i will slide past words i have forgotten how to say, past the memory of tastes i have stowed away, past kisses forgotten and remembered, past loose molecules from last night’s frozen pizza and even an atom or two from some sweet mash of baby food. everything is there to be seen, between the teeth and the length of the throat.

a couple of nights ago i dreamt a dream i have had before – lock jaw. an inability to open the mouth, or an inability to close it once it is open. no speech. inability to vocalize. this is the terrifying dream of wordlessness, squeezed tightly between the parenthesis of physical pain i cannot overcome myself.

i don’t know how many times in my life i’ve had this dream, but the first time i have a memory of it, it’s 2005 and i’m living in the mint-colored room in a building other dwellers at the retreat center where i am working refer to as the nunnery.

around the same time as the lock jaw dream appears, i go to see a massage therapist to contend with several episodes of being woken by a cramp so intense in my foot that i struggle, wake up writhing and gasping, tears running down my face. in conversation with the masseuse, she discovers this lock jaw dream i’ve been having & suggests a connection: fear. a fear of the loss of my ability to self-express, one of the few things i have a real sense of confidence about, a skill i even draw a sense of identity from. and then there is the fear of  pain itself.

“what would happen if you let yourself experience the pain, instead of struggling against it?” the masseuse asks me.

i think, for a moment. not struggle against pain? it’s too big – my body moves before i think. but you see, when you writhe through a cramp, the cramp worsens without end. however, if you go to sleep knowing what you must know, when the cramp fires you into consciousness, somehow your body allows you to give it a new signal: don’t fight. get calm.

so what happens if you believe you cannot maneuver your jaw to speak? maybe you’ve just convinced yourself that your body’s natural reaction to feeling inarticulate is to struggle – not to feel the pain and, somehow, miraculously, trust that somewhere inside of it, the elasticity of unguarded articulation lives.

kick off my shoes, put my sox to this dirty floor, pick up what i’ve carried in, gray on the bottoms of my feet – get the vacuum cleaner out, make the bed, do the dishes, mop, take this long sleeve shirt off, scrub the bathroom clean, get down on the floor with the remaining tracks, or, put those i have already heard back on, on repeat, pull out the study guide for the infamous GRE and enter calmly into some kind of studying with you, man. the evening is painted, the paint is on your hands and mine.

not what you eat:
what music makes you.

here is the stack
i got for my request -
labeled in your writing:
four options for first pick.

these four writable discs -
this is sort of
anything but
a firm handshake -

it claims a greater breadth: to be
a kiss hello, a kiss goodbye,
making love, dissatisfied nights;

trembling hands, hands that do work,
hands that wave
hey! hello!
and also that signal
goodbye.

which track is this? where are you now?
silent, lying on the floor?
dry lips mouthing words, the beat
memorized so that you
don’t have to tap your fingers
to feel it in your arms?

here. can you see me? now i’m listening,
—learning you— no, fuck that.
i am seeing you, and,

in seeing… in seeing you: feeling you.

or, in feeling me feel these
songs you picked, feel what we
don’t, what we are not,
but thought we had it
in ourselves
to be.

(i said, “why didn’t you come to me?”/ i said, “why didn’t you talk to me?”)

i see what i see, feel feeling me,
feel you.

you -
you loved me.
and under the earth’s crust,
no matter the height above sea level:
lava is moltent lava:

this chorus was written at creation,
to hear, for the first time,
today,

so, with this, listening,
can i?
can i know you any better
than i knew you when
i made my request for this,
when what i wanted was this,
to feel you, to feel, to feel me
feeling you?

if a photograph is worth a thousand words, a photograph of an old friend is worth those thousand, plus all of the definitions you think you’ve come to understand to be linked to eyes, cheeks, chin…  but, sometimes, i guess, what you think you remember from those old vocabulary quizzes gets shuffled around. does “dearth” mean you have too much, or not enough? is supercilious a character flaw or a quality? did that taught look about the forehead and jaw mean consideration or consternation?

i guess i missed a muscle or two last time i saw a picture of you, old friend, because the thought bubble i inferred read “help!” and i thought to myself, “friend, run!” but social media chuckled at my reading, and poked back at me with a slender finger – not the middle, but the ring.

i want to jump in,
grab your hand,
run you off,
laughing,
screaming:
the beach
is ours
tonight!

4 PM. the sun widens against the back of a cloud, behind the black hill,
making a silver light, a goldish light, bigger than any summer sun,
fill january’s windows.

outside, city hall, with its dirty cement facade, is swallowed by the mirror-
light which makes of human faces a mirror for itself.

seen from harris hill, this light would spread –
the sky would appear greater, perhaps,

but the edges might cut
less precisely than they do from here,
where the light is bound by
framed sills,
driving, like an anchor, through the wet exhaustion
of the year’s second afternoon.

when it sinks
it will sink with the weight
of sleeping bears, with the force of
astral flames extinguished in the terrestrial atmosphere,

until the blue that hosts the moon closes around it like a fist.

in the light made
by early evening, it is easy to sense

what you have learned
before the year was new
is taughtly sewn to
what you will learn
in these lengthening days,
these lengthening days,
these days
still without ending.

not her,
who instigates and screams;
not her,
who waits with patches, asking: any holes yet?
not her,
who stays still, eyes locked, disengaging.
not her,
who is gentle in her aching.

the radio plays. the message is recording.
but this is not the same girl speaking -

she has learned the international sign for
silence
and wades in while you are
still on the beach, reading.

looking for books that would fit a peace quilt display begged questions: what is “peace” all about, really? can a book of poetry about america suggest peace? what about the story of civil rights struggles, or those of immigrant families, or folk tales from far away countries? what makes people think of peace — not the word, i mean, but the feeling? what makes people feel opened by the vastness of the world, by the diversity of its inhabitants, rather than overwhelmed by it?

great questions; difficult to answer. accompanying the knowledge that this stack of books which will make my display is not the “right” collection of books for the display was the realization that whatever books, of the hundreds of possibilities, i chose will represent merely a place to begin, as much for myself as its currator, as for those who will view it & perhaps ask themselves “what binds these books together?”

i hope that, in asking the question, the beginning of an answer, and not any one answer, opens in every viewer’s mind – and that the search for peace continues.

[Purusing the books for the display before setting them up...
From “My America, A Poetry Atlas of the United States”

Vermont Conversation
Patricia Hubbell

“Good weather for hay.”
     “Yes, ’tis.”
“Mighty bright day.”
     “That’s true.”
“Crops comin’ on?”
     “Yep. You?”
“Tol’rable; beans got the blight.”
     “Way o’ the Lord.”
“That’s right.”

don’t worry about it. just turn on one & then turn on the other. eye closing (and hand holding, where available) are suggested.

1. [guster. backyard.]

2. [elliott smith. color bars.]

this is sort of a modest undertaking (though putting it together caused me to stick a needle deep into my finger, drawing blood, which i sucked out and swallowed, then felt nauseous over, remembering from my first aid lesson during my last job training that blood in the stomach makes one puke…) but it felt like a greater-than-modest-undertaking as it moved from notion to idea, then to action… then to outside participation, then to tackling practical issues of assembly [see blood parenthetical], and on, this morning, to footstools, thumbtacks & public display.

i feel good about this.

here it is: the southeast steuben county library children’s department peace quilt. (amen)

[ photo credit: the fabulous Cherie C. ]