It is impossible to say anything about a grain of sand that hasn’t been said.
It’s the plight of this smallest
most obvious wonder
that there could be
so much of something so tiny
that used to be stone
shell
glass
bone
mountains and teeth and stars.
There is nothing much else to say about sand.
I didn’t even get to the part about how Coke Zero advertises on the AM band, and the shortwave sounded like insects
as I watched the man take out the money
and waited my turn
or how that was just 2 minutes out
of well over a thousand
little bits of time,
one small segment of which included asparagus.
She thought that maybe it was best to simply tell him about the day.
She drank a single tablespoon
with the taste of chlorine
and coal ash
clinging to the sides of the glass
and felt herself shiver
twice now
there has been mention of fireflies
she didn’t tell her friends that the day before
her brothers had been written
back into the story
by her calling them ghosts
and by calling them back
she had felt their voices
saying, “Please, don’t let us down.”
She had laughed the day after
the very next day
talking with her father
for the first time in months
about the ways that puppies run
and the intelligence of big dogs
in seeming to know
their own size
“You didn’t take your nap today,” her daughter had remarked,
smiling as if it were
the best day ever
and maybe it had been
or would be
without her even realizing
until they found the way
back to her house
without any directions at all
she didn’t know
they were brothers
People show up to remind her
of who she is, saying the strangest things.
She has begun to tell them thank you.
Something writhing was inside her.
She could feel it, the press of it breathing with her.
How could she explain
what fear does
how the structures
sludge and scatter
terror, terror
love, and fear
fear
motherfucking
fear
makes it so hard
to do much of anything
The only cure
seems to be love.
What she wanted to tell him was that she had not been able to believe him
and that she loved him
not because she believed him
but because she wanted
to believe him
who is she
to not believe
her friend
who has
no reason to lie
at all
about
wonder, beauty and respect.
she pictured the light
in the dining room
where she’d be stitching
scenes
onto hats
that were shaped like the ocean
and talking with her children
about whatever
she might talk with them
about…
She was open
in saying
that maybe it was the bread
that was making her so sick
all those
motherfucking
crackers
and that
wow
what a stupid thing
for the universe, or something like that
to have to send
two people to
drive all day
and to miss work
to scowl at a tower
in a gorge
and later to dine
on beef heart
and kidney
to then sit on my porch
and tell me
that I need to
take better care
of myself
and to shatter this ennui
with laughter
again
If this proves anything,
it proves that I know
that I need to feel
the things you can’t see
and to trust
that people are sent
some people are sent
to remind me
of who I am
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Date: Fri, 28 Feb 2014 13:35:32 +0000
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she was a hairdresser, used to work in porn and liquor advertisements, called it all the film industry. She was fairly certain at one point that the voices she began hear during that one long year were the voices of a secret society of fabulous people that felt she needed to create something, that she needed to be able to talk with people, to have conversations while doing the breakfast dishes. She claimed that the contents of her storage unit included a medical device, assistive technology gleaned from a woman whose house she had cleaned in the months leading to death.
The woman’s family didn’t think it was worth anything. They were like, ‘Oh, this is just some junk.’
She explained that the woman was a quadriplegic.
(I wasn’t sure how to spell that for a second. I should know how to spell that, profound human condition that it is. I should know how to spell all the words given to profound human conditions. I would like to make a dictionary of profound human conditions. Such a thing already exists, in many versions. It’s really all we want to do, to have a name for every terrible and beautiful thing that might happen to us.)
“She could talk, she couldn’t move anything at all. The machine, the chair, helped her to communicate. She used her thoughts, the electrical activity in her brain, to tell it what to say. It understood. She could communicate with it.”
I paid her 300.00 dollars that I didn’t have, which was stupid and I knew it, but I’d gotten my last cash-out from my paltry retirement fund and, besides, it was Fall and I was 1/2 mad myself, fairly sure that this woman with green eyes and perfect hands had shown up as some sort of interface, maybe even as a test.
She was another trainwrecked genius, with a shitty boyfriend and a bad habit, a treacherous fear of
—– Message truncated —–
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to me |
Hi honey my son is gone please tell me if you know where he is (phone #) he was good in big bear I don’t understand why he fled with nothing im scared
If we view madness through the lens of complex systems we widen the scope of etiology to include prefigurative, formative, and catalyzing factors that stretch from the myths of family history to the regulations of the US Department of Education and the products we are sold or cannot purchase, life opportunities unequally afforded…
I am sitting here on a day that suddenly feels like Spring, as if the weather knew that the calendar had slipped into March and there was no need for freezing anymore.
When it snowed this year, my children asked me: “Would you have liked it if it snowed this much in Georgia?”
They knew that it only snowed once when I was a kid, a thin 1/2 inch that – for just a single morning – covered the pine needles and pear trees in a hush of white that sent me whooping down the dirt road with the joy of seeing my home transformed into something strange and new.
I wonder a lot about writing these days.
This winter took my words with its sickness and fevers, its meetings and disappointments, its frozen mornings of pipes that groaned, pushing water through the ice.
I had a hard time remembering things this winter, like there was some sheath of thin plastic between me and my mind. I could feel the memories there, pushing up against the surface, bent and dull under sheeting. There were words that I could not grasp. I only found thin syllables, popping limply like gum.
Sometimes, on the drive home from work or walking up the stairs I remember that I was to prove something beautiful, that I was to show people something they might not have noticed.
I took down this site for a while, made it private for a few weeks, considered all the ways that I could erase myself, retreat into a quiet life of graying hair and laughter with children, doing what work I might be able to do.
This winter, it has felt like I might not be able to do anything, like I might just need to give up, pack it in, buckle down and get serious with the fact that I am not special, I am not rare, nobody owes me anything and there is no big surprise in the works for me, no big scheme that will lead me to everything I imagined being real.
Why do I have such a hard time with that?
On a Thursday afternoon I came home and found that my house had been broken into and that all my computers were gone. Gone. They were just gone. The door was open, the window was open, the gate was open.
Talking to friends, I said that I used to leave the doors unlocked and that nobody had ever bothered this place.
Then, I got scared, hearing the stories people told about the things they’d done when they were desperate and I started locking the doors when I was gone, but still left them open if I was at home, to not feel locked in.
In November, someone walked through my front door when I was upstairs and took my computer off of the table. So, I started locking the doors when I was at home, too.
Though I was kind in my thought out response, reasoning that a life in which one must steal must not be a very easy life to live, I began to feel leery of people, bitter and even disgusted, confused and guilty.
I am notoriously lazy about backing up my files.
I lost a lot of work.
Everything can be destroyed somehow.
I dance between that statement and the claim that nothing ever really dies.
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It’s sad to me that I am writing this knowing that your email has been disabled and that the message will bounce back to me.
I told someone last night, “I know that the thing I am supposed to do is to write the book anyway.”
I hope you are well out there. I heard Radar Love on the radio the other day. Your mother had sent me some messages and all I could tell her was that I heard that song and took it as a good sign.
I also mentioned that police involvement and psychiatric hospitalization might only make matters worse.
She said that she agreed with me.
PROOF OF GOD! ...and other tragedies. 