Sensing

One journey, three paths
Two lead to the outlands, converge under sand
A third follows the water, follows the water low
It seeps out smaller, compressed in a shell
Which rolls beyond reach to the shore of a sea
Shallows slide under, draw it toward the deep
Here it knows the temperature, knows this guardian chill.

In blackout, senses gone, think of The Center
See its mute vessel, inside a row of small songs
Sing them back to me, back to you, back to you:
Sensing, rub the sand from your eyes, know wind
Know these steps over the land are yours
You are a person walking and not drowned
On the skin of the earth

Atrophy/Innervation

When I turn on patient music, heavy with memory, supine or curled inward, an old awareness coalesces in me. It is the weight of an unoffered, unanswerable apology to my deep mind, a sorrowful guilt. I’ve always felt the deep mind as its own entity, some mute workhorse of creation, the storyweaver at The Center. It constructs and offers up the inner legend that so animates the storyteller—that persistent, erring interlocutor between external and internal realities—willing it, in bolder seasons, to question and to learn.

I speak softly, youthfully, inside as if into the past, “I am so, so sorry for abandoning you. You have turned away, turned around, turned in.” I say, “Would you return to me? Do you still have a home in me?” And I hear only the recorded wind, the soft crickets and footsteps, the wash of cymbals and guitar strings in my music. Reconciliations and reparations come through actions, not words. 

I think of the separate, foundered thing in me now like the dishwashers and custodians and men-on-the-land who cannot speak the language of their employers, their landlords. Without a voice, what is to become of them? I think it has become, too, like a supergenerian dying—unfurling, unspooling—alone in her Tokyo tenement, so much wisdom and work spilling across cracked linoleum, whirling upward by the ceiling fan, and flowing out a window above noontime traffic.

Core memories, the ones that hold fast against any trauma, the planks that constitute The Center, are memories of a feral, untrammeled freedom, of inundation. They are the songs of a thing possessed by the planet itself, of a union with the source of self and life. Portals into The Center lie in music, travel, love, physical hardship. Music transmits precious kernels of the past into the present, like jolts on a string, and into the brain. Through travel, new sensations remind the self how to be naive, and a fertility, a softening in the heart-mind, follows. In love, human intimacy requires an absence of self-consciousness to open the vulnerable mind to another, like a lung giving air. Physical hardship brings the self as close as possible to its destruction; at that precipice, to survive is to hide like a scarab among temple stones.

“Resurrect newly reflective, not glimmering gold…”

I wrote “American Necrotica” shortly after the previous occupant of the White House began his tenure there, four years ago to the month. The poem bubbled out of me with so little agonizing, so few second thoughts, that I was confident I had struck on something latent in me, an ember, an irrepressible desire to process the present moment out loud. “America Necrotica” is as much a report of the state of the US in early 2017 as a reflection of it. America is, after all, a story we tell ourselves, one that can build strength in a crisis and find joy in a silenced city, and it is the longest theft in history. As such, the writing is my original work, and it is counterfeit, pirated. I infect Allen Ginsberg’s “America” with my own words, bootlegging his structure and tone, dressing it in shades of Eliot’s “The Hollow Men,” vulgarizing my diction, and ending with an activist salvo to present a reading of—and a product of—America as it was.

During most of the Trump era, a paradoxical time of doldrums and hellfire, my mind was cold. Trump Time was always Mental Health Monday, it seemed, the news of the day always nightmarishly real in me. Writing felt limp and tacky, as though the stanchions that had supported it before attained the nebulous hurt we feel today in our bodies, and, like us, their force and integrity denuded. “America Necrotica,” then, might have been prescient. It was at once a report, a reflection, and a diagnosis of what was to come. The Trump era, of course, is still ongoing. Fittingly, our deep necrosis has reified as a years-long pandemic and a mass hatred sliding further underground each day, a hatred that much more difficult to uproot, the confounding blight crystalizing in the bones of the nation.

Today, in February 2021, years after I wrote “America Necrotica,” months after I wrote anything at all, something new is percolating in me. It has all to do with penance, a word that came to me, expectedly, in the deindividuating and lightening air of a dim airplane cabin at 35,000 feet. Penance, the self-inflicted suffering required in righting a wrong, the going rate of sin and absolution (in the least-Christian way possible). Penance today looks like loud acknowledgments, long sacrifices, and deep reparations. That description is purposefully vague as it encompasses all our ways of thinking, governing, earning, communicating, constructing, and prioritizing. Whatever work to come on Active Skies will bloom from these ideas as sketches of penance caught in the act.

In socially-distanced conversations surrounding the current American malaise bound in us and binding us together, the idea of life-narrative often emerges, the story that is written as our life is lived, and how surviving a pandemic may shape the trajectory of a life. Conversely, and instructively, this life-narrative is also the story we write before we act, the blueprint we strive to realize by our actions in the world. Each story contains the germ of the teller, the high-level reasoning for its existence. Today, this blueprint must root in penance—not profit, not proliferation, not pretense. Vitally, it is our ticket to a future.

September

I think of Maslow and the Pyramid, how cruelly accurate he was in its making. How it will stand for centuries, delineating, inscribing. I think about how it has marked me.

