Poetry

Living in a Dying World

I finally understand how to enter into palliative care for the earth, humans, and all living beings.

I finally comprehend my way of being in this world as this world is being destroyed.

This is the way I’ll live on this land until my body returns to the land. I say this to myself, now, because I’m afraid I’ll wake up in the morning and this feeling, this understanding, will be gone, like a dream.

I say what I say and write what I write to remember what I’ll otherwise lose in a moment, in a flash, when the wrong noise makes my body tighten, when the wrong move makes me brace, when the wrong memory, reawakened, makes me run.

We’re all just walking each other home, as Ram Dass says. “Said,” technically, because the perpetually present-tense world we want to create—especially in poetry—is an illusion.

Past and future exist and matter, even if it’s only because we perceive them and need them in order to make sense of the everything that’s doing and being and moving and thrumming and creating and re-creating everything all the time. Call it God. Call it Gaia. Call it what you will. Call it nothing. It’s still everything.

Past and future inform us in ways we understand and in ways we never will.

Maybe we don’t need perfect understanding.

Maybe love is all that’s perfect and timeless and always available to us, not in a greeting card way but in that way where something is so profound we need the simplest language to discuss, express, share and feel it.

We need a little carving of a heart to hold what can’t be contained, just as we need talismen to keep big, scary things that can’t be named or tamed at bay.

I think it’s Mary Oliver who calls what lies beyond language the ineffable. I can’t find that quote right now, but I did find this passage Oliver wrote that feels perfect for this moment precisely because it situates every moment, every life—everything—within the larger whole of eternity:

Now in the spring I kneel, I put my face into the packets of violets, the dampness, the freshness, the sense of ever-ness. Something is wrong, I know it, if I don’t keep my attention on eternity. May I be the tiniest nail in the house of the universe, tiny but useful. May I stay forever in the stream. May I look down upon the windflower and the bull thistle and the coreopsis with the greatest respect.

Yes, yes. All the yesses. Oh, Mary. My heart. My heart.

But back to Ram Dass. He’s dead. He died three years ago. He doesn’t say anything now except what he’s left behind with us. Maybe that’s our afterlife, our everlastingness: What we teach each other, what we share with each other, how we love each other, how we fight for each other.

Maybe that’s heaven. Maybe that’s our forever, written not in the clouds but right here where we walk and crawl and kneel and drag ourselves from one day to the next over rough land, over stone, over grasses, over loam.

Regardless, these are things we can do now, while we’re living: teach, share, love, fight.

We can interlace our fingers and move forward, together, until we can no longer move, until we die of natural causes, not from hate or from being cut off from others, from community, from those on whom we all rely for our lives and our well-being.

Every one of us can reach deep into love and, in so doing, become part of a whole that transcends who we are as individuals. No censorship needed. No isolation needed. No shunning. No shaming. No guilt. No fear.

Hold those you love close, and love everyone. I’m begging you.

May you all swim forever in the stream. I’ll try if you will.

—

Sunday, November 20, is Transgender Day of Remembrance. This essay is, in part, a call to end the hate that results in trans people being killed just for being who they are, loving who they love, and being some of the bravest people who walk this earth.

Love can stop these needless deaths. We can stop this. Let’s make it stop.

Sacred and Desecrated

One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. 

― Aldo Leopold

I’m staying in a tiny home that overlooks the Virgin River Gorge in La Verkin, Utah. This is my view from the balcony. When I got here, the river was low and relatively unremarkable—a muddy brownish-red my friend in Missouri described as “stark.” Then it rained heavily in Cedar City, a town that should have been called Juniper City because those are the trees that grow there, but I digress. The river swelled and grew noisy, pushing trees and other large pieces of debris aside as it flowed angrily past. This was a new river, a different river, one that felt at once mystical and mythical. But the sky wasn’t about to let water get the upper hand. The sunset last night, shown in my photo, was brief but as powerful as the one James Tate describes in his poem, “Never Again the Same,” which reads, in part:

              The colors were definitely not of this world,
              peaches dripping opium,
              pandemonium of tangerines,
              inferno of irises,
              Plutonian emeralds,
              all swirling and churning, swabbing,
              like it was playing with us,
              like we were nothing,
              as if our whole lives were a preparation for this,
              this for which nothing could have prepared us
              and for which we could not have been less prepared.

Heavy rain and lightning today, along with markedly cooler temperatures, made the creatures who call this wild area home stir. A great blue heron hunted squirming fish from a basalt boulder flanking the river. Squirrels scurried on the balcony then settled in and stared into the middle distance. Broad-tailed hummingbirds fed on native and cultivated shrubs in the seam where what’s wild meets what’s manicured only to the degree that it still looks wild. A red-tailed hawk swooped into the gorge then headed southish following the water.

The collective stench of wildlife urine, pungent and rising from newly moist soil, mingled with the sweet and musty scents given off by the surrounding flora: native plants such as cottonwoods, globemallow, Mormon tea, and sand sage that live alongside introduced species such as cheatgrass, Russian olives, tamarisk trees, and tumbleweeds.

This riparian habitat is unique in Utah. It comprises only one half of one percent of the state’s total land. The highest levels of biodiversity are found in spaces like this. More wildlife species live here. Bird densities are twice as high here. The visitors who flock to this area each year, especially in the warmer months, may look out from their balconies and see something pristine and untouched and remarkable and precious. 

Except for the homes built right up to the gorge’s steep, unstable cliffs. Except for the homes and retaining walls and bird feeders and playground sets the gorge has already swallowed or threatened to swallow. Except for the large banner on the other side of the gorge advertising finished lots for sale—ones that also hug the gorge’s edge. 

Except for the trash dropped over the cliffs’ steep sides and forgotten. Except for the residents who breed their dogs unethically and leave them outside all night long to howl from fear and frustration. Except for what happens behind some of the closed doors here—the kinds of things that could happen anywhere in terms of the broad strokes but whose details follow unique, longstanding patterns specific to this area.

