Rose-tipped hues of evanescent light reveal an alternate pathway pointing me towards a repository of time, beyond space, only to invite no one into my geographical sphere. I try to escape from this new reality, to one without harm or ill-fated beginnings. One that might hold honey liquid dreams and hazy details that, although cannot be read completely, announce their figments and allow me to search for the nuance in a now surreal world. I learn that these strange atmospheric conditions revolve in a circular motion and effortlessly, without incident, I eventually find my way to this morphogenetic embryo, fall into the blackness of my night visions, once frightful, now suddenly in communion with incoherent sounds. Loudly, the world begins to chime, infecting my sense of being-ness, until it silently draws me back into an indelible womb.
With darkness behind you, You can see the white crest of a lapping water’s edge / you turn towards this baptismal bowl and listen for the bells of a dead sailor’s sails. It swallows you / bathes you / finds your soul Come to the ghost bridge, she said and smell me I’m half-way blue with silver knots that unfurl on a moonlit snow Pay attention to the algorithms that lie between women Watch the atrophied demons succumb to their lover’s organs Their secluded arguments rise and fall distant They eventually melt And become liquid In Harmony Arms reach out, Effortlessly, listening with their skins
Current sounds: tinnitus runs in the foreground. It’s always there, but I’ve become accustomed to its pitch that I can’t quite identify; the hum of a cold refrigerator tries hard to drown it out. No birds this morning which is odd.
i. Strange dreams of being lost in The Bronx. Wandering the streets that have been touched by vandals, I look for my car, feeling afraid as I turn the corner.
ii. I thought to take the mirror down after the 6 pm aftershock. It’s heavy and large and sits above the sofa where I lay down for naps, precarious at best, as I had watched it rattle against the wall in the early morning quake.
iii. I spent some time printing out the grays of new work.
iv. He said that poets were thieves in the retelling of the story of how he stole a Ferlinghetti line. I quickly buy the Coney Island book.
v. My gut tightens and tries to move the chemo through and out.
from the eclipse ; an artistic response to the Dildilian archive, 2018
The Event
We walked along the East River back then, capturing the imprints of crescent moons splashed onto the concrete and grass, we were unable to catch them completely as time traveled and folded in on itself.
Old tin colanders form daisy chains of light strung through the shadowed branches of leafy trees you dream of Aristotle who saw at once that the sun is nothing more than a camera obscura, It barely opens its sliver of an aperture as the moon passes by, lens ready, to transport us all into another dimension in time.
In two days the event will take place again When thousands of eyes are tucked behind the flimsy, color-coded lenses that are encased in faulty paper frames, the crowds will gather to look up and stare into this phenomenon of a magnificent celestial sky where the moon mates with the sun, darkening our path and drawing us out of ourselves for what seems like a disembodied minute.
We stand within the crowd, isolated but together, heaving our chests in a universal sigh, we can almost touch the darkness of it all save for this particular air swirling in its stale stillness of light / not light, it will all move too quickly for our bodies to remember.
Friday February 16th at nearly 11a The wind is strong
Steam rises and spits from the radiator after a long moment of continuous pipe banging. I reminisce about warmer temps. February is a rough month, my therapist tells me. They say it will snow tonight but I don’t believe them.
i I was caught in mid-flight this morning, reminding myself that I was in a fit of lucid dreaming. I have no memory of the passing images, only the thought that my dreams have taken on a Felliniesque stage since the transplant.
ii She said she treasured our friendship when I wished her a happy re-birthday. It’s been two years for her. She’s one year ahead of me and I think about how I’ll feel when I’m two years out.
iii It’s so hard to write I tell myself, constantly threatening to walk away from the whole practice. It’s textbook artistic angst, I tell my therapist. JL calls me at that moment and tells me to keep going as though she knows something that I don’t. I return to the 5 lines today. ‘Maybe that should be a book’, she says.
iv A walk down the avenue to the pharmacy yesterday brings a chill through the body in the sunny cold. I felt relieved that it brought me an awareness that I’m still alive. I come home and turn to the news to read that Navalny has died in his arctic prison. The sun immediately grows dark.
v I read about patience. It’s required the writer tells the reader, alluding to the idea that patience renders us faithful. I dig deeper into meaning.
a white fox in my waking dream (riffing on an acrostic)
Although we held our intimate thoughts / effortlessly feeling each other’s pain / it was only through the examination of our curiosity that we were pushed / falling into nothingness / a sort of mystery swimming in the yolks that have been weathered by our angry kin / Now, inside of the never-ending torment of the gods / we were more determined than ever to find the reverence that encapsulates a path to the precious microcosm called life
******
He sent me a book yesterday. I had purchased only one but the note from him told me that he was giving me two. One inscribed ‘for j.m.c. who knows what I’m writing about’ and one in its clear cellophane protector to ‘do with as you wish’. The book, the story of illness in front of the backdrop of a visiting white fox, was meant to be a gift from him (according to the note) but I defied time and bought it almost immediately so as to begin reading—madly looking for structure, details, storyline, as a way to inspire and continue my own experience with illness. I want to examine him microscopically, finding connections, understanding resolve. I never saw a white fox in my waking dream, only the pin oak tree outside of my window that I call upon at any given moment of the day or night. She is there for me daily—steady, unpredictable but reliable, in a variety of seasonal dress. Ever present, she is strong and resilient, though now trapped and encased in the dreadful scaffolding that plagues New York City. I console her from my fifth floor window, wishing there was a way to free her from their shackles.
February 12th after 10a on a Monday morning ; 2 days before Valentine’s day
Words from the class (The Hidden Library) last week–we were talking about the idea of hiddenness Quietude / blankness / underexposed / illusion / soundlessness / unnoticed / dissolution / desire / death
The soundlessness ofan underexposed illusion
***
There have been relationship dreams with other women. We are strangers in a car or, like this morning, lost in a sea of clothing, sifting through racks and racks of fabric, searching for my favorite collarless, black silk blouse sitting somewhere between the dresses and the blue jeans. I never did find it.
She was dressed smartly in chocolate brown trousers and a taupe tweed jacket, flecked with the colors of a mourning dove. At some point she turned, walked away and was gone, returning in a black, full-body leotard, shiny with angular red stripes slicing across the breast line. She had come to show me some moves, she said. Release me from my pain.
The unfamiliar loft space was large and mine, but not mine. We spin the mattress around and talk about getting rid of the old velvet, emerald green couch although it was sage in this iteration. I take her up on her offer to hop a bus into Manhattan and we smoke a lipstick-stained cigarette together while we’re waiting, passing it back and forth. Instead of Manhattan, I end up back in the space, searching for that collarless, black silk blouse and suddenly realize that I was actually in my basement that held all of these racks. I didn’t know that I had a basement, much less so many clothes.
