chorus 21 / Ojito Canyon / storm
Daniela Naomi Molnar
I dream of my friend on his island, his view of the ocean’s heft
origin-whipped wind touchable, unknown.
He sees an upturned bell of water trying still to ring.
His life moves into memory, all his paintings pressed with precision into storage space.
…
Morning sky like an absentminded, gentle touch. The cloud’s pink fingers trace the sky’s blue back.
Driven by a soft motor other than a mind.
Yesterday, two signs on my hike:
WILL FLOOD WITHOUT WARNING
Are we ever warned of the flood. Do we ever know what is overtaking us or when we’ll be
overtaken.
Preceding that, ALL WITHIN IS PROTECTED
every man/every woman carries a firmament inside / & the stars in it are not the stars in the sky.
All within is protected
tunneling through entropy like memory of —
the Lincoln Tunnel, orange sodium lights every 23 feet. Traffic unmoving, as always.
As always, horns. A jut of citizenry below the water’s weight. I wonder about air,
scarcity of. I wonder about bombs, about heat sensors and checkpoints and skin
color and skin. Inside skin of lungs, formerly pink, caked with exhaust and mold,
lungs suspended between states : NJ / NY : water / air :
real below dream : below dream : below dream :
every passenger in every car, a separate anxious language. Every idling car carrying
within an expectation of arrival and awareness that arrival will continue to recede.
Nobody wants to catch anyone else’s eyes through the auto glass though we sit,
unmoving, close enough to touch, captive in a woven cove of ordinary-strange.
A fragile imaginal cloth holds the tunnel down, holds us all as traffic.
Traffic : to touch repeatedly, to break.
A fragile imaginal cloth holds us, unbudging chasms
full of desire to be not present, to be not visible, to be not seen through the auto glass.
Binary ratcheting up.
…
Everything arrives energetically, at first. I keep finding
songbird’s rumps
tail feathers dusted red
wing feathers spread
what flesh there is
eaten or re-arrayed by time.
The storm brought the songbirds down.
The songbird is and is not a metaphor.
The songbird is and is not gone.
To feel is to give oneself over
to matter’s metaphor
to relinquish doubt’s spin, for a spell.
I feel a bird on a power line look down at me.
Another storm approaches
like a cougar threading through rock
dis- or re-appearing when and how she decides.
The songbirds brought down the storm.
__________________
Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge: fragile imaginal cloth holding
Everything arrives energetically, at first.
Diane di Prima: every man/every woman carries a firmament inside / & the stars in it are not the stars in the sky