Wendell Barry writes, “There are no unsacred places; / there are only sacred places / and desecrated places.” This is a sacred place, but it is also a desecrated place. Visitors for the most part don’t see beyond the perfect images they capture from their balconies, the ones that literally exclude the houses, trash, and other incursions on the natural land from the frame. They trot out, often barefoot and shirtless, right when the sky erupts with color. They are, as Tate describes, totally unprepared for what they’re seeing, to the point that it makes no impression other than the ones they get on social media for images that have a shelf life shorter than the energy drinks they chug after getting a buzz scaling this or that nameless cliff—not because the cliffs have no names but because those scaling them don’t bother to learn their names before picking up and moving out, on to the next adventure, the next cheap high.

Midfield

I want to tell you about the birds, the ones I’ve been watching for months now, as closely as I’ve ever watched anything. There is a stillness when I watch them—their presence demands mine. But there is everything else, too. What stirs in them stirs in me, emotions that fall beyond the reach of language.

It started with desire. For years, I’d wanted to know the names of birds, to be able to identify them. To know things, we must start with learning their names. Only then can we unlearn the names and understand the thing being experienced, as well as the thing doing the experiencing—that thing we call the self.

A pair of binoculars arrived in the mail this fall, along with a set of bird identification flashcards. Both were gifts from my partner. I spliced memorizing the cards with staring out my window through the binoculars. My days were woven in this way: memorize, stare, memorize, stare. I ran my fingers over the birds’ printed forms while saying their names. Fox sparrow. House sparrow.1 Lark sparrow. White-throated sparrow. I had no idea there were so many sparrows. At first, my yard only offered up house sparrows. Eventually, a pair of white-throated sparrows arrived and dazzled me with their black-and-white helmets. Thrilled that I could identify them, I screamed their name in the style of a blue jay’s alarm call: “White-throated sparrow! White-throated sparrow!” The soundwaves my voice created hit the glass in front of me. The pane indifferently refracted the vibrations.

My world swelled after I realized there was more than one type of sparrow. How crude was my perception that I had lumped so many species into one? I widened my search from my backyard to area parks, meadows, tallgrass prairies, wetlands, and wildlife refuges waiting for the quiet to be parted by a sound akin to a flutist trilling while playing wind tones on her instrument. No note, just the airy pairing of consonants amplified by the flute’s long silver body. “Trrrrrr, trrrrrr.” The trills lasted a few seconds, long enough for a sparrow to move from the meadow to a nearby tree, or from a blade of grass to the water, or simply to move away from me. “Trrrrrr, trrrrrr.” A scramble of wings. Most of the time, I saw no more than a smear of color, like someone swiping oil paints with his thumb. Then nothing. Silence returned. It was a companion, this silence. I came to feel as if both of us were waiting for another bird to stir—to relieve my disquiet and to relieve silence of the burden of being silence.

Not every sparrow was a smear. I saw my first savannah sparrows at Heritage Park, where they foraged in patchy grass near an old brick silo. Like an accent color used sparingly, yellow patches above their eyes elevated their otherwise drab appearance. I first saw Harris’s sparrows at the Tallgrass Prairie Nature Preserve. They scurried into a group of shrubs as my partner and I drove past. They seemed to pose as I trained my binoculars on them. One had the darkest face and crown of any Harris’s sparrow I’ve seen so far, features that would ensure a high rank among his quarrel. The wheat-colored spots on either side of his head made him look like he was wearing earmuffs.

I saw white-crowned sparrows for the first time at the preserve where I saw the Harris’s sparrows. They were part of a flutter mobbing the feeder outside the educational center. My first fox sparrow surprised me at Longview Lake. I hadn’t heard its trill as it left the meadow, but suddenly it poked its head out of an evergreen just above me. “This is the red sparrow,” I thought. “Red, red, red. Red like the fox.” That was the same day we saw a rangy coyote on the side of the highway. How slow the animal seemed, how sapless, a stark contrast to the birds in the meadow.

Loess Bluffs National Wildlife Preserve gave me my first song sparrows. My first chipping sparrows hugged the water at the KCP&L Wetlands, a visit that was also notable because of the racist and anti-Semitic graffiti someone had carved into the bird blind at the wetland’s entrance.

Baker Wetlands offered up the shy Le Conte’s sparrow, whom I happened upon as I was taking a photo of the switchgrass next to a mowed path. He balanced between two blades, one foot on each, exposing his blond breast and white belly. He sang, but I don’t remember his song. I was overcome by his beauty: his soft gold face and striped crown, the patchwork of browns on his back that reminded me of the mottling on a hawk, his cocked tail. I was also overcome with how blithe he seemed, surfing in the grass, body shifting and shifting again in the air. “Alive,” I thought. “This bird is alive, through and through.” I had been reading about the Le Conte’s sparrow the day before visiting Baker, though I didn’t make the connection until later. What I read described them as being difficult to see because of their secretive nature. The phrase “secretive nature” made it sound like the Le Conte’s was a gumshoe, a spy, or worse—nothing like the glib creature I had encountered.

Lake Perry is not where I had my first or even second American tree sparrow sighting, but it is here where I had my most meaningful experience with them. I found them where the edge of the lake fed a small inlet. There, surrounded by trees, the tree sparrows (and a few song sparrows) pulsed and trundled at the water’s edge like sprites. They were bathing, and I was watching without their knowledge. I’d crept across a rough-shorn field and made my way through unkempt trees to bear witness to this ritual. All along the section of the shore, as well as in the inlet, sparrows bobbled, sending a volley of water droplets in every direction. I’d never seen anything more joyful, and that joy found its way into my body. “This little world,” I thought. “What have I been missing?” I felt like I’d been born the wrong size. The human-sized world was not nearly as enchanting as this Lilliputian one.

Not unlike the Le Conte’s sparrow, I am becoming more secretive as I watch birds. I skulk about in their world, which has no need for me. I move slowly. I crouch. I crawl. I sit motionless with my legs crossed until parts of my body go numb. I stand looking out and out, seemingly at nothing. My partner makes line drawings of the landscape as he waits for me. Or he listens to podcasts. Or he goes on walks that loop back to where he will find me, still sitting or standing in the same place.

