15 May 2020
Her son told her
that his mother was dead, and it was true. Who is she to correct the
language of grief, unfinished? She wondered why no one was listening
to her, why her words came back to her with “sender no longer at
this address,” why the president’s whining suddenly struck a tiny chord.
The photograph of the dog at the bottom of some stairs renders her as
tiny bauble. Tiny bubbles. You can see ocean off the lanai through an
opening in the palms where the mansions are. Bring us your rich, your
housed, your gourmands. Lady Oligarchy’s torch aims elsewhere. A man
in Michigan wore a bazooka to the store, slung over his shoulder like
a book bag. My mother burned a library during WWII in Italy(?) it was
so cold. My teachers keep saying that all we have is the present. His
relatives, those who worked in factories, compartmentalized time
until they lost the present tense. We’re all living poets’ time,
our nets perpetually empty of birdsong. These meditations are
intended to revise the past as it surfaces through bleached coral and
a scrim of plastic trash. Accidental eruptions, Combray on credit. Revision
not as ordering, but as manifold occurrence. The old memories come
back as ours, embedded in someone else’s history; that is how we
know there was a world before us. Villagers in Cambodia do not frame
their lives as episodes of violence; their narratives have more to do
with interruptions in the crop cycles, with hunger. Many of them
supported the regime that started again at Year Zero. One Zero crash-landed
on Niihau after Pearl Harbor. A survivor overheard a man talk about a
sexual act with a three year old. Trauma’s no direct path, not
cause and effect but pain translated in the body as arthritis or the
desire to drink. She talked about finding the rubble, softening the
joints, sleeping without falling asleep. We fill our containers with
murder videos, with hate speech, with open carry, then we assume our
corpse position and wash it all away. It goes both ways in your blood,
she says, and cleans it.
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