I split the ant with my thumbnail,
my chin pressed to my knee
I was folded up tight
besides the outstretched arm
eliminating the body
between my finger and the stair;
I pushed it apart in one motion.
It moves.
So this is
what it is
to halve.
Monday
Thursday
Maybe I will neither build nor discover a city (that city), I will just travel through one, or settle in one, or assist in the burning of one entirely different city that has no relation to the metallurgy of her spirit or the mining of her language. Of course the stones will always be there, because stones are always there, and they will be compressed and churned around the crust of the earth and maybe cracked and dug up by other people whose voices I may never hear. The point is that she is there and she can be dreamed to be, in some sense, eternal, even though stones, too, can flake away to dust, get carried on a wave, or melted to oblivion in the center of the earth.
Tuesday
Summertime
when i was young the shimmer sound of cicada song was the noise of summer. i was certain it was the sound of the sun burning in its slow toss over the sky.
as it rose from the atlantic in the morning it boiled off the ocean making clouds of steam over Brooklyn before crashing West.
* * *
outside, the gift lily is rotting
at the bulb. dust lifts from the surface
of the soil. when the rain comes down
too hard and too much. dirt grains
floating on the skin of water.
the rocks are smoothed.
the valleys are gouged.
the wrinkles are formed.
it carves as it cleanses.
then, thunder
like i haven't heard in months
like the splitting of my bones
after the jump.
the letter he wrote
hollows out my mind
and rattles for hours.
wall: june, july and august
built against the world.
Monday
Six Miles Above
the continent from above, june 2011
The flight departed at roughly 8:30 in the morning in Portland, 11:30 at my destination. I had never flown across the country in the daytime before.
My knowledge of the United States is spotty. I may as well view the world through a mirror. Having flown nearly everywhere I've ever been, I've barely experienced any spatial transitions between ecosystems or variance in terrain. This flight was the most I've ever seen of any landscape whatsoever, with the exception of the jagged peaks of different major cities (from within their centers), or short trips between them (New York-Baltimore, New York-Providence, etc). Seventeen cities and hardly a step beyond their limits.
Six miles of elevation gives the ground a visual quality not so different from the gloss of the photographs that have and continue to be my vision of the world. 35,000ft. Such a distance leaves only stone, water, plants, and architecture visible to the eye. As such humans are the only animal whose traces I could still detect.
There I was, poised in space, a dis-embodied eye, invisible, incorporeal, seeing but not seen.
The alluvial fan of agricultural development spread out of an Eastern bend in the Columbia River. How could the edges be so discrete? The steep sides of the Coastal Range sank under the momentarily flattened earth, spectacular in greens.
Again the earth began to rise, this time without end. The mountains, the likes of which I had never seen, bore little vegetation and exposed seams of multiple shades. They read like the rings of trees or lines made on walls to count years in isolation. Rivers were only the thinnest bands of water charging blindly along their paths wedged between the rock that seemed to force them out of the way. I remembered that the rivers wore their own paths through the stone. My perception of the hills began to change. They were no longer peaks rising out of flatness, but the remnants of a land that once rose all together, broken by the wearing away of water and wind, as badlands are worn by rainfall. Perhaps this was Idaho.
Quickly the mountains became steeper and trees began to grow. Snow appeared on some of the tallest peaks. I supposed we had reached Montana and was surprised and lost at the lack of signifiers to tell me. I was relieved to feel that common suspicions about mapping are true -- that it is incomplete, futile -- for I've never inhabited a place that did not have a network of streets, a direct articulation of a map, an obvious correspondence. For a while I was frantic in my search for a sign of where I was. I saw a lake that looked like a tear in fabric, a still and unnatural void whose edges seemed too precise to belong in its valley. Identifiable roads began to race through trees as though my eyes were laying them. They widened as they unwound eastward.
A brownish grey appeared in my periphery, and once it entered about halfway into the frame of my airplane window I was certain of where I was for the first time since takeoff. All of the mystery of my location over the land was as stripped and exposed as its surface. Lines winding downwards, a shade of lakewater I had never seen, a legible network of markings. A wide road belting a grid, spilling some street-lines south of its border. A city small enough to fit in my window with a trap door as the surface of its lake -- hardly a lake, but undeniable as such. Why such a strange beach? Carved like a stepwell whose waters none can touch. A city halved by excavation, whose hollows threatened annihilation by gravity. I knew where I was and searched for a white mark on a hill. I found nothing. The slope of the earth seemed to be crumbling into its deepest point. I passed over the scene in minutes, and, having held my breath for too long, surrendered to sleep for the next few hundred miles.
