. To not feel it. Well that is difficult too.
Chapter 5
The question becomes eventually who to believe. There is always yourself, a person known to be untrustworthy. There is the therapist you pay to be reliable who has instructed you on several occasions to lie. There is the lover, or the object of, who cannot or does but intermittently, unwillingly, angrily. There is your sister who advises with the decisiveness of a prosecuting attorney. But how can she know so absolutely what should and should not be done? Perhaps it is living in the east, her proximity to dawn, the day’s clearest intent. You are in the west where endings are the only thing definitive. You listens to all of them, none of them. There is an echo inside the eerie quiet of you that suggests you should bend, always bend. And you do, half way over until your mouth is swallowing your foot, choking on it. This is what it means to.
Chapter 6
There is a story about a crow who tried over and over again to change his color. The raven laughed at him, told crow black is the most beautiful color. But crow was completely taken hold by his desire. He befriended other birds, borrowed their feathers, used a paste of honey and mud to adhere the colorful plumage to his breast. This is a story about compassion. When the feathers fell crow became angry. All he wanted was a bit of color. Who could begrudge him that? Everyone it seemed. So crow began taking things, plucking the brightest feathers from the parrot’s wings. The birds gathered together to discuss crow, envy, the dissolution of self. They decided to make crow a perch of wildflowers tied to the branch of a maple tree. Each day one of the birds brought new flowers for crow’s roost. This isn’t a story about crow, who never let go of his dream of colorful plumage. You can hear him now in the tree complaining. This is a story about you, about desire, the force of it. Even now, you want more than this lovely little nest.
Chapter 7
She has relearned everything. Lived the same lesson so many times it is landscape. One morning she forgets to look down when crossing the street and finds herself without ground beneath her. It had only been her relentless belief in the earth that had held it there. Somehow in the repetition she had forgot to hold still her imagination. This is the predicament, the necessary prerequisite to. She does not fall down or through but onto something new. Everywhere there are solid, non-solids. She is not solid although she experiences herself as such. Even now on the back of another cartilaginous shell, she is dreaming of objects that by their very nature have fixed positions in space. Is it only once she notices that the particles are vibrating, humming a monotone but surprisingly pleasant tune, that she sees the turtle’s beak could just as easily be the moon.
Chapter 8
Everyone has an opinion. On the corner, there is a man carrying his life on his back. When you pass, he tells you, “silence is golden.” He has been instructed to. Everywhere there are lessons. Another man with less belongings but more rage tells you who is to blame, an entire population connected by nothing other than the color of their skin. Days later you have grown accustom to hearing these strange proclamations, these demands that the complications of life, the deep suffering, be lessoned. You are not surprised when a man pushing his belongings as if a sled across the tundra begins shouting “cunt.” You tell yourself he is talking to one of his ghosts. We all are. You hold this thought until he describes her, the cunt in the blue sweatshirt with long dark hair, and it is you. You look back, shrug, you’ve been called worse. You make some internal gesture of compassion but can only manifest pity. That is until he shouts “that cunt there is having an abortion.” Something inside you stops, shuts off completely. To be named in the street by someone you do not know, cannot know, and yet he knows you. Or the ghost of you. That girl who at nineteen called herself a demon for ending what she could not begin. Twenty years later it is still your deepest shame. He crosses the street, but does not stop his recriminations. “That right,” he says, “you’re a cunt.” You do not seem able to move. Standing on the street corner, flayed open, utterly exposed.
Chapter 9
She dines on guilt or is it rage while he practices his gender, getting the inflection, walk, misogyny just right. Anger is something they both do well. It is satisfying to be able to shout what is unspeakable at a lower decibel. They circle the kitchen, enacting some inherited ritual. Everything they’ve been taught to. She grabs the reddest apple, takes a bite. He spits out the bitter wax of skin. There are so many egos in the room their appendages have become entangled. When she tries to leave, his palm is still caught in the pit of her arm. She takes the paring knife and begins to peel the newly haired surface of him. Beneath is not the girl she loved but the man who cares about nothing other than the possibility of what he can become.
