Startles (an elegy)

1.

She told the story from beginning to end, when it was the end that mattered. Story gets in the way of death; perhaps that’s why we’re drawn to it. Not that stories explain our lives to us, but they interrupt their flow. Do not want your friend to be immortal, Weil inveighs. But mortality's the form of our beauty, and hers (and hers before) was not.

2.

She and I watched the OJ chase in my living room in Makiki, spent hours on the phone weighing the clues. Among them, the blond detective with a racist bent, and a glove that may or may not have fit. There was a wall, and an outbuilding with another blond man inside, a high pitched, thin Falstaff, good on television. She liked television dramas, the way you could piece clues together. She wasn’t persuaded OJ did it.

3.

We never solved that one, nor can I solve her death. The unopened cards, years old, the unopened bills, the unopened boxes of subscription teas, the unopened suitcases and a box containing Sina’s papers. The scatter itself was closed, too confusing to piece together. She’d laughed at my resistance to narrative; now I wish there were one. A clean one, beginning, middle, the end.

4.

A good day to sit inside the rain, a roof between, the constant percussion of high and low, fast and slow drops. Ferns reach out their tousled hands, as if to reach through the window grid. My algorithm brings me a brief video on shame, a song by Dolly Parton. Another friend prays to Dolly for her, though she’s Buddhist. Survival is a rhinestone performance in high silver boots and low cut dress.

5. I pulled her tiny red shoes out of the car after she died, carried them to the garage, wondered why I was holding them, returned them to the car. Inside were remnants of fast food, dog treats for the dogs she walked. Her slice of the gig economy. Academia was a sick jig we danced lest we get stuck, like Medea or Lot’s wife, for looking back. One student tells me she was writing a “dark memoir.”

6.

She talked in code. Or was it fiction as fact, easier to breathe through? She called them “Heathers,” devoted a square of her instagram to the name. Sometimes she laughed to think they fit a narrative they’d never recognize. “The clique,” AI tells me, “consists of three girls who are all named Heather.”

7.

Beside the door from her garage into the laundry room, I spotted a copy of Cortazar’s Hopscotch. It had just arrived, her twin tenants said. I told them they could read the novel from beginning to end, or they could use a key at the end to read it in other directions. He wrote narrative software before the fact of software. I didn’t tell them about the man in a short story who became the fish he’d been visiting at the aquarium.

8.

Looking out, he saw others looking in at him. Trans-species thought seems paranoid, but knows what the other thinks, and it’s rarely good. To be a fish is to inhabit a role you can’t understand. A diasporic person flung from China to LA to Honolulu, where she was doubly foreign.

9.

Polite, self-enclosed, distant in public. And then, over the years, in private. “She became more distant after she didn’t get promoted,” a friend told me. “I tried to call and text and write to her,” they all said. She told stories to push them away.

10.

“I’m worried about our friend,” Sina said. She wrote a long letter in her defense. Then one morning I called her to say that Sina was dead, murdered by a friend in Samoa. We’d all had lunch some months before in Chinatown, an awkward triad that failed to last the twin defeats to come. Silence became us.

11.

“We read,” Weil notes, “but we are also read by others.” “To be a slave is to be forced to read yourself as others read you.” “ A dialogue of the deaf.” “Each being cries in silence to be read otherwise.” Weil writes. “Don’t be deaf to their cries.”

in mem.RYH

Simone Weil, Cahiers: Tome 1. Paris: Plon, 1951. Translations mine.

 

from Startles

 

If you’re certain of something, there’s the indicative verb in Italian. If you’re uncertain, there’s the subjunctive. No longer a signal, now simply a verb form, like word sculptures erupting. If space and time are only thoughts, then what is this sentence that fills both with ambient noise (try listen your native tongue from da odda side of da wall) and dark pixels? Fairy tales hover like dragonflies, their shoji screen wings slapping the air .

I can’t remember their sound, simply that there was one, or several sounds, gathered beside the parkway where my friend and I had gotten lost. No one to pick us up, despite our thumbs. I remember only images of images, which is lucky, considering what images there are on our phones. Beware the lion, but welcome the dragonfly, I remember Weil writing, I don’t know why. “That was unintended!” the sangha member said, after she rhymed “air” with her “hair,” which might or might not conceal ukus. Can’t be scared of what you happen upon.

Once upon a time, we remembered very little of this, because we lacked phones. I’ve farmed out names to mine, but not their effect on me. Quick hesitation denotes surprise, but not what that surprise is or might be. I think leads to the subjunctive, but I know does not. Do I know what I think?

Or do you? You’re my reader, after all, even if I can’t locate your name or face. I think you’re subjunctive, or at least a figment of my subjective mind, the one that prattles on at night. Continuity’s a remnant nostalgia; images arise and cut the power. A picture startles, but so does its sudden absence.

One image is not disturbing: we see a man’s ankle, his shoe, someone pointing. Use the ordinary verb for that. The second image cuts like Brutus’s knife; a man falling to the ground. He wasn’t stabbed by a knife (indicative) but by what he felt (subjunctive). “This is what they put on slaves,” he says, of the GPS fastened to his leg.

