Garden rocket

 

20 April 2022

A rocket—green--grows in the man’s garden. Rooted by its nose, fin blossoms stretch from a metal stalk. Earth parts with few traces of violence. He’s alive, he says, though he was beaten. Another rocket bears its awful fruit elsewhere.

These are its stages: train platform, littered with bags; vacant-eyed buildings, empty; littered streets; forest encampment cluttered with cans. Or, the steel mill in Mariupol, resting on tunnel roots. Suck the tunnel walls of their water. Learn from rats how to abide the dark. Only days, or hours, remain.

Lilith and I meet a woman named Noni. I ask if she’s the same Noni whose name I saw earlier on a missing dog sign. Fifi’s been found. Fifi was struck by lightning, dug a tunnel to get her pups out, refused to emerge from under the water tank after Noni took her in. Fifi is unfriendly. “We’re all getting rickety,” she says. “I look in the mirror and wonder what happened. I feel the same.” Stranger still the photograph of the young woman, though neither she nor I say so.

Beauty takes time, the philosopher opines, while information does not. The powers that be are in it to destroy time, consign us to the quirky eternity of work. Even your breaks are part of seamless days of data collection. A mirror’s side-eye captures a warped image of my dog beside a dirt driveway. Ferns held up by old propane tanks, their buds rusted, numbers blurring. We don’t have time, because time has no edges, just wrinkles where the fins wagged.

“Are you still obsessed with time?” she asked me once.

It’s the smoothness he distrusts: smoothness of metal dogs, smoothness of “good” skin, smoothness of elevator music. We don’t remember what isn’t interrupted. Memory’s born of hiccup. In memory, there is an other, and she is we. The girl who ignored her parents is now the parent who tries to catch the eye of her girl. Forgiveness is a salve for regret.

One student didn’t want to see the faces of the dead on photos of road memorials. Not symbolic enough. Memories depend on rust. Only a clean surface gets forgotten, and where is the symbol there? A young woman stares out from a frame, ribbon lei on both sides. She is smiling; her body is full. A sign warns us to go no farther.

“You’re taking photos of the memorials, but not what happens to them.” 

 

(With thanks to Oppen, Han, and Chan)