we are invited to climb

new and old us met today. we ask what day it is; it doesn’t matter. we ask if we are happy, and it matters. we ask how many rows are crossed off on our list of things we’ll never do, and we learn about a whole new list. the plant in our window is drying out in those longer arms that grow over the pot, and we’ve run out of money on our subway card.

these are the side effects of change—the things none of us were looking for—the things which contain the world, and that gray chasm whose walls are so far we float around between them—a mountain above us—a birdflock below—the gridlines are laughing in a genuine kind of way, and we feel a strange compassion in the scope of it all.

what does change look like? does it have a smell? the skypoems are broader now, those upsidedown kites whose strings reach into the clouds—we’ve been looking for one that gives us permission, but mostly we’ve just found nonsense. the kitestrings go taut, then slack, then taut again:

we are invited to climb.

beforemaroon

wayingsong before the eyelids, the underthere, a beforemaroon again again with questions and ideas—how to see around a color when we’re stuck inside it—how to count from one to red with only one hand—everything moving so slowly but the clock seems to be working as usual with those metaled clunks and woodenbits: the hour hand seems different this time around.

the kind of bright outside

it’s the kind of bright outside where the leaves look green and white at the same time.

this these the a or

this these the a or whoagain windowing—paints and possibilities and glare which makes us rub our eyes and wait for the next thought. it hasn’t come yet, but somehow we aren’t quite discouraged.

who the blaring and pinecone? oceancars and melting pavement, an acid noseful of bittercold air, the puddle so much larger than the trees.

we notice how the revolving door is so heavy and we’re glad a stranger behind is helping push.

othergreen

which up and down and otherblue and wheres?

time waiting with its legs crossed and eyes near closed. jeans crumpled beside folded papers and wilting books.

we wonder why we don’t wash all our shelves with watercolors.

littlewaves

that book stares us in the eyes again. a person in flames on a field of grass, littlewaves dancing and so much smoke. we waited years for this and now we can’t get past page six. maybe we’re disappointed, maybe we’re distracted. mostly we’re waiting—the foxes are still just beyond the frame.

we construct and we desconstruct and we destruct and, whenever we look, the pages get a little more wrinkled.

it just feels wrong to read a book when we had to pay money to hold it.

enginesounds, and blackblue light.

colorchords

we wonder what it’s like to see a raindrop start. if we leaned in close enough would we see our own reflection? the wind cracks through the incense and we see a splash of colorchords.

it’s kind of special how we don’t have words for smells; somehow it makes them more real. we wish everyone could smell what we do today.

our little box

a stretch—our arms extending outward, shoulders relaxing; quiet steam drifting from a mug while, somewhere, time is still passing. the room feels wider than it used to, or maybe we feel smaller.

this is our little box. we are the wallpaint, we are the scratch, the people who have been here, the little echo of a grin—peachprints on an apron, stale sourdough on a table, a rhythmic sound from outside, a simple sound from inside—we can’t decide if we’re being distracted or just living our lives. we are smiling.

all the layers

our friend is urging us toward this strange paleglowing thing.

what is it?

it has no bottom.

we don’t know, but look at all the layers.

our eyes stretch over the fabric, the violets smiling in reply. the slowlys and louds drone on and on while somewhere, a clockgear jams. that strange ventilation sound again, that gridded room again—different now—the lines leaking upward and the corners shrinking in—we wonder if our friend feels as still as we do.

how the air just sort of moves around

we wait another minute and wonder if it would be okay for us to ask: is this happiness?

we watch how the air just sort of moves around in the leaves. we take a long, deep breath of sun.

we accidentally imagine

we accidentally imagine ourselves having for a head this strangely shaped box or a bird feeder with a triangular roof and we are sitting in the passenger seat of an old car and someone we care a lot about asks, who are we? and we think for a minute, and then another; we can’t seem to answer with anything but a held hand, but somehow we find ourselves caring more about them just because they asked; they can’t answer either, but their grip is getting tighter and they aren’t making eye contact but that’s okay because we aren’t looking anyway and we are both these strange wooden boxes attached to bodies, heads without eyes which still say so much, eyes with old laughinglines which still find new things to smile about—a crisply turned poempage, a nearby windowcreak, a mug between our hands—laughing about nothing in particular and everything in particular, wanting to want everything and wanting to want nothing, to feel everything and to feel nothing, or at least something—their grip is getting tighter and we remember that hiding is okay sometimes and being naked is okay too, that sometimes things lead to other things, and sometimes they don’t, and sometimes things just happen and they keep just happening and they don’t stop—they don’t stop and it seems like they never will, so it starts making sense to just accept this and close our eyes and smile a little but somehow this feels impossible; we get frustrated and start doing things we don’t want to do, blaming other people for things nobody had control control over in the first place and jumping to conclusions and making assumptions about other people and their thoughts and what they want or what they are afraid of