The flight departed at roughly 8:30 in the morning in Portland, 11:30 at my destination. I had never flown across the country in the daytime before.
My knowledge of the United States is spotty. I may as well view the world through a mirror. Having flown nearly everywhere I've ever been, I've barely experienced any spatial transitions between ecosystems or variance in terrain. This flight was the most I've ever seen of any landscape whatsoever, with the exception of the jagged peaks of different major cities (from within their centers), or short trips between them (New York-Baltimore, New York-Providence, etc). Seventeen cities and hardly a step beyond their limits.
Six miles of elevation gives the ground a visual quality not so different from the gloss of the photographs that have and continue to be my vision of the world. 35,000ft. Such a distance leaves only stone, water, plants, and architecture visible to the eye. As such humans are the only animal whose traces I could still detect.
There I was, poised in space, a dis-embodied eye, invisible, incorporeal, seeing but not seen.
The alluvial fan of agricultural development spread out of an Eastern bend in the Columbia River. How could the edges be so discrete? The steep sides of the Coastal Range sank under the momentarily flattened earth, spectacular in greens.
Again the earth began to rise, this time without end. The mountains, the likes of which I had never seen, bore little vegetation and exposed seams of multiple shades. They read like the rings of trees or lines made on walls to count years in isolation. Rivers were only the thinnest bands of water charging blindly along their paths wedged between the rock that seemed to force them out of the way. I remembered that the rivers wore their own paths through the stone. My perception of the hills began to change. They were no longer peaks rising out of flatness, but the remnants of a land that once rose all together, broken by the wearing away of water and wind, as badlands are worn by rainfall. Perhaps this was Idaho.
Quickly the mountains became steeper and trees began to grow. Snow appeared on some of the tallest peaks. I supposed we had reached Montana and was surprised and lost at the lack of signifiers to tell me. I was relieved to feel that common suspicions about mapping are true -- that it is incomplete, futile -- for I've never inhabited a place that did not have a network of streets, a direct articulation of a map, an obvious correspondence. For a while I was frantic in my search for a sign of where I was. I saw a lake that looked like a tear in fabric, a still and unnatural void whose edges seemed too precise to belong in its valley. Identifiable roads began to race through trees as though my eyes were laying them. They widened as they unwound eastward.
A brownish grey appeared in my periphery, and once it entered about halfway into the frame of my airplane window I was certain of where I was for the first time since takeoff. All of the mystery of my location over the land was as stripped and exposed as its surface. Lines winding downwards, a shade of lakewater I had never seen, a legible network of markings. A wide road belting a grid, spilling some street-lines south of its border. A city small enough to fit in my window with a trap door as the surface of its lake -- hardly a lake, but undeniable as such. Why such a strange beach? Carved like a stepwell whose waters none can touch. A city halved by excavation, whose hollows threatened annihilation by gravity. I knew where I was and searched for a white mark on a hill. I found nothing. The slope of the earth seemed to be crumbling into its deepest point. I passed over the scene in minutes, and, having held my breath for too long, surrendered to sleep for the next few hundred miles.
Notes on Injury, June 2011
My body tells me that something has happened. It is miraculous that anything should happen at all. That the rain should fall again on this night as it did the last, and that the summer should continue until the leaves get tired. I step and I wobble. What amazing memory the body has! I have fallen and landed on my feet, and this was a misstep. I saw no other option, so I have no regrets. I have only evidence of the height and of the hardness of the ground. It has been recorded in my bones. The cracks will disappear soon, but perhaps I will feel their ghosts one day, when I am out walking again. I am thankful that my body remembers. I am thankful that I am alive to the degree that it can.
Sunday
this cartography
the distance
i measure
by parked cars and doorways passed
by feathers falling from my hair
by all of the faces that are not yours
i measure
by parked cars and doorways passed
by feathers falling from my hair
by all of the faces that are not yours
Wednesday
swimming with you
At night I go in search of you
asking my bedsheets to transform into flesh
or hills that i could move through
like the city blocks to you,
your skin to me is a shore
my hands are ten sailors on two fragile boats
i tuck into the sand. it is wet
and forms around me. i use my binoculars
to find your eyes; they are the tide,
your lashes swing their waves
to sink me.
asking my bedsheets to transform into flesh
or hills that i could move through
like the city blocks to you,
your skin to me is a shore
my hands are ten sailors on two fragile boats
i tuck into the sand. it is wet
and forms around me. i use my binoculars
to find your eyes; they are the tide,
your lashes swing their waves
to sink me.