But I am not in the same place. The stillness, the watching—and what I am watching—is changing me in ways that words can’t properly express. Basho’s come close:

Midfield,
attached to nothing,
the skylark singing.

Perhaps that’s it, or at least part of it. The birds are attached to nothing. I am attached to nothing. There we are, held together by the field, singing with life.

—

I just learned that house sparrows aren’t actually sparrows. They’re weaver finches.

Review of Wunderkammer, by Cynthia Cruz

Wunderkammer, by Cynthia Cruz
Four Way Books, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-935536-47-5
Perfect bound, 72 pp., $15.95
Review by Dana Henry Martin (aka M Ross Henry)

The wonder chamber, or cabinet of curiosities, occupies a unique space in history. These rooms emerged in the sixteenth century and functioned as encyclopedic collections of objects belonging to three classes: “naturalia (products of nature), arteficialia (or artefacta, the products of man), and scientifica (the testaments of man’s ability to dominate nature, such as astrolabes, clocks, automatons, and scientific instruments).”1 Wonder chambers were regarded as a microcosm or theater of the world, and as a memory theater.2,3 Also known as wunderkammern, these rooms grew out of an age of unprecedented European discovery whose essence was only partially captured by returning ships full of objects from uncharted lands. Noblemen, scholars, and merchants were eager to add these objects to their personal wonder chambers so they could have a miniature representation of the world located within the walls of their own homes.3

The Tate describes Renaissance wunderkammern as:

… private spaces, created and formed around a deeply held belief that all things were linked to one another through either visible or invisible similarities. People believed that by detecting those visible and invisible signs and by recognizing the similarities between objects, they would be brought to an understanding of how the world functioned, and what humanity’s place in it was.4

It is this context that we must bring to a reading of Cynthia Cruz’s third collection, Wunderkammer. In this work, the poet continually defines and redefines the concept of a wonder chamber and, in doing so, suggests a new group of visible and invisible lines that connects all things to one another. People and places, health and illness, dream and reality, and time itself (past, present, and future) weave and unweave in the creation and subversion of order and meaning. In Wunderkammer, Cruz explores the dark side of wonder and the implications of believing that by cataloging the world we can at once understand and control it.

Throughout the collection, we encounter a series of wonder chambers (wunderkammern), side worlds (nebenwelts), self-portraits, and poems set in all manner of locations, including gardens, hospitals, hotels, passageways, and sanitariums. Taken together, these poems transmogrify the wonder chamber into a phenomenon both tethered to and unmoored from history, myth, geography, culture, and cultural artifacts. A bombed Berlin meets ancient Greece meets a Greyhound station bathroom. Hades meets Eden. Brooklyn’s Greenpoint neighborhood meets South America’s Orinoco River meets an unnamed airport city. Swarovski meets Warhol meets a boombox meets the Bathysphere. The products of nature, the products of man, and the testaments of man’s ability to dominate nature glimmer and whir inside the rooms Cruz constructs, each poem another cubby or display case spilling over with necrotic, narcotic-laced secrets.

The collection opens with the first of several poems titled “Nebenwelt.” In this piece, we find a speaker “drowned in a cream velvet / Mini gown, mind blown out like a city” who vanishes into a “… silvery paste of vapor on the ice.” The poem concludes with a sweeping gesture away from the speaker to the greater, fetid world:

              A row of pretty blonde dummies in the Dutch death

              Museum, death dressed in Chanel and Maharaja

              Paste jewels, a vibrant green bacteria of sea and decay.

This side world sets up the collection as a whole, moving from the personal to the larger, and largely human, forces that shape and limit identity. The dummies in the museum speak to a cultural representation of women in life and after death, as well as referencing the historical role of wunderkammern as precursors to museums. In the last line, the sea is invoked—that body of water humans have crossed time and again on quests for discovery and domination, the same body Renaissance ships traversed in search of artifacts, relics, and natural objects with which to build miniature worlds.

“Wunderkammer,” the second poem in the collection, turns to ancient times—“A Greek crime mars the pastoral. / Charts and maps, an atlas of anesthesia- / Laced nostalgia.” The preoccupation with memory that wonder chambers embody seems to have grown out of their precursor, Italian scholar Giulio Camillo’s “theater of memory.” Its architecture was similar to an amphitheater, and its function was to allow its users to memorize all the world’s knowledge.5 Camillo’s work was informed by mnemonic techniques adopted by ancient Romans and Greeks in which visualization was used to organize and recall information. Cicero described this technique as the method of loci (also called the memory palace).5,6 By taking us back to ancient Greece at the beginning of Wunderkammer, Cruz both situates her collection within a larger historical context and also sets up one of the work’s main themes, which is memory—from its “incessant rush” early in the collection to its effacement near the collection’s close:

              This is not meant to be a koan
              Or a fable.

              I am telling you everything.

              One day they’ll remove
              The memory out of me.

              — “Hotel Feral”

Rather than facilitating memory, Cruz’s vision of the wonder chamber is one in which memory is haunting, failing, or entirely absent. The wunderkammeris not a means for sharpening memory. Instead, it has the capacity to preserve trauma, promote amnesia, and dissolve identity.

In “Self Portrait in Fox Furs, with Magic,” Cruz draws on the concept of the “memory palace” while subverting the idea that a microcosm of the world can be representative of the world at large. “In the city / Of palaces,” she writes, “I lived / Inside a doll house.” Other types of chambers appear in the collection. These include cages, jewelry boxes, mansions, palanquins, wards, a music box, and a locked motel room. These chambers fit together like a set of nesting dolls—some smaller, some larger, but all of them conscribed the way the wonder chamber itself is conscribed.

Throughout the collection, the wunderkammeris imposed as well as self-imposed. The imposition is evident in the poems “Junk Garden” and “Hotel Oblivion,” respectively: “I move my body / But I never leave this room” and “We are promiscuous / In our thinness, don’t leave the green mansion, / Are trapped inside the snow box, noiselessly / Splendoring.” But self-imposition is also articulated. In “Atlas of the Molecular Kingdom of Girl Orphans,” Cruz writes: “In the end, I made my way through the never-ending / Atlas of my own making.” The imposed and self-imposed seem to converge in the poem “Kingdom of Cluttering Sorrow,” in which Cruz writes: “I am frozen forever in this wonder / Room, this zoo of one million / Diamond machines.”

