You have to have had a bad trip
at least once
to endure life in this godforsaken century
where time moves at two speeds
the very fast
and the very long.
Because eventually this will end,
you counsel the scared girl
huddled in the corner
of a dimly-lit crowded room,
it’s only a matter of breathing through it.
Here’s where you start whispering
Shh, my dear one, shh.
your solid hand
on her back
tracing warm circles.
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.
Shh, my sweet one, shh.
It is true
that 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.
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 step off the curb into suddenly empty streets
a shiftless parade taking pictures with disposable cameras
of two impossibly tall buildings with flames leaping delicately only from the top floors
that will 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 sadness
and all of the various fads, waves, strivings
for relief
for respite
for control
Bobby Socks &
Taebo
How else can you 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.
How else can you convince her
that she hasn’t suddenly stepped
into amber
or tar.
Time has always been
this capacious
and suffocating,
and you know that this this level of heightened
attention
is unendurable.
Or, you murmur to the huddled girl
who is 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.