from Remains

This is a test. A set of margins created
for company. For waiting in train stations
or asking a stranger the time. You’re allowed
to freak out this much only. There’s a green car
parked outside, by the curb, near the bike racks.
An old man is asking people to put
change in his plastic cup, and I remember
my name contains both my father’s and
grandfather’s stories. The table I’m sitting at
is made of steel and marble. It’s cold and it’s
spring. In the song on the radio, a noise

.

Carmen. Do you remember Carmen? My cousin
who married young to a man twice her age and with
little means. Back in San Luis. I don’t know
exactly how it happened, but the farm I remember,
the pond overgrown with stalks and moss.
Where I’d catch dragonflies by their tails. Their wings
almost metallic in the gilded, orange noon. Carmen,
still 15 and a virgin, sang in the straw-roofed kitchen hut,
where she helped our grandmother cook, steaming
the pig’s tripe, or grinding corn into mush.

.

At some point, air support was requested. It was
mostly children. But the claims were exaggerated.
140 casualties, in this instance, is an acceptable
mode of living. The captain hacked and spit like an old
engine on a cold morning. When it rains, the homeless
will sit in the shelter of bus stops for hours, sometimes
even long after it’s cleared. I know I call in a time
of brittle language. I know the dams gather floods,
and there’s comfort in the precision of machines.
Is painterly kindness enough? Or what is it, exactly,
that we’re saving from extinction?

.

Is this Chopin? As we drive in the valleys,
graves. Insistent string. Mountain ridges opening up
to reveal cloud formations rifting. Music
as a gesture outwards or a vague suspicion
of what we were. I say this now as my body, which appears
young, goes on collecting small disjunctions.
I say this as a breath rising up to the wooden beams
of a restaurant ceiling. A rhythm like glass beads
on tile. Days like passages in a Russian novel
where love is a distant fracture we can hear from our beds.

.

On the drive through the redwoods, I don’t know
if you recall. A harmonica note held for a summer,
truer than the blanket uncertainty we learn to live with.
The fog making the road the edge of the world.
Our senses broke and scenes began to sputter.
We looked under the seats for a map or a booklet
that might help. The grandchildren will learn
about failure soon. It’s that age. So will they sense
in that moment a well of song? Will they know
what we meant by sorrows or jest?

.

The collision, the rain slowing, the pebble breaking,
the slope of a hip, the skylight’s glare, the tedium
of age, the building full of children, the repetitive
mechanism, the idle company, the phone call,
the steps, the evening walk’s end, the minute space
between two things touching, the loss of meaning,
the boundary’s approach, the rendering of limbs,
the edge of remembered towns,

.

It rained for days. Our hands were covered
in the smell of April. I forgot the time
and place of departure. I was finally free to go.
I was hungry and bad at honesty, attempting still to break
through the blank space. Eternity’s other shore.
A place to wake from one’s portrait. A place
with enough memory to store our lives’ echoes
thus far.

.

My friends and I wanted some way
to see our wreckage as material for a world.
So we put on our coats and headed to the cemetery
on a bright afternoon. Tulip gardens patched
the hills. Young couples passed the time
renaming kinds of rubble. Instead of loss
they had dreaming. No heartbreak. For the length
of a cobbled day, whatever they saw in each other’s gazes
dripped from the buildings as music.

.

A hinge turning in a stranger’s life. A friend walking
toward you in a crowded room. A sound like a sketch.
A blank drawn. An awkward moment in conversation.
A letter in the mail. A mode of transport. A set
of excuses. A distance. A pain in your left temple.
A finite dream. A slip of the senses. A closed
lid. A garden fountain. A fear vector. A need
to be addressed. A need for sound. A brown lawn.
A sky littered with faded jet trails.

.

If it won’t fit into words, we resort to song. Trying to
finish the cigarette slowly, hoping the bus won’t arrive
on schedule. The trees are ashake with time.
Because the canopy blocks most of the sky, the street
corner feels like a living room. White lamps hang
from the lower branches. The cold of early spring
suddenly occupies our timeline. If it won’t stay,
we claw at it, hoping something will linger. Behind
every stranger’s face is this weary hope. I want to say,
“Look up.” Or for the falling twigs to start emitting
notes upon impact. If things won’t sparkle, retrain the eye.

.

