Jorie Graham

[Grand Forks, North Dakota] A boy just like you took me out to see them, the five hundred B-52’s on alert on the runway, fully loaded fully manned pointed in all the directions, running every minute of every day. They sound like a sickness of the inner ear, where the heard foams up into the noise of listening, where the listening arrives without being extinguished. The huge hum soaks up into the dusk. The minutes spring open. Six is too many. From where we watch, from where even watching is an anachronism, from the 23rd of March from an open meadow, the concertina wire in its double helix designed to tighten round a body if it turns is the last path the sun can find to take out, each barb flaring gold like a braille being read, then off with its knowledge and the sun is gone.... That’s when the lights on all the extremities, like an outline, like a dress, become loud in the story, and a dark I have not seen before sinks in to hold them one by one. Strange plot made to hold so many inexhaustible screams. Have you ever heard in a crowd mutterings of blame that will not modulate that will not rise? He tells me, your stand-in, they stair-step up. He touches me to have me look more deeply in to where for just a moment longer color still lives: the belly white so that it looks like sky, the top some kind of brown, some soil—How does it look from up there now this meadow we lie on our bellies in, this field Iconography tells me stands for sadness because the wind can move through it uninterrupted? What is it the wind would have wanted to find and didn’t leafing down through this endless admiration unbroken because we’re too low for it to find us? Are you still there for me now in that dark we stood in for hours letting it sweep as far as it could down over us unwilling to move, irreconcilable? What he wants to tell me, his whisper more like a scream over this eternity of engines never not running, is everything: how the crews assigned to each plane for a week at a time, the seven boys, must live inseparable, how they stay together for life, how the wings are given a life of seven feet of play, how they drop practice bombs called shapes over Nevada, how the measures for counterattack in air have changed and we now forego firepower for jamming, for the throwing of false signals. The meadow, the meadow hums, love, with the planes, as if every last blade of grass were wholly possessed by this practice, wholly prepared. The last time I saw you, we stood facing each other as dusk came on. I leaned against the refrigerator, you leaned against the door. The picture window behind you was slowly extinguished, the tree went out, the two birdfeeders, the metal braces on them. The light itself took a long time, bits in puddles stuck like the useless splinters of memory, the chips of history, hopes, laws handed down.Here, hold these he says, these grasses these torn pods, he says, smiling over the noise another noise,take these he says, my hands wrong for the purpose, here, not-visible-from-the-sky, prepare yourself with these, boy and bouquet of thistleweed and wort and william and timothy. We stood there. Your face went out a long time before the rest of it. Can’t see you anymore I said.Nor I, you, whatever you still were replied. When I asked you to hold me you refused. When I asked you to cross the six feet of room to hold me you refused. Until I couldn’t rise out of the patience either any longer to make us take possession. Until we were what we must have wanted to be: shapes the shapelessness was taking back. Why should I lean out? Why should I move? When the Maenads tear Orpheus limb from limb, they throw his head out into the river. Unbodied it sings all the way downstream, all the way to the single ocean, head floating in current downriver singing, until the sound of the cataracts grows, until the sound of the open ocean grows and the voice.

I dig my hands into the absolute. The surface breaks into shingled, grassed clusters; lifts. If I press, pick-in with fingers, pluck, I can unfold the loam. It is tender. It is a tender maneuver, hands making and unmaking promises. Diggers, forgetters. . . . A series of successive single instances . . . Frames of reference moving . . . The speed of light, down here, upthrown, in my hands: bacteria, milky roots, pilgrimages of spores, deranged and rippling mosses. What heat is this in me that would thaw time, making bits of instance overlap shovel by shovelful—my present a wind blowing through this culture slogged and clutched-firm with decisions, overridings, opportunities taken? . . . If I look carefully, there in my hand, if I break it apart without crumbling: husks, mossy beginnings and endings, ruffled airy loambits, and the greasy silks of clay crushing the pinerot in . . . Erasure. Tell me something and then take it back. Bring this pellucid moment—here on this page now as on this patch of soil, my property—bring it up to the top and out of sequence. Make it dumb again—won’t you?—what would it take? Leach the humidities out, the things that will insist on making meaning. Parch it. It isn’t hard: just take this shovelful and spread it out, deranged, a vertigo of single clots in full sun and you can, easy, decivilize it, un- hinge it from its plot. Upthrown like this, I think you can eventually abstract it. Do you wish to? Disentangled, it grows very very clear. Even the mud, the sticky lemon-colored clay hardens and then yields, crumbs. I can’t say what it is then, but the golden-headed hallucination, mating, forgetting, speckling, inter- locking, will begin to be gone from it and then its glamorous veil of echoes and muddy nostalgias will be gone. If I touch the slender new rootings they show me how large I am, look at these fingers—what a pilot—I touch, I press their slowest electricity. . . . What speed is it at? What speed am I at here, on my knees, as the sun traverses now and just begins to touch my back. What speed where my fingers, under the dark oaks, are suddenly touched, lit up—so white as they move, the ray for a moment on them alone in the small wood. White hands in the black-green glade, opening the muddy cartoon of the present, taking the tiny roots of the moss apart, hired hands, curiosity’s small army, so white in these greens— make your revolution in the invisible temple, make your temple in the invisible revolution—I can’t see the errands you run, hands gleaming for this instant longer like tinfoil at the bottom here of the tall whispering oaks . . . Listen, Boccioni the futurist says a galloping horse has not four legs (it has twenty)—and “at C there is no sequence because there is no time”—and since at lightspeed, etc. (everything is simultaneous): my hands serrated with desires, shoved into these excavated fates —mauve, maroons, gutters of flecking golds— my hands are living in myriad manifestations of light. . . . “All forms of imitation are to be despised.” “All subjects previously used must be discarded.” “At last we shall rush rapidly past objectiveness” . . . Oh enslavement, will you take these hands and hold them in for a time longer? Tops of the oaks, do you see my tiny golden hands pushed, up to the wrists, into the present? Star I can’t see in daylight, young, light and airy star— I put the seed in. The beam moves on.