I wake up and gaze out the window. The doves are nesting again on my bedroom ledge, the window a/c providing a canopy safe from the rain and snow that will inevitably come.
An impossible character / beckons my loneliness. She offers me a robust ember / an amber liquid that forms a well. Hollows form silently / the will to move forward expands.
There’s no difference between reality and fiction, Pasolini tells Agnés Varda, as we walk with them down 42nd Street, New York City in 1967. The film stock is saturated in the only way that a 16mm Bolex can provide. He tells us that in his reality he can photograph a man walking down the street unaware that he’s being filmed and that this is this man’s reality. It’s not my fiction, Pasolini says. If I choose an actor to play that man, then there’s another reality, the actor’s reality he says.
In my new world, life is a fiction. It’s easier to gauge my disease as a dream outside of myself even though it resides inside of myself. Where does this transition begin or end between what’s real and what’s fiction? Pasolini provokes me. I see you a voice tells me. I see me I echo back still somewhat unsure of my own reply.
It’s difficult for me to differentiate between this fictional dream and the memory of living in the real world. You see, I only have the present and the past. The future is too far away from me.
Yesterday I received an envelope with a book of poems written by Buddhist nuns. There was a card tucked inside. You remind me of her she said, pointing at the Manet painting of a gypsy with a cigarette dangling from her mouth. The colors were drenched in the warmth of flesh. I will put this on my bedstand to remind me of who I am, I tell her, humbly observing the love that pours forth from the unexpected ember.
Two days ago, I received a box in the mail. Teas from an Armenian restaurant in L.A. I hadn’t heard from this student in years. She spoke about bravery in the note card attached. I was moved by her words towards me though confused…I remember her telling us all about the loss of her baby. A photograph of worn leather booties made for an infant was all that was left, forged into a tin-type. How does one translate bravery?
Last night, more cargo. This time from myself, receiving two pairs of fingerless gloves as though I needed more than one. Nimble fingers, I tell myself, to wade through my own pockets. There was no card to console me—only the sounds of a winterless winter.
Fade to black. That’s how they ended it. There was the brief frustration of having no end at all. Then the awareness that I would have probably done the same. I love to leave an audience hanging.
In hospital, in my dreams post-transplant, I walked through the darkness for countless days. There was nothing to do but fall in and out of sleep. Eyelids resting behind a black silk mask much of the day and welcoming the dreams even though they, too, echoed the darkness brought on by closing my eyes.
Am I dreaming his dreams? The question comes up again. Always the same, always poking, always haunting. And then, inevitably, fade to black.
As usual, and more often than naught, there are campsites – grungy outbuildings, muddy roads and a lot of wandering in never-been-before places. Environments don’t make sense, I’m not anywhere, neither here nor there, but always returning to the same spot. In my wakefulness, I become concerned that these dark muddy spaces have highlighted a life. Otherwise, why do they keep appearing? I sense that I’m back in the Rocky Mountains with dirt roads and a trail of dysfunctional boyfriends.
Yesterday, I found writing from my early 20s, yellowed and frayed, 6×9 ruled notebooks meant for a stenographer. There was a page of scribbled quotes from these boy callers and multiple pages of ill-written songs. Turning the pages carefully, one cascading over the other, the coiled wire a bit rusty and rough, crushing the scalloped pages fragile and brittle. It’s been nearly forty years. I’m so confused said the half-blind pianist who, on a recent internet search, exposed that he’s now living in Connecticut playing in Christian symphonies.
Fade to black. I wonder if he’s still confused.
When I’m feeling cynical, I consider that looking back at a life once lived is nothing more than an exercise in nostalgic soup-making. I swallow it half-heartedly until I find the taste of sweetness in the sour.
***
Expanding an acrostic:
multiple pages of ill-written songs
Multiple energies live in motion. The Undertakings are only felt through the undertaker’s eye. List them, these reasons for good will. Terms that can only be mounted by their Implied meaning. Poems run fluid and are Listening to my Every word.
Pages upon pages find their prostitutes And are Generously given rewards when they Encapsulate the meaning of the Songs sung. They continue singing~
Oh Fervent madrigals
Interludes and études that hold Love and find no other way to live than to linger in the heart. When she turned her back, she Repeated the refrain. Her Illness ebs and flows and Teters on the seesaw, Taking its time to remember what Ever the spirit desires at the moment. New cells grow and search for hearing.
Streams run red and are Of No one. She drifts until the Going cannot go anymore. Then stops and senses the Shift that has taken place. Time is as it should be.
a writing from July 6th at noon, with Marcy and Juanita
The geologist climbed up the parched quarry in search of the perfect specimen. The ivory white is blinding recalling her trip to China when she passed the troupe of harlequins whose red beaded crowns impersonate the rose-colored diamonds that lay on their chests. Here in this quarry, there is no one to pass but the cloud of white chalk that speaks in powdered plumes turning her black boots a sooty gray.
Upward she climbs regretful that she had forgotten her gloves. Her hands quickly chafe and bleed from the stone. She can only hope to find the crevice where she knew the black alabaster resides. She spots it 50 meters away, off to the right and up, glistening, reflecting back to her like a mirror to witness her own image; an inverted rosary hangs from her left pocket as though the talisman will prevent her from falling.
What can black alabaster bring that makes this gem worthy of such a risk? Descending upon the stone, she finally catches a glimpse of her image. She has not seen the truth of her own reflection in years having been locked away in some hollow against her will but compelled to lock her gaze with an embedded image, a Daguerreotype nonetheless.
She peers into the alabaster’s glassy dome and, for a brief moment, bears witness to the imperfect skin that has failed to disregard time.
November 2nd noontime with Juanita and Marcy more lessons in acrostic.
Nest from Brian
On the Cusp of the Ocular Nerve
Only she could say I Never cry much, her
Timing always so precise. She searches for a Hero that can quietly expose her intentions. A Hero that Enters her inner sanctum in
Crystalized form. Unfulfilled, she tries not to discriminate. Only She could say I never cry much as she Pleads to her tears.
Often, she is Forgetting. Forgetting
That somewhere on the other side the Hero has found a way to enter her, Enveloping all that’s in her proximity,
Only to throw Caution to the wind Until he stops~ Later to find Another clue that points to the Ruins. She
Nears closer, listening. Every thought he’s thinking is a Region that has yet to be discovered. He offers her Variegated memories that will soon Enter into another night’s sleep to dream his dreams.
Process writing / workshop with Marcy and Juanita. 10/15/2023
****
The sound is an interruption. The steps overhead render a heavy foot. It’s a comfort to know Renata is above me. Underneath the radio hums with a drone. I’m relieved that I can’t make out the words, bad news most likely. The musicians—one bass; one piano—practice the muffled sounds of rock vs. folk oozing up through the floorboards and find a neighborly space within my solitude. The sounds interrupt the silence. Not in an intrusive kind of way but merely a means to break through the airwaves.
