Suburb of Refuge

 

5 May 2022

Keeping score doesn’t matter if you lose. Not the next election, but the last; not the next right lost, but the previous. Scorecards hold history inside of repetition; each score staged within a diamond inscribed in grass. I use memory to visualize shapes and colors; the generator’s missing, but not the videotape. Memory’s a form of kompromat, blackmailing us against ourselves. Regret enables forgiveness, mandates regret, as a player runs the bases, tripping around third, caught in the bog of rules and an unforgiving baseline. Bryant follows the tally of dead tanks, dead transport vehicles, dead Russians. I watch video of a children’s park destroyed by artillery shells. There goes the red slide, and there the plastic fortress wall. Even empty spaces get obliterated.

The photograph draws you out into the drop of rain on a green stem beside curled brown ferns. The photo doesn’t live outside history but so far inside it you might drown. Earlier years were about thinking about being, parsing it, making metaphors of it, as if-fing it until the thread wound around your brain like the dog’s leash around fern trunks. Appropriate for the suburbs, when details appear to be claimed by the city, and your house promises refuge from them. “But this was meant to be our refuge,” a woman said of her new house, when thefts were reported. A place called Refuge, where suffering is hidden from view, negating the first noble truth because it can’t be read out loud. The suburbs are anti-photographic. Leave this note on your door: “Gone to seek refuge.” Revel in your abandon.

Photograph of a Ukrainian journalist, killed in action. To see him is to know him gone. His image is his obit. What is in front of us is absent from us. Is this how symbolism starts? Does it matter? Symbol as payback for our losses, money as a kind of poetry. The spreadsheet is a comfort form, like a score card or the metal grid at the front of a tractor. There’s a bent square the spider chose for her web, but the rest is relentless same. In order to straighten the image, you place it inside a grid and turn slowly until it slips into place. She asked why my verticals were not vertical. When I went back to look, the rusted poles were bent. The photograph’s fidelity was in its leaning.

Raindrops. They cling to stems, sit on petals, fall from angel trumpets. I watch the iphone’s screen try to arrive at clarity. When it does, I push the button. Otherwise, I move on. Focus is as random as the drop itself. Go with the chaos, a student says, or organize it in a frame.