This is the first post we’ll have here, the first in real time, and we’d like to imagine we can just carry on being here, safe and sound and right and well. I haven’t been blogging, certainly not in a daily format for years and it is almost impossible to start after having a long-term blogging habit broken because it desire to recap everything you missed mentioning is such an albatross that you can’t move for it.
Because in that gap, in that void-of-course period in my life, I lost my parents to metastatic breast cancer and pulmonary fibrosis within three months. I got a little medicated. I sold two houses. I fell in love. The world broke open with corruption. I moved to the United Kingdom.
It became hard to sit quietly in rooms along with all of those personal elephants. Hard to do a chit-chat. Hard to focus and be fully present. I feel still that it’s so hard to get on to the now, right now of life. To ask for attention to a matter that nobody can do anything about, that isn’t actively bleeding or hurting, it just is. It just *is.* So I’ve held onto all of it, strained my shoulders with the ungainly brick of unspoken and unprocessed trauma and joy. I can’t lose something vital if I don’t put it down. If I don’t get it moving in the air, spill it in the sink, it can just stay filed away like every other thing that ever happened and didn’t matter. I keep my parents forever in my head, I cause love no worries nor regrets, I am in all the places that call to me, nothing is cast off. This is what the past two years have been attempting. Some price has been paid, some child has felt as though she has passed some test.
And now, there’s calm amongst the daffodils and cherry blossoms and I have my feet walking now and again over cobblestones and I am very far away from the places and people whose eyes I can see my heartbreak in. I’m hoping to write poetry again. And poetry doesn’t do much with people who don’t care to feel or interrogate the world, it doesn’t want to roost there or make a bond of trust with a poet that won’t name the stars, the beck, the spate of lost pigeon feathers that greet you on the front steps. It won’t feed where there isn’t food to feast upon.
So I am trying to stand in the flood and say what I see, five hundred words at a clip. You and me, John Donne, we’re going to get this done: this unending attempt at being, doing magick on the land, investing light into the tender darkness, dimming the relentlessly sterile gaze of reality, and finally linking limbs with our dreams and pulling back as we are drawn by our hair, by our hems towards the center where there is no more.