These are early, run-of-the-mill Sunday morning sounds. Neighbors above and below, distant voices a block away, the downstairs dog letting go of an uncontrollable bark. Traffic.
They punctured my lung yesterday. This after the fellow carefully described that the chances are extremely rare. Here, sign the consent paper and we’re good to go. I envision the scene, hustled into a surgical room equipped with a monitor for viewing. I scan the room for the robot. I’m placed under a paper-thin, warm blow-up blanket that resembles a ghostly float. Put your arm here next to your body, yes like that, and now the other, yes like that, and the young anesthetist, I’m going to put you to sleep now okay?
Will he ask me to count backward from five, I wondered. And then I don’t remember anymore.
****
Acrostic (writing distilled to five words)
(silence breath sound a prick) Surely indiscernible languages engulf Neverland / calcified entropies begin / reassuring everyone at the heart / searing outward, under, near-death / angels’ purgatories relive inside catacombs kept
There was a silence, a breath, the sound of a prick. My lung was punctured yesterday. Air, then anesthesia.
****
There was a silence, a breath, the sound of a prick. They punctured my lung yesterday. Indecipherable languages began to engulf my Neverland. I remember: I’m going to put you to sleep now, is that okay? I wondered: Do I count back from five? Then: no recall. The calcified entropies begin. I don’t know how long I was out. Angels come to visit. Their purgatories relived inside catacombs kept. Silence, breath, sound, a prick. Searing outward and under, near-death, reassuring everyone at the heart.
Will I count backward from five, I wondered. And then I don’t remember anymore. Silence. The radio below hums. A dog lets go of his uncontrollable bark. Sounds meld in and out. I think about John Cage.
****
SIJO (a Korean form of lining 14-16 syllables) last line pulled from the words of others
They punctured my lung yesterday; calcified entropies begin. (16) All of the angels come to visit, their purgatories lived. (15) While the colorful devil moves slowly over grass-covered rooves. (16)
****
Sound, breath, an interruption. They punctured my lung yesterday. The chances are rare, he said. Counting backward from five and then I don’t remember anymore. <silence>
Breath moves freely, air fills the cavity outside of my lungs. It’s spongy they said palpating the area around the clavicles. There’s nothing to be done. The body will absorb. <breath>
The radio below hums with each breath. Each sound enters the room of airwaves. I’ve shut down only to receive the symphony. <sound>
They punctured my lung yesterday. Angels came to visit from their purgatories lived in catacombs kept. <a prick>
****
They punctured my lung yesterday. Calcified entropies begin. Shutting down, I listen to each sound that enters the room of airwaves. A breathing tube, I remember the Fellow mentioning. Later, the songs from the lead doctor flow as the Fellow stands sheepishly behind. We need to keep you for the night, he tells me. Take my body any which way, I repeat into the airwaves.
A dark room is lit by bathroom light. I wait patiently to find release from this storm.
Using the words of others: (Each group member reads. We pull phrases that give us juice)
Spinning until it no longer does A colorful devil covering the rooves with grass Dying from this body Different winds define my spirit Letting go of the past defining me All things witchy I am a rabbit, my skin twitches
The Riff
I was spinning. The room was spinning until it no longer did. I look across the road and see the colorful devil moving slowly across the grass-covered rooves. Different winds define my spirit these days as I try and let go of the past that defines me. I begin to notice all things witchy in the darkness of my sleep. I am the rabbit now; my skin twitches itchy until at last I find a place of rest.
****
Silence, breath, sound, a prick. Indecipherable language begins to engulf my Neverland. I remember: I’m going to put you to sleep now. Is that okay? I wondered: Do I count backward from five? Then: No recall.
They punctured my lung yesterday. The dissonance sets in to play. I don’t know how long I was out. Angels come to visit, their purgatories lived inside catacombs kept.
Silence, breath, sound, a prick. Searing outward and under, near-death, reassuring everyone at the heart.
Will I count backward from five I wondered. And then I don’t remember anymore. Silence. The radio hums from below. Through the floorboards, a dog lets go of his uncontrollable bark. Muffled voices murmur a half block away. Traffic. The sounds enter one by one, melding in and out of the deafening silence. There is no intrusion. Merely a sound to break the airwaves.
October 5th at noontime. Writing hour with Juanita (i don’t like, if only, it doesn’t matter)
Homemade transparency of white blood cells mixed with a few red from Wikipedia I’ll print this as an Anthotype
I can’t remember the dreams. Only that I’ve lost the me that was from before. I’ve become a hermit locked in this city. I was sad to have missed the harvest moon the other night.
I remember fragments of the dreams…muddy, ramshackle hostels, dusk into darkness; strangers walking aimlessly about with soiled boots through dirty waters wearing faraway eyes that gaze into the black. I’m lost and never quite sure where home exists. Certainly, it wasn’t there. I can, though, sense the righteousness of my path moving forward towards a vague, illusive freedom. If not in this dream, then another. It’s no matter that I’ve forgotten.
I can’t remember the dreams but I know there will be more.
Am I dreaming his dreams now? The relentless gray of Berlin, the open field, the mud? Where does my dimension end and his begin? One report says that I’m 96.4% his cells. That must mean I still exist in 3.6%.
I step out of this reality and into another, though the two are intertwined~~twisted strands joining legs and arms and torsos. I am him now. But he is him always. He has no me. There is no logic in my taking up space in his body as much as I would like there to be. Do I float through cellular energies and inhabit his world somehow through space and time?
I curl up on the couch and perform mindless tasks searching for answers that are nothing more than hypotheticals. It doesn’t matter that the sky is gray. I’ve come to realize that I don’t have to travel so far to get anywhere.
Mystic undertakers find fuel living in nothing / grieving temperatures hidden (and) ensconced / symmetries out over nebulous dreams / often frightened, leave outer seams (of) sorrow (behind)
Riffing on Acrostic (muffling the sound of loss)
In the dream, she was jumping fences, just short of her five-foot eight-inch frame, knowing that this was carrying with it a bit of risk-taking. Certainly, she didn’t want to create a cut, see blood, or otherwise.
There is a stump on the other side of the fence that she needs to get to. An illegal act of trespassing even though it’s right next door; even though she could search out another entryway that wouldn’t require athletic intentions of hyper-awareness. Paper, graphite, charcoal was readily in hand. Easier to head to a public cemetery to search out rubbings of the dead, she thought.
She had lived with this tree for a dozen years now and grew fond of its ability to splash its simulacrum along an empty white wall and bring life to a surface so banal. It always seemed a bit cramped, tucked in between the jagged burgundy brick and a chainlink fenceline but healthy enough she always thought. Why they tore her down doesn’t make sense.