we forget that they are us, that their grip is getting tighter and that nothing is okay for them either; we remember that their wooden head is crying a little and we’ve been trying not to notice; we remember that we are all the same person born into different bodies, and that this is a beautiful thing. this is a beautiful thing.

the smell of damp sticks from outside

the smell of damp sticks from outside. a slowmoving sound. we notice how everything is so softandgreen, and how the cars going by sound like trees.

we ask if it can stay like this, at least for a while.

it does.

the skypoems

the skypoems are dangling from the colors, and everything is taking our breath. we read these together and between us everyone else does too. we just can’t believe how small the words are and how the ice is covering each individual pine needle. the slightest push of a finger and a thousand crackingsounds.

how can a thing be so beautiful? we look away and wonder if there are any two people alive, whether it’s all just one song in the end. the radiator is making that sound again and our favorite sweater is so, so warm.

there are these towers of light shimmering in the sky outside the car window; we remember reading there’s this sort of reflection that can happen with ice in the air, and how impossible it seemed at the time.

we accidentally imagine things. a violet ribbon, fields long, drifting through the town while everybody watches. an ancient droning sound pilgrims leave flowers for. a rectangular room with gridded walls so vast we can hear thunder and the tides.

we love these places—there’s always something new in them. this has been eight months, this has been eight years—the wheres and arounds never quite seem to stop dancing, the drone so deep we can feel it in our ribs. we try to sing along and feel so many things without trying. we hold our pitch for four long breaths and we go up a fifth. our friend smiles and goes up a fifth too—we’re smiling and everybody is singing fifths and smiling and the drone is getting louder and the ribbon is growing wider. there is happiness here.

shades of purple

it’s funny how we can’t help but smile when the sun starts coming back—shades of yellow whose names we can’t remember—lines and lines and so many lines. the incense is still glowing and becoming smoke in our nose—we breathe and we breathe and we breathe, and we forget how to ask questions.

brighter than usual

all these small and beautiful things going unnoticed or noticed, so much it just somuching. we remember how to be overwhelmed and hear the rosemary. little bits of paint and drywall stuck between the floorboards.

the is brighter than usual today, so we go to the woods and try to find the most uninteresting stone.

the bells from the church around the corner are ringing. we remember an airplane just flew overhead and it must be miles away by now. incense dusts our desk orange, and for a moment we think about how there’s this whole great big world out there, and it’s all so quiet.

these leaves rustling for who?

the sky is bigger here

we were a few minutes into our walk and one of us said the sky is bigger here. we began to feel lighter or smaller and remembered that gridded room again and that halfasleepordizzy sort of state it brings us to.

we could smell springtrees and hear distant birds whose names we wanted to remember. the plants seemed different there—they were thinner than we had imagined.

now, finally, we’re reading that book we’ve been meaning to get around to. we hear far sirens, and the usual hum of the refrigerator. a little blue light behind us is blinking.

little green and misty things

we don’t know whether to feel small or happy, so we just do both. each of these littlelights casting a bit of warmth—the thousandsounds dancing all around us. as we breathe in, then out, then out again, all these strange sounds and abouttosneezes come together and come apart and come together again.

we answer anyway

what is our dream?

who expected to be asked this at an udon shop? we weren’t ready for this, but we answer anyway. there’s this nice shade of blue on the wall. someone finishes their bowl and all these strangers shout good job!

we try to imagine

we try to imagine what it would sound like if the leaves on every tree were poems written on little sheets of paper and everyone in the world started reading them out loud at the same time and then the wind began to sigh and the poems went leaping in the air and everybody just sort of smiled and watched and let it happen—we think about how most of our questions don’t matter when there are so many beautiful and confusing things all around us; we just keep quietlaughing and grabbing for words, sometimes keeping them and othertimes giving them to people nearby.

