Exactly One Year Ago On This Date

Well, you know the rest...

January 6

Poetry

I find myself silent and without poetry often in these last number of years.

My silence is an angry silence; or, frequently, I choke down my mind’s churning formulations, in despair of saying anything not already said or being said. I can chime in with the rest of the choir. Sure. Last year on this date, inarticulately, I had one word: “unforgivable.”

That particular word tends to bounce back on those who mutter it. Not for the placement of blame where it is due, but for each their own placement in the grander scheme. Not for nothing is the Western titled Unforgiven in which Clint Eastwood says,“We all have it coming, Kid.”

If there’s seething, there isn’t any real silence. The throat squishes writhing eels - a delicacy of wrath.

Real silence is bliss and the standard for countering endless throbbing clutter of exclamation. Noise, voices, language, words. Poetry vies with silence over the best way to be replete with meaning over din of opinion, bluster of speech - and usually loses. Its technique is absurd: using words to overcome words, fighting fire with fire.

As sound, words that break silence are intrusive. Paradoxically, the blank page (or screen) begs to be written on. In sound, at the edge of silence is the poetic. On the page, the poetic edges empty spaces that can only be defined by print.

Solution for now: choked up laughter amidst the slaughtering joke of omnishambles. Poetry or violation of virgin/pregnant silence? Nothing sacred. If I’m writing, I’m affirming.

Word Magick

Forget poetry. “Words are all we have.” - commonly attributed to Beckett, probably apocryphal, can’t find it anywhere.

Let’s stay crawling and clawing through the sounds and scrawls that confront us.

Today - all week - we’ve been surrounded by commentating and images. Capitol riots, insurrection, congressional investigation revelations, DOJ prosecutions. I’m reading, listening, and watching as much as anybody and believe in the ongoing threat. Yet, spectating, we’re abused and baited in our agency.

In the midst of this barrage, how to restore one’s own power of response?

Silence is a friend to integrity. Okay, relax, find solace in social emotion, fellow feeling, misery’s company; or, party with your party, join in the feast, carving forks plunged into the meat of seeming victory. Indulge in the necessary chit-chat; as a cover up, a bedsheet over the underlying nakedness of quiet, it does no harm.

It does do harm to drift, to let things go, to go with the flow (suddenly relentless over unforeseen falls); and it’s a waste of speech to repeat patterns heard in the confusion of current threats - such words carry no charge.

All that racket, it’s all a racket. What you really think - a welling up from broken commentary, broken earth, bellowing hollows. Words arisen from those fissures: they’ll have core force. Brain to tongue, to pen in hand, to fingertips at keyboard; thought to throat; the words themselves, set thus to purpose, are activated in their etymological valor.

Leastwise, anyone aware of their times can be effective in bearing witness, giving testimony (distinct from spectating and commentating). Courage of a unique perspective, presented - where it is, at its center. Potency congruent with built-up strength of each individual’s character.

This is presence, when furthered: for words, for persons. Those dedicated to the future, aware of their moment.

Thought

In the breach, weakness.

At the Capitol, the mob bent fences, topped walls, decisively smashed a window into the building, forced doors.

The priniciples of incursion are the same from ancient to modern times: fortifications are illusory in their solidity - it is the logic of hostile will to demonstrate vulnerability - chip away at any obstruction and it will give. City wall, castle portcullis, government building barricade; same seige theory, same fluid dynamics.

What’s missed is that weakness remains even after repair and patched frailties.

The immaterial aspect of the breach can’t be fixed by reinforcement of physical structures and their freshly invigorated defense. The breach extends through time, through the principles upholding our laws, through memory and dangerous knowledge of exposed weakness - historic tear in the history and concept of our nation.

Any excuse to quote Heraclitus: “The people should fight as much on behalf of the law as for their city-wall.”

This tear is psychic, general, personal, visceral. It’s trauma. We are breached in our institutions, we are breached in our commons, and we are breached in the integrity of our own truths and structures of self.

Yeah, the situation’s serious. In the breach, weakness.

Serious enough to laugh but not laugh at moral reinforcement, in earnest aesthetic jest for renewal. A gesture towards civic virtue anew. And now:

interrupted poetic edifice, individualized rhythm of consistency

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January 6th will always be loaded for me.

It’s my father’s birthday, my father who died more than a decade and a half ago. My father who cursed me on his deathbed.

“How Dickensian!” a tall, tottery writer jaded and pestered with haphephobia said to me after the fact. He didn’t take off his lambskin dress gloves but tugged at the wrist button of the left one.

I tried to write about my father’s deathbed curse in an as-yet-unpublished poetry and prose poetry manuscript titled Imposter!: instances, regrets. I can face this work better now than I could in years past and I’m prepared for its refusals of containment, which trouble my re-readings and revisions.

The corridor to my father’s hospital room was endless and glaring and as tubular in the length of time it took to cover its distance as my flight across the country. Eye to eye, I didn’t meet his expectation - that much was plain. I thought I was being forgiving by coming to his side. “Have you no fear?” Rage contributed to the audibility of his rasp. A chasm had traveled with me and, in answer, opened half the room behind my ear and temple. I didn’t waver. He glanced at a photo I’d handed him of the year old grandson he hadn’t met and flipped it aside; within a minute, it’s on the floor. The blinds above his bed eclipsed the afternoon sun. Through an unbearable flourescent buzzing, he gave words to his last wishes for me.

My mother drove me back to the airport. He chose to die the next day.

Lovingly, my brother described to me how peaceful he looked in the hour of his death.