I should have gone down there right away to try and stop the execution. At least hold the tree with tenderness while it gave way to invasive cuts and scars—a simple gesture of last rites. She shared in a mutual pain.
Fall equinox came yesterday, unnoticed, not checked, the rains coupled with a slight fever and chills, reactions to a first vaccination that held the reigns of time this time. Life as she knew it in that moment was one of stupor and dead sleep. The kind of delirium where one forces oneself to eat trying to find the sustenance of a minute or two of wake through some fantasy of false protein.
She looks out the backside window now emptied of green leaves. Autumn hasn’t reached the color of the equinox quite yet, as warmer summers lead the seasons now, confusing time and the atmosphere. What is it about death and dying, she wonders, always tugging at this sudden urge for sex. She retreats from the memory of her tree and decides to watch streams of couples fucking until she at last falls into the rhythms of her daydreams.
September 7th noontime writing with Juanita and Marcy
It begins when I step over the threshold. I can’t remember exactly when it was that I first entered the third space. Only that it took me unawares and a wee bit frightened when I landed there. Both feet on the other side.
Once in the void, I realize that I’ve lost all sense of direction. As when I emerge from a subway stop and the confusion swirls, wondering which way I should point myself before proceeding; unsure of how and where to move my body through space.
I’m in water. I float. First downward, the body acting as a central access. Feet drop south,the crown of my head tugging at its opposition. A slow vertical spin in murky, liquid space. The void envelopes until the body rests. The resistance stops and settles into a place of normalcy finding again the ease of reflective attention.
Sound eclipses sight. Sound that acts as a compass. Sound that provides grounding and becomes a place of acoustic alchemy and possibility.
The fear remains, only now the fear is not so much about the entry but the exiting. The places of dreams in the unconscious become a safety net beckoning me to stay. It’s the realm of consciousness that becomes overwhelming.
I become the benevolent observer. Passive examination of the experience around me is the invisible key. I don the role of student with ears wide open, eyes closed, the floating axis, dreaming in a darkness interrupted by dancing light. There is an awareness of the meaning but I can’t quite see it. It remains out of grasp.
I wait patiently for the wind to arrive in the hopes that it will blow more light through the membrane.
And then, again, I notice the feet. The feet that move me forward. The feet that cross the threshold. The feet that float, pointing south, grounding the axis. The feet that root themselves to the waterless ground understanding it’s the only way to break from this paralysis. The unrecognizable feet that somehow sit in a constant state of numb.
I reach out and touch trust with hope. Only to find that the beginning has no end and the end has no beginning.
Now, as always, each time I enter the work, the work sheds new meaning. The process of allowing the work to find its context within time, circumstance, evolution; all the while it remains quietly static, waiting. Water, while in the past, spoke to migratory paths, or crossings, are now crossings over and into alternate realms and dimensions; life to death. The water texts bleed into one another, find each other now, not mine, but Ron’s letters, trying to find connection to him after all of these years in the bardo. I obsessively search for the day he died, sometime in 2015, perhaps hoping to find clues in old journals or agendas packed away, inaccessible, sitting in a storage bank somewhere in Flatbush Brooklyn. The books, now ghosts of a past, remain elusive still. The web search leaves me empty handed, save for the comment from the fan who mentions 2015. Ron has been erased as has his widow. Neither exist, virtually, like most of the ghosts in my past—somewhat anonymous, invisible, and left to my own imaginations.
As he lay dying (after Faulkner) 13″x90″
Text for As he lay dying (after Faulkner) A letter from Ron 1.22.15 followed by his lines in the margins in Edmond Jabés Book of Resemblances. He mailed the three volumes to me shortly before he died.
Jan 22, or near as,
Jean
So here we go again – I tried starting a letter at the library. I’m afraid for the integrity of this one also as I find concentrating trickier as time and medications proceed a pace.
Books, words, love, boundaries, art, the body’s an admixture of bravery and pragmatism and we got your inimitable dark eyed self.
This letter will (already is) be a mess. Odd, but although I revel in small motor skills and communication, this elementary school “skill-set” slipt me by in the fragmented course of my education’s foundation.
Enough blather. Firstly – I suppose – I am doing ok. The pain and symptoms are not too challenging yet. Concentration and memory come into the picture more as these kinds of restraints choke my work. I’m playing well enough to feel “shorted” on attaining the illusive “art project goal”…that never is arrived at anyway. Still, it’s your art I’m writing about.
You used, years ago, to be involved with a series of pieces about books, paper work, the materials (spiritual, water, honey, etc.) – sloppy recollection I’m afraid – real, living, conceptual homages to the word.
Anyway, back then I ran across an Egyptian, elderly, mystic who wrote words about letters and alphabets – their sentences of words using those tools and on to sentences about books, books about writing. As I recall, 27 books about the inherent everything in the possible nothing offered in words. My take (sort of) being that combining letters which have no meanings, we have the means to employ words which can only be defined with other words.
Pretty scattered way to plod into this – if I don’t do it now I mightn’t! I have been going back to Edmond Jabés in an effort to recover some of the transcendence on offer with musical tone – the “pointing at” being the “pointing at” – the “pointing from” being the place where a mother’s courage hosts a child’s tea party or in any case takes such noteworthy risks (talking about your own bad self dear).
I have tried to resolve my Jabés conundrum for years and finally might have done so. The problem is that this man’s works (he died at 78 in 1991) are so rich, when I hold one in my hands I sense I lay claim to real value. I only have 3 volumes which I’ve been schlepping about for 25 years.
Here’s the catch – I’m not ready – the time has yet to arrive when I have more than a special privy to some great darkness – or an invitation anyway.
It dawned on me that these wonderful objects (they could be books) are of the special Casbarian provenance – be they sculpture, arcane recipes, the latest Hoyles update? You have taken “the page” to places that seem to be at least of part of your work, on a footing with history, mystery, the time and place of the body, and … music.
Over time I made marks in these books – not a habit. I feel this was a more intimate commitment to the bond of vandalism – baptism.
For a few reasons I might never have the opportunity to have access to the results of the intersection of you and Jabés, but I knew, when I knew it, that getting you two more proximate would be one of my later acts in art even if the introduction is the swan song. Of course in plainer language, you may read him from a completely different perspective and my “added dimensional secret back door could be a fetching good read only for you (not likely!)
I pick up these reads randomly throughout the days and let them tell me the day’s lesson. Repeatedly the implication is – “send this material to Jean – she’ll know.”
With more love than understanding The original Fire / Friend Ron
Lines from inside the margin From Jabés’ Book of Resemblances 2 Intimations : the Desert
“I have placed resemblance so high that now I dream only of resembling eternity,” he said. And added: “Eternity and its humble mirror, the moment.”