The closing poem, “Some Velvet Morning,” comes back to the marred pastoral introduced at the beginning of the collection. The poem is set in an undetermined point in the future, in a “Garden with its brilliant white / Hives of memory, its mausoleums / Of locked, oblong boxes jam- / Packed with history.” No longer just a chamber, a memory theater, or a museum, the wunderkammer has undergone a transition. It is now a mausoleum whose locked, oblong boxes are reminiscent of the neatly housed and organized specimens of the wonder chamber. Rather than reflecting the world of the living, the wunderkammer houses the world of the dead.

Wunderkammer starts in death and ends in death, but its central question seems to be whether we can come to know the self, to develop an identity, when the impulse to see the world through the lens of the wunderkammerhasprevailed, when an entire sea and its suffering has been compressed into “Spots of water on crystal.” Perhaps we can’t. In the collection’s third poem with the title “Nebenwelt,” Cruz writes: “Like you, I am / Incapable of interpreting my own body, / Its soulless and mollusk iterations.” Though the speaker is addressing a specific “you,” the lines feel as if they are being directed at the reader. With this utterance, we become more than visitors at the wunderkammer. We leave the chamber-turned-museum-turned-mausoleum to reckon with our own sense of terror, knowing that the wunderkammer has been handed down to us, too, and that it informs our perception of ourselves, each other, and all that is. What have we tucked away in our own memory theaters and what shadow puppetry is enacted on the scrim? In a world where even language is implicated, we are left wondering what part we have played in what Cruz describes as, “These words, this terrible song.”

—

Sources

  1. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. “Collecting for the Kunstkammer.” http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/kuns/hd_kuns.htm (accessed February 25, 2015).
  2. Mendoza, Bernardo Uribe, Rodolfo Ramirez, Neslson Cruz, Manuel Guillermo Forero, and Patricia Cervantes. 2000. “A ‘Virtual Worlds’ Theatre of Memory (Scheme for a Contemporary Museum).” In Virtual Worlds, ed. Jean-Claude Heudin, 205–213. Springer Berlin Heidelberg. http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F3-540-45016-5_19 (accessed February 25, 2015).
  3. Funston Antiques. “Wunderkammer: An Introduction and Preface.” http://www.funstonantiques.com/2009/05/09/wunderkammer-an-introduction-preface (accessed February 25, 2015).
  4. Tate Britain. “History of the Wunderkammern (Cabinet of Curiosities).” http://www.tate.org.uk/learn/online-resources/mark-dion-tate-thames-dig/wunderkammen (accessed February 25, 2015).
  5. Neault, Michael. “The Museum as Memory Palace.” http://blog.art21.org/2012/08/30/the-museum-as-memory-palace/#.VO9Io_nF_uM (accessed February 25, 2015).
  6. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. “Mental Imagery > Ancient Imagery Mnemonics.” http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mental-imagery/ancient-imagery-mnemonics.html (accessed February 25, 2015).

—

“Review of Wunderkammer, by Cynthia Cruz” first appeared in Prick of the Spindle.

The First Wound, a Found Essay in Verse

The First Wound

The first wound was in the right hand
…………………..and occurred at the patrol car as confirmed
by skin tissue found on the car.
…………………………………..It was the only close wound.

The Body

The body weight is 289 pounds and the body length is 77 inches.
The state of preservation is good in this unembalmed body.
Rigor mortis is well developed.

The body is heavier than ideal weight base upon height //.
Lividity is difficult to access due to natural skin pigmentation.
There is no peripheral edema present.

Personal hygiene is good.

No unusual odor is detected as the body is examined.
There is no abnormal skin pigmentation present.
There is no external lymphadenopathy present //

The pupil of the left eye is round, regular, equal and dilated.
The scleral and conjunctival surfaces of the left eye are unremarkable.
The right eye cannot be accessed due to an acute traumatic injury (gunshot wound).

Gunshot Wounds

There is a gunshot entrance wound of the vertex of the scalp.
There is a gunshot entrance wound of the central forehead.
There is a gunshot exit wound of the right jaw.

There is a gunshot entrance wound of the upper right chest.
There is a gunshot entrance wound of the lateral right chest.
There is a gunshot entrance wound of the upper ventral right arm.

There is a gunshot exit wound of the upper dorsal right arm.

There is a gunshot entrance wound of the dorsal right forearm.
There is a gunshot exit wound of the medial ventral right forearm.
There is a tangential // gunshot wound of the right bicep.

There is a tangential // gunshot wound near the ventral surface of the right thumb.
There is a gunshot related defect present near the right eyebrow //.
There is a gunshot related defect present near the right eyelid //.

The Heart

The surface of the heart is smooth,
………………………….glistening and transparent.

Tissue Fragment

Sections of the tissue fragment from
the “exterior surface of the police officer’s

motor vehicle” are consistent with a fragment
of skin overlying soft // tissue.

There are features of desiccation/drying
artifact present within the soft tissue.

There is a granular layer present
within the upper layer of stratified

squamous epithelium.
Focally, lightly pigmented keratinocytes

are present within the basal layer
of the stratified squamous epithelium.

The Hair

The hair is black.
This represents the apparent natural color.
The hair is worn short to medium length.
There is a goatee present on the face.
The body hair is of normal male distribution.

He Came Around

he came around
…………………..he came around
………………………………………with his arm extended
…………………………..fist made
……..and went like that
………………………….straight at my face with his …
………………………………………….a full swing with his left hand

Mace

I know how mace affects me so if I used that
in that close proximity I was gonna be disabled per se.
And I didn’t know if it was even gonna work on him
if I would be able to get a clear shot or anything else.

Um, then like I was thinking like picturing my belt
going around it. I don’t carry a taser so that option
was gone and even if I had one with a cartridge
on there, it probably wouldn’t have hit him anywhere.

