Back to back, they faced each other.

The English words trip lightly from our tongues, here where we

Wrap ourselves in the shared mantle of our mother tongue,

Shaping phonemes that you've known since birth if you

Were listening closely enough.

Still we sit too far apart to feel the common warmth.

What beautiful thread have you picked at and unravelled 

To give pattern to your waking thoughts?

Is it so different from my own, here where the synesthetic experience of

Language overwhelms and annihilates, uplifts and enervates?

The hieroglyphs of the ancients are no more mute than your pictograms,

And I cannot help but wonder if this is what deafness sounds like.

All the Wrong Spaces

I just wanted to feel the words

The way my fingers shaped them

In a consummation of the kinesthetic

And the divine flame.

To have meaning at all--a gift of the gods;

To have significance--blessing without measure.

The crowded heavens with their lonely lights

Cannot convey the simple truth:

You are someone.

A fixture of language that could only flow

From the mouth of a perceiving other,

Giving shape to the sustainer

Who upholds creation 

And tells it, not only that it is good,

But more simply that it is.

Faerie Hunting

The woods in the deep places--not far back, where no one has ever tread, but far enough that few people bother--are full of the sense that Moses must have had once he backed out of the cleft in the rock. The beautiful mystery and awe at that which had been here but a moment before paired with the keen awareness of the no longer.

--

Here, near the top of Mt. Battie, I'm caught up in a different cloud, one of the ordinary everyday ones, except I'm not in an airplane and I can feel it passing over the mountain. It has embarked on a journey that no mere hill can disrupt, though it makes its way like a river, around, passing slowly but surely without demanding that the mountain move... Though perhaps a million years of rain and wind and strong tree roots will move the mountain all the same, and then even the low clouds will look down as they pass over unencumbered.

--

There were many naturally occurring beauties, but some of the most enchanting involved some human trace--a bridge, even a corduroy bridge made of sawn birch logs, can be a lovely punctuation to a little rill that sings quietly over rocks and between low, dark evergreens. (If Barthes's punctum can escape the photograph and hide in the world that lives and dies, I think perhaps a bridge in the woods would be one of its manifestations.)

--

A river weaving through a misty coastal plain appears out of air thick with chilly morning damp. It would be a quiet sight, except for the piercing whiteness of the birch trunks that proclaim the worthiness of Here.

--

The ravens suit the north country, a space where humans are most noteworthy for their absence and all of the animals--bald eagles, moose--are somehow larger. Where woods and fog defy Donne's immortal rejection of absolute solitude (no man is an island, but can we lose again what we have lost by forgetfulness?), the raven is the spirit of the space, flying always by itself with its black feathers sharp against the pale bleach of a cool world.

--

You start to believe in the reality of nowhere when you drive long enough through fog. Your surroundings, such as they are, barely change. Signs pass, suggesting that if you veer a bit to the left or the right, you may eventually happen upon somewhere, but for the time being, you're probably more likely to hit a moose than you are to see and speak words of greeting to a fellow human being.

--

I made the mistake of driving without a map. Strange, how lines and dots that can only be called representational in a cartographic wonderland nonetheless serve to make me feel at home in the world, if only by connecting my here with a somewhere else. We are all contained, not by the internet which still falls short of complete comprehension, but by the map, which leaves no stretch of land uncharted. Though abstract and "untrue" in that way, its lines wrap us in their arms and save our minds from slipping off terra firma into a wild, fantastical sea.

--

What is a trail through the deep woods without human eyes to map human intentions? A bare, hardened stretch of dirt indistinguishable from the forest floor? But no, this takes too high a view of human cognition vs. animal awareness. I have heard of deer paths, which perhaps are barely visible to any but the experienced tracker. Once, these ways were widened to make space for other travelers, and now no trace of the original light-footed pathfinders remains. Perhaps the essence of trailblazing lies in an ability to identify and widen the way that is already there, rather than some brash, foolhardy determination to plow headfirst through unbroken wilderness and thereby to eventually bash one's brains against the unbreakable.

Seeking Hart Crane on Amazon

There is something sick and twisted, she thought,
About finding new words from the tongues of old prophets
And immediately seeking to buy them.
Discretely part of every statue and painting,
We find that unifying principle which makes all art art:
The price tag.
As a justification of labor and a mark of social status, it declares:
We have agreed that the work is worthy.
Thus evaluated into currency, it may be valued in fact,
My moral sensibilities following my wallet
With all the capacity of a sheep for self-determination.
The power of the gratis is the equality;
And I wonder why we haven't learned to love it
When the shackles are unlocked and the door wide open.

Dizzy

I hurtle forward through each day, head down, hands moving from one task to one to-do list tic mark to the next task that must also be done, not because it must be done, but because it has been decided by my prior self that this is how I shall organize my future existence into a coherent whole. I am she who does. The cart, the embodiment of functionality, precedes the horse, which lives. I peer around the cracks of long, deadening hours, stick my fingers in and pry, though their use value as crowbars is limited to the world of virtual reality. And supposedly the answer is to answer the question, but I sometimes wonder if the moment of now and the dream of yesterday will both be lost in the deafening din of the creative word, once it is spoken. "Let there be..." And so there shall. Shall in the present tense has not the implications of should in the subjunctive. There shall, but it is no social or moral obligation laid upon me. No mere cooperation of hormones and electrochemical impulses: set down your megaphone, determinist doomsmen. If only to transcend the story you've written in my DNA, let the heavy weight of a meaningless day fall from shoulders that only grudgingly agreed to carry it. They do not care. They are sick below and elsewhere above like a suspension of brain in bile. They are only waiting to learn the real lesson of life, which begins with a different, life-saving or life-destroying question: how do you survive the small things?

Someday, I will die. And I wonder, will what I do between now and then make those years worth the effort? Or will I settle down in a space not my own, convincing myself in fear-pitched tones that I love it, or at least I can bear it, even as it exsanguinates my foolish husk of self?