“Resemblance goes to the most hurried, the last. With its fortuitous matches, it encourages the amorous foreplay of death. O lure of nothingness.
…this invisible crack that will one day destroy the wall.
“One bolt of lightning is enough to disfigure the sky. Then the infinite resembles a wounded man as God resembles us in the inflected emptiness of our death.
Resemblance is the tragic—or comic—image of nothingness.
It is in unassignable death that we resemble one another.
Just follow my eyes the way I have followed yours from the moment you came into this room. We talk with the words our reading lacks.
“What we thought we said was hiding what we perhaps tried to express, but did not reveal.”
“Are you insinuating that we have not talked at all?”
“Silence is inside the word as something to be read. A book is forever to be lost.”
“Before it could dim and fade into the night, I caught the eye of the last word in my master’s recent writings, and I was shaken. This word was a good-bye to all the words it had not been able to come near.”
(Innocence is the daughter of silence. It dies with the first word.
Innocence is never more than astonished silence. The eye takes one and the same look at life and death: ours.
We are all born from the hollow of a word. We shall die of a word hollowed out.
Any word is death’s challenge to itself, its only chance to die to its name, to all the books of its name.
“Does writing mean undertaking an ultimate reading, first in our mind, then through our own vocabulary, of a book whose necessity is our reason to be?
“Because of it, the page will never have been blank. And therefore it immediately arouses our suspicions—suspicion that there is a book already written with the book we write, and that its sudden appearance betrays innocence where silence used to reign,” he said.
Something is afoot, is organizing, is preparing to function while, unawares, we stay glued to a word, a sentence, and what we try to formulate blurs and fades. Something that is, perhaps, what we fear most.
So the book with its past—or many pasts—of a book takes on body, reclaims its first body, its forgotten—or if not forgotten at least temporarily lost—voice, its bewildered, explosive voice facing a new silence more ancient than the old one, but contemporary with the mute hell of days, the faulty shell of nights.
And moreover, as if suddenly, while we labored to reduce our differences, the insidious angle of resemblance made us more keenly aware of our unbearable solitude.
“Oblivion is the end of resemblance or its beginning,” he said. “Once the mask falls, the enigmatic face is reborn”
Face of life shaped by death, the artist: our face.
Time measures only time, but measures itself against eternity.
We had climbed so many steps together that now only a few were left between us and the void: sky of closed dyes, end of a life; summit, that is to say, the sum of all silence …
“Ever so light, you climb without a word we might recognize each other by. It’s very high, he said, the place where we shall die.”
“Going up, is that the goal? No danger of falling. We’ll croak in outer space.”
The gremlins were out last night whispering through the back of the head / radio interference with sleep itself, thrashing through the body though the body laid still. Go away you kept telling them one by one / the small stressors that hold no meaning yet do when sitting on the cusp of the less than reality scale / you resist / then let go of the grip / somehow, finally, drifting after three hours of such acute madness.
The dreams have become infected. Maybe it’s the letters from Ron you keep digging up, or the late-night escapes into films about bad men or imagined childhoods if yours had been any different and then you remember your own words I go back in time to remember who I am—not who I was—but who I am. The then that brought you to the now.
It was when she mentioned that bit about the neighbors. She didn’t want the neighbors to know she said, but the neighbors knew from the incessant fighting going on in her house and I think back to the suburban colonial, half-brick, half-white siding with dark green shutters turned aluminum from wood, the ceaseless screaming night after night wondering if this night would be different than the others and it never was. Whiskey carried its stale scent, drifting through the walls, the brick, the siding, spilling onto the street, through the neighbor’s front doors, its hold on the psyche, anger welling, fear driving you to an upstairs refuge that sat between hers and his / wooden floors and a white felt throw rug with pink and royal blue embroidery that you bought from the Mexican Shop in a neighboring suburb / a dusty blue record player that looked like a small overnight case meant for 45s barely big enough for a 33. It matched the baby blue portable hairdryer with its plastic bonnet you could place on your head, turn it on and drown the whole thing out.
She had never been touched she said / yours were far and few between / the skinny, scrawny, brown-eyed child that that you were. It’s no wonder that the dreams are filled with flocks of pigeons that steal bed quilts in the night, flying them high in their beaks like enormous prayer flags through muds and rains during witching hour shadows of friends/not friends long gone now. You somehow find your place in your scattered works of words and make-believe movies, fictional characters in a photograph, songs never realized. It’s only then, in this quiet place of bittersweet meditation, that you can finally find rest from the gremlins and drift for a moment into the ebony world of silence.
it was a house with several floors wooden / painted / with flecks of dry peeling white and an unknown amount of occupants. Taylore and I had traveled there by foot on our way to Washington Square Park to listen to the orchestra / Philadelphia’s I believe. It was a free concert but a long walk to get there although this didn’t feel like the terrain of Manhattan at all / no it was much too residential looking more like the landscape in an ivy league college town. A young man came to the door and asked if i wanted to rest. Taylore was much more open and inclined; i was a bit more suspicious of such an ambiguous character. Taylore sat on a square plate just inside the threshold that somehow turned into a block of ice / perfectly confined / floating in the square pool of water. I wobbled about and he gave us gifts of tiaras made from thin twisted red wire and burgundy sparkling stars. I struggle to remember the context until I wake up with a fear that we’re all going to fall into the hungry hands of a demagogue and lose our rights and way of living. It will never be the same I think and the fear is tremendous until i get up out of bed and shake it off and make my tea and somehow manage to find my way into the tiny sliver of hope that someone had dropped / maybe me / onto the kitchen floor.It was March 23rd at 8:10 in the morning / the same as yesterday without the sound of gulls / they’ve been replaced by the mourning dove and bring a sense of comfort. Praying warm weather is on the horizon.
=========
You contemplate the information that you received about him last night. Searching for clues through profiles until you find a note that he had written about surviving HIV and surviving an accident. Apparently from what you can tell he broke his back and his neck and maybe a leg and all of this explains his strange behavior in class, writhing and twisting about in his chair. You knew something was wrong and you knew he was in pain but all you could really know was the intimate grip of fear.
Sijo exercise with Juanita and Marcy / august 3rd.
Hour after hour I’m flushing down the self. I try to spit me out. (16) Let the drug do its thing he said, but that was in the before time. (16) You step through the glass ~ you see the self on the other side. (14)
It’s not so much the retching as it is the reminder of what the retching tells you. You are the sick person the retching says. The chemo personthe personwithout hair the leukemia person.
Sitting on the floor of the bathroom hour after hour / every twenty minutes at a time / head in the toilet flushing down the self / hoping this is the last time / you can go back to sleepwalk alone in your dreams / feed the gulls off of that pier in Dana Point just like you did that time when you were pregnant with life. Find your center again.
