8 Years

At the Paterson Falls (acrylic, ink, pencil, papers)

Yesterday I photographed at the Paterson Falls. After all of the tumultuous storms we’ve been having, the falls were powerful, awe-inspiring. Being in Paterson, once again, had me remembering William Carlos Williams’ Paterson. I first read it in its entirety with Rob. Prior to that (like Joyce’s Ulysses) I read parts. Rob loved to read aloud and what I recall most about Paterson was hearing so much of the book. I went back to see if I could find a section that was in mind, but not recalled with fidelity. 

No defeat is made up entirely of defeat—since
the world it opens is always a place
              formerly
                               unsuspected. A
world lost,
              a world unsuspected,
                               beckons to new places
and no whiteness (lost) is so white as the memory
of whiteness     .

8 years ago today, Rob died. I will tell you that I never imagined what 8 years out might feel like. During those beginning years, placing one foot in front of the other took effort. The lines from Williams quoted here (from The Descent), remind me that in great loss, there is the possibility for new spaces to open up, in part because of the holes left by grief and loss, in part because the pulse to live is so very strong. At the falls yesterday, I thought of how some slim memories endure, while the greater majority of living and remembering the last 8 years flow with a force not too dissimilar to those falls after much rain.

2.10.2016

Edges (Nome, Alaska)

The days get muddled together when I recall. 8 years is a long time in many ways especially when I think of all the living that has happened from then to now.  On this past Saturday, I would remember the hospital room, the quietness of the floor so early in the morning, the oncologist. I would recall all of this and more, almost to the minute. 

5 a.m. and the interstate was more abandoned than not. A lone truck in the far right lane. It’s light cutting through the still darkness. By 6 a.m., I had coffee in hand for both of us and was making my way upstairs to the 3rd? or was it the 4th floor of the hospital?  Three hours later the oncologist who was supposed to be away surprised us. I don’t recall his exact words, but he said something about consulting with his partners, a cat scan, spread, and how Rob who only a few weeks earlier had a prognosis of at least another year of life, was now terminal. Less than 4 weeks, he would be dead. 

This past Saturday, I was sipping a second cup of coffee when the date hit me. February 10. 9 a.m.  I had come home from a client the afternoon before suddenly feeling miserable, certain I had caught a bug. Sore throat, achy, headache behind the eyes. The body knows what consciousness cannot always grasp. I went to sleep early, waking Saturday morning and feeling off. And then I remembered. That is what grief is. Years can pass and in the space of an ordinary day, a sip of coffee, a date and time , and 

     the knees 

fall out from under.

#SOL21 - 5 years Later

The Atlantic, early morning

I. 

During the first week Rob was back home after 50 days in the hospital, I continued to try to save his life. It wasn’t until the Hospice nurse gently reminded that I no longer needed to check his oxygen level, that I  startled and then began to see how hopeless such an act was.  There would soon come a time when my husband no longer breathed. I carry with me the knowledge that I could not save Rob from so early a death.  I carry it imprinted on my bones like a too sad Braille reader who has lost faith in method. Great loss is a way of being in the world and so is the necessary healing. Loss and healing remain special knowledge that has translated into empathy for others. 

At first the replay of Rob's death ran like a movie I could not turn off.  Now I cannot recall the specifics of his death--not certainly with the clarity I once did.  Then slowly memories of earlier times with Rob began to replace the scene of death. I can recall the first time I dreamt of him and not his death. In the dream we are in Scotland. It is just a second of Rob at the shoreline of a loch with his long hair tied back and it is moving as he laughs at something our child had said. 

Now, five years later, the memories of the days leading up to his death are more lone photographs of scenes of darkened faces lit by a flash.  

II.

I want to tell you five years later that loss and healing are tidy matters, but they are not. Both inform how I live. Now what saddens me most is seeing all the life that has happened in these last five years and knowing Rob missed it all. I am now older than Rob. I have lived on this planet longer than he did or ever will.  All of this makes me feel for each of the 520,000 people who have died this year from COVID 19 and their families. 

