A Meditation in Five Parts

I've Been to Sea Before (M.A. Reilly, 2010)

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.                                           from The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

I.

What is named is most always a fiction.


II.

Rhizomatic tendencies do not come easy even if participation in #Rhizo15 makes the rhizome more commonplace, less happenstance.  I don't recognize myself as becoming for I am too rooted.  A narrative.

Time marches along and I stick to its edges.


III.

Much in the way I live works against rhizomatic tendencies for rhizomes are about horizontal movement and little less. Such mindlessness makes me nervous, triggers an urge to rely on what has been given. Don't tell, but most days I want to know the road is well marked, well walked before trodding. For I am dutiful. A modern girl-version of Prufrock who measures life in coffee spoons--full of beginnings and endings and each time I've glanced away from those seductive middles, I've been rewarded.

Yes, rewarded.  I'm a slave to production.


IV

I've come to understand how ruptures, those sweet lines of flight, are more about trusting what cannot be known than over-relying on what has been coded. And I want to trust. I do. But I live mostly by code. I wish I might be different and of course, sometimes I am--like that day in Dún Laoghaire at the Forty-Foot promontory when the afternoon sun cast shadows shifting three mere mortals to angels and I saw it all as it emerged.

I clicked the camera's shutter to clear space and see.


V.

Some nights I dream myself quiet and wake with the sea at my throat.