They want to see them so that they can’t be seen as us. My neighbor wore an anklet for months; image of a narrative lost on me. The narrative for this man is who he is, which is hardly story, but being. We’re beings apart from the gossip we tell about ourselves. An anklet erases that.

I want to walk away calls for the subjunctive; I walked away does not. The man in the anklet can do neither, though he walks. He can't want to walk in the way I or my dog walk. To walk is to identify as the person being watched. “Do you think of yourself as a convict, or a cook?” one prisoner asks another.

Man killed at the maximum security prison. But the newspaper photograph attests to another story behind the story. He called himself Denise, wore lipstick and a bun for his mugshot. The man (for he was a man) who killed him had killed before. Sentences that tell us this waver between he and she, birth and death, a face trapped in a box with a smile on her face.

 

from Startles

Not the image itself, but a memory of the image. Not color or black and white, more a pattern with feelings attached like nuts that burn in the light. Deer fleeing the fires run from between trees in France. The caption tells me there’s a barrier they can’t cross. I turn the video off.

A scrum of men on the street in Madison; three or four on top of another man-shape. They don’t move, at first, image of violence without the act. The caption reads that one of them executed the man on the ground, calmly put gun back in holster. I turn the video off. And I turn it off again when the scroll comes back.

Blurry image off a video of boys in a boat. Diptych of dialogue from 911 call, white words on black screen, no names attached. Someone has cleansed the audio of superfluous sound. “Don’t die, Nolan!,” someone yells. They’re already planning the cover-up. I push past that post; it’s a cue ball in my heart space.

Horses run through a French village, down the street, headlong. Behind them, plumes of smoke. They were ok; they found the beach, the caption reads. Still I cannot watch, even if there’s beauty in the terror of their galloping. I’m sick to death of terrible beauty.

I cannot see what happens in the interval between a man running and his lying on the ground. I cannot turn that interval off. There’s no memory there, but there’s still blood and enough syntax to recollect. Michael Brown in his Cardinals cap, dead nine hours in the sun. I cannot turn the video off, because it’s not on my screen.

A scroll can be sacred. To scroll is action (a movement between messages) and it’s also heresy. An old philosopher ascends to heaven, perhaps, but not these men, these women, these horses on the ground. Ground is verb not noun; there’s no ground on which to stand when it burns away. Woke up scared.

 

from Startles

She misses her furniture. Her ex-husband, late father-in-law, childhood bric-a-brac. Anger’s sturdy as a plank; depression a constantly popping balloon. Her blind dog grows deaf, his nose banging against walls; he has his own issues with furniture, though he still wanders outside and returns to see if she’s in her chair. The word “clustering” was changed to “chair sharing,” marking the diminishment of faculty and resources.

Meditation clears the one, if not the other. My bookcases were all marked “dispose” on my last day in the office. Grieving stored in my hips, I couldn’t walk for two months. The chair I lived in bore witness to morning shadows, late afternoon light. I took photographs of the lanai floor, snail trails, murky puddles, moss.

Kan`eohe would have been a nuclear sub harbor, according to one state master plan. The master always has a plan, and this included industry where the cemetery is. The dead lack industry, but landscape crews do not. Cameras on poles watch them mow and whack and weed. The cyclops is myth, but what it watches is not, is the history of late capitalism, vision folded into threat.

Vulture capitalism. Buddha sits in his temple in the valley, surrounded by signs that order you not to wear beach clothes in his presence, and by others that beckon you to a cultural event of the corporation’s construction. Bon dances have been replaced by photo shoots of tourists in expensive fake Japanese coats. You can ring the bell after the long line dies down. Sacred greed, release us.

Homeless (not the) wander like tourists down Kahekili. They are our furniture, set out at the curb to be taken away. Old man end-table, young woman torn blanket, dog tongue. We can’t set up house with them, but once we clear them out, we see so much less through their eyes. Even unfurnished, the rentals are extravagant, unaffordable.

from Startles

Startles

A big brown dog on a gurney, the other side of the window, lifts up her head, looks for her person on my side. My gaze is caught, like a vision of reddest cloth the moment after meditation. Not epiphany, which means too much, or story, meaning too little. I have been soaked in words so long, but I find none now, if words mean.

That her face was chiseled, marvelous, was not lost to me. I remarked on its beauty to the man who brought her. He’d been all the way to Waikele, where no one could see her. But this wasn’t aesthetics, not at all. Her face offered me no affect, no interpretation.

The common trigger, like a virus, is exclusion. Someone pulls it, you count it down, then the monkey enters the brain pan, scampering in its cell. The job of monkey mind, the psychologist tells me, is to make you feel alone. So there’s no monkey there, just shadows, echoes. A rope for swinging on.

You’re in the waiting room, your mind on a swing. There’s an earth mover aria on the sound system, calling out squeals and squeaks and groans. The only sense is return. The blur of it. What shutter speed could slow it down?

My husband listened to Moby Dick sped up on his kindle. It was ok, he assured me, because he could hear his own voice through the mechanical patter. A vision of Pip in a vortex comes up. A vet tech came out to lead the man toward the examination room. Lilith and I left for home.