I look in the mirror S told you and I don’t see the person who I think I am. I don’t feel 70 she says but what’s reflected back tells me something else; catapults me out of my 30-year self and spits me out into this new dimension.
Hour after hour I’m flushing down the self; I spit me out. Let the chemo do its thing he told me way back when in the before time. I swallow the pill. What’s a little nausea I tell myself. The chemo is doing its thing and then it begins. It’s not the constant retching per say, but the reminder of what the retching is telling you.
Hour after hour I’m flushing down the self. I spit me out.
Let the drug do its thing he once told you. But that was in the before time. This time is different. You ease yourself into the black and white tiled floor your head spilling over and into the black and white bowl. You feel defeated, you’re losing. Let the chemo do its thing you tell yourself, over and over and over.
The head pounds and you choke on the self as you release her into cold water. You find yourself floating back to the bed / rest, back to the tiled floor / retch, back to the bed / rest, back to the tiled floor / retch. The cycle continues for hours let the chemo do its thing.
In this stupor, you catapult to another time when the body was strong, disease-free. You walk through the wall and into the glass. You see the self on the other side. Strong, resilient, unafraid.
What are you doing you ask the self. Nothing she answers back. Nothing to be done while in this state of being.The only task is to listen.
(written February 26, 2017 at 8:41am~~print made yesterday)
She said there was an estuary / it’s fresh water and feeds into the ocean. There was something about the filtration system that the city controls and then something else about a plug and ultimately this estuary is a feeding ground for the community’s shit and e. coli. there are times we can’t go swimming in the ocean she said. Come to San Pancho and do what you do.
I try to remember the hermitage from last summer and the road and the view and the intense blue and falling in love with that coastline that was more of a lover than any lover I’ve ever had. And I remembered who I was. Partly / not all.
And the rains and the melts and the floods and the mudslides that altered the geography throughout the central coast of California have carried these memories and washed them out to sea.
Lucia has been damaged the hermitage said. They’re between too broken roads / no way in and no way out / and I send them what little money I can and I wander back through the photographs. I tossed kari off of that cliff she didn’t make it all the way down falling instead into the rocks I wasn’t strong enough but I imagine she’s in the ocean now. Somewhere.
This thought brought me a sense of relief and then I wondered how far Neery has traveled and Robert too or if the trees and bluffs have somehow protected them.
I was caught in a moment of looking forward and looking behind and getting nowhere.
I want to find my soul face her or him and tell her or him that I’m still alive.
When he thanked me for caring I told him to stop and breathe I am that.
I asked my neighbor about the president last night. She ignored the question and it was then that I realized she’s most likely undocumented. We talked instead about babies being tall and having no more than three children. It was only when I stepped outside after the conversation that the sky opened up and the rains began to fall. There was lightening and thunder and winds. We’re still in February I thought.
more blood, more cells, more cytogenetic studies / more rivers sparkling out the window in the wait as I wait for
the song to sing back, point its verse towards me / reflecting my thoughts of anticipation; my thoughts that will weave it all into a quiet psalm of hope
The lakeside found deer hiding underneath kale and empty terrariums. Dusk made its fall onto the wooded landscape, a fade to black mise en scéne. I looked up and saw the red van.
They called themselves Duke Toad whose driving allegedly went off course and landed into a gravel pit just below the two story A-frame. Pete was the original owner of this van, standing there illuminated, then ran off before I could ask him about the meaning of life. A lone passenger approached me and said someone died there and there, pointing to the two empty seats, left and right, second row of the six-seater. I took the right seat and became bewildered by the sight of Pete. I had been told of his death a little over three months ago. How could he still be alive, I wondered. Or maybe he was an apparition—one of the dead that had been sitting left or right.
Duke Toad took the wheel, their partner sitting in the seat next to them. We were back in Evergreen heading down the mountain at a too fast clip, wheels slightly coming away from the road with each swerve along the one lane highway. I was certain we’d tip over into the embankment and roll down the mountain. I do not want to die this way I thought to myself.
It was long past nightfall when we veered off the road onto some backroad, Duke in the driver’s seat, exasperated and lost, their shirt falling open exposing the two horizontal scars on their chest, the first broken line of the hexagram. Yin energy, I thought. Post op. I got out of the car to assess the unstable dirt road disjointed and afraid to keep going. I found my way back into the empty van, settled into the right seat of the dead, closed my eyes, took a breath. The landscape began to move and I looked up to see the backside scruff of a bearded stranger now taking the wheel and leaving the others behind. I was in a panic, told him to stop the vehicle, let me out. He finally gave in to my screams, leaving me out at an empty dirt crossroad in the middle of the night. I found myself alone, Duke Toad nowhere in sight.
No one may yearn for a mother more than I, –she a woman gazed at from behind as though I were standing on some billowing hill from the next town over, the next country past, the next universe beyond.
A doppelganger, an imposter, though it probably was her dated time.
There is a German sophistication that I question from this afar—her wandering mind, much like mine. An escape from her own revelations.
Enough! Enough!
of these hauntings that find their way through crevices you once revered but were certain that you closed.
Enough! Enough!
of these unheard dreams that have only just begun to reveal themselves. Pushed into another dimension, you watch her as she marks her territory in this silent film.
Enough! Enough!
She wanders back to you, a twin found in a picture book that you bartered for that sizzling, hot day in August at a flea market on Bernauer Strasse. It was labeled in a language that belonged to your grandmother. Not yours, nor hers.
She could have been my mother; she could have been me.
Today, I sat from my perch and looked down instead of up. The world suddenly became smaller but a much busier place. The sky is an antidote to the chaos. I realized weather storms hidden behind the gray clouds were a contrast to the bustle of it all.
IV
The chairs groan from above and in front and behind me in the rooms outside of my hospital room. Their wooden feet scraping the floor in forward and backward motion. It’s the room above me—the pediatric ward—that creates the most distress. I wonder what child is this who lays above me, as bald as I am?
V
Nightfall will come quietly. My eyelids feel as though they are carrying five pound weights driving me deeper into it.
Today, I conjured daydreams about mountains and mountain climbers.
II
He sent me a video of the new puppy who had a wild case of the zoomies on the Jersey Shore. I breathe in the waves from her manic paws scrambling around the rolling water.
III
There were shards of blue glass everywhere, she said. How dangerously beautiful, I thought.
IV
The TV was on in the room next door. I wondered how anyone could possibly have the bandwidth to watch anything on television.
V
I want to feel the air on my face. I’m certain it would cure the new, red rash who’s taken up residence on my torso.
It seems all I could do today was sit in bed and look out the window. The view is three-quarters sky leaving me to watch the gulls float effortlessly. I never tire of their flight.
II
The scent of sweet green begins, I think to myself, sitting alone in my hermetically sealed space.
III
I walked two and one-quarter laps around the hospital floor, thanking the PT for getting me out of bed.