Each morning we would walk through the dirt soccer
fields strewn with garbage. We wore our navy blue
school uniforms and kicked up dust. How my grandfather
shrank after the cancer took hold, I’ve always wondered.
If it penetrates you, if it plants the seed of death in your bones,
can you call this your body? Had I the words. Had I not been so
like a juncture, I might have spoken with him in more honest
ways. What can time do but pass? My mother would bring me
to his bedside every few days, like she wanted me to sense
the weight of it. Can you ride your bike now? he would ask me.
Do you still fall every time you stop?

.

It rained for four whole years. The crops gorged and drowned.
We drew portraits of the city. Our monuments
half-hidden in clouds. Some banded together
for survival. Others wrote love letters to God.
God remained curious as a child. Much like today,
we pondered by windows. The pipes rusted.
What happened afterwards, I’m not quite sure.
We were to dream. A child told us, Go forth,
life is waiting at the bottom of the steps, to your left.
You will know it by its seriousness. Laugh.

.

In rest homes, patients hang on as if trying to commit
some sound to memory. The inverse shape
of what a life becomes. I, who’ve lived on the coast
for a decade plus, drink excess amounts of coffee and tea
to get through the morning. Small beachside towns
becoming homogenous. The stranded “I” watching
from the sidewalk, curious for a last form of listening.
Each day made of scrapped music. A pebble in fragments.
The space revealed by broken forms. In solitude
our hands grow brittle. Memories of touch
start to go.

.

She arrived with a hermit crab shell, small as a world,
in the palm of her calloused hand. As you grow older,
she told me, you will come to such sights,
by and by, and you won’t know whether to weep
or harden. Years later, I sat on a park bench alone, looking
down at my fingers, the grassy knoll before me outlined
by the lights of the financial district. I remembered
there were no more wild tigers. I remembered stepping
forward, each with our own camera, our own flash
containing its negation like a coin.

.

To celebrate death we arrange the day’s remnants
into loving patterns. To arrive at our own absence
we decide on a new name. To know its depth
we put on old gazes. To build a history we mind
our boundaries. To retrain the eye we close it.
To start again we make our way through mounds
of garbage. To hear its song we wait in stations.
To touch love’s end we squander our lives.

.

Across the screen scroll today’s top searches:
polar bears, egg recall list. I’m not waiting for my
body to dissolve, but only hoping that my eyes
will stop recognizing yellow. It’s a strange world out there,
without our personal ways of remembering. I want to hear
this as song. The rioters hurling fire. Aren’t we all
just doing our jobs? I want this wavelength carved. The sound
of fighter jets over the apartment. A place to live in
while the sun runs out of things to hammer
into grapes.

.

Limbs bursting through bolted doors. Limbs marching
through a crowded room. Limbs dancing to the pull
of unhinged minds. Limbs lying. Limbs contracting
in pleasure. Limbs with newspapers. Limbs
at the border between madness and boredom.
Limbs free from thirst. Limbs falling out of broken time
slots. Limbs seated in neat, cushioned rows. Mute
limbs. Limbs moving in tandem with the ground’s
vibrations. Limbs discarded on a Sunday morning. Limbs
meeting silently for dinner.

.

And we divided the world into purchasable pieces.
Billboards apologize simply by winking. It’s a good night
if we stumble home unbroken. A good night if the pack
rips at the carcass. Could you pass the salt? she says.
Could you be the one who stays? We pretend to know.
At the bottom of those thoughts we have no
tongue for, in that place where silence and sight
intersect, we stand on one foot, swaying in a fog.
When both our silent chests sway in tandem,
we call this dancing. As in, we sat at the coffee table,
dancing. Or, it was easy to ignore the stop signs
as we laughed all the way to Moscow, dancing.

.

Each pebble in the stream lends its shape
to the water’s flow. The river ahead
carries these small dances in its threads.
The symphony wants to survive, does sometimes
in the form of nostalgia. I cried
and it seemed the least sentimental thing to do. This
notion of days as patches of insight and loss,
a kind of open loneliness. A muralist finding his paint. Diving
past the wall to the place where his figures go on floating.

.

In paradise the flags are sleeping, fading in the rivers
without hurry. All names are blood memory.
The heart blooming is also the sound of leaves burning.
Knotted strings litter the gardens. Each word
has its tiny ghost. When I look up
the window is open. The cold in the room fills my eyes.
The broken radio patiently gathers history. Atop my
desk sits a glass of cold tea. A ray of red traffic light touches
the sill. I can hear the young couple on the floor above
promising never to fight again.

