Poems

Here’s Where You Start Whispering (8.11.22 Draft)

You have to have had a bad trip at least once

to endure life in this godforsaken millennium

where time moves at two speeds

the very fast

and the very long;

where the periphery 

has become the ground;

where images of murdered children                [the sound of their screams removed]

kaleidoscope 

         fractally

              viscerally

                     unrelentingly 

taking the shape of genocide

then refugees drowning at the lips of angry borders

now the poisoned rain of our slow shared climate death.


Because you always come into a trip with such grandiose expectations:

your friend has a shroom connection

someone knows a cool spot

and no one has anywhere to be the next day,

and then you find yourself huddled in the bathroom,

sweating and crying,

as you watch the Day-Glo bubbles of the city’s breath rise to the surface of the toilet water and

disappear without bursting.


Because you know we came into this millennium with that big Times Square energy

that shared Y2K hysteria, 

our first chance to rehearse for a tragedy with potentially global consequences

without actually preparing for it.


And then one year in

four planes were hijacked

by pilots who trained on US soil

but left class before learning

how to land.

And for years all anyone could see 

was two tall buildings with flames leaping delicately only from the top floors.


Eventually they both

astonishingly 

disappeared

one by one 

leaving pipe-shaped billows of smoke,

that smelled of something terrible

burning, 

and cast a decades’ long shadow.


This is almost the literal underbelly of our expectations.


So now, when you counsel the young girl huddled over the toilet to

Breathe,

or,

vomit if you have to,

or shit

there’s no point in fighting it

you know of which you speak.


Still trembling against the poison she feels in her bowels and blood

she struggles to slow and deepen her breaths.


Here’s where you start whispering

Shh, my dear one, shh.

There is no respite

and no reprieve

and no lost eden to which you can credibly long to return

not post-war plentitude

not the Christian Middle Ages

not pre-Christian nature.

It has never been entirely safe for us,

for women

and there is no figure you can turn to

or return to

for safety 

or wholeness


But, I’m here.


Your solid hand 

traces warm circles

on her back.


It’s automatic 

the tracing

and the whispering

like a mother who continues to rock back and forth lulling the child in her arms 

long after he has fallen asleep

long after he is too old to be held in her arms and rocked to sleep.


You know this is the least amount of comfort you can offer

and the most. 


You know how easily

even you

can turn into a swampy black figure hunched hungry

in her past.


You know that this thin stretch of intimacy

—you know that it’s thin.


There is still solid ground, 

you coo, 

but you don’t have to reach for it yet.


Not here where the breaches are sometimes spectacular plastic vortexes in the ocean, 

and sometimes merely arsenic in the Johnson & Johnson’s baby wash.


Not here, where the predators are 

our familiars.


You have to have lived

through the blindfold coming off

and staying

horrifically off

for minute-hours

of hijacked attention

microscope eyes

running over histories of exploitation, extraction, and extermination

and all of the manic fads, waves, strivings

for relief

for respite

for control

Bobby Socks &

Taebo 

the poorly-sublimated grotesqueries of bad faith, 

what Césaire called 

the West’s “fetid guts.”


How else can you convince this huddled girl

wondering how she can possibly live through attention heightened to the point of suffocation

that being pinioned 

like a fly

in the amber

or tar 

of capacious and unendurable seconds 

is

oddly

endurable.



You have to have had a bad trip at least once

to endure life in this godforsaken millennium

where time moves at two speeds

the very fast

and the very long;

where the periphery 

has become the ground;

where images of murdered children               

[the sound of their screams removed]

kaleidoscope 

         fractally

              viscerally

                     unrelentingly 

taking the shape of genocide

then refugees drowning at the lips of angry borders

now the poisoned rain of our slow shared climate death.


Because you always come into a trip with such grandiose expectations:

your friend has a shroom connection

someone knows a cool spot

and no one has anywhere to be the next day,

and then you find yourself huddled in the bathroom,

sweating and crying,

as you watch the Day-Glo bubbles of the city’s breath rise to the surface of the toilet water and

disappear without bursting.


Because you know we came into this millennium with that big Times Square energy

that shared Y2K hysteria, 

our first chance to rehearse for a tragedy with potentially global consequences

without actually preparing for it.


And then one year in

four planes were hijacked

by pilots who trained on US soil

but left class before learning

how to land.

And for years all anyone could see 

was two tall buildings with flames leaping delicately only from the top floors.


