Voices from June 1
Endless invention
“You must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” —Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable
Gathered here are a few expressions from our June 1 day of writing. It seems a long time ago now — so many days of heat dome, so much dismay and catastrophe, even a few celebrations — hardly a month back, already vanishing out of memory.
Thank you again to all who participated and now especially to those contributing anonymously a sampling of your words. (And please forgive me for giving titles of convenience to untitled work.)
Up and down the river
He was born and named; she was born and named. They grew up in different towns. They married in the big city. A river flowed through the city. She looked at the river every day. Sometimes when it rained the water formed a spine down the middle of the river.
Wars were on, wars were off. Different parties occupied the marble government buildings; the price of bread went up and down, in some relation to the factories which were opening and closing. The papers said all this. Their house was near a forest and near a small river. The lived each in different minds. They were unhappy together in one house. She walked up and down the river to the market and back to be happy. The water, she says, is one big relief map, its mountain-ranges of foam and buttermilk.
They made a child. The child grew long as an eel and one day went into the forest. I can read again, she says, two years after, but with him gone it’s not the same. How do you mean, he said, shaking his newspaper.
Up and down the river. The books no longer speak to me, she says. Maybe you need other books, he says, and he dies. She is now full of meaning. So full, she thinks, that the world around her absorbs her overflow. The frogs near the factory grow fatter. The wind holds a thin flute and flows where the trees part. Music is in the water. Mortality is in the leaves.
Everything blends in with everything else: time, wind, river. Herself. Her son now writes letters. She eagerly awaits them. She reads them walking up and down the river, becoming old.
Missing
I’m missing a world of tears
I’m missing, come find me
I’m missing each target, each attempt, each time
I’m missing when we couldn’t see for shit because tears of laughter covered our eyes
I’m missing Mississippi, a place I’ve never been
I’m missing the next episode. I just couldn’t get into it.
I’m missing kissing slipping lips
I’m missing that but not this, because missing happens only to those and that, but rarely to this and these
I’m missing a chance whenever I chance upon a missing gap, a lacuna of what is not missing, what is there and isn’t lost. Why isn’t there a space here? There should be an emptiness, a no-thing, but I’m missing it, unless I just can’t see it for some reason. What am I missing, if I can’t track the break, can’t spot the space?
I’m missing.
I’m not missing my childhood, it’s just fun to remember. No desire for resurrection, for fantasy bringing back. The past isn’t a target to miss and make true, to fill the gap that isn’t missing.
What’s missing from the past is being in it, when things were happening and not yet happened. Missing something leaves something to be desired, but mostly because it’s been left, there, in times before now.
It’s not that nostalgia is bad, but missing is lack, incompleteness. Imperfection is not worse than perfection. Miss. Go ahead. It’s not like anyone will miss you while you’re gone. While you’re missing, think about me, even if I wasn’t there in the gap. Pretend I’m missing too so you can miss me too. I’m missing, wanting, lacking, but my missing can’t be your missing. So while I’m missing myself, please miss yourself?
Who’s missing?
Wooden Floor
Wooden floor, contact point, connection. “You should write in an unguarded manner, be totally present.” But why not write into the guardedness. It is not a bad thing, it’s the perception of the “bad” that makes the thing . . .
It’s not the bad thing, it’s the perception of “bad” that makes the thing, thing. Robins chirp. Garbage trucks sigh, and the bones shift, release of air and rib, cramp and pain. And what else are we here on the earth to do? Move air, become the birds’ willing audience, shepherd objects from one state to another. Surely, this is connected to the body’s irregular groans and complaints. In the city, it is hard to decompose gracefully. Pulled apart by tiny paws, hunted.
Pulled apart by tiny paws, hunted. This is what it means to be prey to the world. Tiny paws, once friendly, are sharp nails. Going for a run is recreation, now survival. Crawling into a tree as bee might climb bergamot. One time, I swore I saw a Fisher cat scramble across the road. Months before, new to the neighborhood, we heard terrible cries from the hillside. Maybe it was strays or raccoons fighting, but I’d like to think it was the Fisher cat, low to the ground, sleek and dark weasel. Because seeing something rare makes it feel plausible to take a part of the preciousness, to hold it within, to not just be prey, to not just be notchless in the canoe.
To not just be prey, to not just be notchless in the canoe floating from terrible currents, to paddle with a paddle and not a sword, to see the heron dive from the sky, into the flow, to harvest and find harvest in empty water. Emptiness is water, or I am a fish. Emptiness is honest, or I am the lie. Somewhere, a river meets the ocean.
Somewhere, a river meets the ocean, and there are crab traps, a broken motorbike, and casting net that pulls not just minnows but algae, plastics, foam reeds, empty-handed and full, the wood floor of sand of robins and whatever came next, fell from the sky.
Futures
They say the future will be here before we know it, covered in grime, jumping, oozing, quivering, without exit. The future, they say, isn’t fixed, isn’t to be predicted, predicated either, can’t be quit or escaped, the endlessly this, unknown justice, unknowable zero, the forever of now. A near future should be easier to find, just an hour away, a mere tomorrow, but this is illusion, carved out of fear and fixation and the solidity of denial, the program we assign ourselves to quit the present moment, to zero in on anywhere but here, anything but this, anytime but now, this grave we call our life. Vast, beyond reach, immeasurably close, the future overflows itself—past and present, beings and things, light, sound, worlds, bigger than the biggest, smaller than the small, the explosion that takes out our universe a tiny candle on a birthday cake—a sheet cake, maybe, decorated with marzipan and quinoa, why not?—roses and lilacs and firecrackers, sparklers dancing, and balloons, a thousand golden balloons. The future harbors birds and rains and lilies, births willow and milkweed, rabbit and fox and vole, spits out grackles and crows, blue jays and robins, raises question and paradox, rainbow and wildfire, lions and elephants and chimpanzees. Forever. Never. Amen.
Until next time — tentative date for our next gathering: September 21