“What to write on the blank sheet of paper, already blackened with every conceivable handwriting? Choose, why choose?”
-J.M.G. LeClezio-
a blank page
“I speak now and shelter in the tent of language or writing”
-Michel Serres-
Choose. Why choose?
Deep in love
the sight, the thought, the feel.
Look around.
Over here a line comes singing, her misting whispers, behind the ear.
Bold graffiti in the midst: the faces, the lettering.
Trilling of a baby’s babble.
Choose. Why choose?
I build my shelter, I fashion my tent of language.
I might hide here. I might scribble the wall.
Curving words, like celanic, like ocean.
I choose.
Why choose?
To shelter, to bloom.
I build a barn of story, the structure to hold it in.
This body, its experiences.
This wife, and hers.
Seven starling children, darting out and in.
And things: stuff, books, ideas, smells.
Dreams and hopes; fears and memory.
Do words burn?
I make a sprinkler, and a hose. I fill them with water.
There is a fire there. For warmth.
To build a well.
I am speaking tools.
Choose. Why choose?
To erase disease-words, and plight.
She says color and I leave it on the walls.
Call and response, they’re in, through the windows.
I sing a night with rain.
I sculpt a bed of vowels.
We cry out in the form of wings:
Take shelter.
And choose.
Why choose?
“There seem endlessly those situations of particular experience wherein one knows and doesn’t know, all at the same instant, which is to say, the information is inherent, actual, in the given system, but (itself a word of this qualification) we cannot step out of its context to see ‘what it is’ we thus ‘know.’”
When I think of you, think about us, I want to. That’s exactly what I want to do: be done with mysteries, be one in fact.
But when I look at you, when I touch, taste, smell and listen you, I cannot conceive it. Can’t even imagine comprehending all that’s unknown, inexplicable. And I’m afraid to. That too, I’m frightened of some unfathomable overwhelm.
Yet from a distance, I mean, from here, now, it feels plausible. To declare all mysteries, one to another, in song or verse or gesture. Enaction. To enact our mysteries and imperceivables all at once in some enormous chaotic unison, unashamed. What is there to be ashamed of? Secrets are not mysteries, only their private signs. What forges them is larger and unclear. Diversity and variation – these we celebrate – no?
Step out of your houses and enact your whole selves!
We will bewilder one another – not such a bad catharsis!
Running, perhaps amok, perhaps silenced to a shuddering ball – who knows? It’s a mystery!
Perhaps we’d shout in brand new languages – delighting everyone’s ears! Perhaps we’d alter the surface of the earth, its environments?
Would that we were one expressive impressive cacophonous voice!
Would that we were?
I’d split into a willow tree dropping language-boulders from my fragile limbs. I’d erupt a perfect mountain steaming as a cold clear lake. I’d mud. I’d sprout as a milky pasture of weeds.
You’d Sousaphone in primary colors woven as a world-shawl. You’d be all the quiet stars, glimmering in their conflagration. You’d whisper through grain and aspen, moving through air like helium.
We’d crash without injury, fomenting monuments of grandeur. Melding our mysteries. You-topia. Humana-topia. “Other”-worldly.
Perhaps.
Perhaps a universal dancing, a carnival of beauty so trouncing our balancing globe as to shatter it, sitting afloat or casting about – some atmospheric inferno. Perhaps a gaseous stench would burst forth, a deadly poison. Perhaps disaster. Apocalypse of invisible revealed.
We could surely say “we know not what we do” living mysteries, eh?
“Off the hook” even as it gores us.
Earthquaking order in riotous glee.
The maniac’s laugh.
A universe of blindness and flare.
Breaking the eggs, precarious shells.
No wonder veneers. Elaborate mechanisms.
Flexible and porous, rigid and finely tuned.
It wears out, the strain and stress: containing, defending.
What if we went right on ahead?
Plunged up out of deep waters, rocketing down from our skies?
Going through with our propensities: explosion/implosion?
What do you imagine? The beginning? The end?
A flood, a conflagration? Some perfect balance?
We hardly know ourselves, one another…
secrets give way to hiding, large blank territories blocking the unseen, from ourselves, one another…
equilibrium-fear
we call eco-system, survival, “life.”
Undoing?
From here, right now, I want to release, to channel and broadcast – to expose without imposition, sing that I might hear, dance that I might see, enact in order to know…become some inward/outward thing, supernova and black hole at once…
“And our personal stories are the only moves, the only moves that help us postpone, at least for a while, the predetermined ending to our game. And even though we are going to lose the game from the strategic point of view, the idle moves of our stories always postpone the end. Even if they are stories about failure.”
2. From Li-Young Lee’s Book of My Nights
The Hammock
When I lay my head in my mother’s lap
I think how day hides the stars,
the way I lay hidden once, waiting
inside my mother’s singing to herself. And I remember
how she carried me on her back
between home and kindergarten
once each morning and once each afternoon
.
I don’t know what my mother’s thinking.
.
When my son lays his head in my lap, I wonder:
Do his father’s kisses keep his father’s worries
from becoming his? I think, Dear God, and remember
there are stars we haven’t heard from yet:
They have so far to arrive. Amen,
I think, and I feel almost comforted.
.
I’ve no idea what my child is thinking.
.
Between two unknowns, I live my life.
Between my mother’s hopes, older than I am
by coming before me, and my child’s wishes, older than I am
by outliving me. And what’s it like?
Is it a door, and good-bye on either side?
A window, and eternity on either side?
Yes, and a little singing between two great rests.
All my Words are Silent 