Chapter 10
There is story about a crab who grows tired of his claws, the enormous weight of them. He asks seagull to bite them off with her sharp beak. Seagull loves to slip the world into her mouth. She snaps his claw between her beak, cracking the shell, but not severing the flesh beneath. Ouch cries crab, withdrawing his mangled claw. Crab decides that it was not his claws but his shell, the entire exoskeleton that he wished to be free of. This presents a greater challenge. How to become something else entirely. Crab crawls back into the crook of rock he calls his home. Using all the magic he has scavenged over the years, crab drinks a concoction of herbs, buries himself in ointment soaked wraps. For months he sings songs he learned from the ocean, birthing songs, songs of death. When he grows too big for his cave he moves farther inland, toward the mountains, toward milk secreting mammae. The earth turns slowly around the flame. It is hard to say how long it takes to become. One morning he simply wakes to himself, a grey and white spotted horse, his right front hoof cracked in two.
Chapter 11
It has become a national obsession, adulthood, realism, prudence. Even the hummingbird has stilled its wings. She doesn’t notice when the vegetation begins to mute its colors; she is too busy practicing her circumlocution. The daily parade of boys thins out. He is often alone in the street, holding one side of the gender line. A child of loneliness, he does not notice the absences. It is too intoxicating, this becoming. Too change everything and nothing, as if slipping off the dressing of skin only to be wrapped in another. When she leaves, he will replace her with pornography. Girls on girls, boys on girls, boys on boys, everyone on everything, dildos, dicks, pussies galore. This should carry him through her departure. Adulthood is trying enough, she knows, but being a chaperone, intolerable.
Chapter 12
When she leaves one room she moves into another. This is a platitude. Being obvious does not make anything less so. She is as predicable as any other member of the species. The door to the first room had been partially closed, only a fraction of the interior lit. She stumbled around in the darkness, smacked her shin against the chair. Who wouldn’t be frustrated by such difficulty? She slammed the door shut despite the body, the boy waiting in the bed. The hallway affords a kind of transition, too short to reside in. She moves toward the next room, which is larger, better appointed. Or at least she can see the furniture, the dresser covered in photographs, the trunk with its history tucked neatly beside the bed. This does not make the navigation any less treacherous. Obstacles are often intangible, but she bumps up against them again and again. The door is open, the hallway precarious. Does it really matter in which direction anybody heads?
Chapter 13
Holidays are the perfect occasion on which to celebrate the heartbreak of repetition. To wake one morning beside someone new only to feel that old sense of. Outside is the meadow, creek, morning sun bright against the slope of trees. Inside is the self with its circular narration. The laws of physics, as least the classic ones, are derived from a similar addiction to dependencies. It is how we recognize the objects around us. Is it how we know ourselves. This makes future difficult. We can move toward it, but with all of our belongings, it looks quite similar to what is being left behind. The woman beside you is not like any of the woman who came before, and yet she is eerily familiar. Another broken person. Someone who knows love as fleetingly as the winged tip of the robin flying past.
Chapter 14
If it seems as if nothing works, is it true that nothing does? Or perhaps everything works but the one thing you keep trying over and over. You should get a new hobby. Something simple, something that occupies your hands. Perhaps knitting or assembling model airplanes. Perhaps sniffing glue. Your pantomimes have produced little understanding. Maybe it is the discontinuity between your mouth and hands. You’ve always had difficulty with alignment. When the guests arrive, you hide yourself in the back of the room, the couch swallowing every limb in its blue cloud. “Where is so and so?” somebody says. A woman steps forward. She is not so and so but what does it matter? There are breasts, a medium length of nondescript hair, some lipstick. “Oh,” says somebody, surprised but not unhappily. At least there is alcohol, you think, or perhaps somebody else says, under her breath, and you believe that you have thought it. It is not a party but there are many gathering. It is not a gathering but some kind of collective act of desperation. “We matter,” the MC says. Everyone nods. So much easier to prove when there are multiple occurrences of.
Chapter 15
What is being investigated is not who or why but what. What does it mean to? She is clearly old enough to know. Should know. Isn’t that the reason for all those years seated in a small wooden chair? So much nomenclature and chronology to memorize. Even now she remembers the names of things for which she no longer holds an image. The igneous crust. Hominidae, Lucy, that brittle ancestor. Everyone knows how to live: one foot planted firmly after the other. But what if only one foot? What if the earth is not soil but water? She smashes the wooden chair into pieces. She is angry yes, but productively so. The wood can be used to craft a makeshift boat. Her hair can be used to tie the oars. Her skin, she finds, makes an excellent sail.