"How do you live in an age of bewilderment, when the old stories have collapsed and no new story has yet emerged to replace them?" asks Yuval Noah Harari. 

You live.
It is that simple and that complicated. 
Live.

Live to the Point of Tears

I.

Tree Lines (M.A. Reilly, acrylic paint, gesso, citra-solv)

"Honesty is reached through the doorway of grief and loss," writes David Whyte in Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words. "Honesty is not found in revealing the truth, but in understanding how deeply afraid of it we are. To become honest is in effect to become fully and robustly incarnated into powerlessness."

Loss brings the opportunity for honesty, in part because it allows us to know in our bones that powerlessness is unavoidable. Four years ago, most everything I thought I knew to be true became opaque, less clear and the world more topsy-turvy.  By mid-September, 2015, we had seen the oncologist, learned Rob had stage 4 lung cancer, and Rob had scheduled his first chemotherapy session for later in the month.  What we did not know at that moment was that a week earlier a surgeon had placed an infected port into my husband's chest and altered any chance at life he might have had.

I was reminded of all of that and the five months that followed when I received an email from a friend on the West coast last night. When I opened it what first caught my attention was that new email was written in response to an email I had sent 3 years and 7 months earlier, explaining that Rob had died. This caught me unaware.

Loss does not leave a body.  It carries a breath-stealing punch that surfaces without any self-will. It rises full force stirring the acid in the gut, the heart.

A wolf to the throat.


II.

In the trail of emails back and forth, I read the new message: the mother of a friend of Dev's from childhood had died. Agnes Kurdyla Lauria was just 48.


III.

After Rob died I found myself paying attention to death notices as if some insights I so desperately wanted could be fathomed through the loss of another.  The year Rob died, so too did David Bowie, who lived 9 years more than Rob. I measured every one's death by the plus or minus of years from when Rob's life ended.  I did this automatically, without thought. The way I organized time was redefined.

This morning I am wondering once again why good people die. This is not productive thinking and I know that, but nonetheless the thoughts rise and with them come the unknowable, the unanswerable. Agnes, like Rob, was a beloved teacher. I can recall when she first was hired as a basic skills teacher and the many conversation we had while waiting for or collecting our children from school or a sleepover.  Her child, Alex, like mine is just 20-years-old.

How could two sweet children each lose a parent so early in their lives? 


IV.

Perhaps asking, "Why do good people die early?" is a place holder for a more important observation.  Whyte explains:

The French philosopher Camus used to tell himself quietly to live to the point of tears, not as a call for maudlin sentimentality, but as an invitation to the deep privilege of belonging and the way belonging affects us, shapes us and breaks our heart at a fundamental level. It is a fundamental dynamic of human incarnation to be moved by what we feel, as if surprised by the actuality and privilege of love and affection and its possible loss. Courage is what love looks like when tested by the simple everyday necessities of being alive.

Life happens whether we have a hand in designing it or not.  Each breath that breaks tells us we belong.

Nostalgia

Once at Grand Central (M.A. Reilly)

I. 

"Hun? Could you read your section of the paper and let me read mine?" I ask Rob hoping he'll stop reading aloud.

    

"Ok. Ok," he answers. He takes a sip of coffee and returns his eyes to the page. A few minutes later I hear him say, "You have to hear this..."

Even though a bulk of the Sunday NewYork Times arrived along with Saturday's paper, we tended to save it all for Sunday morning. Rob would inevitably read aloud whole articles and though I would grumble some Sundays, the truth we each knew was that I loved to hear him read and he did so often. 

II. 

