Selection from Hive-Mind
April, 2006
Some places take a journey to arrive at: face closed doors and silent moments when nothing can be said and you don’t find anything interesting, not even yourself. You have to get through nights when you couldn’t arrive at the resolution of a cricket call. You have to get through wondering how the hell you can remain upbeat and sustain yourself when everything around you—from the gas burning on the stove, to the dishwasher pinching your arm, to the sixtieth mixed lettuce salad—yells wake up to all these details you pass over daily. You know you miss something that you shouldn’t be missing.
Get through and here: you arrive with the air clear after yesterday’s storm and scented with expanding greenness, plum and lilac blossom, but you cannot feel the growth as you know you should, as something that comes from inside you.
In the early evening, we went on a hike up an old county road to a ridge top where we could see the square swaths of Sacramento Valley farms, Sierra peaks, Sacramento’s black buildings, and the webbing of Delta marshes. Everywhere was green. In a pasture near a cow- bitten fig tree: lupine and chicory flowers.
We walked to a look out point and gazed at the farm from our hillside perch. The sun just set. Peeper frogs began their chant. The song rose from the valley up to us on the ridge; each frog’s voice became a note, blurred into a rhythm that beckoned me. This place: life burst beyond any holding point.
When we got back from the hike, down in the lower field the first group of night stars came out. I stood in the middle of the onion and chest-high fava bean field, alone. I thought of this line from a Mark Strand poem: “In a field/I am the absence of field./This is/ always the case./ Wherever I am/I am what is missing.”
But I felt the opposite of those lines.
I am the presence of field.
We must continually fling ourselves out from prisons. Cast ourselves out from how we conceive of our existence; abandon the sick self. I don’t know what fears are mine anymore. I don’t know how my shape will rise up, a shadow behind me as I walk close to a plum blossom’s open mouth.
April, 2006
Some places take a journey to arrive at: face closed doors and silent moments when nothing can be said and you don’t find anything interesting, not even yourself. You have to get through nights when you couldn’t arrive at the resolution of a cricket call. You have to get through wondering how the hell you can remain upbeat and sustain yourself when everything around you—from the gas burning on the stove, to the dishwasher pinching your arm, to the sixtieth mixed lettuce salad—yells wake up to all these details you pass over daily. You know you miss something that you shouldn’t be missing.
Get through and here: you arrive with the air clear after yesterday’s storm and scented with expanding greenness, plum and lilac blossom, but you cannot feel the growth as you know you should, as something that comes from inside you.
In the early evening, we went on a hike up an old county road to a ridge top where we could see the square swaths of Sacramento Valley farms, Sierra peaks, Sacramento’s black buildings, and the webbing of Delta marshes. Everywhere was green. In a pasture near a cow- bitten fig tree: lupine and chicory flowers.
We walked to a look out point and gazed at the farm from our hillside perch. The sun just set. Peeper frogs began their chant. The song rose from the valley up to us on the ridge; each frog’s voice became a note, blurred into a rhythm that beckoned me. This place: life burst beyond any holding point.
When we got back from the hike, down in the lower field the first group of night stars came out. I stood in the middle of the onion and chest-high fava bean field, alone. I thought of this line from a Mark Strand poem: “In a field/I am the absence of field./This is/ always the case./ Wherever I am/I am what is missing.”
But I felt the opposite of those lines.
I am the presence of field.
We must continually fling ourselves out from prisons. Cast ourselves out from how we conceive of our existence; abandon the sick self. I don’t know what fears are mine anymore. I don’t know how my shape will rise up, a shadow behind me as I walk close to a plum blossom’s open mouth.