Eventually they both

astonishingly 

disappeared

one by one 

leaving pipe-shaped billows of smoke,

that smelled of something terrible

burning, 

and cast a decades’ long shadow.


This is almost the literal underbelly of our expectations.


So now, when you counsel the young girl huddled over the toilet to

Breathe,

or,

vomit if you have to,

or shit

there’s no point in fighting it

you know of which you speak.


Still trembling against the poison she feels in her bowels and blood

she struggles to slow and deepen her breaths.


Here’s where you start whispering

Shh, my dear one, shh.

There is no respite

and no reprieve

and no lost eden to which you can credibly long to return

not post-war plentitude

not the Christian Middle Ages

not pre-Christian nature.

It has never been entirely safe for us,

for women

and there is no figure you can turn to

or return to

for safety 

or wholeness


But, I’m here.


Your solid hand 

traces warm circles

on her back.


It’s automatic 

the tracing

and the whispering

like a mother who continues to rock back and forth lulling the child in her arms 

long after he has fallen asleep

long after he is too old to be held in her arms and rocked to sleep.


You know this is the least amount of comfort you can offer

and the most. 


You know how easily

even you

can turn into a swampy black figure hunched hungry

in her past.


You know that this thin stretch of intimacy

—you know that it’s thin.


There is still solid ground, 

you coo, 

but you don’t have to reach for it yet.


Not here where the breaches are sometimes spectacular plastic vortexes in the ocean, 

and sometimes merely arsenic in the Johnson & Johnson’s baby wash.


Not here, where the predators are 

our familiars.


You have to have lived

through the blindfold coming off

and staying

horrifically off

for minute-hours

of hijacked attention

microscope eyes

running over histories of exploitation, extraction, and extermination

and all of the manic fads, waves, strivings

for relief

for respite

for control

Bobby Socks &

Taebo 

the poorly-sublimated grotesqueries of bad faith, 

what Césaire called 

the West’s “fetid guts.”


How else can you convince this huddled girl

wondering how she can possibly live through attention heightened to the point of suffocation

that being pinioned 

like a fly

in the amber

or tar 

of capacious and unendurable seconds 

is

oddly

endurable.



 

Mama, what don’t you know?

First, I think of languages.

My college French

and fledgling Spanish,

all of the dialects.

I don’t even know the name of every country

or how many there are

or who gets to decide

what makes a country.

I haven’t seen every movie

or read every book

and then there are all the things that were never in books.

I don’t know the stars

or the name of every bird.

I wish I did,

especially the birds.

Here’s Where You Start Whispering

You have to have had a bad trip
at least once
to endure life in this godforsaken century

because eventually this will end
it’s only a matter of breathing through it

and figuring out how to convince everyone else
that time hasn’t suddenly stepped
into amber
or tar

it has always been
this capacious
and suffocating.

Here’s where you start whispering
to a scared girl
huddled in the corner
of a dimly-lit crowded room
your solid hand
on her back
tracing warm circles.
The tracing is automatic
so is the whispering
like a mother who continues to rock back and forth lulling the child in her arms long after he has fallen asleep, long after the child is too old to be held in her arms and rocked to sleep.

Shh, my dear, my sweet one, shh.
It’s true that there is no respite
and no reprieve
and no lost eden to which you can credibly long to return
not the Christian Middle Ages
not pre-Christian nature.
It has never been entirely safe for us,
for women
and there is no figure you can turn to
or return to
for safety
or wholeness

But, I’m here.

You know this is the least amount of comfort you can offer
and the most.

You know how easily
even you
can turn into a swampy black figure hunched hungry
in her past.

You know that this thin stretch of intimacy
—you know that it’s thin.

There is still
solid ground, you coo,
but you don’t have to reach for it yet.

Not here,
where the periphery has become the ground
where milling spectators stepped off the curb into suddenly empty streets
a shiftless parade taking pictures with disposable cameras
of two tall buildings with flames leaping delicately only from the top floors
that would soon
astonishingly
disappear
one by one
leaving pipe-shaped billows of smoke
and smelling of something terrible
burning.

Not here, where the breaches are not always spectacular plastic vortexes in the ocean,
but merely arsenic in the Johnson & Johnson’s baby wash.

Not here, where the predators are our familiars.