we try to catch a leaf and miss, but we aren’t so disappointed—the wind needs poems too.

strange triptych

this strange triptych stares at us, each frame lined with commas.

on the left, we watch a room full of people in a meeting with a projector and a whiteboard full of important diagrams. the room is sideways, and the people have no faces.

on the right, there’s there’s a candle with a buried wick.

the projector switches to a video of a woman drawing with ice cubes and ink; we can feel the mist melting, and the people shuffling by.

little starlights dangling on string.

this little bug

who the behinds through before hows and wheres when whenever the—againagain the words repeatingly as we notice a little cottonfluff drifting toward us. it sticks to our ink, and we ask again where meaning comes from. a million coins being thrown every instant, fields of possibility so terrifyingly wide we have to look away—

and we notice this little bug just sort of flying around, landing, and flying around again.

the changes

we never seem to notice the changes until they’ve already happened.

anothersong thismomentingly

now marbles in a glass bowl wondering how the birds get their sounds, their patterns clanging or scraping against cardstock. the coffee mug looking right back, eyes glimmering so loudly in the sun or lightflickers or drained batteries, lithium looking for water.

how’s this different? asking between colorshades and subject matter like it were important or something or anotherthing—anothersong thismomentingly—an old cerealbox casting shadows longer than expected while, incredibly, the light bounces color on the walls. papers littered from months before: some important, some notsomuch, some with words and blindly drawn paintings and some made with an old inkjet printer; the edges are fading.

purple cliffs and blackblue folds

these purple cliffs and blackblue folds just standing there below the piano sound—we see a metal rock reflected in the glass and we tell our friend about the gray bird we saw on the way here.

what do we see when we stare into the sun till those graymoving shapes start appearing and outlining themselves? we don’t own paints yet, but we try to do our best.

the bigandsmall

a silent auditorium, a glaring spotlight, a bead of sweat—this is the speech where we finally speak our mind:

won’t everybody please, please, stop all this cruelty?

can’t we see how unnecessary it is?

some glass creaking under winds, some oil spilled in a parking lot

who before and after there some behind throughingly, a manual for writers of research papers about mechanical engineering and game theory, complex analysis and early marxist painting, somewhere in these pages an actual answer to a question that matters. color palettes making us feel sick, making us wonder why we should care about the dissonance, why we should prefer one to the other—

we suggest that we’re all just bits of dust moving to the waves of some song we can’t hear: now banging on the wardrums, the hopes and the doubts, the views and delusions smashing keys—some body of loud waters, some electrical structure groaning in rains—particles trapped in the breezings, the sine waves, the eyeballs tossed left and right or up and down—the arounds and behinds lost somewhere in the mix:

we are reminded of the fourier transform, and how we can’t quite ever have enough signal to be sure of anything. who’s to tell what’s harmony and what’s dissonance? who decides the key of the song when any moment’s just a few bits of data? hard to see the film from a picture, hard to see the picture from a pixel, to find the sentence through a word—a letter—an inkdot—

we ask each other where it happened. where the music got faster. where the green became blue and the light was switched on and the newer waves started interfering till the noise was noise and the signal was noise and the noise was still noise but somehow wider, more sideways and spinningly and uppingly and backingly, more harsh and out of sync—

now neon colorlines and batteries, strange gaps in the spiral—not patterns but something about them which makes us feel the walls are moving away and the room is becoming smaller.

this is the bigandsmall. the gridsquares are mountainsides stretching upward as everything flies away from everything else. windgusts from belowabove howl through these lands—shattered glass and falling trains, splintered wood and ash—marching canyons and rolling hills, saplings and so much rain. a whale above throws a shadow on our hands; it cries out with pipe organs in its lungs, and all the cathedral stands at attention:

WE ARE EACH AND EVERY ONE THE SAME REFRACTION—ONE OCEANSCATTERED SALT—THE LIGHTGLINT AND THE MELTING ICE—THE KITESTRING AND THE BOOK—LIKE GOD, WE HAVE MANY NAMES, BUT BENEATH THEM ALL A SMILE BETWEEN FRIENDS. THIS IS OUR PRAYER—TO SAY OUR NAME.