 

from Startles

Stories are grim, but moments burst out like peonies. On Elepaio, a sign reads: “Private Sign / Do Not Read / $500 Fine.” I like the anonymous wit and the threat to me, who can’t be seen by the sign maker. In a framed, cracked mirror, I see my own torso reflected through the encroaching forest, take a selfie, which requires my face, my cap, my camera. I shoot a private photo of the private sign, and post it.

The joke’s on me, but who told it? That’s the funny part. I try to tell the canoe builder a “funny story,” but he asks me if I have any. I tell him one, but it’s not funny. I wonder how he knows about my stories. We’ve exchanged paranoia.

The tall husky mix who walked miles with me ran around the ranger’s cabin after a pheasant and brought it back in her mouth. Veered sharply, trotted back the way we’d come. How we choose other souls to accompany us; how we ourselves are chosen, is a mystery. She wore a collar, so someone had chosen her.

The story was framed by two episodes of forgetting, the first a face and the second a name. Both people recognized me, in a recognition scene that went only one way, or bent before it arrived, like a driveway in the forest. That way, you can’t see the house at the end of the road. It’s built-in privacy, and you can get fined for trespassing. I make the mistake of not asking, again.

Where we once belonged is no longer where you are, my friend. Two years ago you were still alive, looking forward to your granddaughter’s visit, a house on your land, a poetry workshop. You’d told me years before that you were no longer afraid to die. Were you still afraid of the violence, of not being found soon enough to tell the broken story of your death? Does death become you now, like a prayer scarf?

It’s the one way nature of the sign that makes me laugh. Someone has invited me into a conversation I can’t sustain, like talking to the dead. A grant writer invents new words for now forbidden ones: woman is now person; equity is now assumed. Because racism doesn’t exist, we indulge it more. We call it fairness.

Just when you think you belong, you trip hard on the rock of being seen as stranger. To be, long. A temporal measurement, as if duration were the only key. Sympathy sometimes leads to bad writing. Those who try too hard are both admirable and foolish.

 

from Startles

Startles

I’m shocked but not surprised, startled but unmoved. We'd been the American empire, but suddenly—how suddenly?--we are Romans. Afraid that he won’t be remembered, the president promises to erect an arch for a triumph to be announced later (TBA). Why can’t blasphemy be more fun? You cross over a hill and there it is, the Colosseum!

Festivals of blood replaced by rivers of tourists. We only see what others built, saw diminished, shored up, sold tickets to. To see is a neutral verb. But to see so many seeing so much; I had not imagined so many! I told a boy in Temple valley he was taking photos of a Brazilian cardinal; he didn’t look up. We confine seeing to our own devices, bearing witness in so many private rooms.

“The public” used to park for free. Now, instead of flowering bushes, we get poles with signs on them, telling you how to pay. With your entry to the Temple, you can get a faux Japanese shirt for $58. Tourists mimic pilgrims at the mock temple; to see is to take a pilgrimage, if you follow your maps closely enough. The Holy Sea it ain’t.

The feeling is heavy on us here, where a graveyard mimics Trump’s America. The boss insults his staff, tells them to “get over” their grief if they’re suffering, to “stop eating so much” if they’re heavy. Cameras on poles have replaced the security staff, like some nightmare out of Jeremy Bentham. Tree stumps accumulate, some red setter orange with red setter eyes staring up. Warehouse the dead in these plots or behind black walls.

Nature is our refuge, is it not? The sharply angled mountains, green, promising waterfalls when it rains. The earth, rich and dark, piled beside the road. A man with cut grass fur on his boots, green on brown leather. Another with dirt under his nails pets my dog.

To arrive at refuge, we crop our images ever more narrowly, leave off the absences of bushes and trees, the accumulations of signs. The space of the image grows small as a die, nearly as prone to chance. “It’s my opinion, and I have the right to have it,” a neighbor says, after telling me he “hates poetry.” Who’s to grieve if consolation’s odious? Who’s to praise the ruins?

 

from Startles

     

We’re slouching toward justice to be reborn. Or something. He saved us money on the drapes for his big beautiful ballroom. Oh, and dead soldiers, mangled limbs. His neck on fire with what might be shingles.

Not a roof in sight, only rubble couples on the street, and a monkey with an orange plushie to make it all better. A small child with hers is somehow more and less disturbing. She’s in Gaza and the bigger monkeys have bombs. Lilith turned back this morning, as the gray of the sky threatened to fall in dimly lit diamonds. It’s the more and less of it that cancels action.

Some have flown to Tokyo to see the monkey, Punch. No one goes to Gaza to see the girl, as Gaza is closed to merchants of aid, to say nothing of tourists. The monkey lives in a concrete enclosure filled with hills and a cement mountain. It lacks greenery. Commenters object to these poor conditions, even as the monkey dances on two legs beside his stuffed toy.

I withhold what doesn't have any effect, like judgment. If my anger is judgment, it breaks my own bones. The girl, too, lives in a concrete “jungle,” but hers used to cohere, before the bombs. The world is our zoo; in it we play our roles of empathy and distraction, the western detachment that has so little to do with compassion. After I was kicked out of a hotel for sleeping in the lobby, I talked to every homeless person I stepped around.