IV
My eyes hurt and I don’t know why. For some odd reason they want to stay closed. I spin the curtain down a bit to filter the light hoping for some relief. Photosensitivity says the professor of photography.
She had me roll my shoulders front to back and back to front, count backward from 100 by 7. That’s so cruel, I protested.
II
They thought I could leave Friday but now it’s a question. You’re just not quite there yet, they sheepishly told my melancholy.
III
I went to sleep in the evening fog and woke up in the morning fog. I preferred the former. It was so much more dramatic and wished I had taken a photograph.
IV
I blew a blood vessel in my right eye. Now, I am a bit of a bald cyclops.
V
Water is my holy grail. I wish I would treat it as such.
In the dream, I’m sitting next to my first lover, surprised that we look the same as we did back then.
II
To write, one must experience. My days drift by, the same routine, in slow motion.
III
I choose to sit and look out the window and study the architecture of Weill Cornell Hospital with its gothic arches that sits across the street. The gulls choreograph their dance with currents waxing and waning above and I recall the time that I chatted with a head groundskeeper who told me stories of the horse-drawn ambulance and children’s wards back in the day.
IV
The sun comes through the window across the sill, over the floor, into this hospital room. It left as quickly as it arrived. Rain is in the forecast they tell me. Weather is abstract to me. The sun and the moon, however, are not.
V
The sender of the three Forsyth books remains a mystery.
Blurred vision, headaches, bone pain as the white blood cells rise.
II
As of today, four weeks pass. The same slide show reels by on the computer screen at the nurses’ station. All of the photographs were taken by Sloan staff and I wonder how many times I may have viewed this carousel of golden retrievers, flower shows and open valleys somewhere out in the world.
III
I walked freely without Max today in anticipation of going home.
IV
My dreams feel like reruns—something like the slideshow on the carousel.
V
She kissed me goodbye, then flew off to Maui. Take photographs for me I asked and wondered if any will show up on the carousel in hopes of breaking up the monotony.
Silence came in and removed me from the tribe. I visited the crown of the head and there was nothing. She said that nothing isn’t nothing.
Shadows exist in the throat.
Within silence one speaks. He said patience is fortitude to awaken the cells waiting.
Is it a fear of meeting another’s cells? Does time live in patience as much as the nothing that does not exist in silence?
Dreamspace does not exist. Only the seed of silence will awaken the cells.
Only through the prism of patience will a marriage of cells exist.
++++++
I found a video that illustrated the white blood cells in action. Three dimensional viewpoints of their amorous play drifting through and in communion with a blood system.
++++++
Within the silence he speaks. He knows that external heroes can never escape the songlines. There are only laced wings between you reaching eloquently over non-linear years.
You look towards the lighthouse. Kindness too often weeps at restrained desire.
Look yonder, outwards.
Look underneath the lavender, the oak.
Look for something that heals entropy.
Listen closely.
It gathers a harvest, thanking hands over, under the seasons.
I fell asleep this afternoon listening to the Köln Concert. My dream took me back to Judy’s A-frame up in Pine Junction, Colorado, in the early days of getting high, listening to Jarrett all night long. How often does one fly in dreams?
The foggiest of sleep brought the rainiest of days.
II
I wake up to a display of violets, daffodils and roses that only a 3-year old and his mother can transform into precious.
III
A steady fog has crept in now. My bridge lies underneath its sheath of gossamer.
IV
Methuselah – Great Basin – Bristlecone – 4,852 years old Alercea Mitanario – Chile – Patagonia Cyprus – 5,584 years old Old Tjikko* – Sweden – Norway Spruce – 9,550 years old *oldest known clonal tree
April 4th at nearly 5 minutes to eleven in the morning. Day +13
I
Delerium, dry heaves and twisted waists. The body is working terribly hard. I call out to Matthew to behave.
II
Dictation is easier than writing but not so much.
III
I spied through the door window of a neighbor three doors down. Across the room on the other side sat his window filled with a collage of hanging birds. It was a symphony of marionettes singing.
IV
Though scant, I finally ate something today.
V
The sounds of sirens matched the color of my make believe moons.
A small orb the color of eggplant marks the left side of my belly.
III
He told me that his perception had shifted when losing sight in one eye. I’d drop something he said but my depth of field couldn’t make sense of it. I was unable to catch it.
IV
Red tiled roofs carved with large flat skylights finds footing for the gulls.
V
I can see the tips of my bridge that leads to home.
My hair fell with less trauma than my heart thought it would.
II
He told me that an elderly, weathered man shuffled to the podium in his snakeskin boots. Taken by his testimony, the Mormon touched a chord. I have been far too dismissive in my life of community, family, faith he said. Life in Utah.
III
Tell me a story I asked. I wanted to listen to his voice all the way from Yerevan as I lay in my bed about to drift off to sleep.
IV
The day was fraught with attempts to crawl out of fatigue. I didn’t get very far.
Light floods bright across the sill, the bed, the floor, into this hospital room.
II
The night movies were tamer than they’ve been. I fell deeper into the blackness without the fear of an abyss.
III
The body does not lack for want.
IV
I realized yesterday that I fantasized a future that floats above the scenery, travels to places I’ve never been. I haven’t thought about future in quite some time now.
V
To the left of me, Zenobia rests in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea somewhere outside of Syria. Her massive stone breasts pushing forward to conquer her challenge called Rome.
Like my childhood jar of a dozen or so fireflies, the flicker fades by morning.
II
I was sleeping outside on a cot under your kitchen window. I tried to call out your name, barely audible, in a panic. You could not hear through the raging thunderstorm.
III
Five times she rang the bowl, then a slow resonance, until silence. She told us to notice what was left behind in the nothing that was there.
IV
My siblings’ silence can oftentimes feel so silent.
i lay in bed and watch flight. seagulls, a plane, a helicopter. i give thanks, again, to the sky.
II
the dreams kept kicking me from fallen stones to broken washing machines. i ended up nowhere in the end.
III
a rise, a walk six paces, a burst of strawberry sensing itself through my organs, until i need a rest again.
IV
I thought a scarf wrapped round my head might do the trick until i saw the nurse’s braids through my door window–long and black, a cascade of one hundred rivulets flowing down her back falling just below her beautiful bum.
i opened my eyes and was relieved to see the sky. the window finally opened.
II
she said she reminds her of hello kitty falling into a rainbow. all of her pots and pans are pink.
III
if i concentrate hard enough, i can feel the presence of a highly skilled practitioner running their hands over the nape of my neck, over and around my shoulder blades, down each flank, right and left, until they reach my waist, close, then release.
IV
the bed was breathing into me.
V
looking for miracles to happen in the pustules of blood shit and piss.
the sky is drowning dark early this morning; it’s not quite daybreak.