needed          explanation because of the mystic nature        of the theory and our reliance          on collective belief I could not visualize the end the tools that paved the way broke the body the foundation the exact copy of the real our surfaces were covered our surfaces are all covered actual hands appear but then there is writing in the cave       we were deeply impressed as in addicted to results oh and dedication training     the idea of loss of life in our work we call this emotion how a poem enters into the world there is nothing wrong with the instrument as here I would raise my voice but the human being and the world cannot be equated aside from the question of whether or not we are alone and other approaches to nothingness (the term “subject”)(the term “only”) also opinion and annihilation (the body’s minutest sensation of time) (the world, it is true, has not yet been destroyed) intensification      void we are amazed uselessness is the last form love takes so liquid till the forgone conclusion here we are, the forgone conclusion so many messages transmitted they will never acquire meaning do you remember          my love my archive touch me (here) give birth to       a single idea touch where it does not lead to war show me    exact spot climb the stairs lie on the bed have faith nerves wearing only moonlight lie down lie still patrol yr cage be a phenomenon at the bottom below the word intention, lick past it rip     years find the burning matter love allows it (I think) push past the freedom (smoke) push past     intelligence (smoke) whelm      sprawl (favorite city)   (god’s tiny voices) hand over mouth let light arrive let the past strike us and go drift        undo if it please the dawn lean down say      hurt      undo in your mouth be pleased where does it say where does it say this is the mother tongue there is in my mouth a ladder climb down presence of world impassable       gap pass I am beside myself you are inside me       as history We exist         Meet me

Although what glitters on the trees, row after perfect row, is merely the injustice of the world, the chips on the bark of each beech tree catching the light, the sum of these delays is the beautiful, the human beautiful, body of flaws. The dead would give anything I’m sure, to step again onto the leafrot, into the avenue of mottled shadows, the speckled broken skins. The dead in their sheer open parenthesis, what they wouldn’t give for something to lean on that won’t give way. I think I would weep for the moral nature of this world, for right and wrong like pools of shadow and light you can step in and out of crossing this yellow beech forest, this buchen-wald, one autumn afternoon, late in the twentieth century, in hollow light, in gaseous light. . . . To receive the light and return it and stand in rows, anonymous, is a sweet secret even the air wishes it could unlock. See how it pokes at them in little hooks, the blue air, the yellow trees. Why be afraid? They say when Klimt died suddenly a painting, still incomplete, was found in his studio, a woman’s body open at its point of entry, rendered in graphic, pornographic, detail—something like a scream between her legs. Slowly, feathery, he had begun to paint a delicate garment (his trademark) over this mouth of her body. The mouth of her face is genteel, bored, feigning a need for sleep. The fabric defines the surface, the story, so we are drawn to it, its blues and yellows glittering like a stand of beech trees late one afternoon in Germany, in fall. It is called Buchenwald, it is 1890. In the finished painting the argument has something to do with pleasure.

In this blue light I can take you there, snow having made me a world of bone seen through to. This is my house, my section of Etruscan wall, my neighbor’s lemontrees, and, just below the lower church, the airplane factory. A rooster crows all day from mist outside the walls. There’s milk on the air, ice on the oily lemonskins. How clean the mind is, holy grave. It is this girl by Piero della Francesca, unbuttoning her blue dress, her mantle of weather, to go into labor. Come, we can go in. It is before the birth of god. No one has risen yet to the museums, to the assembly line—bodies and wings—to the open air market. This is what the living do: go in. It’s a long way. And the dress keeps opening from eternity to privacy, quickening. Inside, at the heart, is tragedy, the present moment forever stillborn, but going in, each breath is a button coming undone, something terribly nimble-fingered finding all of the stops.