David Whyte in Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words explains nostalgia:

Nostalgia is not indulgence. Nostalgia tells us we are in the presence of imminent revelation, about to break through the present structures held together by the way we have remembered: something we thought we understood but that we are now about to fully understand, something already lived but not fully lived, issuing not from our future but from something already experienced; something that was important, but something to which we did not grant importance enough, something now wanting to be lived again, at the depth to which it first invited us but which we originally refused. Nostalgia is not an immersion in the past, nostalgia is the first annunciation that the past as we know it is coming to an end.

I read this and pause, knowing that the writing today--this story of a Sunday morning newspaper reading is wrapped in nostalgia. It is bringing me somewhere I haven't named before and that is part pain and part gift, but they are not equal.


III. 

I realize this morning that I want grief to be a simple math problem I can solve. I write in the margin of a book I shared with Rob: 

1 sorrow is negated by 1 remembrance of love.  

I know this is not always a truth. I reread Whyte's words, halting a bit to reread: 

"Nostalgia is not an immersion in the past, nostalgia is the first annunciation that the past as we know it is coming to an end."

Grieving is less about time passing and more about grace--about accepting how the past as I knew it, is no more. I don't think I could have known that 3 years ago.  There's a thoroughness with which I remember these days. Those bits of recalled stories, some days, lead to new understandings. 


IV.

Rob told me years ago the only way out of something is through it. The last few weeks I have been in tune with the immense loss, the life I am making now, and the changes Dev and I have been through. 

After Rob died:

We had to break. We had to break apart. We had no center to hold.We had to break and then begin to heal. 

To be whole again we needed to break. Not just ourselves, but also what was between us.

As I remember once again, I note the many triggers that bring me back to Rob just the last three days: 

a lecture I attended on Friday, the notice that Lawrence Lessig is speaking nearby soon, a quiet meal a few blocks from where Rob worked in Hell's Kitchen, the way the light slants in the weeks before spring officially arrives, the noise of birds who have return to build nests, the smell of coffee, a man reading softly to the woman next to him on the train--their heads tilted towards one another, the sound of a hearty laugh, a song we loved that comes on the radio, a couple holding hands, a father and son,most everything Dev does.

V.

I read the paper online now--even Sunday's. 

This morning, I miss the smell of ink from the magazine section, the weight of the book review, and the sound of Rob reading aloud.  

Some days it’s almost as if he were upstairs reading...

Rob at home a year before his death. 

Some days it’s almost as if he were upstairs reading. Perhaps, he would be sitting in the easy chair he loved that used to be in the guest room, or in our room putting away laundry—folding it as he did so perfectly.

The old familiarity developed across decades together resurfaces and I am all anticipation, and as quickly as I want, I remember too.  In that second, it’s as if all that I have felt punctuates my breath and my heart stills. I have to stop myself from calling up the stairs to him, as I remember he is not there, cannot be there. Not anymore.

Sorrow is as fluid as breathing. And though I do not dwell in sorrow, the many faces of loss surely have changed me as well. I want to tell you that this loss, this single parenting, this need to take stock of self has made me a better person. And that is no small thing in this age of me, me, me. I carry these three years of experience like an extra chromosome and am reminded that all privilege is stripped at death and how we have lived is the measure of our lives, not what we have acquired.

To say I miss Rob would be wrong, for miss, is too milky a term. There are no words I know.

Even now after three years have passed, loss is incalculable, fleeting, rooted, recalled. It is all of these things and none of these. The only constant is the inconstancy of grief and pulsation of life,  Life demands, and I find it impossible to not greet it fully. 

Rose, Shabbat, and the Rabbi

Dust of Snow (M.A. Reilly, 2014)

The first time the rabbi came, Rob was in intensive care. It was a Friday evening and the rabbi slid open the door to the room and greeted Rob. He had brought with him two electric candles (oxygen was being pumped into Rob), grape juice, and challah to celebrate Shabbat with Rob. I excused myself and returned a bit later to thank the rabbi.  My husband would live just 6 weeks more and for the next three Friday’s he spent in the hospital always in a different room, the same rabbi, sometimes accompanied by his wife, sometimes with his sons, came to celebrate Shabbat with Rob. On what would be his last visit as Rob was in palliative care and would be coming home to die, the rabbi gave me his email and asked that I contact him to let him know about Rob. We will keep him and you in prayer, he told me.

