Do you know where your son is? Your daughter? Does worry for them pour from your mouth like a cataract into the pool of your chest, racked open to the sky, your heart torn from its home there, its old path worn by the flood—gone, it seems, for good? This is where I know they once stood. Here—in this spot—they blew candles. As we try to get a handle on our world without them in it, we pray and still we wait and sit with the empty notes of our song echoing…echoing, then gone.
(…an abecedarian…)
It was...
…about this time that I decided to
become the list, to see and feel what
came next, to know from within the
dead weight and heft of
every single
form that I could fathom, the
grand scheme (if you will) of this
healing human game that has played
into (and out of) our history in countless ways for countless days,
jogging our memory, not judging us exactly, but still
keeping an eye on us from—
lying just there—just inside the door,
measuring and metering and giving
nonce notices from the threshold,
once in a while letting us
pretend to be in control,
(queer as that may seem) while still and stilly and quietly
reassuring us about our lacks at the same time, and
stretching us ever-so-gently, nursing us at the beginning and at the end, taking its
time with us, not leading us directly to (never that!) but at least pointing us
ever more towards
understanding, placing things in our paths with the utmost
veneration, teaching us the value and deep, deep roots of our
wonder, opening and reopening us, encouraging us to not fixate on the
x-y axis of every single thing around us, while still reminding us of the value
of anchors,
yearning for us still and always to always and still reach somehow beyond our
zenith, and maybe—just maybe—helping us to get out there, somewhere just a
little bit closer to it.
We both drum our fingers. He plays keys that aren’t there while I count imaginary feet and sole syllables.
(two for one today, again, because yesterday was a cock-up and today we get weird...) Hum(m)us Hearth of soil and soul of stone, gather us to your bosom. Hum us like warmth into winter’s close conjuring. Hum us into the bellies of our love. Heirlooms live in ancient ovens leavened with our tailings, leavings telling of our ordinary meals, the most sacred shared by us, alone. Pulses from one to the one that sprang from her very soil (earth murmurs), the maker passes on the notes of a melody for the making. Six simple gifts, the land's material, ascend in scales, soft sound offerings of humble place; ordinals older than words; sounds fat and round and full of life. "Fully formed and transformed by the mouth’s own making, the soil's song sings itself in tongues' silence," mumbles humus, a tune down in its roots. Oysters We went into the streets and squared our shoulders against the coming night. The clouds hung low in our minds, eating us-- eating our thoughts. The rats were everywhere, walking over our feet and chewing our fingernails for us. We twisted our hearts into animal shapes and gave them to the rats. They did not want them. They wanted the bones of our world to gnaw on. They wanted to be the humming birds that ate the fairies of our hearts. They wanted to filet the blue fish of our minds. They wanted to burrow through our marrow and delve into our guts, coming up with fresh oysters.
You can not save your life. It is not yours to save. No one can save your life. It is not theirs either. It is not yours to own. It is not your own. It is not to be owned. This is the beginning of bondage and the illusion of how to be possessed. It was never yours to own. It is already all loss to you the moment you think it a thing. A life-saving procedure is only a small procedure for delaying the moot loss of a thing you never owned, that was never a thing, saving it just to later lose what you never had to start with. You can't save life any more than you can save time. There is no bank in which to make this deposit. You cannot bank on it at all though you can, it seems, bet on it, bet with it, bet it on something, gamble it and waste it in so many ways that you can lose track of the ways in which you’ve lost it. But wether it is or isn’t here or not there, it is all you have to go on.
Are your words still with you? Did you carry your stories deep into the night and leave them like luggage on a railway platform, an age and more down silver tracks, with just the wind, the stars, and leaves like dust blowing and hissing in the dark? This silence leaves a fading mark. The thing that took you left your face in bodies unknown to you, lace filaments tracing what the eyes of others cannot see: the ties that generation takes away; the look in eyes that cannot stay.
A Prayer Like Gravity 