.

To wake from the portrait, scream. Or to wake
from the portrait, touch the tip of your tongue
to the roof of your mouth. To process the sound
of separation, walk far into the crowd. To move
in fault lines, to keep from starving, we talk about it.
To step forward, to balance on the string, knotted
at points, to propel the thing unsaid through locks
and chain, to keep our hands from breaking, our judgment
from aging, we skip waking, eyes weightless

.

I threw my bag into the stranger’s car and got in.
I hid my altered state by nodding in a serious manner.
I listened to his long sentences that fell about
in all directions. I looked past the glass, at the mountain range.
At the clouds lowering themselves
onto the slopes. At the clouds beginning to roll
into the valley. I concealed my worry by periodically
refocusing my eyes. I leaned my head against the window
when I ran out of questions, hummed in my head
a line of anxious music.

.

Wholecities have sprouted from weariness. In a land
far away, people commute and cook dinner in fear
that a pop song will toss them toward the sky. A rapture
marked by leftover pavement. And what about the war?
I sit in the shop, letting the night go in peace. Basic
diplomacy. Looking at pictures. Trying to make out
what is actually there. Preparing to live with less space.
Retracting my tendrils. Remembering my spot on the map.

.

Inside the dead tree, the children built a fire
and tried to find the birthplace of each flame. Their hearts
drifted like ghosts. The flames rose from the small
pit of coal and dry newspaper, reached a peak and
vanished. The result was a kind of trance. The spastic
flashes colored the walls of the trunk and lent
the children’s skins an ancient glow. The children smiled
as if this proved they still knew something. After a while
any constant noise can substitute for silence. When the flames
dimmed and the crackle subsided, there was the forest’s
sighs and creaks.

.

Every day we obsessed over the outlines of our shells. The extent
to which love could confound us. We knew almost nothing
about the backs of our hands. We knew the uncomfortable
corners of the city. Wires nesting behind cardboard panels.
We knew how to stand outside government buildings
and how to fall asleep anywhere. We rode in packed cars.
Assumed we would eventually grow out of it. We drew
maps of famous graves to follow. Claimed the dead air
for our own. We knew it was best to leave unfinished.
To go back and risk ordinary lives.

.

No one goes into a cave lightly, even to hide. Mighty
are the numbers drifting out there. Try turning off the lights
and paint what you remember. Paint the wall of screens
that caught you. The way hands hold still. The blue glow
of the sand during red tides. What remains are not stories
but moments of color that stain. The song
from the speakers drifting to the window and fading
down into the sidewalk full of plans. We would often lie
on the grass, waiting. I’d leave my hand
on her waist for hours, attempting to record.

.

It’s true that the gods may discard their shapes.
They do it often, in a place of complete peace where
the problems of humans cannot move them. Our language
cannot concern them. They are not open to structures
or prayer. What they like to see is light shows. Bodies
on stages, plumed and wild, propelled by the fear
of inertia. They like bodies thrown in spectacle,
torn at the hinges, hearts expunged, ghosts expelled
in moments of white. The spark of leaving.
The sound of our fabric undone.

.

Is it possible to get rid of time by refusing
to make machines? Packing all one’s life in a suitcase,
and disappearing into the white room
where we sat and built a fire
and had no patience for melody. The edges held no shimmer.
The sound of the paper did not make us dream. And so
we ate it. And grew obsessed.
With endings. With the perimeter of bells. With screens.
My friends slept on the floor and one day the floor
gave out beneath them, and they let go their thin phones
in the quick strum of the fall.

.

Before they wake. Before the scraps of vision
have been turned into wallpaper. A vehicle the size
of invention, sputtering. Or films.
And some language, where the shadows of raindrops
on windows Or a feeling. Drain
pipes dangling free in the wet curve of the alley.
Skies full of old motion. We are told to fear
strangers, for they are points of absolute uncertainty.
Told to be faithful as if time did not exist.

.

One man says to another, do you see my colors?
I’ve worked hard for these matching eyes. One man
watches a crowd in silence. One man’s wife
stops acknowledging his body, going about as usual
in a different time. One man waits for a scene to repeat.
One man dedicates his free time to erasing, usually two
hours after work, before going to bed. One man admires
photographs all night. One sits on the wet earth
and starts eating the strawberries.