8.20.23

Can a face be a mountain? To try to move to that place beyond biography, I remembered myself and then forgot again. The speaker speaking is this, myself, and you. I ripped through the world to remember you, I reached my hand through the screen to touch you, sitting alone on the other side. To write poetry, to risk knowing, to contend with my true face. I thought I saw that time was a circle, but now the circle is inside of me and I cannot hold myself without feeling the shape of that circle, whose "center is everywhere and circumference is nowhere". But - isn't the center, here? In the car with ______, I said to him: "I think being a mother is the hardest job in the world. Parents and children are the true star crossed lovers." I held my hands up to demonstrate: one hand parent and the other child. I moved them past each other in a straight line. "They just go like this through time, you know? And when you finally reach other, maybe reach some kind of understanding after 30 years, it's too late." 

So, the face is a mountain. All of my work is work in translation. I listen and I tell you, with difficulty, what was told to me. Being born like this, I learned to write poetry. Walking through this world, I saw where there was suffering "there is holy ground" (Wilde). I was given every sign and direction and I was told that I'd lose it all. Along the way I lied to everybody while trying say what I really meant. What I meant was god, what I meant was breath, but I was a beast that "turned [my] life into words" (Rich). I lied, I said: Yes and no and maybe so. I want you, this, us. I want to live, I want to die. I love you, I hate you. I am a good person. I know where the wind comes from and I know where the wind goes. This is the beginning, this is the end.