Sunday
Like the Spring
mother culture told me that refuge is other bodies
that when i transform it will be through word promises
strung by hand between bodies in twos
but i want to transform like the blossoms in the spring
i will find one shimmering summer to sing for
then throw my petals to the asphalt
before that summer comes.
that when i transform it will be through word promises
strung by hand between bodies in twos
but i want to transform like the blossoms in the spring
i will find one shimmering summer to sing for
then throw my petals to the asphalt
before that summer comes.
Friday
A Kitchen Scene
My body is a drawer of knives
spilled onto the floor
in my childhood home.
Nobody is in the room
I am too young
and I cannot tell the handles
from the blades.
spilled onto the floor
in my childhood home.
Nobody is in the room
I am too young
and I cannot tell the handles
from the blades.
Wednesday
Parts 1 & 2 of x failed romance during y lifetime
I always found it tiresome when you cried. Eventually I realized that you could tell by the way that I held you, from behind, shh-ing and rocking you back and forth. Sometimes I would wipe your tears because they annoyed me. Your emotions are so sloppy.
When you would turn around and look at me, eyebrows raised and shaking, you were no longer asking me why x horrible event happened to y innocent person, but did I give a damn? I would nod and pull your head into me again, unable to look you in the eye.
/
Seven months ago we were walking along Lake Michigan in the sideways autumn sun and you looked up at me, asking some stupid question, in love with the world and with me. The sun angled into your iris and cut through the darkness. They were burning brown. I don't remember the words we said, only that I thought you didn't deserve me. I did not know the color of your eyes. I could not stand them.
When you would turn around and look at me, eyebrows raised and shaking, you were no longer asking me why x horrible event happened to y innocent person, but did I give a damn? I would nod and pull your head into me again, unable to look you in the eye.
/
Seven months ago we were walking along Lake Michigan in the sideways autumn sun and you looked up at me, asking some stupid question, in love with the world and with me. The sun angled into your iris and cut through the darkness. They were burning brown. I don't remember the words we said, only that I thought you didn't deserve me. I did not know the color of your eyes. I could not stand them.
Monday
Sleeping with You, or Walking down Seventh Avenue
The question of You is daunting, especially since I was not asking.
*
Knowing is weaving, tightly or loosely, it is a fabric. Dull pressure may tear through, something too heavy, a slow ripping apart. Or there can be sudden force.
A stranger on a bike getting struck by a moving car, flying into the air, her head landing on the asphalt. Suddenly the skull is a soft thing. A moment ago she was pedaling, and now she cannot control her limbs.
Temporarily you see her legs flailing. She is not moving like a woman. She is a kind of doll.
The other pedestrians rush to her aid. They move with precision.
Somebody will call an ambulance. Another group of strangers may or may not succeed in keeping her alive. If she is dead, it was only a moment ago that she was alive and pedaling. You are still breathing.
*
Why look me in the eye? You know that I can see you. Did you need to check?
*
It is of no consequence. Her body will be cleared from the street. The pedestrians will continue down the avenue. There may be brief exchanges about her stranger's body, like a conversation about the weather.
It is raining.
She will be alright.
More people will drive by in their cars, avoiding the unguarded bodies of the passers-by. You will wait at the light of the cross-walk, and then, when prompted, you will go.
*
*
Knowing is weaving, tightly or loosely, it is a fabric. Dull pressure may tear through, something too heavy, a slow ripping apart. Or there can be sudden force.
A stranger on a bike getting struck by a moving car, flying into the air, her head landing on the asphalt. Suddenly the skull is a soft thing. A moment ago she was pedaling, and now she cannot control her limbs.
Temporarily you see her legs flailing. She is not moving like a woman. She is a kind of doll.
The other pedestrians rush to her aid. They move with precision.
Somebody will call an ambulance. Another group of strangers may or may not succeed in keeping her alive. If she is dead, it was only a moment ago that she was alive and pedaling. You are still breathing.
*
Why look me in the eye? You know that I can see you. Did you need to check?
*
It is of no consequence. Her body will be cleared from the street. The pedestrians will continue down the avenue. There may be brief exchanges about her stranger's body, like a conversation about the weather.
It is raining.
She will be alright.
More people will drive by in their cars, avoiding the unguarded bodies of the passers-by. You will wait at the light of the cross-walk, and then, when prompted, you will go.
*
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