8 December 2023

 

There are entire wars I cannot bear to witness.

From the ledge, I attend to what falls in front of me. He pushed himself as he fell backwards, half-remembering there was sand past the rocks.

From the living room I witness a broken city, broken people, bodies borne down rubble streets.

From there I see light cast itself on tile, my black and white cat half-purple in the morning sun, grooming his black and his white fur.

From my chair, I have seen the so-called news come and go, around and back. When you come back to forward, let your arms fall slowly to the sides. If you go into a city with your arms, you may come out wanting to wash your trigger finger with acid.

From my perch, I hear weed whackers and mowers and carts and pidgin-inflected voices cut into strips beside the bird songs.

She said she had not trimmed the tree, because it had already been cut.

“Why didn’t you just say so?” refers not to periodic sentences but to single words. My every conversation a translation of over 40 years of language use.

There is the bumbling toward, not something to say but how to avoid saying it, yearning for spots of time that frolic in the meadows of a distant England, when memory seemed more benevolent.

I entered the room where I studied teaching English as a foreign language. It was that in South London. (I never called “oven” a “cookah.”) Everyone from their desk in a circle stared at me, late from the train. I was my children’s age. “He was very insecure,” one instructor said the of man who’d been shot; he knew a man who worked for him. We went to the caf to talk about guns in America, underneath signs addressed to “our custies.” A barge on the Thames blared "Imagine." (Was that before or after?)

From my chair I cannot see pure memory, pure light, pure poetry.

Machine drone, rattle of chains, pieces of a voice, bird chittering, back to droning. Drone has graduated from dull sound to hoverer, to photographer or to Kiki’s Bomb Delivery Service. One sheep’s baby was stillborn (or is it still born?), the other had twins. The sheep with twins gave one to her grieving companion.