The visits from the rabbi and celebrating Shabbat each Friday night brought Rob peace—peace that wrapped around him when he was home and no longer could hold on to days, or places, or names. During those last days of his life, Rob would now and then tell me about all the fanciful things he was seeing as he edged from this life to the next.

When I heard about the shooting at Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, I thought about the rabbi who spent Friday nights with Rob celebrating Shabbat and how he brought both faith and kindness during each visit.  Ceremonies, especially ones tied to faith, connect or reconnect us to something larger than ourselves. In many ways that is the definition of grace—that reconnection to other.

One of the murdered, Rose Mallinger, was a Holocaust survivor. Each of the eleven murdered have families whose grief will rise after the awful shock that something heinous happened lessens. I’d like to think that connections among us remain even when our bodies are no longer present. As I wrote this I had a powerful feeling that Rob was there in heaven to welcome Rose and the others.

#SOL18: 3 A.M. (For Rob on the 2nd Anniversary)

Rob and Devon celecbrating Dev's 2md birthday.

As I write this it is nearing 3 a.m. We are buried under the snow tonight. More than two feet fell throughout the day. In the next room, my son is busy making a pot of rice. I can hear the press of his foot against the wooden floor, the rattle he makes each time he lifts the lid off the pot and stirs. Such ordinary sounds are the ones of industry. Earlier he handed me his iPad and showed me a piece of writing he had finished. Strong, clear writing. He is his father's son.

Thirty years ago, Rob and I went to hear Li-Young Lee read. We quickly purchased two volumes of his poetry--books I have kept close throughout our many moves.  I have turned to Young's words for comfort, joy, surprise, and knowledge. His insights so soften startle me. So it isn't so surprising that tonight, although accidental, it was Young's words that were the balm I most needed.

Rob, mid-word. 

"From Blossoms" caught my heart tonight on this anniversary of Rob's death. How two years could have come and gone is more mystery than not. But it has. More lessons than my  hands could possibly hold have come and faded these last two years. From that fog, what emerges most though is the blessing that comes from living deeply during those twenty-eight years.

I'm so grateful now that we didn't muddy living with too much worry about things we could not control. "From Blossoms" is a reminder of that adage: live well, live deeply, live now. It is a sensual feast and against such lushness, Young's closing stanza resonates. He writes,

Rob and I in Maine. Dev took the picture. 

"There are days we live/as if death were nowhere/in the background; from joy/to joy to joy, from wing to wing,/from blossom to blossom to/impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom." 

We lived more days than I could count as if death were nowhere in the background.  Tonight, I'm so grateful for that. These days when I start to feel blue, I remember what it means to live joyfully--to appreciate the ordinary moments that give the most definition to the day by noticing how the scent of rice lingers well after it has been eaten.

]

#SOL18: After Great Loss Comes Acceptance

Moon Over Field (M.A. Reilly, 2012)

For the first 18 months I was very, very careful. It wasn’t as if I understood the care I took. Rather, it was something that felt essential.  I lived by some adages those first months after Rob's death:

Ensure Devon is well protected, well loved.
Stay healthy.
Minimize risk.
Avoid drama.
Be positive.
Fill life with what is most good. 

I avoided mishaps as best I could because each problem felt so devastating regardless of the problem's actual weight. After such a loss, the smallest concern would derail me. There’s a vulnerability to being sick, to having problems that exacerbated my sense of loneliness.  Each sniffle, cold, or disappointment triggered a feeling of loss. In the aftermath of great loss, life is more tenuous than reliable.