They were like punctuation on the sidewalks of San Francisco, but we’re trained to overlook our commas, our periods, our colons. I notice there are no semi-colons in Italian; paragraphs are one long comma splice, repeated like an aria several acts in. The semi-colon asks you to stay, if you’re thinking of suicide. The semi-colon stops you, if you’re between clauses. Brakes in rain sing like little monkeys, more resembling birds than primates.

"Ode on a Macaque," as written by a poet beneath Cement Mountain. I thought the Filipino gravedigger was Chinese, what with his pony tale and ragged beard, as he stood under the fogged Ko`olau. “He speaks up, Uncle Golden,” says Ola. He hates the tree cutting, the unmaking of nature from this climate into another less tropical. When tourists get off their buses in the cemetery, heading to the temple, they sometimes have next to nothing on.

“You can see everything,” says Ramsey, who hands out tickets from behind glass. “They don’t even know they’re in a cemetery,” he adds. It’s all beach to them, with side trips to ring the gong at the bonsai temple. It resembles another, in Kyoto. On Tuesday, they’ll be making an MMA film in front of it.

It’s already monetized, after all, the Buddhist temple. We can squeeze money from a koan, make it worth our education in ambiguity and impermanence. “I like money,” the president says, looking at his drapes, before he remembers the dead and dying soldiers of other wars. His war will last only a few weeks; deaths will happen, but we’ll get a “good deal” in the end. It’s transparency, it truly is.

from Startles

     

My dead entered the dream single file and formed a circle around me. Not sure if that was the dream or is the dream of the dream as I write. Do they remember me? I wondered, as one does about the demented. How close are dementia and death, or death and my dream? The dead are relatives, til we become them, dissolved.

Dissolved into solution, where solution is liquid, not a fix. To solve for X means Y is but a pedestrian on the equation’s sidewalk. A pedestrian sees not what is there, but what has heretofore not been seen. The backwards puddle reflection works, but only once each time. Impermanence is cloud, is cloud dissolved.

There are stories, but I don’t want to tell them. Gestures will have to do, the sweep of an arm we make over piano keys when sound isn’t enough. Wings of the egret above a scene of mowing. What a therapist of egrets couldn’t find there, the switch from cow to machine, from meadow to lawn. Does an egret dream of worms, of roaches, of men on mowers?

The dream went nowhere. There was the circle, and I was in it. There were the dead and I, asleep. The scene, such as it was, felt neutral, unadorned. Do my dead recognize each other through me, or must I introduce them, as I would at a meeting?

In another dream, my father disappeared. He hadn’t died, he had simply moved, leaving no address, no phone number. He stayed as the idea of my father rather than as a man in a dapper sport coat, preparing to leave for dinner. I don’t remember seeing him among my dead; all the dead have lost focus, been redacted. Like victims, they’re protected from their names and faces.

Or like the predators, whose names are too big to fail. Structures, also, dissolve, and in their place, an empty plaque. No memorial where none intended. Death starts as memory, ends as erasure. Red smudge where Y took the place of X and was corrected.

from Startles

Startles

The photo is pornography’s abstraction, black square with a little girl’s tutu peeking out. Stuffed animal held by a woman’s hand beside her. Another photo can’t be seen, but the files contain its thick description. Words, sentences, images as we know them in poetry, a document as we locate it in the archives. Why redact photos, but not the words?

Look, don’t look, witness and/or be traumatized. Testimonies on social media, first person behind a handle. If you click on the gray lines, words exfoliate. “That’s not the word I would have chosen,” my daughter says. They blossom, horribly.

Like a mouth full of blood, every orifice a wound. Hide pain behind black squares. When words emerge like translucent dots on a camera lens, they correspond with you, your wish to void yourself of poisons. Our old cat coughs up fur in small puddles you hope not to step in before the lights come on. The prophecies are coming true, a man in scrubs says.

Down to the detail, he adds, meaning that “peace and security” in various contexts makes a prophecy, or is it a conspiracy, true. Once you turn the conspiracy theory upside down, and shake it out a bit, it makes more sense. The monk tells us to wash our mirrors after we brush our teeth. Odd in a philosophy that downplays identity, but we can at least see our form, if not the smudge of soapy stars. The monk wept at his teacher’s feet, his face vividly damp when he stood.

Wisdom is internal, but only if you fail to react to what wants to enter, lie down on your couch, watch your television, plaster you with obscene videos. To redact is not to take away, but to cover over. To unredact reduces us to our basest impulses in the sentence-mirror. Typos are rife. They pulled teeth, so the children couldn’t bite.

I don’t see images in my mind, even the worst of them. But words hang in my mind’s cave, sharp, savage, promising the onset of migraine. I cannot push words away, as I sometimes do the images they describe. The cave fills first with music (drop after drop) and then the redacted sound of forced silences. Your phone is your lover, the monk says, turn away.

 

from Startles

 

Startles

He loved the large and colorful moth, before he knew he had to drown it. Moths would destroy his palm trees. Pigs destroy lawns as persons bulldoze the rain forest to make them. So persons kill pigs. “I enjoyed the torture video,” Epstein writes to the Sultan.

