Inherit the earth

Morning rain, its various registers. Plot them on a staff, some higher, others lower; some quick, others with staying power. Through the window we saw a small rat climbing a hapu`u fern. I was struck by its big gray ears. It climbed past the frame, but we didn't hear it land on the roof. Just a slight aftershock of fronds.


The plot thickens, with crescendo. Tropical storm remnant (like carpet). I used to wonder why a carpet could be called a "remnant," when it clearly was a carpet. Even completion is partial.


To write in this way is not to take time apart from the ordinary, but to chart it from the inside. The detective comes to find that the plot implicates her, even that she is the guilty party; there is the moment when the story completes itself, only to unravel again in a drama of consequences. One consequence is knowledge, a capacity without use-value, if that is to mean wisdom. Another is suffering, when knowledge is what adds hurt to mere feeling. "Mere"? Mer. I live at no border, save that the edge of an island is a total borderland. Someone I know is on a ship in the Mediterranean with refugees; another is walking with them in England.


She says she can't call because her ankle hurts. She says she can't call because when she talks on the phone she paces. My high school French teacher stopped using her hands while talking at dinner because her Anglo-Saxon husband asked her to. She fell silent. Gesture gifted her with speech.


Another time this teacher was in a car that skidded on ice. It came to a stop in utter silence and she wondered if she had died.


Silence denotes absence of mechanical sound, not of my breathing or the roof clacking with rain. After the man at the farmer's market gave me a concoction guaranteed to make me healthy, I felt a rush of tightness in my chest, the edge of asthma and anxiety.


Anxiety's use value: a rat's over-size ears, a man's desire to stay home. Goad to wisdom until it turns, like a little girl in a red hood, and you see a wizened and horrible face. She was horrified by the students' lack of preparation, astonished that they wandered in and out of class (bringing back Starbucks after 20 minutes), and that they stared at their computer screens, unaware of her voice. My students said the music that flowed through their ear-buds slowed their anxiety. When I say hello to them, they often don't hear me. I stand alone on a sidewalk, calling out a name. The apostrophe calls into being the one who cannot hear.


A neighbor says she hears coqui behind her house; they keep her awake. They are a natural sound that sounds mechanical; in chorus, they resemble a work site just past your sight-line. She'd almost rather have a constant call than this random, disordered series. I was more comfortable in the consistency of my depression than in the variations that came after I started my meds. The one hour window at 4 p.m. slammed shut at 5.


Clifford's cars are gone from near the abandoned house the next loop over. There's a seating area now, plastic chair and tarp hanging from a line, used bottles and cans that are neither thrown away nor recycled. But he's not there when I walk by. "He spends time now at another property," a friend says.


The still yet moving line of refugees, the houseless whose very stability is a form of precariousness. Near his camp I meet a woman who is watering sheets of cardboard beside her bright purple flowers. Her name, she says, is not Filipino, but Hispanic.


The questions always are: did you know you were adopted? does your mother know who you are? I knew myself despite my mother's blank eyes. He knows himself as an adopted person, category of precarity that lends us our mythologies. We live your myths, an adopted friend says. I was my mother's keeper after I adopted her. She became my paper mother, and I her paper daughter.


Grown children are usually horrified the first time their parent screams profanities. They are stunned when a grandmother's first internet search is "Bill Clinton's penis." How do you even search that without showing grandma a dozen porn sites? Clinton traveled with the man indicted today in sex trafficking of minors. How power requires the powerless to affirm itself.


Dementia is raw affect, but it is not corrupt. Its power is of not knowing how to build the web that catches you. A demented pedophile might become a saint. No saint is wise; he only turns his empty eyes to you, and your imitation might approximate wisdom.