Vespers from the Void

July, my mind swimming through the shimmering mirage of your heat, let me catch your phrases in the crude net of my pages. Reel you in with the nib of my pen. Some things have happened. I made final revisions on the draft of an essay going into an anthology later this year and completed the first draft of another essay that hasn't been pitched or submitted anywhere just yet. There's something about this kernel and koan that wants to be in a gooey, undefined gestation for a longer period. I've been taking my time exploring its properties, what inferences can be made, what comparisons come up. Is there an echo? What is the vocabulary? What is the flavor profile? The bouquet? What key am I in? What is the tone? What is the tempo? Is there a ghost here (the answer to this is almost always yes)? I sent these pages to my writing group and don't want to tinker with anything until after they give me their impressions and insights. I've been in the post-first dr

Sunset on the Mississippi River . New Orleans, LA. A gravel path on the levee parallels the water's path. There's an orange sunset on the horizon in the distance. Does an expanding light straighten the crooked path? Does a light extending to its furthest point in time illuminate the burls and gnarls and chasms and cliffs? Or will I be dazzled to blindness and continue to wander in a new form of unknowing? Mystery is its own beauty. Yesterday, I met a person who pointed to my language on a page and said keep going. They said my path-making is its own true direction. Keep going. You're already doing it. You're already making your way. How is it that language never fails, even when we say, "There are no words"? We make new words or we make new meanings. There are always words. The path is built by words. There are five soil horizons and three forms of twilight. These are the physical properties of earth and light. Add one sun and one

  When the clouds come in, swelling moisture ready to give, I see the spiders net their webs together, mirroring the density of the sky, fortifying their spaces by relying on each other.  A golden orb weaver spider in Colombia sits at the center of a thick, white web that's attached to deep green fauna. The sky in the background is also thick and white with clouds gathering for a rainstorm.  It isn’t a Monday, but it is a moon day, and I am still mystified.  Is it the drag of the paper or the drag of the pen that reminds me I am holding on even when I’m writing myself off? Chirp chirp chirp chirp chirp chirp chirp chirp chirp chirp chirp chirp chirp chirp chirp chirp alarm or alert or steady telling the order of the moment containing the chirp chirp chirp chirp chirp chirp chirp chirp I could go on forever but the good news is we won’t survive any of this except maybe the things we make will still be knowable if we take care to put the record online.  Why is S

Some notes on returning to Los Angeles.   An image of a street with shadows of tree foliage in orange sunlight on the pavement in the foreground. The top third of the photo is a concrete curb with a driveway. There is a patch of grass above the curb and green plants climbing the embankment of the driveway. At the house in the valley a man named Ever works to repair damage from the atmospheric rivers. The sky is falling. A side quest of three+ years traveling has been to acquire a library card from each place I end up staying in for more than a few days. After unpacking on Thursday I put a hold on Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space. I want to know what this text will tell me about myself, a displaced person who has lost her home to a hurricane. I have no structural space and I think Bachelard will tell me that I am living the poetics. Maybe I don’t need Bachelard to tell me this; I think I need his work to support my theory of myself. Octavia Butler two times alre

We were in Vanderbilt Hall, Grand Central Station, and I was knitting a tank top out of brushed Italian silk. It was three weeks before Christmas and one week after she and I stopped speaking about anything other than the holiday market, the knitwear we were making to sell in our booth, how those sales were going. The straps on the tank were too long because I was knitting while standing. The weight of the garment was expanding the fibers, something akin to the way a garment’s shape conforms to the shape of a body. There are contours, there is stretch. There is tension. An ivory brushed Italian silk tank top draped over a retail counter. Beneath the silk tank is a variety of colorful merino wool hand knits. I was knitting but I wasn’t paying attention. I was too hot. Sweating. My button-down top was damp and clinging to me; my hair plastered to my temples and the back of my neck. This wasn’t the menopause brand of sweating, which is a distinctly internal chemical reaction

