Springing Forward? – Let’s Say “He Jumps”

I breathe in.  Drawn-long, held as if full of some essential substance, then let leak, some as a rush, some hardly – again signifying a value – a perhaps-last or at-long-last.  I’ve breathed out.

I breathe in.  My children, my wife, my house and its yard.  Strange concoctions of scents – some floral, some stench; some earthy, some fume – through my fingers, my beard, my innermost emotions and mind, the surfaces of skin.  I let them come through, I chase them, I hold…they pass…through cells, through nerves, through blood and muscle, snap of tendon and ache of bone.  I’ve breathed out.

I breathe in.  Sun-saturate and gleaming after the exceptional days of steady dark rain.  The fans are whirring, windows propped.  It is night.  The wet has passed.  The inside.  Full with smoke of dry leaf and lung, I exhale.  I’ve breathed out.

One day: 50sish chill and thick drizzle; the next: 82 degrees warm and nary a cloud.  It is Kansas, not uncommon to span thirty degrees in either direction in its differences of highs and lows from day to day, multiple seasons endured every 36 hours, a place my wife (Oregon-bred) names “schizophrenic”…change, its speed and accrual.

I breathe in.  We left him either building on what he already had or starting something new, something fresh (building on all he already had) in the Spring, a wet-now-dry, unimaginably rainy and verdant-now-bright and vibrating in the sun’s Spring rays of a year, a year that for reasons unsurmised seems to him enormous – open and glaring, great obstacles of blank.  Without directions or directives, at an edge, a frontier, an expanse…like a blind man blindfolded (thus muffling the ears) and hog-tied in the trunk of a vehicle on a plane or placed in the hull of a rocket, drugged to dream, awakened and set forth…where he could not know, but only, if gutsy or desperate enough, might grope, or set out…or double over, hunker down, spin himself and see what he has, what he brings wherever he goes…

a fragile little egg on a continent-sized glacier, endlessness behind, indeterminate ahead and a recklessly rattling now…change, motion, flow,

no where (as a placedness)

no when (as a fixed moment)

no how (as a correct path, replete with map and supply)

no why (as a genuine reason)

no what (of comprehended identities, complete entities)

nothing but movement and emptiness, finitude and frontier.  Stunned, deranged, nearly catatonic, nervous, breathless…I’ve breathed out.

I breathe in.  Fosse, Wallace, Bernhard.  Celan, Derrida, Bakhtin.  Kafka, Montale and Blanchot.  Languages – songs, poems and signs.  Beckett, Jabes and Walser.  Rilke, Roubaud and Gertrude Stein.  Stevens, Thirlwell, Stafford.  Cixous.  Clement.  Tillman.  The sounds, textures, silent emphases and vocabularies, grammars and syntaxes whirl about in whispers…blurs and hues, a beauty; cacophony, melody, consonant percussion…shushing out the ears…I’ve breathed out.

I breathe in.  Grains and grandparents, livestock and faith.  Institutions and knowledge and parents, their arms.  A sibling and a thousand loves.  Culture and geography, politics and verbs, losses and gains, failure’s success: atoms making webs of sick knots and health, betters and worse and could-be-worser-stills…a fabric?  a substance?  some tissue?…it snaps…I’ve breathed out.

Facing an unseeable void, we left him.  In shock, exultant, with unimagined possibility.  Either I build on what I already have or I start something new, something fresh (building on all that’s passing through), I think to myself, on this clear near-summer’s night, at this edge, this vast expanse, this outer space, just breathing first, first breathing.  I’ve breathed in.  I’ve breathed out.

Let’s say “He jumps.”