You have to have lived
through the blindfold coming off
and staying
horrifically off
for minute-hours
of hijacked attention
microscope eyes
running over histories of barbarity
and chickens coming home to roost
and all of the various fads, waves, strivings
for relief
for respite
for control
Bobby Socks &
Taebo
time moving at two speeds
the very fast
and the very long.

How else to recognize
this manic hyper-conscious shuttle toward an inevitable end
as the past by which
we will all be measured
whose right side
we will long to have been on.

Like Burroughs writing in his final journal
we know that some of these words will be the last
and we want them to be good
and prescient,
so we imagine the power of their latent meaning
if they do prove to be our last
even as we write them.

But that level of heightened attention
is unendurable.

Or, you murmur to the huddled girl
wondering how she’ll live through this, or how she’ll be able to stay awake with your palm tracing warm solid circles on her back,
oddly
endurable.

“It is not death we fear but the leaving of what we’ve loved.”
-Chorus, Thyestes

for Toni Wilson

Love is someone I want to tell everything to
and then don’t

Someone with whom I rehearse
imaginary conversations
they will only ever read.

Withheld intimacy
concentrates
into incantation
finally betraying
years of formal
and infrequent dispatches
like an actor’s silence that only becomes revelatory
when it is broken.

But you died before I could finish even this tribute.
Someone called me when it was too late
and I couldn’t even tell you
I was thankful
and filled with regret
that you didn’t know
the magnitude of that thanks.

I could only realize it here in the course of a poem to commemorate you
that perhaps it didn’t have to be an epic.
We could have put on Seneca together instead
something truly unstageable

He is meditating, either attending to Tantalus’ GHOST or else inventing him

You couldn’t resist the temptation
to stage the unspeakable gulf between what can be experienced and what can be expressed.

How could I know there wouldn’t be time enough to unspool each thread into its own filament?
How might you have received the lesser thread?

There is no recompense in the warmth of the writing of it
and yet, my beloved teacher, I continue to write.

Ars Memoriae

Why do you watch all of these videos? Shot by black men and women whose voices we hear but whose faces we never see? Videos that document the violence against them in case they are not there to testify or in case the people who come to protect and serve don’t? Why watch all of this nastiness? And hatred?

They are pilgrimages
temporary journeys for people privileged to not have to take the videos ourselves
that do our age the honor of
seeing it for what it is
seeing it from the eyes of the woman with the camera who cannot dare to feel outraged at this outrageous behavior

You can’t get out of the way you see the world
how you’ve been raised into it by teachers myriad and diverse
but you can try to see it
the thin translucent barrier
between brain and skull
that you can’t take off

Is the project of life
to take it off?

To flatline acid trip our way to
oceanic deliverance
categorylessness
prelapsarian plentitude?

Do we reverse the Fall
into coercive civilization
by an uncivilized order
when we chart its crimes?

Is this why we line up outside of Anne Frank’s house in Amsterdam
in the cold at night
and then funnel through
a gradual and subtly dawning
claustrophobia
propelled by the waves of people behind and in front of us?

Do there have to be hordes for it to work?

If the space wasn’t filled would there be this
panic
as we recede into smaller
and smaller
spaces
on vertiginous steps that creak and creak and creak,
into their hideout
where the audio guide goes silent
past photos glued to the wall,
a map of the Allies’ movement from Normandy dotted with scattered and hopeful pins
into the attic terminus where there is space for only two or three?

A small sign by the door explains
that originally the room ended here
the door to the street
was added later
for us
because the thought of turning around and squeezing through the throngs crushing behind us sucks the air out of my chest
which now swells with gratitude,
because the room they were trapped in
has a door
for us.

Like the video on Facebook that ends when the police arrive.
“I wouldn’t have stopped recording when the police arrived,”
someone comments.
When would you have stopped?

It is not deliverance we are looking for,
a gaze that erases itself,
but an honest depiction of the only gaze we can know
a map of its particular contours
the great work of a fully-realized life
replete with gaps and lacuna
moments of incredible attention
and then a door
through which
we can pour into the street hungry, thirsty, and free to
to go home.

the western tradition is only a puzzle
whose pieces can be gathered
and coerced into
a deceptively olympian view
by puzzle makers
who fancy themselves olympians

mastery
is obsolete
there is only curiosity piqued
momentarily appeased
and never sated

you teach
by modeling your reading
modeling your mind
a plume of native curiosity
a camp counselor leading her charges
laughing through the waves

 
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