12 December 2023

Tiny Houses

 

 “Seduce him and then shed on his eyelids,” comes up as I open the Iliad, something about sleep, though I prefer the shed to be noun, stick edifice constructed on an eye’s fleshy platform. What comes between seeing and vision, like blinds between virtue and virtue signaling. Flat floor, semi-translucent, eyes at half staff behind a veined wall, wondering why flags are sulking halfway up their masts. Even the wind stops for them, leaving cloth heaps hugging metal posts. I shed skin like memory, find it lying like dust on the carpet. Dust bunny snapshots, returned to sender via phone, where sender is also the sent, scent of plum blossoms alerting us to a friend’s absence, except that we see a photograph, smell nothing. Reconstruction projects depend on erasures, rubble couples standing on concrete piers in Gaza City, where civil order promises to collapse, as if promise could be used as a negative. I promise you my worst, but warn you of my kindness. The gall to offer such a thing, wanting only kindness in return. The echo chamber of my bursitis hips contains a world’s theater; what I cannot see in Gaza is almost contained in me, though I can afford care. The half-truth of metaphor. Hear the dead poets recite their last wishes, for they know they are last. Hold that against the prize-winning poem that panders to an audience of others. There’s a difference.

A boy, his face bleeding, covered in concrete dust, pleads with the camera. There are no sunflowers in the background, or canyons striated orange and white. This is a selfie without others, without even the assumption of audience. The new prayer is spoken to a digital device. It places us as micro-gods, but we having nothing to wield but words, and more words, none of them arriving in his hearing space. They don't worry about death, but about not dying quickly enough. The carnations on my lanai turn yellow again, but droop in displeasure at my inattention.

In the meantime, crops of kittens trot out with their names, some kept, others changed. A nose patch the shape of Idaho, tortoise shell eyelids, one cat asleep on the other, choreography of new life in an enclosed space. My son’s hand brushes the backs of both cats. He’s pinned to the couch by such purring, eyelids closed, paws outstretched to reach a pillow, or his arm. It’s not abstraction that’s wise; it’s a species of love more than of knowing. The greatest virtue is a vacation from the rest of it, if vacation can be described as right view, the sea spread out in front, telegraphing its moods as currents, bathing the sun in its folds. A girl in Gaza holds her cat close for a photographer's glass lens.

 

Note: the opening quotation from Stanley Lombardo's translation.