Files are made from dead trees and tortured girls. Girls in basement stalls—today we’re pointed to a five year old—girls in massage rooms, girls on beaches, girls in airplanes. “Where are we going?” one asks. The mic-ed up tree might ask the same question, where someone left a chainsaw on the sidewalk unattended.

Moth and pig are “invasives.” ICE is leaving Minnesota to go wherever they’ll go, the governor says, his arm flailing outward. The governor does not look well. Photograph of a woman in a bathrobe on a cold city street, her phone up to record ICE. She lives in St. Paul, in the photograph, in our minds. The monks walked through DC barefoot, bearing flowers.

Being put in a stall makes the child a beast. Bestiality among billionaires comes to seem normal, or at least expected. Epstein marked girls as “virgins.” Was he moth or man, hunting his prey? A southern sheriff leans over, his hands in prayer, as the monks approach.

Bull Connor was a beast. They are hosing down protesters in Argentina today. Photograph out of the context of meaning is surreal history, cruelty’s lineage. Is that nature or nurture? Or lack thereof?

You have offered us their suffering, even ramped it up by doxxing them. You take back the men’s names, for they are victims. Bad Bunny’s grasses came out as themselves on social media, with their numbers attached. Joyful concentration of souls. Benito behind a bulletproof football, clutched to his chest. 

“No one is illegal on stolen ground.” What approximates ground is Vegas, pretending. After mass murder proved their point, the gamblers went back. Chance pilgrims, hoping for heaven from the slots. My daughter’s teammate’s grandmother played the penny slots for hours, in rapt concentration.

So many posts begin: “do not look,” but they lead to small rooms with black squares in them. I am not I but the black square that covers me. Blanket over my pain, this double excision of self. The shame lies with the man beside the square, the man who lies. You are now behind the square, in this perverse community of protected blanks.

Firing squads shoot mostly blanks so that none will know who killed. A redacted conscience, there but not there, bruised and yet not bruised. Are we the shooters or the fired upon? Clear the mirror after you brush your teeth, the monk tells us. Then you can see yourself.

We see us both. That is our own particular torture, this knowing what we cannot see, or seeing it, unable to take it in. Mirrors take in nothing. Sponges are full, the ground is flooded, a washer floats down the street like a rubber ducky. Aloka the peace dog plays.

from Startles

Startles

Kona storm: clouds scurry from the Koolau toward the ocean to the east; trees pronounce the wind before it arrives. I pronounce you and you pronounce me. The diary of a young girl appears in code, though “Jeffrey Epstein” looks clear enough, as if clarity had anything to do with it. She was made pregnant, the birth monitored by a woman dressed in blood; the baby was taken away. “From then on, her tone shifts permanently.”

From then on, she writes as if to gather artificial flower petals that fall on a cemetery road. If you can’t put the actual flower back together, then try the fake one. There’s less wilting, more willingness to be glued in place. We won’t ask the meaning of place, as flowers are less that than portions of one. I must remember to save my document, I tell the wind.

The horror is in their use of ordinary things: masks, pizza, ice cream, a pacifier. None of these are what they mean. Metaphor takes us to the hell of cackling rich men. You can find two bodies on the New Mexico ranch, one email says, its writer saving that information against legal cases. We don’t report crimes, we pass them on for bitcoin.

She went in a lamb and came out a lion, she wrote. Was her name redacted for safety, or pulled across the internet sky like an ad? “She’s available,” the future president was told. She was told what to eat, what to wear, how her teeth should look. The chair for dental work doubled as something we have no word for.

Or none that we shall say. “Did you get the torture video and did you like it?" The photographs I can’t forget are the still ones. Girls in white blouses and black skirts, dressed as if for Catholic school; from a stool, one reaches to take something from a cupboard. Her panties fall around her ankles, her face is black square.

A woman in a red dress screams about the smell of human flesh, after it was cooked and eaten. She disappeared. Girls’ frail voices ask where they’re being taken: Epstein and Pinker stare back at them. Girls play the part of the camera, taking it all in, never emerging from its chrysalis/lens. If you want to witness, click yes to “are you over 18?” on the government website.

I love Reznikoff, his testimonies, the gaps he left for us to fill. The gaps offered an ethics, the answer to why a Black man had been killed in a barn in the south. The gap is where we fell, and out of which we came clutching our bills of rights. Holocaust I couldn’t read past babies thrown in the air for target practice. No pacifiers there.

Now, as then, gaps can only tear fabric; no spools of thread can be had, only blindfolds. To have one’s eyes covered takes away our power to witness. I might see bodies fall from the sky if they’d not been redacted, twice hidden in limitless streams of words and photos. Documents without end, amen. Completion would be a form of justice.

 

from Startles

 

Startles

Upside down tee shirts hang on the line under an overhang, dripping from the head space below. Half moon on white shirt or window whose translucence wrinkles. Clothes pins turn to the right; palm fronds hang down. Wallace Stevens is not my type, a poet announces on social media; and if he were? What would dangle down?

Farther trees lumber in moist wind under a clotted gray sky. My teacher corrected me to “skies,” but I see only one, smeared like chalk on cement. Small boy hands brightly colored drawing to monks; one receives it, hands held out, palms up. The new mayor prays with open palms, gloved ones. The palm outside drops dead fronds beside the laundry.

