and every smile is a fracture
of sadness, a breaking
open, a displacement
of place, a forgetfulness that erupts
across the surface, opening
an entire new point
of departure
Category Archives: words
the suburbs
there is something nightmarish about the suburbs, i can’t quite put my finger on it, something resolute about forgetting, about assimilating, that is both subtle and harsh and constant. like the pressure on the body as it leaves the atmosphere: either you learn to live with it or you die.
it’s hard to describe lest you slam it, and that isn’t quite right either. an insistence on ignorance, or perhaps it’s a certain kind of blindness, a near-sightedness that is pervasive: property taxes, school taxes, the color of your neighbor’s skin. you are forced to consider these things as if they were fragments of history to be weighed, anchored and judged by. it’s not a lack of attention, but rather the attention to a set of details that are a flash in the pan, that matter so little in the grander scheme of things.
not to say that urbanity doesn’t have it’s own problems. but the crush of space, the living atop of one another gives rise to a different decorum, a different way of being. in the city, space is not an issue, your areas of living are more narrowly defined, your choices seem to be more rich. in any direction you turn, you find something, there is no mapping ahead, no need for a trivial kind of civility that’s predicated on class. although there are considerations of class, perhaps even more highly stratified, but because of the variety and density, it becomes a more tightly packed mosaic, a picture with more depth, greater breadth.
in the suburbs all routes are predefined, all destinations decided upon before even leaving your house. and your home becomes this kind of fortress, a kind of prison, where you keep the world at bay, keep the mongrels outside, and you are kept safe.
the problem of course is, as for the prisoner, the longer you stay, the less likely you are able to survive out there.
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.
think to dream to think
she asks, “did you think it or did you dream it up?”
as if the dreaming and the thinking were two points separated, serrated, cut and distant as the difference between a burst of laughter and an accident between a cracked tooth in the mouth and the floor where the tiles meet exactly beneath our feet without peeling upward into lemon rinds stuck in my knuckles against the mesh of chicken wire to the point of uprooting the two by fours and nothing more, nothing more, nothing more
but he asks, “was the leaving and the going the same?”
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.
to walk on barbed wire
to walk on barbed wire, to try to move ahead, getting stuck and tugging, pieces left behind, flecks of skin, blood on metal, the forget-me-not pieces, the pieces you balance yourself to retrieve, once again getting caught up, pierced and loathing the capture, relishing it, moving on, moving through, despite it, because of it, “the difference between moving and moving away”, never weeping, only jarring loose, shaking the limb, with some measure of grace, with some measure of compassion, even in pain, to go on, pluck meat from the skewer, and move.
contain
i said, “please stop this. stop doing this”
as if i could ever contain
you, fix you, set you
straight, when you have every right
for rage
you did not tell me
blitz, you did not tell us, did not tell me
why didn’t you tell me, what sort of monster i was
and would become?
did you know? you knew didn’t you?
you saw it and did not tell
was it because there would be no stopping it
or that it would be my choice?
to face myself as i am
shattered and smashed and ugly
love without stopping, cruelty without stopping
a damage machine, nails for tears and blades for lips
hulking beast beyond all reckoning
resting for thirst, begging for rust
and i pu(ni)sh myself
i push
myself, that extra inch and i feel
wounds open again and i
want them
to open, i want them to stay
open
heal only to tear
again, the question is,
do you really want to heal? that much
harder, i twist
and turn and
stretch and twist
again
and it shoots right through me,
angry, happy, electrified ants
here is your arm dear, look how pretty it is, here
is your arm
i do not want to heal right
away, i do not want to heal
the right way
a million little tears, like streaks
of blood down my arm
first few drops
before
rain