II
my dreams were relentless in how they came out in the middle of the night to torment. i couldn’t speak but crackled chirps. the nurse woke me up at 2am, blood pressured high up to 170/90. it must have been the dreams i said.
III
there was a rose gold Cadillac i bought from my brother for $1400. How will i pay for the gas? i wondered.
IV
gentler now. i’ll travel further down into the southern hemisphere today
V
reminding me that i want to see the icebergs of antarctica.
Fossilized leaves, crooked sticks and star shaped vertebra the color of coffee organize themselves in rows along a mud path. I could smell the scent of petrichor.
II
Crusted eyes and imperfect dreams, each speaking to the other.
III
What is delirium?
IV
Two tiny tubes flow the gentlest of air through my nostrils. A tickle teases them away.
V
The sky chalked a heavier gray than it did yesterday.
I woke up crying this morning. My dreams were back in the ghosthouse. Halls of mirrors, stark white bathrooms and a misplaced car. Andrea was there to help me find it. I had to stoop down to reach the strange little man’s lapels. Our mouths were moving but nothing came out.
First there was nothing. Then there was everything. First there was everything. Then there was nothing.
He said he wonders what it will be like returning to Chicago. My life was so much more alive during that time, he said. Hindsight is always the best foresight. Isn’t that how it works? I asked. I guess so, he said.
There is this moment in the return when you realize that that particular time is gone; you’ve moved up a rung or two or three. There is this moment in the return when you come to realize that the absence from the time you once spent is not at all what you thought you were mourning.
First there was everything and then there was nothing.
++++
I hurt everywhere I told her. Small moves even. I could slide into this pose with ease months ago. Am I sitting still wasting time, waiting without acting? Or is it the disease that’s shoving its face into my face?
It would be so awful to be living through some boring, deadly disease. At least I can be a character in my own science fiction novel.
++++
She told me to read Simone Weil. A philosopher, anarchist, mystic. A Jew turned Catholic. It’s the ritual I told her embedded in my go to church every day except for the day of Sabbath that still holds. For some strange reason, I can turn a blind eye to all of the bad behavior that goes on in the catholic church.
I want to go back to New Calmaldoli. I want to revisit those secret burial grounds that I dug and documented with my homegrown compass back in 2016 when I was walking for the dead.
++++
It was the humming that rang them up. I find this somewhat disturbing, they seem so close. It was Ron (always) and Klaus that stopped by this time.
It was the humming that rang them up. I told them that I threw kari off the edge of a cliff.
++++
Who were these Camaldolese Benedictine monks sneaking food into the kitchen for us to find, bring back to our rooms, eat alone and in silence? I could witness these men from a distance, from a pew, during vespers in the chapel. I could feel that sweet spot of community. But it was the time spent alone in contemplation that brought light as to why I was at the hermitage, walking, burying, performing private rituals for my dead friends.
++++
She told me to read Simone Weil.
Ron and Klaus slip into my vision, mid- hum. I half push them away and quickly shift my focus to Behrman and Teitlebaum, two composers who held my back. They understood my intentions. Behrman is still with us. Teitlebaum decided to check out with a stroke in the just after the before time of Covid. The ghosts of the past are moving closer. Maybe too close.
I shake it off. Again, I shift my focus to the walks—first, wandering the side streets of Denver with a microphone tied to my waist in 1998. I wanted to record my steps, listen to the as yet to be heard sound that was three blocks ahead of me. Then nearly twenty years later as I walk with the small bundles that I bury along a mud road looking out at a blue on blue Pacific.
The beauty of it all made me nauseous. The chemo is making me nauseous.
++++
It’s the blue that keeps turning up for me she said. That blue. I’m queer she said. Queer…When I was queer...as though to enunciate this fact.
It’s the heart I said. The blue of the heart.
++++
It was the hum that calls them up. Ron, then Klaus. Where are all of the women in this dream, I wondered.
++++
That blue. I’m blue. Blue of. Blue from blueness. A Bluets blue.
++++
The beauty of it all was making me nauseous, I said.
The beauty of it all. In each and every curve in the road. In every failed attempt at seeing a cloud in the sky for miles. Only the interruption of tourists could break my nirvana. There they were, standing on the edge of Highway One with selfie sticks in hand, attempting to capture the blueness behind them. Even so, the beauty, awash in variegated shades of cobalt blue, encapsulated the drive and kept me in a state of blind suspension.
++++
Klaus was dying on the other side of my computer screen. Just sit with me he said. We sat in virtual silence. I heard a lark this morning he said.
Ron was dying behind the posts of a caring bridge page. It was in the fall when he mailed me books by Edmond Jabès, golden aspen leaves hidden inside the pages, lyrics to October Song. It was his note — ‘Casbarian will understand’ that I took to a blueheart. I didn’t understand. My fantasy was an invention of his paper language.
++++
If they do come, one by one, who will lead?
I draw back.
++++
A girl child on a two-wheel bicycle careens down Paulina Street just off of Howard, down road from the sketchy movie house where hidden faces sit, malformed hats on their laps, sticky fingers, sticky floors from fizzed out soda that could weld the stale popcorn under your feet into the color of burnt orange.
The taco place on the corner provided me with a hidden foxhole. The general at the register wore a make-believe general’s coat made heavy with never-earned medallions. The scene was a Fellini’s Chicago. There may have been more blue skies then, but probably not. Everything was in black and white.
I’m careening down the the gentle slope of Paulina, just off of Howard Street. Feet off the pedals, legs spread and open, the humid heat of a summer wind sinking into every pore of my skinny little frame. I’m suspended in time. Free from it all. The memory evaporates before I ever reach bottom.
Water spilled pages, the book won’t press flat. I give in to its uneven, toothy page and push the pen forward.
II
The sound of a glass harp finds its way across the backyard scrub to my early morning REM. I float in the swirl of a stranger’s wet finger. Who’s playing this ghost fiddle, I wonder, and why is there only one? I wake up, stroll to the kitchen and make one of my own.
III
Cell by bloody cell.
IV
I told him that I can’t see the future. There’s only the present and the past to remind me of who I am or what I was in the before time. There is no becoming. In this respect, perhaps there will only be the nowness of me when all is said and done.
V
I think I may now have a photograph of every organ in my body.
She said an oblong ball of mist hovered over the dining room table and when she passed, all of the hair on her body stood up on end. A shiver, a calling, a noticing. She ran to her bed and covered herself in sheets and blankets.
From her makeshift tent, she rang me on the phone. Sshhhhhh. She’ll hear you. Stay quiet, she whispered.
I told her to just go back out there, tell the mist that she was frightening her.
Go to the back room and be with your husband, dear mist. He’s waitingfor you.
***
Waiting.
She said she was stuck in the in-between. But really, if we can be honest, she was already on the other side.
field notes 