Era of objective falsehoods, like fictions about facts, or facts without invention’s anchor. To tell the truth is to look outside of us, as through a camera, not to dance inside among the crazy synapses. Under tyranny, we see, not think, at least not feelingly. Nothing’s traced inside the diagram of depth, where feeling used to lie like the monks’ dog. Only if introspection orbits over black lines can it operate at all.

Where’s the manual for this time? If space and time are invented by us, we’ve made two big problems! The spaces of time constrict, like blood vessels, while the time of our constructions dissolves like water on salt. That leaves us on a flat surface, flailing to launch. My dog killed a bird the other day; in the family story that followed, bird became two chicks, and death a couple of snacks.

The monk calls our phones our lovers. Hundreds pointed at him, who is coming to be loved through them, set on silent to honor pilgrimage. He urges us not to worry about the world, but to be present to ourselves. “Selves” is not the right word, but will take the place of emptiness for now. At the turn of the year we cling to the high rope with bare toes, bare life meeting the asphalt of a Georgia road, our blisters the size of saucers.

Not flying ones, but those that hit the hard ground. If I cannot find myself inside, I will look for “it” on the road, treasure each pothole as an internal incident. It or thou, no matter. The difference is in our being taker or receiver of the photograph. One monk runs ahead, holding out his phone to record the other monks walking. The phone contains a sacred space, but compresses it for social media.

“I’ve never before seen anyone act Christ-like,” a woman tells her phone. “You give me reason to stay alive,” another tells a monk. She and he are sitting on asphalt. Compassion is also hard. As is this present.

from Startles

 

Startles

Many of the details proved incorrect, but they made such good stories. The truths they assigned to us didn’t come from the stories themselves, but out of a need to tell them. It was we who absorbed them, unknowing, responding in truth to what were lies. If the fear of a bear scares you as much as a bear, both are true, bear and not-bear.

Bear with me. A phrase my daughter can’t comprehend, like “in a word.” She can’t answer our question with one word, she says. It’s not irony, but the failure of an idiom to mean to her what it means to us. The idiom, rendered literal, is silly, like “I’m glad you found each other,” when she wondered where they’d gotten lost.

No one had been lost, they simply hadn’t been found. If they hadn’t been found later, they would not have been lost, simply displaced to fantasy. “At least they’re reading books!” my neighbor says of kids who read “only” fantasy. The truest genre in this time when the real refuses to acknowledge itself as such, or when fiction turns into our history before myth even tries. But I’ve lost my bearings now.

It’s like time travel without time, or dreaming without needing to dream. I dream I need to rent an apartment in New Haven, return to school, but I keep forgetting where the apartment is. Roads ramify into veins branching out from the suburbs (never central) and into wooded areas. The poet sat beside a large window, out of which we could see lawn and trees, and more trees beyond those. Unable to see well, she listens to books.

The actor’s memoir concludes with a 45 minute reading of poems. That a life story can end with verses suggests they were necessary to the unraveling of time into experience. His accent accentuates significance. Some Shakespeare, some Heaney, some lives, like the widow’s, defined by lost couplets. What shall be the exit song of us?

Will the stadium darken, laser lights do ADHD flickers across the crowd, or will the lawn sit unmown like the palm of a hand that eases closed? Speed correlates to compassion: move quickly and you lack it, but move slowly and your hesitation maps love’s portion. The words of the loving kindness prayer evaporate like rain from a summer parking lot, but I’ll lay it out like a sketch. Not detail but structure matters then. Not the hollow tubes of a pervert’s island home, but a monastery’s poor plenitude.

Hurt, not harm, my mother-in-law says. Is that like pain without suffering, I wonder? Between concepts a yellow police line droops in cold rain. I’ve changed my climate—warmth startles me!--but echoes feel cold to the touch, as if sound were transmitted by light off a pond. He loved it, but she ran, its tintinnabulations chasing her like a breaking chord.

from Startles

She’d been praying as she drove by, she said. Not cell phone distraction, but god’s own. I read an article this morning on attention as “predatory.” We become prey, as he (yes, he) devours us. The author argues that attention is usually conceived of as solitary; I suggest otherwise.

The cult is false friend to compassion. It closes what is opened otherwise. The woman in the cemetery comes nearly every day to lie on her son’s grave. Grieving is her attention to that patch of earth, a blue dinosaur in brown lei standing beside a typed prayer, a white rosary. I witness her grief from the road with my dog.

To witness might be to prey upon, I suppose. Effective witness is rare, like royal jewels, and can be stolen in broad daylight, if you bring the laddered truck. When nothing comes of it, keep at it. The woman looks at me with tears in her eyes and smiles. The other day I left her alone under her black umbrella set against the sun.

In a poem, her tears would be jewels. According to the article, I might be stealing them. To write about them takes, and then offers, like a palm over the heart, or the palm over my stained white umbrella. What does the language see in us? Does it take the words we write and reorder them, making true statements false?

