3.7.2022

Digging deeper, descending, as called to by the words. Where are the words now? An endless list of correspondence and incoherence. What's at the bottom of the words here? Perhaps it is the bottom of the river, along with all stones waiting for the current to move them into the stream of things. Once, long ago, the words called me. They've never stopped. I learned arrival / departure early on, and all the nonsense in between. Sitting in the backseat, I'd watch my father get out of the car with his luggage. No one ever told me where he was going, or for how long. I never asked either. How did I know, even then, that some questions have no answers? A poet is made of questions that can never be answered. The answering is a song, or maybe a foghorn. Two nights ago we sat on the beach overlooking the sound and I thought about how a body of water might be called a word used to describe language, or even music. Sound is a round word that returns to itself. There was a poem I liked I wanted to tell you about. This line in particular:

Lake is a such a beautiful word. / I'd like to die with it inside me. 

Let's return to the night. The night is long, yes, but the stars above are beautiful. People before us would find their way in the dark by the light of the stars. In the dark we begin to draw a map to freedom. I have my own freedom story. It has to do with fathers and mothers and what they have happening between them. Before my father walked into the airport he would pat my head with one hand and tell me I was a good kid. And then he would turn away, a face in a crowd. That unbearable moment. How can there be so many black haired men? If I called for dad how many of them would turn to look at me? The memory of father parented me for far longer than the black haired man, disappearing in the distance. Memory, like any parent, is arbitrary and inconsistent. Memory is sweet one moment and ruthless the next. Memory is making it up. Arrival / Departure. My mother would drive us back in silence to where we would resume our long waiting. We were destined to wait for the rest of our lives until one day I woke up in the night and began to plot my way to freedom. And by freedom I mean I awoke to the sound of words and began to swim up from the bottom of the lake towards the glint of stars. 

Even now I am undrowning, which is a return to water as much as it is a departure from it.