Going Om: Prose Pieces & Strange Birds

This change isn't a breaking away from the past. This change is a launching into the new, the different; the real of an original world.

As my heart lays itself down with minor explosions it knows that the eruptions are of an old world, one where death is inevitable. It seeks to remove the needs it once felt for anger and so to suffer only once more as it accepts the pain of a final attack.

But it can't last.

The heart is too human. The body too conditioned by history to simply say, "I'm leaving now," with a wave of the wrist and a bittersweet farewell glance. That romance is not part of the scenario.

It is a day of quiet and of letting rest the thoughts that trouble the heart with false emergencies. Also, real emergencies take a back seat and the mind clings to an image of the universe being pushed gently into place, all the loose ends being tucked into a tiny, tiny little ball the size of an atom.

One picture is taken in the camera of the mind and it is this esoteric ball.

A gray fuzz forms the image's backdrop, like the inside of very comfortable sweatpants from the early 1990's, when sweatpants were simple and, though we did not walk to school barefoot through the snow uphill for miles both ways, the place where we lived was pinned firmly to an unchanging idea of itself.

The world was whole.

Now, the tattered edges are worked back to the center like shrapnel moving slowly through the flesh toward the lungs; like the shard of glass fallen into the bread dough, with every thrust of the palms in the kneading it makes its insidious work: we exist inside a tapestry of peril.

It's just me though. Well, not just me, but the truth of all of this is not Absolute Truth. It is not even entirely materially true. It is only a single facet of the psychology that seeks to catch up to the changes that spin around it, as well as the changes that spin and gyrate inside.

2

The whirling gyre cannot hold its center, someone said with a pen. What speech might do is allow this falling apart.

No hands may hold together a liquefying mass. A certain madness demands that the word gurgle be used here. Gurgle and polyp. We are not yet undone.

But we are getting there.

3

This heart tarries on the first step of a ladder. The ladder goes only up to its own top. It refers and accesses nothing beyond itself except, perhaps, an air six feet up that might be different than the one down here. On the first step, this heart waits and listens to its minor explosions.

4

A trumpet sounds. No prophecy follows.

It's jazz.

The soul responds and does not ask questions of the music though heart enters its throes, dissipates, and dissolves.

It's jazz.

"Strike the key, King! Strike the key," and the music rains inside out, seeping through the skin as through a porous membrane, emitting a tink and a honk, a gurgle and a polyp.

The soul will understand.

It's jazz.

5

Inside the tunnel we can see only the end. Despite our groping about against the damp walls seeking discovery, we can see only the end, where a thin light seems to await us like Doom.

It is a winter light and it is not inviting.

6

So pleased with its departure, the heart sits on the second step of the ladder, unmoving, unseeing. There it listens to Mr. Bolano say that prose can do everything. Everything that poetry can do. And more.

Echoes of Wallace Stevens attempt to drown out the Whitman singing in the background. There is more than one I, more than one Me, and more than one Myself, and the imagination will not fail if it is asked to tell its own story.

Who will let it speak?

7

She wears the ring of her dead marriage and will not allow herself to visit the memory of her wedding, despite the many she attends each year.

Today is a wedding day. A good, dear friend is embarking on the journey into difficulty of achieving Permanence in a Transient State.

"I don't shake my head," she says.

"I don't shake my head, though I can't believe."

"I can believe in friendship. I do. If I did not, I would not be here."

"We all have to take a chance on ourselves. We have to take that chance with someone else."

There is a balance to her thinking with its fulcrum set like a rugged old log directly across the chasm where her faith resides.

"Can I sit still, or stand there, and watch quietly?" she asks herself, no longer thinking of the wedding of her friend.

"Can I sit still and go to the source of my life - as it is - today - quietly stand and watch as I take his hand and smile into his face?"

No.

No.

No.

8

Birds from another region have arrived in a flock on our roof. They do not sing or squawk or preen or poop. They flutter their wings occasionally and look down. This is clearly just a stop-over.

Tomorrow they will be gone.

9

The heart has come back to the first step and begins to bleed in perfect, frank desperation.

There is no reaching the air above and if there were, who would make the journey if there can be no return? What air is sweet enough to follow with no promise, with only the most vague and uncertain intimations of purity?

What heart can conquer its own history?

10

There is no such thing as a heart.

History is a flock of birds, looking down.

11

I stand and listen.

12

Nearby something quietly explodes.