We like to think we’re built of major, minor, and trace elements, which use DNA as the recipe to mix and combine in patterns to make blood, bones, organs, skin,and such. Wrong. We are made of words. Words are in us from birth. As we grow, words take on meanings, so they can be combined and recombined indifferent patterns. Phrases and later sentences lock together, shaping how we move through our lives, more as architecture than language. Some of our words look inward and some outward, and we need a full complement of each. If some inward words are missing, we are incomplete. If some outward words are missing, there are gaps in our connections with others and these gaps are the distances between us.…
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A frail man with a shock of hair and transparent skin shuffles across a red stone courtyard in the heart of Andalusia. Amidst a cluster of buildings, he knows he must find the Citadel, and is drawn right, right, and then left. A Nasrid archway crowned with an arabesque leads to a long, dimly lit corridor, ending at a wooden door strapped with iron. As he lifts his fist to knock, rusted hinges chirp, and he enters an impossibly tall cylindrical room lined with shelves overflowing with parchments and books. As he slowly scans the rows of writing, a soft swirling sound fills the room, a deep song of distant voices that covers his skin, enters his body, spirals within, and finally fills his heart. At that moment the light switches in a pulse-beat to a hot white.…
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In the name of the former and of the latter and of their holocaust. Allmen.
-James Joyce
1. Los Alamos, New Mexico
Theologians exploring crucibles and intersections of faith light upon the fact that Trinity, where the secret gang detonated the Gadget, was likely christened after a verse by John Donne: “batter my heart, three person’d God”. Multi-armed Vishnu is present as well: “I am become death, destroyer of worlds”.
2. Hiroshima, Japan
Archeologists exploring the ruined city discover a ruined statue of a young girl holding a ruined steel origami crane over her head near images of people burned into battered concrete buildings. Words are carved in the broken stone beneath the broken girl: “This is our cry, this is our prayer – peace”.…
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St. Mark’s Place at dawn, trash blown, summer light’s perfect clarity so good for artists, wasted here. Lower Manhattan, brick walls remain, black-painted window sills. Somehow I thought the old world hanging on here had some right to peace, even if then or now, there was no peace. From Alphabet City I walk, young enough to be thrilled about it. He lay: rags, or a bag of trash. But a gray-brown face. But black pants, legs bent, shoes gone, one foot bare. I crossed the street. He looked asleep, but something lay too still. The street rose up around him, a pavement’s song, linear harmony, dun and straight. I saw death, & dancing toward the Village, I wondered what this conversation meant: am an urn to filled with flecks of ash, broken centuries later on the floor of sea amid rotten keels, home of colored fish, or, a funnel for all senses, piling cryptic lines like off-kilter bricks in a sagging building?…
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Cold rain stammers on lines of street bricks, worn ideas in rows, stained with tar or blood; read them at your leisure, coffee smoldering in her cup, your sweater bunched at the elbows. Eye shadow left open on the sink. Of tears there is a novel, or dictionary of smudged intentions. Here is a man, there a woman. That’s all the franchise needs to boil. Someone coughs in the night. Match snaps fire, lights a face for a moment. You gave up piano years ago, regrets are fool’s cash. A car door slams. It’s time to leave. Or time for two men to drag you out. Where the trees recline in winter. Dirt garnered, a congregation praying above the dug hole. The only prayer you’ll get or need.…
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For Walter Butts
The fathers are waiting with their cigarettes and big stomachs for us to arrive. The place where they live does not have time, only space, and they fill it with talks of shortstops and bars, drill sergeants, meals remembered from the days of appetite. Worn jokes about drinking too much and who cares if smoking takes a few years off your life since those are the last years anyway? They talk of their sons, joggers, salad eaters, their strange music and soft hands, the angular jargon of their professions (not jobs). Most will nod, say grudgingly that the kids seemed to come out all right after the crazy stuff with drugs and hair. One will admit he laughed when his son said the kids were driving him crazy.…
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There are secrets to how things are made, and they hold the world together. Learning these is part of what keeps us alive. How to clothe yourself and fry an egg, how to wash your clothes and show up on time. I thought about this today while I hung a pair of folding doors and decided, for once, to follow the directions. Then it was process, not mystery, and soon, I had two doors opening nicely, then closing again.
I had never heard of a trotline or seen one run until my roommate and his fishing buddy, an overmedicated vet, decided to run one in the mud-colored river that cut our town in half more decisively than any set of railroad tracks ever could. In two weeks, they snagged only a few catfish.…
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