He Said

He said, “You’re too much of a fuckin’ pussy
………………………..to shoot me” and grabbed my gun.

Then

Then I took my left arm and I pinned it against
my back seat and pushed the gun forward
like this
…………………..took my left hand, placed it against his
and my hand on the side of my firearm
and pushed forward both of my arms.

Somewhat Lined Up

When it got there I saw
that it was somewhat
lined up with his silhouette
and pulled the trigger.

Nothing happened.
Pulled it again,
nothing happened.

Um I believe his fingers
were over in between from
the hammer and the slide
preventing it from firing.

Blood

The first thing I remember seeing is glass flyin’
and blood all over my right hand on the back side
of my hand.

……………..Um, he looked like he was shocked
initially but, and he paused for a second and then
he came back into my vehicle and attempted
to hit me multiple times

………………………….He had, after I had shot
and the glass came up, he took like a half step back
and then realized he was okay still I’m assuming.
He came back towards my vehicle and ducked in
again his whole bod …

………………………….whole top half of his body
came in and tried to hit me again.

……………………………………..Um …

Again

I tried to fire again, just a click.
Nothing happened.

…………………….After the click,
I racked it and as I racked it,
it just came up and shot again.

Dust

I was still in this position blocking myself
and just shooting to where he was ’cause
he was still there.

……………………Um, when I turned and looked,
I realized I had missed I saw, a, like dust
in the background and he was running …

A Grunting Noise

When he stopped, he turned, looked at me,
made like a grunting noise and had the most
intense aggressive face I’ve ever seen on a person.

Still Charging

Still charging hands still in his waistband,
…………………..hadn’t slowed down. I fired another set of shots.

…………Same thing, still running at me hadn’t slowed down,
hands still in his waistband.

He Went Down

He went down his hand was still
………………………….under his, his right hand was still
……………under his body looked like it was still
……………………………….in his waistband. I never touched him.

Swabs

Swabs from Michael Brown’s t-shirt / Swabs from Michael Brown’s shorts / Swabs from the palm of Michael Brown’s left hand / Swabs from the back of Michael Brown’s left hand / Swabs from the palm of Michael Brown’s right hand / Swabs from the back of Michael Brown’s right hand / Swab from the fingernail scrapings/clippings of Michael Brown’s left hand / Swab from the fingernail scrapings/clippings of Michael Brown’s right hand / Piece of apparent tissue or hardened nasal mucus from the driver front exterior door of Ferguson [Police Department] vehicle 108 / Swab from the driver rear passenger exterior door of Ferguson [Police Department] vehicle 108 / Swab from roadway in front of 2943 Canfield / Swab from roadway in front of 2943 Canfield / Swabs from RBS on the upper left thigh of [Police Officer] Wilson’s uniform pants / Swabs from top exterior left front door of Ferguson [Police Department] vehicle 108 / Swabs from exterior left front door mirror of Ferguson [Police Department] vehicle 108 / Swabs from interior left front door handle of Ferguson [Police Department] vehicle 108 / Swabs from [Police Officer] Wilson’s “SIG P229” / Swabs from [Police Officer] Wilson’s uniform shirt—left side and collar / Swabs from [Police Officer] Wilson’s uniform pants—left side / Buccal swab reference sample from [Police Officer] Wilson / Bloodstain card reference sample from Michael Brown

The Deceased Hands

The deceased hands
were bagged with paper bags
to save any trace evidence

—

The text above was taken directly from the documents pertaining to the grand jury investigation of Michael Brown’s shooting. Omitted words are indicated with a double slash (//). Omissions do not alter the context of the information provided. Read the grand jury documents here.

May everyone involved in this tragedy find healing. May we all find our way out of this, of this and so much more.

The Poem and the Body, the Body and the Poem

I intended to write a piece on poetry yesterday, but instead I experienced a tear in my retina. Right eye. Noonish. I saw white lights like fireworks, followed by a hovering gray blob that obscured my vision. It was roughly the shape of an acorn cap or a winter hat with a fuzzy ball on top. An ophthalmologist at KU Medical Center saw me right away. He looked deep into my vitreous gel with a fancy headlamp that made him look like he was about to go spelunking and exclaimed, I see the acorn in your eye! I thought he was making a joke, but apparently he could see a bundle of proteins torn from my retinal lining floating in the gel.

Why does the poetic image communicate faster than other forms? A few years ago, I asked this very question on Facebook and then proceeded to answer it myself. How annoying of me. My answer was as follows:

Arthur Koestler has an interesting theory. He says poetry requires thinking on a third plane, a kind of “bisociation,” meaning perceiving a situation or an idea in two individually consistent but habitually incompatible frames of reference. This bisociation disturbs our patterns of thinking/feeling and causes a crisis, which requires a third plane of thinking/feeling to arise, one that is antithetical to but that does not negate the strife of the two.

Since this moment of entry into the poem is a moment of crisis, I would argue that we respond to the crisis the way we are hard-wired to respond to all crises—as quickly as possible. Our entry into the poem is similar to pulling a hand away from a scalding object before realizing on a conscious level that the object is hot. It’s instinctual, a survival tactic. Perhaps bisociation in poetry works on this level as well—because of the crisis the poem presents, we move swiftly to a different mode of thinking/feeling that allows us to enter the poem without completely fracturing our identities, without obliterating our ways of seeing and moving through the world. Bisociation is a way of surviving the poem, of seeing the world as we experience it on a day-to-day level, then seeing the world of the poem itself, then seeing a plane on which to stand, one that straddles the two and gives the reader a place to exist, to breathe.

Perhaps this is why poems work on us so quickly, why the image communicates faster in poetry than in other forms of writing. Precisely because poems put us in crisis.

I removed that post from Facebook years ago, but I stashed it in my poetry files. I came across it today and appreciated it as one way to understand how poems work. I also appreciated my former self for leaving me this trace. It could prove useful when people ask me what poems are, how the mean, and under what conditions they operate.

