Meditation 62

21 May 2020

See yourself as you’d like to move in the world. My gray and white cat turns tight circles on the be, front paws stretching out. Tail! He bathes one paw, flips again, falls, sniffs an open book, bathes, turns toward noise of rain and birds and circular saw. Pushes at another book, sniffs, returns to front left paw, hears cabinet door shut in kitchen, smells first book, props nose under it, sits up. Treatise on Stars braces like a lean-to on his shoulders, then falls forward as he returns to tail, bathes belly. From one square, a poet opined we’re living in open time, almost in outer space time, floating. Who are we, then? Not the driver in the bus, nor the RN in ICU, nor the mourners we cannot see marching to a jazz beat. Not the talkers behind walls, breathers in ventilators, heart monitor beeps. Muffled breathing, muffled weeping, muffled dying. 95 thousand dead and no word. Words uttered are all lies. The truth is in our dying, our witnessing, our refusing to attend. The poet is a pall bearer, but he’s caught in a video square looking out, lamenting a technical glitch that places him outside the screen's center. In an ill-lit room, a woman dances beneath a sheet, making and unmaking mushrooms. Not the mother of small children, not the student in her room on the computer, not even the cataloguer of same. We cannot reach from square to square, so we wave as we would move in the world to embrace. We lean forward to read each other’s names. We turn off the video so we can pee. It’s a dance where we watch ourselves watching each other, imagining communities of squares. Yeehaw! One poet never arrives at his square. Let me turn you on. Or let me turn you off. But don’t breathe the word death to the screen, for fear it might, like a stone, come into being as not.