Redemption Song

 

9 April 2022

The disharmony of our conversations. There’s no more monotone, only clutches of mixed notes. We still want to learn about each other’s desires, about the histories that might make sense of all this, but we’re folded in like a t-shirt whose imprinted face more resembles an alien than Bob Marley. Or that speaks of the miracle of walking on the earth and that there is an elf. Never quote Oppen on a shirt; lose one syllable and it’s all over, the clear bell of meaning ceding to demented sentences then saved to our clouds.

I said I wished I hadn’t talked so much. She assured me it was a conversation; there were two of us, ears pressed to phones, and there were two voices gathering up work and suicide, homesickness and grief. It was as if the earth took Marthe after she’d gone and the Kapoho tidepools filled with molten lava. Reclamation project by one angry woman of another. I would leave an altar to Pele at his lava installation. When I took black rocks for him from the beach, I told Pele what I was doing. But that was not a conversation. Prayer leaves the interlocutor out.

One Y took a photograph from the Kyiv to Warsaw train. The land is flat and white, a bit blurred by the train’s speed. The subject seems anonymous, if land could be without a name. That she needed to take the photograph marks her desire to remember what she passed through. When we doubt our memory, we take up our machines to capture it. Put them in the folders, the albums, all the dead metaphors that litter our screens. Some day we’ll be reminded by iPhoto that we have memories they cherish for us.

The suicide squeeze failed last night. You only succeed if you survive to score a run. Unmetaphorical suicide operates differently. The young woman who succeeded will be doubly forgotten inside the institution. There were cops and firefighters and a memorial that quickly disappeared. Inchoate sound might be better than the silences that followed. Since we cannot say our grief, let’s stand to hear the sirens, the alarm bells, the leaf blowers and weed whackers, all the instruments of our grieving.

We have only eight years with this earth, Laura says, and everything else is a distraction. Distract me from climate change by showing me a war for energy sources; distract me from the war by turning my attention to the violent slap of one man’s cheek by another man’s hand; offer me the accumulated grief of any newspaper screen. When you’ve sponged it up, squeeze hard. Each leaf will sound a different note. If you listen, you’ll know.

My forthcoming book may never come forth. In perpetual chryslis, it will swallow its words. They’re surely not mine now, as each section was a photograph taken from a train. Refugees now look out from trains and buses, as if to take the photos back. Take the flat land in and chew it. The image will not appear in reverse, but as if it had never been. The film was so experimental we didn’t know which reel went first. Halfway through the first reel we knew it to be the second, and so respooled it by hand. It must have mattered to us that we watched the film in that way, spooling and unspooling and respooling on its plotless track.

My husband calls me on Facetime from the Mauna Loa road. After days of rain, the sky is a clear blue. He pans the scene down the mountain: the road's yellow zipper, the koa trees. He is happy, the dog is happy, and I will say that I am, too.