“It is impossible for either side to withdraw now; the only question at stake is whether or not we actively take the initiative. ”
There is "no middle ground" in the war between Greece and Persia. One must swallow the other. Like marriage.
From last year's notebooks....
I cannot text the words to P. as the plane takes off. If I say I love you, the story is finished. He will disappear into a morgue.
So I'm writing a poem inspired by Billy Collins' "Litany". Calling it "Litany with Pina Colada." Playing with Collins uses tercets, or 3-line stanzas, to the slow reader down. Stanzas "as stones in a stream" one must step on to cross. [I can't remember where this got published... or maybe I just read it at poetry readings because it was likable. Unlike so much of the rest.]
"Liberate" is such a strange, aggressive verb--not light or open-ended like free.
My lover wants to liberate me. My killer wants to imprison me. They are the same man working different shifts. I train the eye to know the man by the uniform. When we cross the border, I will drink a very cold orange juice with ice. I will color my hair red as bolero’s rose. I will sleep through a night. I will take my baby to the doctor for pneumonia. I will let the sun rub my shoulders, fear nothing. I will find my father and uncle. I will be a white man’s hardworking wife. Under my pillow, a knife.
“ She was happy and ready: the happy wife, the ready woman in possession.”
And what's the difference between possessing--what we assume marriage grants, a safe haven-- and being possessed? Our complicity, so stark.
The first five years of married life, the impossible intimacy; being pregnant; the "emotional enthusiast" lacking energy for her spouse. A man taking offense at being comforted for his loneliness; the thundercloud of a feller falling asleep before you. And you assume they understand what you've given up to be a wife. You assume this understanding is enough to build loyalty, but socialization recoils against the need for a wife, the crave of comfort. They hate us for loving us. It's so generic. Like cheese dip.
“We can’t talk about all that the universe contains because to do so would be to render it finite and we know in some way, that we cannot prove, that is infinite. So what the universe doesn’t contain is as significant to us as what it does.”
More than fifty years ago, the Higgs field emerged as an omnipresent expanse of energy that explains why some theoretically-massless particles have mass. The boson was predicted to appear when a particle interacting with the Higgs field excites it. Since physicists could not directly observe the field itself, they looked to bosons for evidence of the field's existence.
Nothing is finished. All of us are beta now, products not ready for official release, the upgrade on the horizon.
Phenomenologically speaking, the swan has yet to dive and its white is soundless. I am fine. Not even wet. My ears ring with crickets and uninvited bullfrog events. A disjunct between two connected places— this grimy lake and the downtown four blocks away. One being the boson to a Higgs field that proves its existence but I am too lazy to discern which.
Again, this lake where most teens in my town get pregnant bears an invisible physical relationship the downtown clinic where they creep behind bodies to secure an abortion. To visit one is to feel potency of the other by implication.