Tweeting woman

 

11 March 2022

Erased yesterday’s entry and changed the date. A Ukrainian woman on twitter can't find a manicure. “Do you not know people are dying?” is one man's response. Does he not know the value of nails neatly trimmed, of the clothes we work in and those we sleep in? (Sometimes they’re the same.) Each nail marks a boundary between air and skin, a mobile defense system to keep us in our chairs. She hasn’t left her home, sends photos of coffee cups, steaming.

I join her for coffee, laughing at her previously-annoying neighbors, Snoring Man and Sneezing Man. I used to live next to Laughing Man.

I am copying her words, because that is how I receive this war. I drink coffee, too, so we have that in common. Cris pulls back his project based on war images, photographs he transforms to brazen metallic near abstractions. He's reached the boundary of art and horror, wonders which side to stand on. Art is Poland, war Ukraine. You can eat in Poland, but you feel guilty about it. Trains are passing through the night, some returning to Ukraine. There are people on them.

Atrocity as cliché. Russian soldiers talk to their wives. One is bringing back a large TV, another a kitchen appliance his wife requested. Another says they shot two civilians who saw them. There’s less bluster in opposing war, sticking a hole in your gas tank and walking away. Four soldiers confront an elderly couple. She shoos them away like stray geese.

Dear Y: It’s a cool, crisp morning in Volcano, Hawai`i. I’m in a rain forest, listening to birds, tracing the course of shadows through the large leaves and the hapu`u fronds. My dog Lilith got loose yesterday and ran through the forest chasing pheasants. When I came around a corner and saw her at the end of the loop, I called her name. She turned, rain the other way with an absolute joy I can’t deny her. When she returned, it was for water. This story escapes allegory; it’s so much more simple than that. Imagine everyone else who feels this feeling: the grief, the anger, the frustration. The dog in my former student’s film was beautiful in this way, walking an old man toward his death, tail up, nose out for the ghost of the old man’s wife under the tree outside.

Who’s to say who or what leads us out of such helplessness. The tedious horror of maternity hospitals and apartment blocks destroyed. The antic humor of a tractor pulling a stolen tank. Helen was the original meme, and she also emerged from war. One of my students lost her father, a veteran of a US war, to suicide; another’s father merely threatened suicide; and the father of a third died of a heart attack in Ewa.

Our suffering over your suffering hardly matters. My writing to your writing is trivial. Cris’s art from the bombed out city square is one poet’s click-bait. Our despair kills only us. The man’s grief over his wife’s miscarriage isn't sentiment; it’s analogue. Witness doesn’t abide scale. I’m writing words as if to protect you from bullets and bombs. A comedian speaks for us all.

From my morning walk: