We Only Have Time Left for Healing

Listen to this next track, this ample supply of nectar. Stick your neck out. Take a long, drawn-out chance in the direction of this awkward kiss and embrace it as you would a dying animal whom you found aching in the middle of your room when you woke up this morning in your soft, warm, wet bed, the window open so perhaps this living being flew in because it was looking for help and it found you and it took a chance and you won’t have to kiss it because it’s a metaphor; at least it started as a metaphor and now it’s literal. It has worked its way up the emotional ladder and now it sits throbbing in the middle of your room and tears are welling up in your eyes because you feel its pain and you want to help but you don’t know how; at least, you don’t believe that you know how or could learn how, but something in you switches, as if the right song, just the right song, has begun to play on the radio to inspire your movement out of bed and towards helping. But there is no radio in the room, so the words must be coming from your own mouth. You must be singing without trying. The animal, the other living being in the room, is certainly not singing. It is quivering more than anything. It feels alone, just as you feel alone, but this situation isn’t as simple as you and the wounded animal being the same. You are different. You didn’t fly through the window. You are not quivering on the floor, though your heart has been shaking like a plastic bag in a wind storm for years. Doesn’t this make sense to you? Doesn’t it want to make sense to you? The man on the corner is singing your song, has been chanting your name for years, and you haven’t noticed. At least, not yet. At least, the weather wants to rain for you in this dark corner of the mind’s museum. Hear those violins, the multitude of violins, the strings like super thin licorice tempting from your ears a particular kind of awareness. Doesn’t this moment reach for your shoulders and shake you until you finally wake up? Because there is at least half a page to go on this screen, this fake, computerized version of paper, and those songs keep coming, and this moment, this moment is full of rich treasure. And the last song, that last song, just like the other ones, finished too quickly, disappeared from the sky like another batch of fireworks you spent your hard-earned summer job money on. And now it’s all gone. All that color. It was beautiful. You watched it. It went up and sprouted like an onion in fast forward, and it burst like a pillow in a pillow fight, except the stitching was bad and the feathers flew out. Doesn’t this beg the question? Haven’t you considered the possibility that those feathers wanted to fly? Isn’t it lovely to know that possibly, just possibly, those feathers wanted to having nothing to do with fighting? They just wanted to be by themselves flying, whether or not you were in the room, whether or not the sun was shining through the window, whether or not the rain had finally fell. So today wasn’t your best day, and neither was yesterday, and that’s okay. The wounded, quivering, loving, tender animal is still there in the middle of the room, sprawled like an unfinished handwritten note on the hardwood floor, and you are getting closer. You are sampling the quality of the air and light, not knowing what to do with any of it. The animal looks up at you as your shadow folds over it, like an invisible bed sheet, like cool hands on a day without shade, and you pick it up gently, careful not to bend the neck, careful not to move too quickly, and you, there, kneeling down and still stiff from a night of long, hard sleeplessness, feel the sudden sensation of snow on your nape. This happens to be that time of the year when snow doesn’t fall, but that matters not to you from now on. Weather forecasts, like emotions, are arbitrary. Better to open the window. Better to listen to this small animal’s heartbeat. Press your ear there. No, not there. Here, yes here. What do you recognize? What do you find before it disappears? Take this sorrow that fills your bones like toothpaste in a wall full of holes where nails where pounded before pictures of lost things, of past things, were hung. Take this sorrow and let it sit there next to you and the wounded animal that doesn’t quiver anymore. Your hands are still two bowls: one of sunlight and one of clouds. One hand folds into the other around the animal, and the sky finally rains after what seems like days of too much dust and dryness. Taste that. Taste this. Slip your mind from the glove compartment. It has been a long time, and the drive was full of bumps that rocked the balance, shook the tires, made the songs skip. But distances were travelled. Long distances full of thunder and moss and creosote and hills and wanting and living and water.

