From Startles

 I was corresponding with a fellow poet recently about how difficult it is to write now (right now); there are so many pressures from the outside, that the inside feels suffocated. So I'm now writing about that feeling, though it doesn't go anywhere toward solving the real problems: Gaza, ICE, the death of the social safety net, a paucity of empathy in society. You name it. So here's today's prose poetic meditation. Not that genre seems of interest either any more.

Yesterday evening, I talked to a neighbor who was trimming a large bush, one that had already been hacked at by maintenance. A few days ago, I saw another neighbor weeding the space between curb and parking lot near his house. It occurs to me that gardening, while always a bit prone to the authoritarian trim and pulling of "weeds," might be seen now as another symptom of our shared helplessness, our looking for something we can control. I was told that the bush was a "safety issue," as you can't see around it to the other part of the parking lot. Maybe slow down in your car? 

 

3 August 2025

Marcel wept over lost photographs as if they were the places they ghosted with their flat presences. A photo can be a memory disowned, stilled to an instant that no longer moves. But to disown a memory is not to forget. I misplaced the photograph of my father that sat unframed on a ledge beside my mother’s bed at Arden Courts. It was the photograph that was crumpled, not my father beside a canal amid orange and red leaves of an autumn.

There’s the photograph of my parents in front of a large rock in their back yard. The last I have of my father. The glass to a cheap frame is broken, but that has nothing to do with time, rather with the fragility of glass. My father is not broken, but he’s gone. The space of thirty years is a dirt path next to the water that autumn.

During, enduring, time’s passage measured by the gap between me and the photograph on the shelf, the wall, material kissing material, albeit with a nail’s assistance. An artificial stillness ensues, as if the photograph will last. A real sweetness, this melancholy. Then the photographs of bodies, their teeth, their bloody shirts, their mangled limbs, as if a corpse were merely proof of their having been, then when time meant something to them.

And us. We’re not happy with our art, are we, when it requires a trade wind’s occasional showers. No tariffs on that trade, no anger in the palms, no disappearance of light. What does it mean to make art when there is no time, no space, only a tunnel under Gaza ruins where someone digs his own grave, or so we’re told, not able to trust a voice we cannot hear? The bulldozers come for us, too.

It’s not our bodies they consume, but our beautiful sentences, the ones we want to have written, want to be writing, want having been written, the verbs we can’t find in mind’s crushed concrete. To make metaphors of genocide to fulfill the need for art is nearly as vile as the photographs themselves. But we take from what we see to make what we intend to be; when being’s crushed, what’s left? The new boss at the cemetery’s taking down trees, razing patches of bamboo; they call him Chainsaw Mike. Our neighbor cuts a large bush to smithereens to make it symmetrical with another, previously hacked.

Symmetry’s a forced art, farce inside the chaos. Perhaps you can use some software to focus the chaos into clarity. A fascist architecture admits no variation on the mean. The new boss has his men cut the trees for fun, perhaps. What the paperbark has seen it folds into itself, like the shadow of a leaf or the ribbon that marks it for extinction.