I am waiting for a representative from the moving company to arrive
and give me a moving estimate and they are late, late. The sun through
the window and my thriving plants. I have not looked at the news,
alive as I am, sullen as I am, staring at bestrewn hay on someone’s
lawn as I drive by, wondering dully if I should similarly re-seed and bestrew
hay upon the grass in our front yard. A pardoned Capitol rioter who live-
streamed himself touching women’s hair on the metro last month was arrested
again. I’m preparing for a breakthrough; I contrive an idea that I might
find something new in the archive of dry flowers in my studio. “I’ve noticed
something weird,” says Coco. “Do birds eat grass?” I start to say something
about what starlings eat but lack information. I can’t stay focused today,
keep thinking about Iran and Lebanon, keep humming songs from K-Pop
Demon Hunters and checking my email. I want news but not the actual
news. Want someone to tell me they’re giving me money or publishing
a poem. I’m ready to be tractable today. Convince me. Is this a madrigal?
No, it’s already too long, but I long for poetic polyphony, something uplifting
but real. In one week, I’ll be in New Orleans at a conference, and I’m already
anxious about leaving my family and anxious about who I’ll see. I canvass
my friends, ask if I should be worried. I know the answer is no. My unsteady
mood is not ready for this clarity, cannot read a compass, cannot unamass
enough nervous energy to just push on through. To what, anyway. What would
an oneiromancer say about last night’s dream where I married my highschool
boyfriend? This is a new dream development. In adulthood, my dreams return
to former lovers more often than anything else. I found a hawktail feather in my
drawer, feathers are made of a central shaft with branching fibers called barbs,
and each barb has even smaller branches called barbules. The barbules of
dreams are the associative ideas based on the few things you remember.
I remember in dreams that people are not themselves, they are often marvels,
messengers, obstacles and cerebral reminders of what has passed and what
is to come, if we can be reminded about the future. What are the chances
that the signification of certain people and objects detaches from them to
become a melange of significations? What are the circumstances of this
detachment? I have loved a lot of people, so don’t intimate that I’m stingy.
I’ve probably loved you, engaged in at least minor flirtation. And why not?
The grimy, un-empty echos of love bring me closer to some solution. The clingy
vestiges of romance are not for me, and in this fashion I formate a kind of
burning patience, the patience of fire on a slow burn, the patience of
bad romance, which is the patience of romance, the patience of conversation,
of hesitating revelation. We don’t need to know everything all at once,
statements of falsity are as likely as statements of fact. A starling eats
whatever it wants. In spring and summer they eat invertebrates, their favorites.
So truth and error interlace. Late, late, I wait for the call that does not come,
I do not read the news, but news arrives. I cannot compass this turning, this
weather of nerves, this half-articulated conversation. A starling sings again.
