Meditation 101

24 November 2020

Ding dong! Don’t ask, it tolls for thee. Dying is a transition, long denied. I AM NOT DYING, he yells. As I lay not dying, I imagined the power of a deathbed on which there was no death, just endless waiting. The pings of machines matched, in miniature, civil defense sirens, and the boy who played “A Love Supreme” to mirror them. When is a mirror also vehicle for sound? The lake’s face broke into splinters, leaving the barest asemics for us to puzzle at. I looked it up, after posting a photograph of a palm trunk from close range. Resembles words or tangles and plaques to no ambition we can recall. The shape of no meaning is as lovely as that of a line of verse, the arc of whose words you misplace. In translation, you choose either to convey meaning (with unionized labor) or to engage with the play of a broken belt, flinging its conveyances like a gorilla in a suitcase commercial (labor anarchized). The deathbed’s a conveyer belt, from which souls are sorted and packaged for later consumption. I said “soul” does not violate separation of church and state, because souls exist without knuckling under to icons or strangers. The toy that grinned at me from the gutter surely a sign of something, if only of laughter, contextualized by chance. My death shall convey me, whether or not I deny it. She refused to cry when my father died, and so began my fascination with rituals of release. Catch and release grief: it keeps the ecosystem stable. She tottered into tangles, refusing a rebirth of grief postpartum. Bryant tells me the witch’s green make-up burned, so Oz wasn’t without pain. You mean it all happened because she hit her head? our daughter asks. Dreams look better in technicolor, and the red of her ruby shoes shows better outside the television. She was young then, but never grew old. She's caught in time, but only if we keep pushing the remote.