 On staying alive. Not like the Bee Gees but okay, maybe. Let’s sing and dance about it. Could be disco. Could be danse macabre. Like Saint-Saëns. Once during lockdown zoom, J and I mirrored each other’s love of language and encouragement. We met weekly to discuss each other's work. This piece is coming together, we said. These are good questions you’re writing into, we said. Keep going, we said. And then J said the thing that I carry with me on a post-it everywhere I go since that time of utterance: Stay Alive, J said. Vespers today on the mantra Stay Alive. I wrote these words on a post-it and attach it to the door of wherever I happen to be living. Since 2020, that's been many places: New Haven, NYC, Los Angeles, Bogotá, a small village in the upper Andes in Colombia, Buenos Aires, New Orleans, Galveston, TX. Many little places in between: Upperville, Virginia; Savannah, Georgia; Chattanooga, TN; Washington, D.C.; Phoenix. Carlsb

 In praise of scales, ascending, descending, alternating tones from one octave to another - a call and response - arpeggiating like running away, a crescendo, a denouement. Da capo. Here we go again. From the top. From the head. From the beginning. Da capo. When I revise my writing I lean into my piano practice, running scales and chord progressions, sometimes blues riffs, sometimes a simple phrase: 2 quarter notes, 3 halves. Rest. I play the same thing over and over, for years, since my last lesson. Practice makes practice perfect. Unlike my writing, the piano practice is pure exercise. Weight-training for grey matter; a commitment to functional, at least. Functional so the writing, the thing I practice that is more than just exercise but for (hopefully) sourcing strength to other thinkers/dreamers/lovers, can be made. In praise of scales. Footpaths to stability. My latest essay in progress excavates the memories of a month

The last time I came to the Battery Park Esplanade was when B had a conference and put me in her hotel room across from One World Trade for the weekend. She was out during the day, checking in every few hours, returning in the evening for dinner and sleep. I stayed in the room even though it was late spring and the trees along the Hudson were in full splendor, leafing out a golden green canopy that taunted me with its hopefulness. I wanted to throw myself into the dirty water. When I left the room it was to walk, and I quickly found that walking, walking, walking, became automatic once I started. Simple. Keep it simple. Walk. Nothing was simple, though. Grief pulls your body way down to the ground while your head is off somewhere else. The disembodied feeling is a haunting of the self. What I mean is that it’s there, that not-there-of-the-body feeling, even when you’re paying attention to it. Working a mindfulness program of meditation or somatic movement is an eery way to wit

 Day 5 in bed. I tell myself it is winter. The animal body knows it is winter, the season of rest. Bill collectors call at the same time every day. They make their own form of time and grow impatient, threatening, menacing, when I fall out of rhythm. They want me on the one but I falter at the down-beat. The knock at the door goes unanswered so long I no longer have an address on record. Something about disappearing, being invisible, etc etc but let’s just say now that I’ve fully divested. No longer participating. Day 5 in bed. Write from bed. Read from bed. Make toast. Make tea. Eat in bed. In bed, blow a cooling breath into the porcelain cup, saucer in your palm, liquid surface rippling, your pursed lips. Steam. Slurp and sip in bed. Take the ferry across the New York Harbor. Think about the billion oysters anticipating a vertical life from their gabion nests. See some art. Hug some friends. Get back on the ferry. Get back in bed. Listen to Bach. His

After looking at the map of Staten Island and seeing all the green space ( the borough of parks! ), I drive out to Lemon Creek Tidal Wetlands to walk. Walking is writing. Writing doesn’t happen without walking. Walking is how I swamp out the cluttered mess of my mind, oxygenate the thinking room. Make it ready for the work. Google takes me to a residential neighborhood, where I park at the end of a cul-de-sac, step over the low bough of a rusted chain, and stumble into the cold woods. The footpath is marked by bright blue discs tacked to trees, which is helpful given the serpentine route is covered in leaves and sticks and I am alone here on this first Friday afternoon in January, new to the place altogether, and wholly lacking an internal navigation system that leads me out of the woods in both the literal and figurative sense. I happen upon a rectangular hole in the ground filled with ice. Alt text: A rectangular hole in the ground of a wooded landscape. The hole is filled w

Come on, I’m thinking. Come on now. Try to hold more than one way of being inside your one single being. Isn’t that some trick? This might be the way in to the new year with some peace. If you can figure it out. The New Year. I sit in the writing room thinking about writing. Thinking about what I know about writing and how I’ve come to know it. I don’t really know anything about writing except how to read. Which is everything. Sometimes I sit inside a narrative and am so moved, so changed by what happens in that world that I have a hard time understanding why people do drugs or drink when books are a thing. And then I remember (just yesterday) digging through the prescription pill bottles in a bathroom closet . Asking my ex-husband (just a week ago, Christmas eve) what kind of drugs he keeps in the house . I don’t even do drugs but there are moments I forget my mind and would be willing to do anything to escape . And I understand this to be an edge of me, the cusp of one