Like water through splayed fingers, that protection slipped greatly these last six months. Acceptance took hold even when it did not announce itself. It came after a challenging fall when I had been sick much of October, November and December with blinding headaches, congestion, and difficulty breathing. I had been seen by an ENT, suffered through a lung x-ray to rule out lung cancer, and swallowed several rounds of steroids and antibiotics that failed to even temporarily fix the sinus infection. It wasn’t until the second ENT said, “Something isn’t right. I want you to take the medicine I’m prescribing and after you finish it, get a CT-scan. Something is causing this infection to resurge.” A day after the scan the doctor phoned and told me there were no blockages and that he thought the source of the infection was an abscess tooth.

“My tooth?”
“I’m not a dentist so I can’t say for sure. But it does look like that on the films. Upper right.”
“I have a tender tooth there. I figured that was because of the sinus infection.”
“When were you last to the dentist?”
“Six months ago. I had a full set of x-rays, no cavities and my teeth were cleaned. I guess I need to make an appointment.”
“Yes, as soon as you can. I’ll have the office put aside your films so you can bring them to your dentist. Let me know what happens.”

A week later my dentist confirmed the abscess and a week after that I had root canal. I returned to the ENT who confirmed the infection was still present and he prescribed more antibiotics and a steroid and told me to come back in two weeks. I returned to have another CT-scan and was able to see the extraordinary difference between the first set of films and the second.

I cried easily those three months, missing Rob deeply. I tended to isolate myself at first because I felt miserable and then because the isolation felt like comfort. What I did not know was I was saying goodbye once again to my husband.  By the second year, Rob was more memory than body.  He was removed from my day-to-day life.  Life resettled and hope once again felt palpable. Acceptance wasn't a decision as I first thought. It was more a process that arose in time.

That adage about time healing all wounds feels wiser these days.

SOL17: The Play Set

Sing to Me (M.A. Reilly, 2017, acrylic, watercolor, pencil, gesso, digital remix)

I.

It takes a little more than ten minutes to play Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings and it may well be the saddest and most glorious music I have ever heard. It's best reserved for days that are cloudy, threatening rain. I was listening to the piece two weeks ago when my oldest brother showed up, sawzall in hand, and said he would take the play set apart. I had mentioned the previous week wanting to take it down as I readied the house for sale. It took Jack, Devon and I most of that day to take apart the large wooden play set.

Imagine hearing Barber's music and you'd have a fair representation of how I felt after the play set had been sawed apart.

II.

We moved the pieces to a new location on the lawn: the small slide that used to fit Devon's body just right, the two benches and table where we ate peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for lunch, the climbing bars Devon would swing from, the two swings Rob and I sat on moving back and forth as Devon commanded his world from the top of the set behind the acrylic bubble. Later that day after Jack left for home and Devon went upstairs I called a junk remover and set a date for these bits and pieces of my life to be taken away.

Now it is gone and the space left behind is large, looming, and mostly just empty.

III.

Rob and I bought that large wooden play set when Devon was four-years-old and money was more scarce then not. One Saturday afternoon we watched from the deck as men assembled the set in the rear yard. We had moved into the new house the previous year and for the last fourteen years it has sat like a sentry in a corner of the rear yard.

Some days, Rob's death hurts in ways hard to name for somehow in the sting of all of that pain, time somehow moved on.

#SOL17: Birds Sung to Me

Night, I (M.A. Reilly, 2008)

"On starless nights, one can feel like a loose array of limbs and purpose, and seem smaller, limited to what one can touch."   ― from Diane Ackerman's  "Dawn Light: Dancing with Cranes and Other Ways to Start the Day"

I. 

It was time to let go of our house where light fell through familiar windows and each creak of the staircase I knew by heart. It was time to pack away all that could not be carried further. Such cargo weighed too much and I carried it too far. Some truths took greater time to surface. Sea deep. They resided where sunlight did not penetrate. Oceanographers called this the bathypekagic zone. Poets knew it as the midnight zone. I, like every other widow, simply called it the blue-black absence of love. 