If I take her story, am I thief or amanuensis? If I offer her story up, have I pawned it, or left it on a doorstep like a foundling? To the extent that her story becomes mine by way of attention, I am both creatures, prey and praying for. If I breathe in her hurt, I take what she would not offer me, and breathe it out where she cannot see it. In my depression, mere politeness seemed the utmost of care.

Both depression and happiness are true, even in the same container. Put it on a ship and send it to sea. Or talk about it as a shaggy dog story. Daniel told me one that ended with “soldiers in your cup.” We live on the hinge of the pun, the turn between truisms, the balance born of counterweight, a sometimes happy accident.

 

from Startles

In the everything makes sense department, the Temple’s enlarged black parking lot fills with orange cones and “compact only” spaces, each separated by a line of fresh white paint. No need to up the contrast. A lone chair sits on the grass, lone cat beside it. I ask where the tourist buses will park. “Behind that line of cones,” one worker says.

The line of cones in front of “compact only” spaces? Yes. The woman at the front gate says where there were two rows for buses, now there will only be one. “They need five people back there now to figure out what’s going on.” A line of temple-colored bird houses stood where only compacts dare park.

In the everything makes sense department, the White House now resembles Gaza. Who saved the furniture, the windows, the wooden floors? Who removed the archives? Where will tourists go, whose entrance was into that wing? A huge American flag droops over broken concrete.

Who needs metaphor now, when rubble is rubble, and history’s washed away with water hoses or blood? Susan Howe’s “rubble couple” denoted the end, but at least they had each other. Tree stumps on the cemetery’s hillside sprout new branches. The same “rubbish trees.” You don’t have to weed, if you replace plants with stones, says my worker friend.

In the everything makes sense department, I suggest that the cemetery’s boss has taken over landscaping for the White House. “I don’t pay attention to that,” the woman at the front gate says; “it gets to me.” The trees are coming down, the grass being paved over, roses getting cut out. It gets to them, these living beings inhabiting a symbolic space. If you tear down the space, the symbol goes with it; that’s the thought.

In the everything makes sense department, the homeless of DC were taken away, the men at “Alligator Alcatraz” disappeared when it closed, and the rubble will doubtless be sold at a profit, like the Berlin Wall. It hardly matters for what the symbol stood, it stands for him who sells it. And the rubble will turn to gold, like water into wine. And donors will come from far and near, bearing myrrh and incense, chips and crypto, to dine with the ballroom’s money changers. Senators must make do with goodie bags given them by the Orange King.

 

from Startles

Startles

The land of magical thinking forsakes thought for desire, a flatter sense. Days I want to think I drive the car; only at construction sites can you see the road’s peeled skin, mud and pipes. As a child, I had a clear plastic doll filled with colorful plastic organs. I could take her apart and put her back, admire her pink intestines, her gray lungs. Like a jar of pickles, she seemed immortal, though they both got misplaced in the end.

The inside that is outside lacks air. The outside that is inside escapes the brine, the bitterness. It’s all compromise, but we’ve forgotten how. The diagrams on fliers apply to other procedures. The joke begins when a literature professor walks into a room where engineering diagrams have been written on the chalkboard.

Whatever the process is, she follows it. An IKEA bed frame instructs you on your grief. There must be five stages to both, though only one is clear cut. Instructions on how to meditate offer us paradox. Images of screws and wooden slats take wing, then fade out.

The diagram is a recipe and a dream. The recipe appears stable until you follow it. The dream revels in its precarity until you wake up. The bed is sturdy, though you’ll forget it unless you put your memories in a jar, hide them on a shelf somewhere. I write to close my jars and read to open them.

There’s an engine of return to the poem, more form than format. Double space your way back to the doll’s transparent skin, her plastic bones, and see if you can’t imagine her alive. An older sister to your childhood. No matter that your mentor was plastic. She hid nothing from you.

 

from Startles

 

Writing not to know what I think, but to think how I write. Now, when the street resembles itself only and my bed is still firm, nothing else is the same. Nothing else feels like metaphysics, a windshield blurred by heavy rain, but is an ICE raid set to music. Only perform! If you say there is peace, then there is; if war breaks out again, it hasn’t.

How I write changes with circumstance, as if style were a mirror, after all. As if everything we post is a position, not an impulse. Even whimsy’s become instrumental. Be the frog who isn’t that frog, but isn’t real, and you’ve arrived at the counter-symbolic nature of fact. Meditation’s a fly-over state, all content striving not to be.

But none of this gets me to the end, even if the end is everywhere in sight. Are long sentences back in fashion? a friend asks, noting the cultural capital of words that fail to find pause. Your post will find more readers if you include music, the very music you find suggested above. A man wearing a Yelich shirt and zip ties gets pushed toward the maw of an open van. It’s 3 a.m. in Chicago.

The sound of the music echoes Fox during the bombing of Baghdad, classical yet hollow, in case you can’t imagine people dying below. Gaza re-opens, but there’s nothing left that isn’t wrecked concrete. What’s the music for that? Post-triumphal, like the melody of a single tone that warps on stage. Silence is freaky, don’t you think?

The era of magical thinking lacks magic. In lieu of cleansing mantras, we have the clutter of lies. America is a hoarder whose storage container is set to explode. To describe it would require one long sentence, if only you could walk inside of it. The dream has awakened us, as if we were its dream, folded inside a sheet.

