shatter & fuck
comfort & cunt & compassion
sternum & femur & shit
delight & defiance & tongue
restless & alone
& all pronouns, in particular, “you”
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?)
to promise, to lie
i will never make one promise to you i will not lie to keep.
i vivid wildly
i vivid wildly and akimbo, like some trestle flung over a dark highway, afire and crackling, seen for miles and threaten, fucking the moon orange and searing night of all comfort, stitching lip back over eyes, teeth for lightening for place.
and these things
and these things i say
to you, as the you that is always
entirely different
each time, cast a spell for “a moment
of hang time”
(as he once said to me, so many years ago, the pricelessness of it)
to hold it
together just once, and not
by meat hooks or
desire or
sorrow, but by denial
of gravity, of surrender, without need
or addiction, effortless
for all the effort and the pressure
of this world
the breaking open
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
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.