Chapter 16
She has come to the place in the script where she finds herself waking to her grief, a pig roasting on a spit. The meat is gritty with ash. This too had been predicted. To repeat, to compound, is carcinogenic. To interfere with a cell’s natural death. She should put the pig in a casket, say the necessary eulogy and be done with it. But it is hard to let go of the companionship of its remains. Perhaps cremation. Or a funeral pyre. Such devotion to the suffering of. She wonders if emotional excess offends god, or the collective sentience often described as such. Probably not. We all seemed to be made from the same stubborn clay. If she were to hold a wake others would bring their carcasses too. She should just get on with it, somehow lift herself from the bed. It is possible to be simultaneously both alive and dead. To dress and leave the apartment, to find oneself on the corner with no idea of which way to go. As an experiment, she covers her eyes and walks into the street, into the damp skin of fog. She can hear the cars but cannot see them. There is nothing to fear, she knows; the vehicles are filled with people just like her.
Chapter 17
There is a story about a fox who grew a multitude of tails, one for every calamity she survived. At first she was pleased with the density of plumage, but eventually she grew tired of holding so many tails up in the air. When muskrat asked her how he too could be so luxuriously appendaged, fox told him to put his nose into the fire, catch his paw in a metal trap. Muskrat being naïve, and perhaps a little dumb, did exactly that. And while his injuries were serious, his tail remained the same. Fox, however, grew two more tails, each thicker and more richly hued than the next.
Chapter 18
There are the predictable weather patterns: wind, rain, a potential flood. By dusk, the birds have bedded down in the trees and the boats have come home to roost. Despite the warnings, she swims out past the buoy, past all calls for self-protection. To be broken is to have lost the memory of. If she finds herself here, there, anywhere, then she is meant to. Or so says everything she has come to believe. She finds herself empty-handed, having lost something specific but vaguely rendered. Having found something that looks nothing like what she thought it would. Back to this place, this bay, waking or having woken to. Back to location and everything it provides. She dives down, grabs a rock, a cuttlefish. She scrapes the shell against her palm, drawing her life across its tenderness. There are plants that die at the slightest touch. She was meant to. Or no one was, but somehow she learned to wither in proximity. Proximate. This desire to.
Chapter 19
The simplest agreement can be made between two people, one predicated on common gestures and locutions. Here is an example: Subject A has concerns about Subject B, or the loss of him; Subject B has concerns about Subject A, or her capacity to. But they play the mating game nonetheless. This is their accord, to always choose the make-believe. Sometimes she slips, can’t remember that the toy should be as desirous as the boy who is holding it. Sometimes he lets go of everything he pretends to be. The agreement cannot withstand such forgetfulness, every word, every touch becomes a breach. She agreed to love him, the man he was intent on becoming. He agreed to let her, to love the person he wished her to be in return. She does, in bits and spurts. He has the predictable seizures. It should be easy enough to tear up the agreement. They have tried repeatedly. But the paper is pulp and glue. It has been difficult to wash it completely from their hands.
Chapter 20
Every dawn, there is another one. She wakes and tells herself she will no longer. She makes it partially through the day. To arrive again at the some point in the story. There is a kind of presence to it, to self-aggrandizement, self-hatred. She wonders if there is not even some comfort, the dilemma so perfectly ensconcing her. When she thinks of her mind, it is not possible to picture anything beyond the spelling of it, its alphabet of despair. She has learned to tell herself that it is only her mind, a simple malfunction. It should be easy enough to repair. She crawls out the window onto the fire escape. Despite the asphalt, the birds are all she can hear. She thinks often of her amputated wings, missing the heft of them. There is no reason, she says, to believe this body is any different than the previous one. She is alone, speaking to herself, but the sound of her voice is birdsong, nonsensical, sweet to her ears. There is no reason to believe this mind and its endless narration. She grabs the railing with both hands and swings herself over the metal bars. It is not far really to the ground, but she has no intention of landing there. She leaps out, diving, no flying, flapping her phantom wings.
Chapter 21
It has become abundantly clear that she has no idea how to be an adult. Maybe next go around, she says, hearing the familiar howl. She has taken to walking long stretches of the city, the perimeters of it, as if circling an invisible pen. Some animals live longer in captivity; wolves gain an additional six to ten years. There is the obvious issue of quality versus quantity but on that subject the wolf has not yet spoken. The wolf’s relationship to captivity has been clearly expressed. Unpredictable, untamable, the wolf will challenge the dominance of its captor. The wolf, in fact, will never submit. She has proven to be less resilient. Although bored by him, his unspoken demands, she has been seen, on occasion, licking the master’s hand.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)