draft 12: an unexplanation / an assemblage / a rumination—on art, & self, & the artistry of being

but such signs are difficult to read when you’re driving so fast down a country road that you catch air going over hills while hay-heat smoke surges through your open windows & lifts you up to the ceiling & swallows the space between you & the seat, & you can feel spaces—every gap has a pull to it, pulls you toward all things—& you are like the smoke between them all, & you can feel far-off wildfires spiraling up cedars, licking dry bark, & you can feel the urgency of the hay balers, feel the car pulled back down to sweat-beaded pavement, & it’s only been a second, but when each second sings with the whole of the universe, how the hell are you supposed to read signs?

brief / encounters make us exist always / as echoes, as one whole ocean in a bucket / in the memory of a stranger

I miss you like missing a train, as if I’m sitting at the empty station, waiting for you to draw near again.

I drift free from my knot of veins, woven / like kelp, to the surface where I touch the empty sky for the first time / since we met (when your grey eyes submerged me like a prophecy…

“Maybe my body hates me because I never wanted it.” Ibrahim stops examining our finger ratios. “Now that’s pseudoscience,” they say.

While my younger sister poses in front of Rothkos on her brief recess from a jostling lurch through the white-walled American wing / , whose plaques admit no mistake, / I read a different room. I read, beside “Seascape with Three Boats” / , each ship a beige word curled over stunning blue, / that the calligram, an abstraction of Islamic calligraphic scripts, “occurred well before the advent of twentieth century Western modernism...and continues to this today.”

I wrote this lyric essay years ago, but I feel its themes—indeterminacy, loneliness, distant forms of intimacy—are especially poignant now. So I want to share it with you, this love letter to friends, and to longing, and, too, to the possibility that sits within uncertainty.

My bones are not softer than average, and their pain when broken is sharp, hard. But years of injuries have taught me that bodies are soft—softer when wounded—all the way down to the bone.