WATER BELIEVES WHAT WE CANNOT
I wrote this love letter in the spring, when there was pandemic, which was news, and weather, which was not. Now pandemic has been superseded by police brutality, the American presidential election, and wildfires. The unknowns, the unknowable, accumulate; the future refuses to emerge from ellipses. By the time you are reading this, our imaginations will be stretched further, thinner—across the suffering between us, and the suffering that binds us. And still: you keep showing up, we keep showing up: in love, and in rage. Perhaps—to borrow from John Cage—this is the best, the most we can do: make space for the rage that will one day bind us in love.
| 1 |
In the morning one of you says, We no longer know how to live safely in the world.
Outside my office window the trees are throwing their yellow flowers against the startled March sky. Everywhere, it is spring and the Earth is remembering her beauty.
February was tricky and strange. In this last, open-ended moment, I am almost fooled into believing March will be different.
That was a Wednesday. By the time I finish teaching Poetry for Prose Writers, campus will close, you will be sent home due to a silent, invisible, and unpredictable killer for which we have no cure, and the future as you had once imagined it will suddenly be reduced to ellipsis.
Two weeks later, I invite a poet who knows struggle to join our online session. He says what I—whose struggles are small, having largely been of my own creation—cannot:
1) You can’t be afraid to think broken because if you don’t think broken you won’t think at all.
2) What’s your Existential Bucket list? If you don’t have one, get one.
3) Your fear exists on the threshold of self.
4) Your fear doesn’t exist in the same shape or form anymore.
5) Your fear is the cause of someone else’s suffering.
6) Crisis is a creative opportunity to transform fear.
7) Rise above for someone who has less than you.
8) We are born screaming on the inside and die screaming on the outside.
9) What song unsticks you from Writer’s Block? If you don’t have one, get one.
10) Visualize the person you want to be on the other side of crisis.
He reminds us that this is an old story. For some, this crisis is the one—in a series of crises that have largely been ignored by the collective—we all happen to care about because the virus does not discriminate as we do.
Together, we write a poem called “Water Believes What We Cannot”:
Buy a plant. Name it after someone who broke your heart.
Don’t ask whose imagination you’re in.
Everyone should try on a dress at least once.
I believe that spirits visit me. You should be careful which ones you invite.
Don’t be a bitch on accident. Be purposeful.
The strongest parts about me are the weaknesses I can admit.
Flatirons are like a crash diet for your hair. Avoid at all costs.
There is no right way to die.
Exercise your lower back. The