If you look at a vertical sagittal section of the human eye, you are supposed to see something that resembles a camera. That’s not what I see. I see an angelfish without the fins. I’m sure this says something fundamental about me. The watery fish in the head. The brain home to an aquarium. The two specimens that cannot swim, that cannot escape, that do my bidding, that are forced to document the production.

In his poem “Trace,” Eric Pankey writes: To occupy space is to shape it. / Snow, slantwise, is not white / But a murk of winter-black basalt. / In the gullied, alluvial distances, / On the swallow-scored air, / Each erasure is a new trace.

Having a torn retina is not without its consequences. I feel like a mean girl punched me in the eye. Maybe at a bar. Maybe after I looked at her the wrong way. Maybe after she mistook the fireworks in my eyes for something I never intended.

If you look closely enough at a poem while wearing a headlamp, you can enter its recesses and observe the detail held within its vitreous gel. What drifts and where. What has lost viscosity with age and use. What holds fast. But when you occupy the poem, you change it. We change things by looking. There is no way around this.

When I told my husband about my retina, he asked if reading poetry might have caused the tear. I said poetry had no bearing on what happened. He seems to think poetry leads to disaster. I’ve tried to tell him for years now that we all lead ourselves to disaster, with or without poetry. Poems simply document the path from cradle to grave; from point of entry to point of no exit; from one dark, craggy landmark to another.

Origami

I grew up eating okra, which my mother breaded and fried. I never knew until I moved to Kansas City and bought a bag of frozen okra that it was hairy on the outside and slimy on the inside. I didn’t know the seeds were soft and moved within the mouth in an unsettling manner, avoiding the tongue and slipping down the throat. Okra and I parted ways after our tryst in the frozen food section of the Piggly Wiggly at 51st and Main, but I see it sometimes in gumbo and imagine what we might have become if we had stayed together all these years.

I feel like I’m in a car driving down a dark road, just two headlights between me and the black world.

I read a poem today that was so good I had to stop reading poems. It wasn’t about okra. It was about family. It was one of those poems that makes me cry and pace and ultimately climb the stairs to the main bedroom, at which point I consider the unmade bed and its implicit invitation to ride out the rest of my day there in the disturbing drift of silence and synthetic down.

Now I’m sitting at the computer wondering what comes after silence. I looked to the moon for an answer, but it seems to have vacated the sky. I don’t trust this level of darkness.

My husband will be home soon enough to invade my senses in the best or worst of ways. My tongue is already burning. My arms tingle. I don’t know if my body will accept or reject the presence of another human being in its vicinity.

There are not enough light bulbs to illuminate this room. I feel like I’m in a car driving down a night road, only two headlights between me and the black world. But I am not moving. I just keep staring at the same two monitors and, behind them, the same set of bookshelves—one shelf sports a thumb piano, the other a rusted monkey with articulated arms and legs.

Maybe I want poems to be pop-up books or choose-your-own-adventure verses. Maybe I want them to be origami. You would buy them flat, and the poem would be revealed as you folded the paper into the proper form.

I wonder if I could sauté okra in water and if I could learn to like it that way, if I could ever eat it without thinking of my mother. I wonder if my husband could lasso the sun and place it on my desk like a lamp. If not, maybe he could take me to the lighting section at IKEA. I could stand under all those fixtures and pretend to be Cinderella at the ball. Someday I will make my own light, like the stonefish or the false moray eel. I will be the bright thing in the shadows.

My CPU warms my feet. The heat makes me think something is curled up next to me, a small being in need of comfort.

The Chosen Life

I knew before moving to Eastern Washington that the land—by which I mean the soil, the air, the water, the flora and the fauna—as well as many of the people here, including native people, had suffered and were still suffering deeply.

The poems have to come from life, a life fully and deeply lived. Even then, they are still only clues.

I knew this side of the state had taken in or had foisted on it some of the worst industries imaginable, from personal and industrial waste to toxic waste.

I knew unthinkable things were being done to animals in one of the country’s largest meat processing plants, that its walls housed extreme suffering.

The river was being poisoned. I knew that. I knew the ground was contaminated by the radioactive slurry left behind and improperly stored at the Hanford Site and that the ground water was also contaminated.

I knew all this and I came here not in spite of these realities but because of them. I’d been living in the Seattle Bubble for too long, going about my daily business without issues such as these entering my consciousness, let alone being at the forefront of my consciousness. I led a relatively easy life, one in which I believed that if I earned a certain salary every year, if I had a certain type of living situation, if I had this or that material object, then I could extend my sense of happiness indefinitely.

But I always knew that was no life, and that the “happiness” I sought out, relied on and through which I defined myself was as flimsy as the plastic cover that stretches over a swimming pool in the winter months. It was easy to break through that “happiness” and fall into the depths, into frigid water that could kill.

I lived for something more. I craved something more. I wanted to connect in a deeper way with the world. I tried to bring that about—to create some kind of transformation—in my writing. I attempted to write myself and those I loved into spaces of myth and healing. Writing poems also altered my consciousness temporarily by giving me the feeling, the fleeting feeling, of transcendence.

The poems were only clues, though. I realize that now. They were clues and little addictions. You can’t live from the high of one poem to the next any more than you can say you are living on a higher plane because you chain smoke cigarettes all day. The poems have to come from life, a life fully and deeply lived. Even then, they are still only clues. Yet they might become enough of a trail to keep you headed in the right direction, which is toward a life in which you place your faith in something and then act from that position—in the interest of other, of community, of the infinite within and without.

Moving to Eastern Washington was the best decision my husband and I have made in our adults lives, other than finding our way to one another in 1995. Coming here set me on a path whose end I cannot see, but I do know it’s a long journey—a life’s journey and one worth taking. It is here that I have learned true love in all senses of the word, including a true love of place. Though this place is not my home, the land has welcomed me and taken me in. It has led me down its paths and back roads, so I could see its scars and wounds. I have seen those wounds up close, and I worry that they are fatal. I worry that the land I have come to know and cherish is dying, and that is a grief I cannot tolerate.

