The New Normal

 

25 March 2022

Possessives. Your war is not my war, but I share it somehow. Possessives where there are none. I write in parallel, though my side of the tracks remains fixed, for now. Your time shattered, my time still a thread, if a bit bare. “Who would read this?” she asked. Resistance in the micro-narrative to the macro. Economics as prophesy, where prophesy is a dismal science.

I took photographs of flowers this morning, not the usual rust or chance absurdities. To be “in memory” is to be only there. It lets us know there is no more memory to be made. Like fossil fuels, they pool, and we can make energy from them. The climate of our memories gets overwhelming. He said he was a climate refugee from Sydney. Fires and floods kind of cover the elements, don’t they? The flowers, as photographs, are now memories of being “in memory of” my friends. Loss leaders. Accumulations of lack leave what he would call “residue.” There’s an area for mud-making at Putin’s palace. And a pole for dancing.

One woman says there is no normal; to say “normal” is to actively forget those for whom such a thing never exists. Another wants normal life inside her war, makes coffee in the morning and evening, looks out her window, counts the internal refugees.

Putin so hates the west he buys his furniture from Italy. Apartment blocks in Mariupol stand as burned skeletons. The larger structures remain as memorials to what they’d held inside. Empty eye sockets, like the machines that fire vacuum bombs. Speed balls: the flash comes first, then air rushes away like water before a tsunami. “He must have been in pain.” No one has named a cause of death. I ask a friend; he says he refuses to ask because he doesn’t want to know. To care how someone died is different from caring for them, though entanglements exist.

Tony’s student asks if I simply write my sentences, or if I take weeks to put them together. I tell his class that, while I’m hardly Emerson, I believe the poems are all out there, and we simply need to walk into them, take them down not in the sense of taking down a building but in that of penciling them into speech. If you want to tell a story later, you can’t afford to judge.

Seven Russian generals dead, a battalion commander killed by his own troops. A tank ran over him. You are in a foreign place, though you have a common language. You’ve been sent there to depopulate it, degrade it, set up a Commissioner of Despair. But it turns out you’ve been had. He’d known some dark mothers. And you are they.

This is my war by proxy. Rather, I am your proxy, permitted the space to think on it. I’ve had my morning #warcoffee, walked Lilith, thought of you and your son in your small village outside Kyiv. We haven’t lost normal so much as discovered how to make it, memory by memory, until the battle shifts and we must pass it on.