At first, I bewail. After ten minutes, I settle into weeping, reading accounts
of people looking for kin among the bodies recovered from yet another mass
grave in Palestine. I spent the day with friends, talking poetry, renouncing
parenting and work for an afternoon. My body, agitated to impasse,
hives out and the regular solar plexus despair node says “you will surmount
nothing, Poet!” and I say nothing. My mourning is a minimal offering that
makes nothing tangible happen except this poem. Imagine the actual words
doing something substantial and particular, say the slow long lines contend
with grief and habitual lassitude, know they’re steeped in the un-undoable violent
paradoxes of American English and white lady tears but keep versing. Trevor
pulls a tick off Desmond who says, “I’ll never roll in the grass again,” and next
to me Coco sleeps off a sore throat while my neck pain moves closer to migraine.
I napped in the grass growing up, avoiding bees, wasps and nettles. The effects
of apocalypse are I don’t know, uncertainty is a given, but the arcane practice
of any mental gymnastics required to harm people in a hospital is murderous
self-sabotage, fear of failure. You, IDF and you–Great-great grandpas, with your
inadequate support systems other than white supremacy, even though you didn’t
believe: May we weep. May we deeply feel our unbearable guilt. May we unbend our
unbearability and hold these contradictions. May we divest and may we reckon.
May we accept the implications of what can and cannot be enumerated. I append
this prayer to the poem, knowing there are many armageddons. This morning
I gave the church lady rosemary, thyme and mint from the garden, said I’d read
the Psalms. “After the apocalypse we’ll live like this,” she said. “I’ll dry these for tea.”
David spends a lot of time asking God what God is doing, and why are they taking
so long. The church lady recommends tea in anticipation of the end times. Coco
sleeps perpendicular, minimizes bedspace. Preparation variously about birth,
and drinking tea, and getting your shit together to build the magic portal, though
no one opens the gate alone. Henceforth the poem sings to pass over the earth
to some immortal estuary where it can cease libration, where its heartstrings can
rest without hierarchical interference. As if freedom might possess us like the
holy spirit, and all this weeping and wailing might carry us out to sea.