how
do
you stop
this
maw
of
the past
&
threat
of
the future
Category Archives: internals
thoughts, musings, life, etc
overwhelmed
bringing one child into the world is dangerous enough
how to pass the navigational skills you’ve acquired
to recognize the sign posts of disaster and the edges of cliffs
and keep secret from them the disappointments you’ve collected
but two, to bring another, after you already feel that you’ve failed
as if by stacking the burden you can somehow break the tension
of another life you cannot hold gently in your hands
breathache
and i’d like to be believe that the ache in my breath is from all these cigarettes
not something i’ve passed to my daughter or son
the spinning of something out of nothing and seeing ghosts in the wind
where the sun collapses over the pressure of bloating
some festering that has always been my own
not a wound but pus that demands rupture exactly
the prying open of skin that does not know how to heal
the cessation of a street when it turns on a bend
as if sorrow traveled exclusively in the blood
pitching stakes in ground yet unclaimed
6:13am, 7lbs 2oz
welcome to this mad mad world. be kind to it.
this smoke off your skin
in a matter of days have gone from a cig or two
to polishing a pack
old habits resurfacing and hopefully won’t be hard to kill
she says, “our son will be breathing this, this smoke off your skin”
and what do i say to that
having already bruised him in the womb
contractions, hard and soft
they had begun the night before, as they had last week: contractions hard and soft, not quite steady. she gets an old mickey mouse watch we picked up when we were in florida with the little one last year. mine was already lost and abandoned, still ticking in a drawer somewhere in the den. she notes the time they begin and their duration. looking for rhythm, for a narrowing. sometimes ten minutes part, sometimes seven, then not for an hour or so. but she calls the doctor anyway, can we be squeezed in. late in the afternoon we go.
they strap the fetal heart monitor around her swollen belly, a seat belt over a skinned basketball. they give her a silver little handle with a button at its top and a cord that unwinds back to the machine. the baby’s heart beats mad as he muscles his way around her womb. its a seismograph of delivery, correlating baby’s heart to her contractions. after ten minutes or so, the doctor pops in, gets her in stirrups, snaps on some rubber gloves, and peeks underneath the tissue paper wrapped around her legs and hips.
she shakes her head, snaps off the gloves, “uh-uh. not yet ready yet. you’re not due until the ninth you know, but,” she shrugs, “you never know.” she looks at me and then back to her, “it’s your second one, so he might just pop out.”
any day now, literally any minute.
stutter frame
i’ve become a pile of addictions and gestures that echo in my mind and throughout my body, to remember and breathe, and back again, the action returning to thought, infinitely, from my lips to my hand to your lips, the stutter frame and stammer, repeating again until touched and frozen, never an end but a new beginning, an angle not yet considered.
(i’m being attacked by a monarch butterfly, is it attracted to the cigarette or its bearer?)
what is “the work”?
she asks, “what is the work?”
blanchot had this idea of the writer erasing himself in the act of writing. that the writer in essence disappears as a person, as a living thing, thrown into a cavalcade of history and memory and desire and culture in the act of writing, that the writer is no longer there. and i found that appealing as all these french ideas were and are to me, something romantic about disappearance most likely, but i understood and still understand it as well, the disassociation between the self and the act, the giving over, where you become not-you, the confusion ceasing to be an issue between the self and the act. this is not to say writing becomes impersonal, no impossible that, stupid to think it actually, but becomes other, as jabes writes in The Book of Questions, writing as the desert, as exile, or as i had echoed in “Restoration”:
in the desert one becomes other…
far from excluding us, the desert devours us,
swallows our being entirely,
and consumes us whole.
to be consumed by writing, to be devoured. how many times have been i shaken by what i found before me on the page, on the screen, that came from me, so surprised, how did i write that? did i really write that? some metamorphosis, some transmutation, some transubstantiation, some translation of you to not-you and thwarted back again amongst the living. it was also blanchot who intimated that it was only through writing we understood our mortality, we write because we know we will forget, we will be forgotten, we will die and the act of writing, as michaels points out in Fugitive Pieces, is to throw a “brick into the future.”
ah, to bruise the future, smack a brick into its face over and again, a million times, to make it scamper. that is the work.
summer fall
there’s nothing as beautiful as the fall of summer, the turn from summer to fall, the wind kicks, shakes the trees, they rustle and whisper, cicadas chatter lullabies, a certain kind of peace, the lack of a certain kind of stammer, the frenzy of pointed heat dissipates, abates, all things returning home briefly for a short while, before migration, before the harsh closure of winter.
i will always remember reading faulkner during the fall, my graduate seminar on the author in albany, the one course where my writerly instincts were not thwarted or dismissed, where they actually came in handy. sitting on the stoop, cigarette in one hand, Absalom, Absalom in another, ridiculous mug of coffee beside my feet. a lifetime ago, before that too was shattered for me by the fissures that were echoed in all english departments across the country, the politics of writing versus the politics of literature versus the politics of cultural theory. that rhythm again here, of that kind of life, of solitude and yearning, of being part of a vast stream, uprooted and buoyed, gentle and mysterious, knowing there was so much out there to learn and not being intimidated or threatened or bullied by it, but rather excited by the challenge, invited almost to wade in, to swim with or against the current.
and now fall again, sitting on the porch, different and the same, having changed again, writing again, on the work again, hand skimming the surface yet once more.
sitting outside with the little one
sitting outside, writing, the little one comes out.
“what you doing daddy?”
pitched cigarette smoldering on the grass
“nothing baby, just getting some fresh air”
she scrunches up her face, “but there’s nothing outside”
i smile, “sure there is. there’s the wind, look at the leaves, the trees.”
she settles up next to me on the bench, takes my arm around her
“yeah,” she says.