7:47am Meditation

Is this as much about hippos as broad hips? Hipsters and Halifax, Canada couldn’t make this anymore interesting if whole populations let down their hair in a manner akin to whatever and whatnot. That’s what the lollipop-shaped girls say, anyway. It was a dream of being above water that started it all, and then thoughts dove, submerged, and the whole island left itself wide open to be embraced without necessarily wanting to be held so tightly, and rightly so, don’t you think? It has been years since the mountain moved one way to the left, and sooner rather than later it will decide to move back in the other direction, or perhaps backwards, with a tiny strut, and a tutt tutt, and then out at an angle, similar to the Electric Slide, but with more danger of losing an ankle. I don’t remember there being another I, another me, but apparently that is how the story goes, that is how the gifts unwrap themselves. Around the wrists, and then the elbows. It is easier that way, we’ve been told, to shimmy through the ever-narrowing passageways of our lives. The walls are tall. Certainly we can both see the sea from the side of a sofa seat. Don’t worry about taking your time. Just close those eyes, squeeze out the mercy, the apology, the foam and rock, the cold sand, the wet weed, the shells and what used to be inside them. Like buses, driving north, in the rain, in the traffic. Like skeletons of stories that haven’t been written and peep relentlessly as we’re sleeping.

2:37 Meditation

What happened to my blue sky? I woke up to sun, blue, warmth radiating from the light through the window, and now? There are lobsters coming down and up through the sink, and I don’t feel sunk yet but I am getting there. There is a there there, as I pat the lobsters on their heads and tell them that everything is going to be okay, that everything is going to work out just fine between the floor and the ceiling. This means that catering to the needs of light is sometimes troubling, a troubling act of reassurance, which can be exhausting, which can be, of course, really very interesting to biologists of the marine variety, but let’s not forget how long it takes to drive a steak to its point on the map because a steak does not have any wheels, nor a driver, nor a steering wheel, and if things got windy on the road there would be no windshield to stop the bugs from flying into our faces, and perhaps even into our mouths if we found the motivation to open them to sing our favorite show tunes. When I say that I am over the moon, I mean, literally, that I am over the moon, and that my intentions have been altered by a sound of walking in the snow – crunch, crunch – each step a step in meditative silence, my brains quieting, because what is a brain without another to accompany it? I say go forth with your madcap coronary disease. This river runs in both directions, in case you hadn’t noticed, but the lady selling umbrellas outside the lower Manhattan tunnel entrance, this being all lines, all colours, sounds like she is sick of being wet, sick of holding that loaf of granary bread above her to keep her thoughts and dry and ready for the next round of street bingo. The man across the street, selling ice cream in autumn, dreams of summer, when he was happier, when he could take a horse by the tail and kiss its meaty flanks with a desire unparalleled, a desire so unquenchable that the pedestrians find themselves quite unafraid to say hello. Hello there, why hello there, there is a there there as the lobsters have gotten sick of my story, how it rambles so, and they continue to squirm about, so I pat them each on the head, each three times, there there there, things will be okay I tell them, things will be just fine, but I am privy to the knowledge that things are not okay and that things will not be fine, unless you consider the future of the manhole, how it will open up to receive more water than usual, more time and more attention than usual. Let’s say that a suggestion as big as a mountain can be lifted up and sold to the nearest bidder, not to the sound or the smell or the taste of an antelope running about the living room. No. That is not wild enough. We will block the bottoms of the doors so that the water from the kitchen tap will not escape, and we can have our own indoor pool. The lobsters want to do some laps, of course, though the younger ones may require water wings and supervision. Hand me my whistle! There is mapping to do, not to forget the dancing. But when we say not to mention, doesn’t that imply something that doesn’t need mentioning? Then why mention it in the first place? Why mention it at all. I will take this sharp nose to the sky and carve those altocumulus clouds into shreds of paper after a night in the bag of darkness and sadness, lines removed and revised and added to so that the poem we began with was a selection of cheeses, and our fingers ran the lengths of the legs quieting down in the night, with the tables getting some sleep, and the chairs regaining their balance (with only sixteen legs apiece, after all), and I lift my hand to each lobster, to pat and reassure, but they have caught on to my ruse, and we have settled in to a long night of self-deception. None of us will talk to the others. None of us will admit that we came from the back door rather than the front. We sit and watch the waves of clouds go by, rather quickly I must add, and then the wheels jump off the ledge, and our time seems to have come to a standstill. I remove my watch, throw it down to the ground and watch the glass crack into at least a thousand different bad ideas for reclaiming one’s own compassion for the earth. I assert my right to the last piece of chocolate, to the last pigeon wing, to the last moment in the last conversation when someone brings up the topic of architecture, and I am reminded of a beautiful woman with buck teeth and a plant by her side. A plant with sneakers. It fetches things when asked. It doesn’t bark, but lets its hair down when the night is young and the walls are pink, and the salmon have floated up from the cabinets to play water polo with the lobsters and their friends, the sea urchins.