stand. no, turn. put your arms in the air. move your hands. slightly. to the right. pull them back. don’t pick at your nail. i don’t know how the blood got there either. relax your fingers. shake it off. wait. kneel. not so close to the wall. further. more. that’s it. put your head down. stretch your neck. keep your arms up. a little longer. a little longer. a little—
praise to the emptiness that blanks out existence. existence:
this place made from our love for that emptiness!
yet somehow comes emptiness,
this existence goes.
praise to that happening, over and over!for years i pulled my own existence out of emptiness.
then one swoop, one swing of the arm,
that work is over.
free of who i was, free of presence, free of dangerous fear, hope,
free of mountainous wanting.
the here-and-now mountain is a tiny piece of a piece of straw
blown off into emptiness.these words i’m saying so much begin to lose meaning:
existence, emptiness, mountain, straw:
words and what they try to say swept
out the window, down the slant of the roof.
(rumi)
we hang on to the day and to the hour. we cling to it in the hopes that it explains whatever followed it. in a land of unfinished businesses and interminable longings, the date and the hour hang listlessly in an eclipse, setting out for an exit that disappears, unfailingly.
(tap that blood.)
(look at the teeth, all picketed and dark.)
(you are thirsty for departure.)
strangers come together and seamlessly fall into warm conversations, but not us, not us. we sit in retreat, quiet and unapproachable. the condensation from the tea cup falls on my hand, on my lap. i am dressed in black so it doesn’t show, but i feel the moisture seeping through the fabric, where it reaches my skin and feeds it. i am not alone with this water.
we keep our wrists thin and bent for you, in circles and in servitude.
i am rushing to be quiet, hurrying to find a moment of silence. i run though there is no real noise around me, only faint, familiar sounds behind the windows and the walls: a lone cat meowing among chirping sparrows, a pair of crows building a nest in one of the most conscientious sights i have ever seen, stoic seagulls perched on chimneys, chimneys expelling no smoke. in this stretch i run my fingers on old routines, and i find feathers on the ground all delicate and white. i look at them—these tokens of a sky we cannot reach—and i wonder what would happen if we cared as much about all the scrapes of skin, strands of hair, and crescent nails we abandon in our wake.
spring comes with the rotation of the neck. it is torticollis season.
i follow an invisible thread—there’s enough in the back for the spine.
hi, how are you? i have a headache —
so began most of the letters i wrote through high school, and so began my recurring need for acetaminophen, which was later replaced with ibuprofen.
i would begin my letters this way regardless of whether i actually had a headache. it became routine. i assumed i had a headache. youth gave me a headache. i was a sensitive adolescent prone to psychosomatic ailments. i kept myself focused on a headache, real or imagined; it was the natural companion to a melancholy disposition.
my friends and i wrote each other letters during study periods, to pass the time mostly, as we couldn’t always hide in the soundproof piano booth to sing queen, or sneak out in the dead of winter to smoke cigarettes at la brioche dorée. there was something about our correspondence that went beyond the words in our mouths. our letters were sentences upon sentences of swirls and arrows, seamlessly braiding english and french. in this hybrid language filled with secrets, headaches and bad puns, my friends expressed themselves beautifully…
hover through the fog and filthy air
(over troo de fogue hand filty hair)
…and i learned proper pronunciation.
when you say “just give me five minutes”, you know it will take closer to an hour. you are so easily bruised. your skin, the flesh under the tissue, the air above it—everything around you is a cloud of black and blue. you try a new method, but the bell chimes and you fall from the tower. (how quickly patience is lost when we are cold, when we are hungry, when cannot find what we are looking for.) you raise your voice from the ground up, and the fire burns out. you make it there from the middle of the night. you drink your coffee, all wounds and muddles, and speak in slow copper-coloured tones.
i am in tbilisi. i walk along the narikala fortress. i think about my back. i see a priest ring a bell a few steps up. as the bell tolls, pain shoots through me in a cluster of angry pulsars. i lift my hand to capture the priest’s hand on the clapper, and a ribbon-bruise envelops my lower abdomen. i press the shutter and think about the energy i generate through my broken spine.
i look at the century-old stairs carved on the other side of the fortress. i stretch my arms and my legs, and the tips of my hips sting and tingle like glitter tassels dangling from tricycle handles. a cat meows at my feet. his fur is matted and full of knots. i want to pick him up but my body won’t allow it. i walk around the st nicholas church and find an open door. i peek in and there is the priest, surrounded by candles, chanting ominously in a language i do not understand. his voice echoes against the walls and resonates in the flesh surrounding my pelvis. every note is a baritone reminder of the aches that follow me.
i step out and look at the church’s walls. i see a small lizard dart and disappear through a crack. as i kneel down to inspect further i gasp in horror at the millions of hands pinching the tender skin around my vertebrae. for a moment i cannot move. i forget about the lizard, about the crack. tears fill my eyes but this isn’t the work of god. i look around in search of a place to sit. i find an empty bench by a wooden house. as i get closer to it, i see bees buzzing about several beehives right behind it. i wonder if a bee sting could distract me from my lumbar woes, if one pain could supplant another. i choose not to take the risk.
i walk toward the stone arch exit. an old woman dressed in layers of black approaches me and tries to sell me a postcard of the virgin mary. is that what it comes down to? can this papered mother of jesus soothe me? will i inspire divine wrath by dismissing the old woman’s gesture? all of the world’s evil eyes are already fixated on my lower back, and my pain feels as crippled as these walls. there is no need for temporary faith. i take a breath and prepare my descent.
it is difficult to think of time as a passing thing when you are right in the middle of it. lifetimes go by when you travel—you are never the same at the beginning as you are in the end. you write but you cannot keep up. your skin changes in softness. your hair remembers to curl. you feel your heart beat at the tip of your toes, and all of your histories rumble in the depths of your lower back. every place is new even though every place is old. these sights come from another time. (and you come from another land.) yet what people saw then is likely what you see today: trees bending to the will of the wind, birds quiet in the fog.
(a glimpse of 1971, through arman.)
***
i hear the door open and close, but it is not the right door, it is another door, and while this door may not altogether be a bad door, it is not altogether a good door either, as it is not my door, and it is not the right person going in and out of it.