amen

this place visits us when we are tired, when it is too cold. years ago we planted a tree here. it always seems a little bit taller.

an actual human person

all these words washing around us and we feel guilty for daydreaming and try to pick up from the last line—it’s in the middle of a thought but we are too, so it’s hard to blame it too much.

what gives us the right to do any of this when just outside we can hear an actual human person digging through the trash?

the edge of who we are

i.

we lean past the edge of who we are—waterchasm yawning—

we see the top of our head, the question marks all upsidedownandsideways. we’ve been thinking about how life is one continuous shot, and how the page is dusty since yesterday. the field of color spins with the rapids, and we unshut our eyes:

ii.

it’s hard to speak sometimes. we are frustrated with ourselves for our inconsistencies—once at peace and allowing things to be the way they are and what they want to be, always taking action and never taking action, leftandrighting with the rightandleft—once again wishing things were a different way or that the coin had landed on the other face; we can’t figure out who we are, and we aren’t quite sure where that leaves us—hard to find the energy to say much, too many responses waiting behind each choice which never seem to go anywhere good, anywhere that doesn’t hurt somebody or dissipate into the grass as if nothing had happened in the first place; we start to wonder if anything actually does or did happen or if instead we had somehow thought it all up out of some kind of desperation and confusion aimed at nothing in particular—cycles going back and forth but never quite the same way, always surprising and somehow adding to the confusion and the feeling that we are nowhere and that we are getting nowhere.

iii.

which whynow thumpingly the doors, the momenthow slipping and falling away.

we heard that consistency is another sort of illusion and that taking a step away could even mean allowing things which don’t make sense to happen—less difference between our own words and the weather outside today, less difference between our minds and our shoelaces—tied or untied, on or off or tangled with wires in a trashbag somewhere—

we heard that having no control over the world also means having no control over ourselves, our thoughts, our actions, and that this is kind of a beautiful thing. this is kind of a beautiful thing and that’s completely okay if we let it be, if we just watch the pollen drift to the ground, following a single green speck in its strange path—at the same time being together with the crowd and being the crowd itself, at once going somewhere with a goal and just falling in the air’s path, standing around for hours supposedly doing some job playing some role, vaguely defined values being pushed on everyone even when we don’t quite understand what anyone is saying or why they are saying it and we ourselves don’t quite understand what we ourselves are saying or why we are saying it—the wind still saying something outside, the sun’s belly still rising and falling with every breath it takes as it thinks about wooden trees and why they are shaped the way they are when there are so many possibilities—

so many ways to blend a color or make a point, so many ways to build a chord or move a brush when it seems every day that there is a new colorshape in the sky, a new piece of garbage on our desk. different modes of voice and combinations of words, probabilistic relationships imitating meaning while our eyes or arms make up for their emptiness or soullessness if we prefer to think of it that way.

the illusion breaking down again—a small-voiced reminder that we are a pale blue dot, a grain of sand out of place in a library where every book is in a different language and where the pictures are of things we don’t recognize or have names for even when we thought we had a pretty good grip on shapes and colors; we aren’t sure if the shuffling feet around the corner are from a librarian or an old friend we haven’t seen in a while whose name we don’t remember even though years ago we laughed till the sun came back and realized together that why and when and who and where are all the same word in the end.

we remember that the galaxies themselves are asking questions, wondering where they’re hurtling toward, how long it’s been, when it’ll stop for a minute, how they ended up in this colossal rectangular space with distantly gridded walls and worlds between each line. even with these whalesongs and purple paints, the galaxies need poems too.

iv.

stillness now. a smallvoice joking in the other room. a crystal or some melting snow. behinds toward while again around the wheres or whys while leftandright shrinking silently. a wooden creak. a scratch. all centers—things happening all around, things just happening and being what they are, and we think about how this is a beautiful thing. this is a beautiful thing.

v.

we figure out who we are,

and we aren’t quite anywhere.

goodbye to the paintings

we said goodbye to the paintings today, with a little bow and a silent thank you.

our friend noticed and smiled.

the paintings noticed and smiled.

we’ll get there

the year has come around again. air conditioners and traffic, but somehow different. we have a new plant which is very very green. it’s only been in the window for a couple days, but already it’s reaching toward the sun.