It has all to do with power; of course, it is a hierarchy. But, too, power as a current through a city, with each light, each malignant facade, each vibrant womb a subcircuit grafted onto the main. To reach that next step, you need a surge, you need your current to arc across town, across a wide synapse. A risk, a question. Like an atom exciting in the sun, you need to be energized to spark. Luminated perhaps, or touched. Humans are electric, remember; they are energized, despite the gruff, high-minded slights against them.

Whose Words

Whose words exist in this unrepentant country? Where do they live? Under whose subtly dripping eaves? Do they slip around the chipped corners of small tarred hovels and over great vertiginous heights?—The great heights of our difference? Do they hide in morning’s indigo shadow? In the tangerine shine of blood-slicked avenues?

“Whose words” are not my words; they are not yours. They are words that ape the transformers on the hill. They are the substations, and they are the coal. They are the constructors and the constructed, the woven hands of the builders and the dust that coats them, the grease they knead; they are the public works.

Abundance

They walked in under the torn canopy facade,
a smart pairing and young;
They knew how to hold each other at a distance.

Water hangs in the air through the reggae beat,
it brightens in tangerine around the wires;
the sounds, life sounds everywhere of thunder.

Please tell me that’s someone on the stairs,
tell me that’s the night-watch, pacificadores down the stairs;
the Afghan boys and a ball.

Show me how a black sky discharges;
numinous, the passion of electric light.

Restoration

The sharp edges of our songs are a kind of planimetry;
delineations along a firmament only we used,
breaking the treeline, in rockplay and rolling,
these balancing acts.

Hammers, your words;
along a small ebony dulcimer
I could hear beat-making,
echoes in the belly resounding like hair-strands,

Taut lines traveled by eye in golden afternoons,
gamma rays of handmade space spun through dust,
spinning with my fingers and forming winds
into lace, like archipelagic warps.

We whispered the words eighteen times on the slippery camp floor,
our tarmac, our New Canaveral, testing engines in six-eight time;
we were beat-making again, this time sidereal, tantric
around ink and cloth and tangled faces,
and then, as when after ascent,

The silence of a Namibian plain, starry desert forms, rusty spinnerets and irregular moons, crenelations looping across sand to sea where we lay as plastic tokens in a child’s smallest drawer, in darkness, in composure, formed on each other and into the dim recess of the meekest of sandway sweeps, themselves directed by the same clockwork winds off the Atlantic, and like us in a kind of rapture of their forming, their submission to a formation they could not name or divine, and compelled on the wing to iron shores and scablands, into greenness, into perennial folly and short tired business, into dustplay rolling on the red-hat mounts, mingling with grey cones browsing over browsed land, below leaden thunderheads rending to rain, and falling, and home again.

Conjunction

There are magic highlines rising,
sliding among these leather-trunk trees,
or long arms of starlight.

Reliquary

And he took a map formed on a fingerprint, and another, shaped like an eye. This one held all manner of things inside, about his wife, floating loose, haphazard in time, and the numb contours of the space she had left; about their daughter and her valiant needs and the way her eyes fell on him drifting, how she spoke from the root of her throat with words in turbulence with their creator, things hardened in form but brilliant; and of all the names, so many names of the people he had seen gathered around him, and those he had pulled in at the ebbing, wet last days, wound into him off now-disintegrated twine. He thought a sphere would hold all forms of memory because, like the Earth and how the mind sees itself, it demands a rich swirling of its contents, where recombinant flows mount from the raw tangle and dance like flame at their newness. The map was arrayed like an eye, he knew, like an eye is shaped like an explosion of his Lakota grasses, or where they had been sent: the fractal creeping-out of life from a dark, unseeable source.

The other fitted his ancestry between the whorls at his right index finger, cradling every arch, to spread it like seed across whatever new plains he felt.

And she carried the faint recorded messages of her breathing in the dawnlight, of the sound moistened skin makes on nighttime adobe, and of the zen chop of windblades through a fat rumbling of mountain haulers. She held the high-cooed murmurs of twenty-six jumbled tones, given out in time as if to fortify her like the first simple psalm, private knowledge of a kind of genesis. The crooked voices of her father at the gate, spitting at the screen, unbending at the altar, and the strip-mining on the heart she had borne back to him at her Confirmation all lay coiled and sunken along her right temple. At the left, the quick tapping-out of her first unified chords, in counterpoint always with an accelerating beat at the tips of her fingers and beside her brow. So thin the wafer chips felt when she touched her skin, for all their velocity, the breadth she knew they contained.

And close, so close to home––she would feel her hair move with it, on her arms as powder, and rippling across her scalp––the warm hum of a late afternoon surge ran the dusty deep-range cables within her, from old Union past Mosquero, primed low in the skin, there to flood in before the holdfast broke, as O went null, at the knock and whine of heavy cavitation. System triggered it, with a power faster than her body could trick endorphins to cortex, faster than her own awareness.

Fata Morgana

My aquarium mind wears an indomitable war costume of challenging glass, like changeling skin. It draws in human colors from the mechanical fury and paints me with them.

My nation’s grinning infiltrators and gas-chained howitzers would don it if their keepers bowed to something small or true. They would throw their pacific acids and shells skyward, and all would know a passionate silence reflecting off their unpowered steel.