Meditation 24

2/18/2020

He asked for the word for times he floated near the ceiling while his uncle molested him below. It’s what saved you, a survivor responds: internal space travel--though decades later clocks strike back, as your absent self falls to the floor of that tiny room. After eating the pink edible, I wanted to get outside my body, so I walked to the porch where the air was cool. But the body is always there to be returned to, like a husk or house. Dreams are fictive itineraries. The young poet appears ecstatic as he pronounces the name, James Baldwin. He writes a sonnet to Baldwin’s face, which doesn't reveal coral teeth or rosy cheeks. It’s the crevices of his voice I loved, the wandering up of his cigarette smoke. I want to point to how history and memory intersected in his face, the violence that cut it. But I can’t find an indirect way to map roads that cross other roads in a seemingly vacant space. Every fork in the road clenches its teeth in Thomas Hardy novels. Serendipity’s no longer a private matter. It feels more like conspiracy every day. “I realized I hadn’t thought of Trump for a couple hours,” he said, surprised. He’s internalized himself as shame. When I went for my appointment, I told the ob/gyn that I thought of him as my legs opened to her speculum’s advance. Don’t worry, he’s not here, she said. You survive by thinking otherwise.