Across the last two years, grief remained a spiraling affair.  At times a darkness rose up to reclaim and then release me. Claimed and released over and over and somehow each time the sudden pain of it stunned me. The center I once knew by heart was blown wide open after Rob died making it hard to find my balance in the dark.

II.

And yet, I stood 
          at the open window tonight
                               where the fall of late light
                               felt familiar,
                                      memories remained bittersweet,
                                       and the sharp desire to be still
                                       pressed against a need to move.  
                                       
Grief was a tension
that rose between then and next
leaving me only a slim truth:
Rob was dead and I was not.

Outside the window
           a pair of cardinals settled
                      on the limb of a bare tree
                 just beyond my reach
                 and sung to me.

As I listened even the darkness felt warm.

#SOL17: I will arise and go now

Forgetfulness (M.A. Reilly)

I.

From somewhere in the high heavens, the places I could not see, far beyond my gaze, there was a future floating down. I was alive, feet on the earth, so I could not outrun that future and slowly it covered me up.

There is, my dear friend, in the heart of every living being, the will to go on. 

- KAO KALIA YANG, Your Threads Have Come Undone: A Letter to a Grieving Husband

The words quoted here are from a letter, Kao Kalia Yang wrote to a stranger who was deep in grief. Her words are poetic, brave, fierce, and so very, very right. I have been struggling to understand what it is I have mostly learned these last two years and it is the unquestionable understanding that the will to live is an untamed pulse.  Something fundamental urges adherence to living when the self is less sure of breath. 

At first I didn't feel. Shock insulates, slows the blood. Then I resurfaced and forgot. Each step in the day was a moment to anticipate Rob. I surfaced and remembered and it hurt in ways that defy language. When light began to creep in, to sink below the shut eyes of doubt it was largely because of the company I kept. Awakening happened alongside others deep in their own bereavement--mostly women I met in grief circles. In time I shared and shouldered sorrow and joy, and these connections rerooted me to the planet, to earth. I was feet to the soil. 

A day or two ago, a friend, Sandy, commented on a set of images I have been making this summer.  The presence of blackbirds can be found in so many of my paintings and truthfully I had no reason I could name as to why their presence in each painting was so prominent. She told me what I simply had not seen:

Blackbird singing in the dead of night
Take these broken wings and learn to fly
All your life

Birds in Flight (M.a. Reilly, 2017)

You were only waiting for this moment to arise 

- The Beatles

II. 

What now feels like a million years ago, though it was just the summer of 1990, Rob and I traveled north of Sligo to visit Innisfree. There we were rowed across the lake to the island and spent the day in Yeats' bee-loud glade. Born there was the promise of something permanent and something also fleeting.

I will arise and go now.

 And I am.

#SOL17: Clay

Morning Light on Lake Como (M.A Reilly, Argegno, Italy, July 2017) 

Only Hope remained there in an unbreakable home within under the rim of the great jar, and did not fly out at the door.  - Hesiod

I.

Within--there's a new, strange feeling hard to name.  Alongside each breath, a slim sense of possibility plays. It seems to whispers, All things are possible and I lately answer, Yes. And by answering, I see the woman I have been and am becoming.

It has been so long since I simply have felt like me.

II.

Grief yields. Who knew? It felt so much a part of my blood. Cut me and I bled sorrow. Now the sadness, kindled within my own Pandora's jar, has given way to chancing, to looking down at fear by saying, yes, to life.

Friends, the antidote to grief is verb.

III.

Love as action is stronger than grief--stronger than sorrow.  I'll tell you this:

Once, on a snowy cold February morning, my husband told me a secret. He said, "You attract others to you. That's your gift. Live brilliantly. Don't you dare hide away."

And in the 18 months that have gone by since then, I have hidden and stood among others. Both felt unfamiliar until being among others, known and new began to feel comfortable.