Does the dream know we exist? Can it be witness to its own vanishing? Can we find it in Freud’s index near “pulled teeth”? What interpretations do our dreams have of us, of our desires to live them out? What dream embraces the men who walk the highway’s narrow shoulder, pushing their shopping carts?

Put music to it, the supermarket refugees. My son said a homeless man asked him for something to eat and he bought it for him. Said the man was brave to ask an officer in uniform. One or two different decisions and we’d be there, too, he tells me. I’m proud of his wisdom, if not the cruel economy that gets him there.

from Startles

 

Startles

No doubt, I’m an awkward Buddhist. No, there is no no doubt. Can’t be two places at once, unless you are. Imposter of prosody, I limp. Here with the donkey, there with the cloud, if it’s imagined. Even faux transcendence is better than this, no?

That is, if transcendence gets us out. Expats of natural time, clutching our memories as truth’s pearls. The ocean, Buddha said, though he’d not seen one. Led by our noses to the shore, where water is water and is also greater than itself. Let my feet stay in damp sand, my hair in the “firmament.” All words are doubles.

The rain keeps us in, but we still hear it. Sound shorn of wet, plunkers plunking. A man in a regal blue shirt played an instrument in the cemetery; not xylophone but more like a workshop table being struck with a hammer. Around him, people in masks picked up sticks around the grave. As the mortician said, the acoustics are very good.

If the beat of the rain runs in accordance with my pulse, does my pulse spatter? The matter on the sidewalk is now kept behind a wall by instagram, except when it isn’t. It’s brain matter, arm matter, child matter, everything that ought to matter. Mother and child, father embracing white sheet covered corpse. Our meditation teacher said she’d cover the corpse later.

But that was metaphor, that corpse. The body, unmoving, rendered as log, as plank, as half a cross to bear (without the wheels). Even as metaphor, it’s heavy, but we feel less anguish over it. The man in the cemetery bangs his mallets, but we can’t see what for. The mongoose is a prospective corpse.

My body is useless before the animal on the road. Compassion knows us connected, but no umbilical gives my blood to him as nourishment. How do we make an action out of helplessness? The return to self precedes the exit into community. Or does it?

I know that kindness matters, but it’s not armed. If it were, I could zip-tie small children with my love, throw grown men into unmarked vans with my caring. I want to think the outcomes would be different, but I’m piss poor at logistics. The woman is but two steps removed from the man who (was) disappeared. Soon so many more of us.

If only disappearance could return to the world of magic, rabbits escaping back into their tall hats, children running to follow them. Transcendence isn’t magic—Thoreau could tell you that— nor is it unentertaining. Hire a mystic for your birthday party, and you might grow younger yet. More time to witness history unfolding inside and outside of time. Put metaphors of blood and flesh here.

from Startles

 

My eye met the mongoose’s eye; the animal appeared to be paralyzed, though one front leg shook. A leaf-like object fluttered in its mouth, from which an electric pulse seemed to emanate. The mongoose’s odd stillness met our own. I spotted a motorcyclist at the top of the hill and told him, as if to describe the mongoose might cure it. On the way down, the man stopped to tell me the mongoose had walked off the road, “struggling a bit.”

The story lacked a beginning or an end, at least for us. What it didn’t lack was analogy. Take the mongoose as an immigrant on the concrete road; take the road as a cul-de-sac, which it is, though it’s at the back of the cemetery in front of accordioned mountains. Take yourself as witness without power to aid, your dog less bloodthirsty than befuddled. This is not a story, but a situation whose emotional center is helplessness.

If I could have walked for the mongoose, I would have gotten him off the road and onto the grass. But empathy doesn’t extend to the limbs. If I could reach to remove the zip ties from a small child in Chicago, I’d need to break the screen that sits between us and history. Not like a truck window in late morning, reflecting blue sky and trees and me with my camera. Rather a screen that cannot reflect. One that only projects.

I can take photos now, but I can’t reflect. It’s not that I’ve become a surface, like a window, but that the truck cab inside my ribs is stuffed full of paper cups and straws and a Bible on the passenger seat. There’s no way to get inside. Auto-portraits come of it, my face blocked by the camera’s lens as it looks at, but not into, itself. One comfort of photography is its refusal of depth.

To say is not to explain. To have explained was a privilege, but explanations wear out like light bulbs and washers and dryers. We hope to hear the sound of the machine to know we have fixed it, but there’s no looking at its eye, an eye that stares back. There’s no talking to the small brown mongoose on the road, though it squeaks like a tiny motor. To say is to say what you see in the early light beneath mountains and the clouds they seem to spit out, but there’s nothing to listen to now, except 80s music that leaks from the earbuds of another walker.

That isn’t the sound of time passing, but of its repetitions, those that are surfaces that prevent us from feeling time boring in, reminding us of politics and loss and the fact we won’t know where the mongoose went or if it is still alive. The man on the motorcycle sees things not as they are but as they pass by. Fence post to fence post to fence post, the clicking of a shadow into place. I cannot think of what it means, but I see it as musical notation, stuck in space but marking prospective sound. Start time by singing it.