When I reached the rough manner of this rain, the scrunched petals of these flowers, their fraying edges, I stopped and set down language

by Cory Hutchinson-Reuss

photo by Jeylan Jones

 

O, O, O:

Of ode, incantation, pain, ecstasy, or completion. No paraphrase. The body dissolves on the tongue. Done. The river lapped her up. A kind of conversion. Consummation. A communion or an erasure.

 

~

 

Here, now:

I try to write about time and I write about my grandmother’s body.   

 

Years silt to minutes

at the bottom of a river.

Layer and layer.

Knucklebone, fingernail,

mole on the neck.

 

This is how you survive

amorphous time, freed

from the clock and fumbling, treading

water: you read Bashō,

akin to a grounding technique

you practice when in distress: notice

five things in your surroundings:

 

wooden frog. Joy-con.

Eucalyptus candle. Couch

pillow. Box of kindling.

 

~

 

She said she wasn’t a joiner: 

But what metaphor did she live by, what vessel. Bells clang their ur-language, elemental, like a mouth on your skin, an infinite hammer in your inner ear. The leaden circles dissolved in the air, a sea with a lapping circumference. The hour, metallic and calcium, a shimmer of oil. Now, here, bass thumps in your chest and disperses in all directions. Teeth polished and chiming clocca, klocke, cloche. Can the body be an anchor or a cloak. Do shells ever laugh like pearls, numerous and strung.

 

~

 

Green wake:

all the garish

irritable buds / itching

rhythm on the clock

and in the creature 

writing comes / from a dialogue

with time / sunlight

passing over

a bowl of eggs

 

~

 

A book of exits, the study of last things:

If the cells become obsessed with immortality, they will abandon cycles, multiply with unchecked growth. They will try to eat time, and in doing so, they will eat the body.

 

~

 

As capitalism, as time-release capsule, as variations on a cell:

1 System in which the list becomes estranged from its ecstatic nature.

 

2 Repetition of routine acts as ruler, a rod, a stripped branch, a switch. 

 

3 Muscular disruption becomes part of the animal, like the croc who swallows the clock in Neverland. At first a tic, then an embedded rhythm. Chaplin in Modern Times, twitching.

 

4 In my mind a factory manufacturing need, a rut in my thought, a redundancy: justify use-value, even in sickness and worldwide trauma, even when the moon eats birds’ voices then spits them out as stones.

 

5 Meanwhile, B. goes to work at the hospital every day. Every day, delivery vans like blue pills speed through the neighborhood.

 

6 a) Inability to distinguish between desire and defense, want and prove. b) Restlessness, scattered focus, false starts. c) Diminished capacity for grief, elation, or stillness. d) A system within a system of collapse. e) Finally crying off-screen, on mute. f) Remembering her white head, her white hand. g) Each child in their own room, working alone.

 

7 What won’t take no for an answer. Demands cooperation, (in)corporation, consumption of the self into the mystical core of empire’s legacy, its burning crypto heart.

 

8 Reading Sun at Midnight, trying not to try. Poet, monk, and gardener Musō Soseki had a teacher named Issan who told him there is no rule, no way, no word that achieves enlightenment. No trick, no currency that will purchase it.

 

9 A hammock has no work ethic. In the hammock as in the First Egg. Nothing to (im)prove. Not the body, not the mind, not the spirit’s prismatic fog. Sway in the heat, no longer Protestant, no shoes.

 

10 Loafer, lounger, idler. Lazybones cat in a patch of sun.

 

11 Repetition of ritual to build thresholds. To step into a bright cloud’s call, to lose sequentiality, more like fans fluttering in your thorax, under your scapula, across your scalp. A portfolio of doors.

 

12 And in the dark, eyes that close.

 

~

 

Pulse oximeter: 

on a twin bed in my aunts’ old room     in aubergine folds

and shadows    walls sun dim and gone    hours

after her panic    my mom

in the other twin    my grandma in the next room

turning to milk

in the dark are we twinned    we’re daughters of daughters

no escaping    my grandma’s breath-knot slipping 

I’m willing myself

to breathe    slowly    eyes tender to close    sleep’s brittle crust

furniture looming                    more substantial than a person

she’ll die in an hour

her children will gather    my heart will shudder into a bell

the days bruise in the wind    my brother

will be absent    hospitalized with the virus and pneumonia    each   

text buzz will set my chest

clanging    he will recover slowly    this year of emergencies

the family cascade    my own

fever and isolation    I breathe the oldest plea    to recover

a slow prosody    every breath              pushing a name outward

through the body    a frequency

rippling the air    disappearing at the room’s violet

edges               like the end of a bargain no parent       can keep

 

~

 

Digital age: 

With my fingers I conjure you.