IV.

John O'Donohue in Anam Cara writes,

"When you find the person you love, an act of ancient recognition brings you together. It is as if millions of years before the silence of nature broke, his or her clay and your clay lay side by side" (p. 45).

We are ancient, older than our bodies, unruled by matters of time. I recognize my husband in the march of life that continues.  I see him in the wing of a lone cardinal as it glides from view;  in the way morning light on Lake Como diffuses the color of the Alps, in the absolute chatter of birds an hour before sunrise, in the sound of the subway as it yields to the station, and in the way memory lives each time my foot still seeks his in bed.

V.

Months ago my son told me that his dad formed us. We carry him with us wherever we are. He's in us. And he is, but not in the way I first thought.  Rob would not have sought homage from his son or me, but rather dialogue. And perhaps that is one way to live brilliantly--to live in dialogue with the here and now, with you and those I have yet to meet or know, and to live with the ways our past (re)forms the present.

We are clay, ancient.

#SOL17: Faith - A Poem My Husband Left Behind

Rob and Max (Many, many years ago)

16 months after Rob died I have found the courage to sit down at his computer and to begin to browse. It's a stormy night and somehow the mood seems right or perhaps the courage I needed to do this is somehow present.  Rob left behind 40 notebooks and a computer filled with images and poems and stories and the the first 6 chapters of a novel he was writing when we first me. Lemmings. 

I have been thinking about a poem he wrote--one I fell in love with as I was falling in love with him. I can remember him reading the poem aloud in in the basement of an old mill in Paterson, NJ at some poetry event. The emotion his voice captured. The passion. It remains.

He wrote "Faith" when he was 33-years-old. What legacies there are that he has stored and left behind in this old computer. Such gifts.

Rob Cohen

FAITH

   

I stood on line

in a chinese takeout place

on 9th ave

while the owner

leaned

his back against the counter

& spoke

on the telephone

I wanted to know

how

an american phone

could speak chinese

as if the technology

were language dependent

& I thought

of all the prejudice

I was taught

about foreigners

    

that each country

has a separate history

that all those people

in all those places

are different

that this

is america

& our technology

is ours

do you picture china

with phones?

Or do you see

a peasant

farmer

in a coolie hat

& loose garment

in a paddy

hungry

or perhaps

at work

        bent over

some old piece of equipment

in an antiquated sweatshop

in a rickety seaport warehouse

where there are no downtowns

this man

who spoke chinese

became more

& more animated

until I realized

his voice

was translated

by a device

which does not remember

conversation

yet carries out

an ordered transfer

of energies,

              his voice

broken into parts

dissembled

& reassembled

in a demonstration

of 3rd grade science

where atoms

are made of parts

so small

that the distance between them

is comparably vast

as in a solar system

where most of everything

is made of nothing

is this the logos?

No. It is just

cheap talk.

& I wondered

who

was on the other end

of the line--

a chinese man

in china?

do you see him

in a 3-pc suit

briefcase in hand

as he stands

in a tall building 

an

     important man

with a corner office

one window

a view

of the waterfront

the other

of the countryside

No.

He spoke to a different china

--the one downtown

is a selfsufficient village

a bunch of brownstones

where gardeners work underground

old apothecaries

have potions for everything

& the gang of 4

wears leather jackets

knives & chains

a west side story

in chinese

& because the words that carried

across connections

were messages

of a confused culture

chinatownman

in a broken down universe

tells us

how it is

each mystery

lessens the number of things

we understand

about democratic laws

that let a chinese man

speak his ancestors tongue

on an american phone

laws which last

& work

only

as we believe in them

did we want phones?

Doctrine tells us

to stay on the line

just hold on

it will work better

once we find the explanation

for all of this

we can harness

this universe, understand

its every machination

an autism

which barely initiates

is its own language

it keeps

every last bit moving

when we already know

what it means to believe

that the way we have come

is not

the way things are

.