You catalogue the early shames,
a tattoo on the lining of your lungs.
The mural leaves its stain despite the stretch
and growth you chart first on door frames
then belt notches
then monthly statements,
each unit of measure distorting the fresco
as much as the measurement taken.
Recognizable no matter the eons intervening,
the arcs of those stories.
Petroglyphs,
kaleidoscopes,
crime scenes,
autopsies.
All tales have tongues.
They scour the natal down
from your heart. They leave a taste
like pennies and char.
What young self didn’t know was that cool is a lid that screws down tight on the swelling delight of yes. From the edge of her ancient eye, older self notices women in the dark corners of the bar bouncing in their seats. Girls titter near a post trying not to sway — girls who are surely women but seem so far from their fullness.
The dude in an oversized plaid suit and orange ponytail hollers into a microphone while the bassist ducks his eyes under his fedora and yanks on steel strings. Two spaghetti-armed boys blow brass right through the back wall.
Older self stands and strips off her sweater. She steps toward the unnamed sister, the one in a cherry red tank top and spiked gray hair. She touches her arm and draws her onto the space in the center of the room. The worn Persian rug there is a far cry from a welcome mat, but carpet is no great challenge. Years earlier, she sent her young selves scurrying off to road-test every surface. Concrete, rooftop, mountaintop, pier. Boardroom, waiting room, snowfall, bed. Every floor is a dance floor when it’s time to dance.
It’s always time to dance.
She pops her hip and snaps her hand, beckoning to the one across the room who’s been having trouble sitting still. They are three now. Soon they are five. Soon nine.
Low ceilings press in on the battered cafe. Amateur pencil sketches hang crooked the walls. Light shifts and a gleam slices across the bowl of the saxophone. Soon it’s a glittering ballroom. Soon the pulse of the Cotton Club on a Saturday night.
The wall of dudes collectively holds confines itself to straight faces and non-committal postures until one man, pushing 70 easy, steps into and sheds 10 years. The young women form a ring of cool, turning their taut backs out for protection. The rest shimmy and grin knowing there is no outside and no in. Guarding one’s soft parts is a survival skill for certain, but the older ones have learned the taxonomy of danger. They can differentiate battlefield from playground now. It wasn’t always so clear.
Here, the belly is free to roll towards the snare’s smash and crack. That’s lightning for sure, but older self unfurls anyway inside the grounded body of her scars. She twists the lid loose and drinks the song’s bright rain. She is growing older still. Time is running out, so she runs out into it. She fills her bones until they spill over with dance.
It is the same path she’s always followed. It’s grown so familiar she can walk it in her sleep. Most days, she does.
Then one December day, slipping into the groove is more of a stumble. Cold seeps under her cuffs. With the sun so far, the chill has no escape, not up or out, so it stays. The fall turns her neck. Looking up now, she sees how deep the trench, how far the sky.
She remembers the open place up there. Unmapped, daunting, the choices had radiated out in all directions. Wearing this furrow into the uneven terrain had seemed the most reasonable way to proceed.
No doubt someone told her then that ambiguity’s promise eclipses certainty’s price. Only now can she grasp what was lost in the exchange.
With damp walls at her hands and back, she presses in. She begins the climb.
It’s a strange thing about the human mind that, despite its capacity and its abundant freedom, its default is to function in a repeating pattern. It watches the moon and the planets, the days and seasons, the cycle of life and death all going around in an endless loop, and unconsciously, believing itself to be nature, the mind echoes these cycles. Its thoughts go in loops, repeating patterns established so long ago we often can’t remember their origin, or why they ever made sense to us. And even when these loops fail over and over again to bring us to a desirable place, even while they entrap us, and make us feel anciently tired of ourselves, and we sense that sticking to their well-worn path means we’ll miss contact with the truth every single time, we still find it nearly impossible to resist them. We call these patterns of thought our “nature” and resign ourselves to being governed by them as if they are the result of a force outside of us, the way that the seas are governed — rather absurdly, when one thinks about it — by a distant and otherwise irrelevant moon.
And yet it is unquestionably within our power to break the loop; to “violate” what presents itself as our nature by choosing to think — and to see, and act — in a different way. It may require enormous effort and focus. And yet for the most part it isn’t laziness that stops us from breaking these loops, it’s fear. In a sense, one could say that fear is the otherwise irrelevant moon that we allow to govern the far larger nature of our minds.
Novelist Nicole Krauss responding to Vincent van Gogh’s 1884 letter to his brother.
You’ve been so near
for so long
your imprint
shaping the bed that
you are the bed
now where I plant my feet. Roots
snarl along spring and vein,
deeper still into shale pressed so
it has no room to flake
apart and reveal its face
upon face upon face.
I’ve stayed here where you hold me
down claiming tether
against weightlessness. A shaft
of sun warmed this place
once. Branches long since thickened
close arthritic around that narrow frame
sealing shut the last dust-streaked pane
and I’ve lived so here
for so long
closeness
shading the bed that
I am the shade
now
trying to nurse
up from you the sustenance required
to lift
free
but the feeding
goes one way
only. Down
you churn salt and pulse
through my marrow your vital
mix. I am conductor
of a symphony
you fold
and chew
to silence.
What you eat:
Gifts
and the wrapping. Steps
and doorjambs, jawbones, tissue paper
hearts. Arcs, eggs,
ink, god,
match
tips, wings,
risk.
You eat smoke right out of the flame.
You eat the eye
of the hurricane. You eat tides
flat. You swallow
the sky.
When I twist my ankle and begin to shiver
loose, I know you
will send plagues. I know you
will chew off
both my feet. I know you
don’t know
how many crumbs of light
I’ve tucked into the nest
under my tongue
or how many miles
I can crawl
on splinters
and scars until I learn to
fly.
At the end of the first really, truly single week of my life since 2002 (that’s 11 years of men, my friends), lessons blow in gales. I can barely hear a thing. My eyes sting.
Somehow, I am still upright.
Honestly? It’s a little bit thrilling.
Anxiety is love’s greatest killer. It creates the failures. It makes others feel as you might when a drowning man holds on to you. You want to save him but you know he will strangle you with his panic.
At first it was the rock
pinning him down.
To rage and chip
at the obstinate thing
was the best he could do.
It took time to work up to the idea
that his own fixed self
would kill him in the end.
Then, just gritted teeth
and a dull blade
to saw through his own
tendon and bone.
Up and out,
leaving behind in its mausoleum
a scrap
once as much him
as the man who climbed to the surface
and lived.
We are each one of us
trapped where we landed
by way of foolish missteps
and a distracted gaze.
It is not the weight of boulders
we swear we can feel
holding us in place.
It is the delineation of a cave
we believe the dwelling place
of our whole.
When we finally concede
that freedom is sweeter
than the precious fragment,
we toughen up
and amputate.
Shannon E. Williams 