4 June 2022
Invent constraints. The dog is one, the phone's lens another. Begin to smile, but don’t complete the arc. Make of it a concept divorced from happiness or St. Louis. It must be more difficult than that, like bent trees denoting Alzheimer’s. Or dandelions so fragile that they’re grand (“this is life,” the photographer notes). His is an inverted constraint, concept infecting object with meaning. Does dandelion know it means, or does it simply allow the wind to take it, like pieces of a mother octopus that drift apart when she dies? The myth of Dandelion and Octopus has yet to be written, but calls out to be framed as Dispersal. They both follow a medieval actors’ wagon over the rutted roads of an old century. I think I heard vowels shifting from that wagon, as I hear consonants come and go now. Often. When oft we saw the number ten. Or off in, double preposition like a wall switch waiting.
Comic relief in Tolstoy shares transience with humor, though not its cadence. Alexei, on his back and in pain, sees the clouds and knows them beautiful. Pierre sees an old and a young man shot, a city in flames, a fearful toddler, blood on his shirt, and knows the human vocation is happiness. He sees Natasha dancing (flashback) and a bloody field (flashback). They merge into a single image, with a single floor. Something needs to change, we say after the latest massacre. Our forgetting is hardly balm.
If the word doesn’t fit, take another and wrap it around the pole like a snake, its meaning rippling like water, fixed and then unfixed again. Stillness lasts too short a time to merit its name, a “still yet moving bridge” constructed of stone and light, cables and church towers. Leave the citations to me; phrases drift like dancers in the ballroom I live inside of, or it inside of me. If forgetting doesn’t work, try forgiveness, which still remembers. If that doesn’t work, refer back to the recipe from today’s newspaper. You may have neglected to breathe.
Theater of war: theater of dance. Both choreographed, both dissolving at the moment of action. A stopwatch captures an instant when they cross. Take your favorite poem and make of it a dance. You will leap at the sound of a preposition, bow before a noun, stand tall for verbs. Soviet soldiers acted the parts of 19th century Russians. The dogs had to be swapped out, because they couldn’t seem to hunt. A wolf’s eyes tracked from side to side, a stick in its mouth. Perhaps it knew earth’s beauty at that moment, on the other side of a crowd of men and dogs, a cue ball smacked from the top, spinning away and then back toward its mark.
A man yells into his phone on I`iwi Street. “Don’t give me that shit!” Then, as Lilith and I walk by, “it’s such a beautiful day here.”
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