I have no choice but to act. I must act in any and every way possible on behalf of both the land and the people. I must commit my life to this. And the poems will never tell the whole story. They will only be clues to the life I have chosen, the one I am leading.

Cold Sun

The cold sun of fall woke me early. I’m thankful for that. Sometimes I believe I can do more waking than sleeping. Other times I admit the truth: More goes on in my life when I sleep than when I am awake.

Unbridled joy is just that: untamed, messy, imperfect. It falls. It gets up. This is how I learn from an eight pound dog.

I have a small window, not in the main bedroom but in a closet whose door I keep ajar because I like to see some of what’s in there, but not everything. I like to see the bookcase, the yellow one, and the clear containers full of poems (mine, those of friends and strangers). I accumulated the paper back when the world was paper, when I thought thin sheets organized alphabetically could help me tame, or at least take part in, the world.

The window is positioned high on the wall, right below the home’s eave. It’s only purpose, I believe, was to let cool air in before there was air conditioning. Now it’s stuck shut, like most of the windows in the home. It didn’t do anything all summer, didn’t seem to do anything. But two days ago, when the cold sun of fall was created anew this season, the small window, the small high window, took its opportunity and caught that light. The sun is lower now. Low and clear. The eave can’t hold light back, and so it comes in, thanks to the window—not in a stream but as a single rectangle, a slot, which lands on my face, framing my eyes. The rest of the room remains in relative darkness.

There couldn’t be a more direct wake-up call. So I woke. What was I supposed to do? I can’t remember last night’s dreams. That must mean things are going OK. The dreams come—lucid dreams, night terrors, false awakenings, the half-dreams of hypnagogia, out-of-body dreams in which my dream self hovers over me threatening to float through the wall and stay on the other side forever, long long endless long dreams in which I obsessively play out scenes from my life—when things are not going OK.

We can’t wipe someone off with a towel in this poem. It’s so boring, I tell the children at Farm Labor Homes. Poems are fun, exciting, they don’t do what we expect them to do. I watch as a look floods their eyes the way ink does when it’s injected into water. A crazy look. “Chicken noodle soup,” one of the kids exclaims, jumping out of her seat. The others lean into the table, waiting for my reaction, expectant.

They get it, they get it, I think, relieved. Yes, I squeal. Now that’s more like it. I complete the line of the poem we are writing together: And then the girl who fell / in mud gets wiped off with / chicken noodle soup.

They all laugh. They laugh and laugh and beg to write another poem. I tell them that they made this, emphasizing the word “they.” It’s a poem and they made it. I try to tell them how important this moment is, but they are too busy laughing and grabbing the poem so they can read it again.

My chihuahua was overcome last night, as she sometimes is, with what I can only interpret as joy. She ran as fast as she could through the living and dining rooms, making the same lazy circle around the seating. Every time she hit the wood floors, she fell: hip into floor, side against floor, legs behind her, crisscrossed. Her nails made a “schrwish schrwish schrwish schrwihsch” that would have frightened someone who didn’t know what was going on. “Schrwish schrwish thump.” “Schrwish schrwish thump.” The thumps are the falling, obviously.

I love how my dog slips, and how she gets back up, her joy intact. Unbridled joy is just that: untamed, messy, imperfect. It falls. It gets up.

This is how I learn from an eight pound dog.

I remember my dream, the one I had last night. He and I lived in a basement apartment that had never been fully converted. Concrete walls painted red. Low ceilings. No real plumbing, only a drain in the middle of the space into which everything—bath water, kitchen sink—flowed.

What happened next? He left. We had just moved in when he moved out. Left me there. Took everything. I didn’t have a bed. I would lie on the floor each night and think about how we used to lie in the bed together, with sheets and pillows and a gentle breeze coming from somewhere. Suddenly, I realized I wasn’t living in a house; I was living in a cell and always had been, even when he was with me.

I wanted my home. I mean my mother’s home. I cursed him for not letting me move into it when I had the chance. What I really wanted was her. I went outside, dug in the dirt. I was looking for her, meant to bring her back the way one might bring a radish back from the garden.

Then he appeared. He held me and I screamed.

I just looked outside. Evidence of first frost—a thin semi-frozen mat over grass. Sun and window woke me early to see this.

All summer I thought the summer sun was clear. It wasn’t. It was overdoing it, trying to impress. Fall sun. That’s where the real light is at. When you have sun without heat, you’ve got something special.

I don’t live alone, though we all live alone in some ways. I live with a man who is a great love, a great love who moves inside the great love of the world.

Lame Skills and Dreams and Being and Doing (and My Dog, Hayden)

I am sitting here, staring at my screen. My dog, Hayden, snores at my feet in her puppy bed, which we call her butt nest. The term is a misnomer, of course, since her entire body is in the nest, not just her butt, and since it’s technically not a nest.

What I’ve been thinking about lately is the difference between doing and being.

I don’t know. Maybe it qualifies as a nest. I suddenly realize I don’t know the actual definition of “nest.”

I’ll have to look that up.

Later.

I feel like I should write something, since I am here at the computer and all. I can’t go anywhere anyway. Hayden just had surgery, her second procedure in three weeks. I have to watch her until she feels better and gets over her predictable but still unpleasant post-op constipation.

I’ve never cheered for poop the way I’ve cheered for poop with this dog. I’ve been cheering all day to no avail. In response, she looks up at me and wags her tail, as if her very existence is worthy of applause—which it is. She doesn’t have to do anything for me to sing her praises.

I also feel like I should write something because I am a writer, or at least consider myself a writer. I certainly don’t consider myself someone who stares idly at the computer all day, fingers curved over the keyboard as if on the cusp of writing, without actually doing any writing.

But the thing is, I don’t know what to write. And when I don’t know what to write, I usually begin aimlessly and somehow end up with a five thousand-word essay on some unexpected thing that wells up in the not-knowing-what-to-write moment.

I don’t have time for a five thousand-word essay today. That’s not true. I have time. I have nothing but time. Time and love and capacity. That’s all I have and all I will ever have. Even on my deathbed, I will have time. Just not a whole lot of it. But technically I will still have some of it. I hope I will have love and capacity then, too. We’ll see.

