Bonedog

Coming home is terrible

whether the dogs lick your face or not;

whether you have a wife

or just a wife-shaped loneliness waiting for you.

Coming home is terribly lonely,

so that you think

of the oppressive barometric pressure

back where you have just come from

with fondness,

because everything’s worse

once you’re home.

You think of the vermin

clinging to the grass stalks,

long hours on the road,

roadside assistance and ice creams,

and the peculiar shapes of

certain clouds and silences

with longing because you did not want to return.

Coming home is

just awful.

And the home-style silences and clouds

contribute to nothing

but the general malaise.

Clouds, such as they are,

are in fact suspect,

and made from a different material

than those you left behind.

You yourself were cut

from a different cloudy cloth,

returned,

remaindered,

ill-met by moonlight,

unhappy to be back,

slack in all the wrong spots,

seamy suit of clothes

dishrag-ratty, worn.

You return home

moon-landed, foreign;

the Earth’s gravitational pull

an effort now redoubled,

dragging your shoelaces loose

and your shoulders

etching deeper the stanza

of worry on your forehead.

You return home deepened,

a parched well linked to tomorrow

by a frail strand of…

Anyway…

You sigh into the onslaught of identical days.

One might as well, at a time…

Well…

Anyway…

You’re back.

The sun goes up and down

like a tired whore,

the weather immobile

like a broken limb

while you just keep getting older.

Nothing moves but

the shifting tides of salt in your body.

Your vision blears.

You carry your weather with you,

the big blue whale,

a skeletal darkness.

You come back

with X-ray vision.

Your eyes have become a hunger.

You come home with your mutant gifts

to a house of bone.

Everything you see now,

all of it: bone.

Eva H.D.

CLOSE

is what we almost always are: close to happiness, close to another, close to leaving, close to tears, close to God, close to losing faith, close to being done, close to saying something, or close to success, and even, with the greatest sense of satisfaction, close to giving the whole thing up.

Our human essence lies not in arrival, but in being almost there, we are creatures who are on the way, our journey a series of impending anticipated arrivals. We live by unconsciously measuring the inverse distances of our proximity: an intimacy calibrated by the vulnerability we feel in giving up our sense of separation.

To go beyond our normal identities and become closer than close is to lose our sense of self in temporary joy, a form of arrival that only opens us to deeper forms of intimacy that blur our fixed, controlling, surface identity.

To consciously become close is a courageous form of unilateral disarmament, a chancing of our arm and our love, a willingness to hazard our affections and an unconscious declaration that we might be equal to the inevitable loss that the vulnerability of being close will bring.

Human beings do not find their essence through fulfillment or eventual arrival but by staying close to the way they like to travel, to the way they hold the conversation between the ground on which they stand and the horizon to which they go. What makes the rainbow beautiful, is not the pot of gold at its end, but the arc of its journey between here and there, between now and then, between where we are now and where we want to go, illustrated above our unconscious heads in primary colour.

We are in effect, always, close; always close to the ultimate secret: that we are more real in our simple wish to find a way than any destination we could reach: the step between not understanding that and understanding that, is as close as we get to happiness. David Whyte.

kumina

on the sixth day

after yr death. there is this silence of flowers

their petals say their shining needs

soft water needs

sweet showers needs

sweet rain from heaven

.

i see them once again inside the chapel of my funeral

mary oliver

twice

This Wound Is a World

i kiss a stranger and give him a middle name.
i call this love.
it lasts for exactly twenty minutes.
i chase after that feeling.
which is to say:
i want to almost not exist.
almost is the closest i can get to the sky.

— Billy-Ray Belcourt, from “Gay Incantations,” This Wound Is a World