 

I feel an affinity for the faces on display, as well as a distance, an indifference, I feel an infinity of ways through which to scatter (or multiply) my energy, my self.

 

Pixelated and particulate. Grain. Mosaic. An icon. An offering.

 

I’m one of many, the numerous minute windows through which

light shines. 

 

We live in a world in which there are constant flows of information

between the animate and inanimate, the technological and the divine.

 

Mystical body, scattered across time zones, sleeping on planes, flossing teeth, fucking up another apology.

 

Image and flow, re-enchanted limbs, I conjure you and you endlessly branch, world without end.

 

I mistrust this story, the hands gathering what they can’t touch.

 

Yet I browse online for books, for silk fans, for drone sounds and their psychological effects, for clips of Jennifer Hudson, Colette, giant pandas rolling in snow.

 

A consumerism, devoutly.

 

What is Patti Smith up to? Reading Rimbaud or watching Tarkovsky’s Rublev, his likeness of ones and zeros switching on and off, flickering like old film or horsetails or ghosts.

 

~

 

Collapse, flow, kairos:     

Open scroll: a 1909 recording of Tolstoy, one year before his death, his afterlife as image and voice. Gravel and aromatic bitters,

chiseled river, beard, and tufts

of winter grass. All

my humblest garments.

A lonely pony, field-grazing.

 

The screen says the kingdom of God is within you. And you. And also in you, a field, an origami fold, a river of clover. A realm hidden within a body, time’s fullness planted in a thorax, into a minute. Tolstoy spoke/speaks a kin-dom unfolding in my chest, affinity without domination or violence, a time-lapse bloom of skin, flushed with pulse. Then-now-always of sun behind cloud.

 

~

 

Horologic body: 

Our cells and various organs, slick and ticking. The body’s main clock, the suprachiasmatic nucleus, above the optic nerve, in charge of circadian rhythms. Synchronous with the earth’s turning. Dear dark, dear lost tempo, I’m tired of the backlit window, the burrowing hole, the set pace already humming and spiking and impossible to sustain. In the air a singe of lightning, the owl’s ragged and throaty call tearing through the trees, ivy runneling along the maple, ghost flowers opening only to the moon. My sensory suspicion of a fundamental mistake. The ticking of sleet on the window makes me want to set adrift, hermetic, a floe broken from the blue-lit field.

 

~

 

4:30am:

Vasomotor instability, then chills. You can burn into a different realm, into a moon flare, in an act of petition to the branches out the window that mimic your reaching. My most recent grandma has slipped out of time, or into it differently. I’m out of sync with her earth-turning. My hand rested on hers. We intersected briefly. I wake and wake.

 

~

 

Counterpart/continuation:

My little girl self bursts through the double doors.

 

I see her flicker then disappear, reconfigure.

 

Daughter.

 

Sunrise pulls fish to the water’s surface then they slip away,

recede into a mirror.

 

Dear double-walker, dear disturbance—

 

A weaving of hair keeps the time.

A loom of fingers.

 

~

 

Pilgrimage in place:         

Turning, sun-etched, casting shadow. A labyrinth frees me from a set pace, a predetermined way of keeping or using time, from the obsession with correct choice and destination. I pass close by the center before arriving there, I turn in all directions, including “away” and “backwards.”

 

~

 

25 October, lectio divina:

how to read the body: scars, crows’ feet, sun spots: time as depth experience, not order of occurrence:

 

: downstairs,

 

B. hollows old books into gifts: converts chronology into container, information into emptiness that can hold a surprise:

 

~

 

9 November:

Unexpected mildness prepares me to drive south.

 

When I wind through the Ozarks, I’ll bend

backwards into evergreen.

 

See my living grandma in her weakest state.

 

Sit in grief—a curtained room—then spool it out

as a highway that runs between family and home.

 

~

 

9 November:     

Easy talk in the hammock with E.

Books, online school, the virus.

 

Repetition and pause.

 

With the river rocks

we made a labyrinth to house

our emptiness.

 

            Sun-flare

behind amber leaves, I think the trees end

in burning bells.

 

And what if we will—

end in astonishment.

 

The air rings

with copper fire, chamomile, the season’s

last apples.

 

Note: “When I reached the rough manner of this rain” takes its title from This Little Art by Kate Briggs and includes italicized lines from Virginia Woolf, Etel Adnan, Graham Ward, and Leo Tolstoy.

---