Over a dock railing, I watch the minnows, thousands, swirl themselves, each a minuscule muscle, but also, without the way to create current, making of their unison (turning, re- infolding, entering and exiting their own unison in unison) making of themselves a visual current, one that cannot freight or sway by minutest fractions the water’s downdrafts and upswirls, the dockside cycles of finally-arriving boat-wakes, there where they hit deeper resistance, water that seems to burst into itself (it has those layers), a real current though mostly invisible sending into the visible (minnows) arrowing motion that forces change— this is freedom. This is the force of faith. Nobody gets what they want. Never again are you the same. The longing is to be pure. What you get is to be changed. More and more by each glistening minute, through which infinity threads itself, also oblivion, of course, the aftershocks of something at sea. Here, hands full of sand, letting it sift through in the wind, I look in and say take this, this is what I have saved, take this, hurry. And if I listen now? Listen, I was not saying anything. It was only something I did. I could not choose words. I am free to go. I cannot of course come back. Not to this. Never. It is a ghost posed on my lips. Here: never.

Late in the season the world digs in, the fat blossoms hold still for just a moment longer. Nothing looks satisfied, but there is no real reason to move on much further: this isn’t a bad place; why not pretend we wished for it? The bushes have learned to live with their haunches. The hydrangea is resigned to its pale and inconclusive utterances. Towards the end of the season it is not bad to have the body. To have experienced joy as the mere lifting of hunger is not to have known it less. The tobacco leaves don’t mind being removed to the long racks—all uses are astounding to the used. There are moments in our lives which, threaded, give us heaven— noon, for instance, or all the single victories of gravity, or the kudzu vine, most delicate of manias, which has pressed its luck this far this season. It shines a gloating green. Its edges darken with impatience, a kind of wind. Nothing again will ever be this easy, lives being snatched up like dropped stitches, the dry stalks of daylilies marking a stillness we can’t keep.

Dying only mother’s hands continue undying, blading into air, impersonal, forced, curving it down — drought incessant rain revolution and the organs shutting down but not these extremities, here since I first opened my first eyes first day and there they were, delicate, pointing, will not back off, cannot be remembered. Mother, dying — mother not wanting to die — mother scared awakening each night thinking she’s dead — crying out — mother not remembering who I am as I run in — who am I — mother we must take away the phone because who will you call next — now saying I dreamt I have to get this dress on, if I get this dress on I will not die — mother who cannot get the dress on because of broken hip and broken arm and tubes and coils and pan and everywhere pain, wandering delirium, in the fetid shadow- world — geotrauma — trans- natural — what is this message you have been scribbling all your life to me, what is this you drag again today into non-being. Draw it. The me who is not here. Who is the ghost in this room. What am I that is now drawn. Where are we heading. Into what do you throw me with your quick eye — up onto me then down onto the blank of the page. You rip the face off. I see my elbow there where now you bend it with the pen, you fill it in, you slough it off me onto more just-now making of more future. You look back up, you take my strangeness from me, you machine me, you hatch me in. To make what, mother, here in this eternity this second this million years where I watch as each thing is seen and cancelled-out and re- produced — multiplying aspects of light in the morning air — the fingers dipping frantic into the bag of pens, pencils, then here they are — the images — and the hands move — they are making a line now, it is our world, it horizons, we ghost, we sleepwalk, everything around us is leveled, canceled, we background, we are barely remains, we remain, but for what, the fingers are deepening curling, bringing it round, the mind does not — I don’t think — know this but the fingers, oh, for all my life scribbling open the unseen, done with mere things, not interested in appraisal, just seizure — what is meant by seizure — all energy, business- serious, about direction, tracing things that dissolve from thingness into in-betweens — here firm lines, here powdery lift off — hunger, fear — the study begins — all is not lost — the thought a few seconds wide — the perusal having gone from here to here, aggregates, thicket, this spot could be where we came in, or where we are saved, could be a mistake, looks across room through me, me not here then, me trying to rise in the beam, nothing I do will make it happen, rock-face, work that excludes everything that is not itself, all urge in the process of becoming all effect, how can I touch that hand like snow moving, when is it time again as here there is no time, or time has been loaded but not cocked, so is held in reserve, all wound up, I was also made but not like this, I look for reluctance, expectation, but those are not the temperatures — if only I could be in the scene — my time is not passing — whose is the time that is passing — the hands rushing across the paper, cloudy with a sun outside also rushing scribbling — wisdom turning itself away from wisdom to be — what — a thing that would gold-up but cannot, a patch of blue outside suddenly like the cessation of language when lips cease to move — sun — self- pronouncing — I want this to not be my writing of it, want my hands not to be here also, mingling with hers who will not take my hand ever into hers, no matter how late we are, no matter that we have to run so fast through all these people and I need the hand, somewhere a radiant clearing, are we heading for it, head down towards the wide page, hand full of high feeling, cannot tell if it takes or gives, cannot tell what it is that is generating the line, it comes from the long fingers but is not them, all is being spent, the feeling that all — all that we need or have — would be spent for this next thing this capture, actually loud though all you can hear is the small scratching, and I feel dusk approaching though it is still early afternoon, just slipping, no one here to see this but me, told loud in silence by arcs, contours, swell of wind, billowing, fluent — ink chalk charcoal — sweeps, spirals, the river that goes nowhere, that has survived the astonishments and will never venture close to that heat again, is cool here, looking up at what, looking back down, how is it possible the world still exists, as it begins to take form there, in the not being, there is once then there is the big vocabulary, loosed, like a jay’s song thrown down when the bird goes away, cold mornings, hauling dawn away with it, leaving grackle and crow in sun — they have known what to find in the unmade undrawn unseen unmarked and dragged it into here — that it be visible.