In my dream she sends me Both Sides Now by Joni Mitchell , the Vince Mendoza arrangement from 2000. I know I’m dream-remembering the conversation I listened to about music arrangements that featured the maturation of this song. The musicologists cited the atmospheric sensibility of this latest arrangement and then played it in its entirety. I cried from Queens to Harlem. From Harlem to the West Village. I cried from New York City to D.C. to Upperville to Charlottesville to Chattanooga to Bristol to Auburn to New Orleans. Savannah, Atlanta, Wilmington. To Galveston to Austin to Carlsbad to Truth or Consequences to Phoenix to Los Angeles to San Francisco to Reno to Idaho Falls to Twin Falls to Cody to Rapid City to Sioux City to Tomah to Chicago to Detroit to Pittsburgh, back to New York. In my dream she tells me this song reminds her of when she was alive. I know I’m dream-remembering and dream-longing for you. In my dream I was able to unlock your iphone and see th

 Abstract: Introduction The 2023 vocabulary lives and leafs out in the form of new pages from the notes section of my planner. Purpose I started the vocabulary list with a word of the year then added to it as I researched other projects or was sparked by experiences. On my intellectual map of 2023, these words were destinations. I wanted to write to, through, around, under, over, behind, these words. Dissect them, make a cross-section, step over the trimmed pieces, rearrange what’s left, appropriate and reappropriate. Make new shapes of my thoughts with them. Make new thoughts with the shapes of them. Method 1. Enter the word list here. 2. Review my work from the year. The words I haven’t written to, through, around, under, over, behind just yet; the words I’ve not yet dissected, studied cross-sections of, stepped over pieces of, rearranged, appropriated and reappropriated; made new shapes of my thoughts with; made new thoughts with the shapes of, will be carried forward to

 It’s one thing to read scientific papers and articles, watch news reports about climate change. It’s another thing entirely to walk the landscape in mid-December, three days before the Winter Solstice in the northern hemisphere, and see the pink, ready buds forming on pruned hydrangea and peony bushes. It’s 53°F/11°C in the early afternoon. The internet tells me we’re having a bomb cyclone in New York City, a weather event that sounds terrifying but really means the wind and rain are exposing the pain points of the city’s civil engineering. The power blipped overnight several times; there are inches of water making streets impassable, spilling over the planks of footbridges, reminders that the coast is right there, that the inlands are wetlands. That this is an island. Nonetheless, if it’s a day for writing then it’s a day for walking. I have an agreement with my environment that I will write it. I made this promise, have spoken it aloud and often to the natural world. And when,

 I will remember. In the morning, I will remember. My short-term memory shorts out, the lumens blown. Yet, I will remember in the morning, I tell myself at night when I lie awake. The mind gives me poems, lines, fragments. Bits of language respond to my stillness, coming to the fore of my mind like koi awaiting my arrival at the edge of a pond. In the dark, in the closet, the stillness invites the language. I promise to write it down in the morning. I will remember, I promise myself. I will write it down in the morning. About haunting, being haunted: it is memory and remembering. The tremors, the terrors, are traumas of the body being remembered. Haunting is memory. The ghost is me. Heat ignites in my core, rises through the column of my body. Like a wildfire I am my own weather system. Radiant. Grief induced menopause. My body burns, a final period just a month after my child left. Tell me, grieving mothers, how has your body been remade by your children?

 I write from a closet in New York City. In my mind it’s October 2023 but the calendar tells me it’s 12 December. Since mid-September, when I returned to New York, there has been an unsteady suturing of days and nights and places: New Haven and Queens and the West Village and Morningside Heights and Grand Central Station and Staten Island and Princeton and Philly and Bay Shore. The times and places form a puckering seam. There are remnants of the recent past I’m stitching into a new present. There are fibers too tattered and frayed to be anything more than a decorative gesture of what used to be. Little flags of the former life. I fly the colors of truce. In 2020, like many others, I lost my job to CoVid-19 cutbacks. I worked in the university system for 10 years creating international education programs and building relationships for study abroad programs. In 2021, Hurricanes Ida and Henri damaged my home. I financed the repair and, having not yet secured a ne