I just don’t feel like writing and writing and writing, namely because that necessitates proofing and proofing and proofing. Proofing is not fun, especially when you’re proofing your own work, and you’re dyslexic.

Don’t get me wrong: I proofread like a champ. If there were an Olympic event for proofreading, I would take at least the bronze medal, maybe the gold. I have consistently out-proofed every candidate on every editing test I’ve taken for editorial positions. I even find unintentional mistakes in people’s tests, scads of them. At a large publishing company I worked for, one that produced more than ninety magazines and had an editorial staff in the zillions, I was recognized by the group’s managing editor as the best proofreader he’d seen in his decade with the company.

My ability to proofread is, apparently, only outpaced by my ability to brag about my ability to proofread. It’s not even that hot of a skill. Why can’t I be the best planker or illusionist or dog whisperer? Why can’t I invent some awesome new bobby pin-based hairstyle-enhancing device that sells millions? Or a self-folding handkerchief? Heck, a self-folding everything-that-is-meant-to-be-folded!

Can you imagine throwing your sheets, towels, kitchen rags and the like—even your undies—on your bed or linen table after they’ve been washed and dried, and all of them FOLDING THEMSELVES while you kick back and sip on some tasty pomegranate juice? Can you IMAGINE that? I can. But I can’t do anything beyond the imagining. That’s because my skill lies in the area of proofreading.

PROOFREADING! It’s like reading, only it’s a specific type of reading of a specific type of document, with specific symbols and notes for the printer and whatnot—which 90 percent of writers, editors, designers and printers don’t even know anymore! (If there even are printers involved, which there aren’t when it comes to digital publishing. There often aren’t other writers or editors, either. So who exactly are my symbols and notes for?)

What the hell? My whole world is caving in right here, right now as I contemplate the boringness of my skill coupled with the outdatedness of it. My ability to proofread is like a beige argyle sweater vest for men or a brick of tofu sold the mid-’80s at The Earth Natural Foods in Norman, Oklahoma. (Mid-80s tofu, for those who don’t know, don’t remember or weren’t alive in the mid-80s, was so bland it possessed a nasty nontaste aftertaste. At least the kind sold in Oklahoma.)

I mean, PROOFREADING? That’s what I have to work with, to show off about? That’s a bragging FAIL.

The problem with proofing my own work is that I like to publish my writing as soon as I’ve written it. (None of that waiting around to see if the work is “quality”—that’s not how I roll.) My tight production schedule gives me very little time to go through the entire editorial process before putting the work out there. Sure, this is a self-imposed schedule. I could give myself overnight or something instead, or as much time as I want.

But no. Once it’s written, it must go live ASAP. That’s my compulsion derangement style.

Now Hayden is looking up at me, with that look that tells me she trusts me completely.

Why is it that almost all the dogs and children I’ve met have trusted me implicitly, while few of the adult humans I’ve met have exhibited the same level of trust?

I dreamed last night that someone I care about, a poet, was living behind a crack house in a hole he’d dug in the earth and covered with a rock. One day, he pushed the rock aside, left the hole and fell in love.

He and the woman he loved rented a studio apartment a few blocks away from the crack house. He bought a folding cot that resembled a hospital bed. She said it was hideous. He said the metal frame could be painted bright blue and that the color would really liven up the space. She told him to get rid of it.

Dejected, he ran off, leaving the cot behind.

Nobody could find him. Weeks passed. I knew where he’d gone. Back to the hole.

I made my way behind the crack house and started shifting rocks until I found him under one, lying next to Charles Bukowski. The soil was carved to fit their bodies perfectly, earthen molds designed to accept them and only them.

They were high. Each had a glassy look. Each was close to anger, but the drugs in their systems prevented them from reaching anger, the way water at the edge of a lake is prevented by various forces from reaching the land just beyond its reach.

“This is what people mean when they talk about being blissed out—this look that is so close to rage but does not permit rage,” I thought.

I pulled my friend up into the world and took him back to the woman he loved.

He never wrote another poem, but he became famous for living under a rock behind a crack house with Charles Bukowski. He was all over YouTube spouting off about Žižek. Everyone loved him, even more than they loved Žižek.

He kept taking drugs. He took up smoking and drinking and abusing. He spray-painted hideous folding cots in bright colors and people called them works of art and put them in museums and bid on them at auctions.

When he walked down the street, long lines formed behind him, like the tail of a comet. This pleased him, but not as much as having the love of the woman he loved. And he had that, finally. He finally had that. And cots galore.

What I’ve been thinking about lately is the difference between doing and being. I find myself shifting into the realm of being, as opposed to doing.

Not that being and doing are mutually exclusive. Not at all. But for me, doing has always been the driving force, with the idea that being comes from doing and not the other way around.

I am inside of being right now, and inside of becoming. From this position, the doing will reveal itself, what I am meant to do—assuming there is anything I am meant to do that my being does not accomplish.

Ultimately, I want to not have to do anything for me to sing my own praises. Once I can do that, I can go back to doing, if that’s what I want to do.

It’s all very confusing. I am confused by it. I am sitting inside that confusion. I am petting it. I am trying to make the confusion feel so comfortable with me, and to feel so comfortable with it, that it rolls over and lets me lightly touch its stomach, its paws, its long, graceful arms. I want it to trust me implicitly, as I am learning to trust it.

Confusion. Confusion. That’s not what it is. Not at all. Not that, not that. There’s the pesky trap of language again, and the trap of culture that led me to the trap of language. Confusion is like the hideous cot before it’s been painted a bright color. What I feel is something else: the hideous cot after being painted the bright color.

Uncertainty. That’s what it is. I am sitting with this uncertainty.

Right here. I am right here.

I have a writer’s dog, there’s no doubt about it. She’s sleeping with one eye, watching me with the other. The click of the keys under the direction of my fingers seems to calm her. He ears are up. Her breathing slow and steady.

I don’t think she’d rather be anywhere than where she is right now, beside her writer. Her writer who loves her.