Dying, Dad wanted sunscreen. Nonstop. Frantic if withheld. Would say screen, and we just did it. Knew he was dying. Was angry. In last weeks wore red sleepmask over eyes day and night. Would ride it up onto his forehead for brief intervals, then down, pulled by hand that still worked. A bit. Sometimes shaking too much so just cried eyes. Cried now now. Once cried out light— more like a hiss — was there for that. Yanked it quick. Needed it so badly, the bandage, the world is a short place, wanted the illustration of it gone, wanted to not see out, wanted no out. But I am guessing. The vineyards down the slope, each latent bud beginning to plump. In the distance, mountains. Beyond sea. All of it distraction, but from what. A waste of what. The red sleepmask. I should have burned it with the rest but kept it. The pane made trees look painted on. Silky. Not good silky. In the next valley once, hammering. Thought it human at first. The woodpeckers went on for days. A carnival of searching for void. How full void is. Small tufts of grass growing so that I can keep track.Taking root is not an easy way to go about finding a place to stay

here. Have been for centuries. No, longer. Everything already has been. It’s not a reasonable place, this continuum between us, and yet here again I put the olive trees in, turn the whole hill-sweeping grove down, its mile-long headfuls of leaves upswept so the whole valley shivers its windy silvers, watery ... A strange heat is upon us. Again. That was you thinking that. I suggested it. Maybe the wind did. We both put in the horizon line now, the great loneliness, its grip, chaos recessed but still there. After finitude you shall keep coming toward me it whines, whitish with non-disappearance. We feel the same about this. The same what? We feel is there more. That’s the default. We want to live with the unknown in front of us. Receding, always receding. A vanishing moving over it all. A sleepy vacancy. It’s the sky, yes, but also this thinking. As from the start, again, here I am, a mind alone in the fields. The sheep riding and falling the slants of earth. The sleepiness a no-good god come to assume we are halfwits, tending, sleepy, the animals gurgling and trampling, thistle-choked, stinging. A dove on a stone. No sky to speak of, the god lingers, it wants to retire, it thinks this is endgame, what could we be — mist about to dry off, light about to wipe a wall for no reason, that random. This must have been way BC. Or is it 1944. Surely in 2044 we shall be standing in the field again, tending, waiting to surprise the god who thinks he knows what he’s made. Well no. He does not know. We might be a small cavity but it guards a vast hungry — how bad does that hurt you, fancy maker — you have no idea what we turned our back on to come be in this field of earth and tend — yes tend — these flocks of minutes, whispering till the timelessness in us is wrung dry and we are heavied with endgame. Have I mentioned the soul. How we know you hustled that in, staining all this flesh with it, rubbing and swirling it all over inside with your god-cloth. Rinse. Repeat. Get this — here with this staff which soon I shall turn into a pen again — brilliantly negligent, diligent, inside all this self truly formless — I hear the laughter of the irrigation ditch I’ve made, I see the dry field blonde-up and green, day smacks its lips, they are back, the inventors, they are going to do it again, sprinkle-seed, joker rain coming to loosen it all. How many lives will we be given, how many will we trade in for this — it comes in bushels, grams, inches, notes, crows watch over it all as they always have, come back from the end of time to caw it into its redo again. Cherish us. Will not stop. Nothing to show for it but doing. The flock runs across as the dog chases and I walk slowly. I admire what I own what I am and I think the night is nothing, the stars click their ascent, I feel it rise in me, the word, I feel the skull beneath this skin, I feel the skin slick and shine and hide the skull and it is from there that it rises now, I taste it before I say it, this song.