Mending

Is the desert a complaint against rain? I want to feel something soft. But the water in this bar is awful, and the television raves and raves. A man waves from a golf cart, the ice waters my drink, a country blows up. My hands don’t fit around anything anymore. Rocks glass, neck, apparition. Today I told the story of my childhood stalker to a stranger at the behest of a lecturer on empathy. Yes, I’ll have another. Can you turn the sound down. I don’t know anyone who died today. I put my hands around a bottle and it dropped. I looked up the firing range of submachine guns and North Korea’s mid-range nuclear missiles. These men, these men with their little lies and guns and golf carts to haul them around in. I want my big life to start. But also this citrus and gin. I lied to the guy at the bar too interested in my ring and notebook, but not to that girl about the stalker. I wonder what happened to him in the end. It went: jail, institution, I don’t know. Sometimes when I think about all the small things I’ve survived, it adds up to a kind of mythology. Years ago, my love and I wandered so long in a stupid apple orchard corn labyrinth that eventually we walked out the side. Just parted the stalks and walked out. The kids with their pumpkin faces gaping. Sometimes lying to strangers is a kind of armor. There’s lightning even in the desert, a dry storm.

Last night, watching a fire, I thought, the wood doesn’t mind being burned, becoming ember, ash, smoke, air. Isn’t it odd to have a body? To be alive and dying, all the time. There are things we can only become by dying, both the act and the process that takes a whole life to happen. I am interested in those things, though I know I can’t know them. To be interested in the unknowable is, I think, to be interested in the divine. I know that the deeper into the self we dive, the closer we come to the divine. Not the ego, but the internal internal. The point at which we are so interior that it’s all light, all spark, all of the fashion, trappings, furniture of externally indicated identity fallen away. Just the Self and the Everything, entirely porous to each other. Is this what it’s like in the womb? Is gestation a microcosm of how we are held by the Everything, and how we move away from it to experience physical life? A thing I remember from high school physics is that matter is neither created nor destroyed, only transformed. The matter of the wood doesn’t cease to exist when it burns, but transfigures into new forms, distinct from how we found it stacked, which is of course separate from its form as tree, as sapling, as seed. My grandmother died this year, after 100 years in her small, strong body. Remembering this about death, that it is not a destruction but a transformation, a release of both the physical structure of the body and the Everything stuff of the spirit, helps me. Death makes sense in this way, and holds then no urgency and less dread. This lets me live the way I want to live.

Do you know Nils Frahm? He’s a German musician, composer, and record producer. His music is ethereal and electric and resonant even in recording, but his live performances feel like ecstatic communal musical meditations.

My wife and I went to see him play last night and watching him play reminded me of watching Yo Yo Ma, and also sports. To see a human so utterly doing one thing with their body that every cell is doing it — and so visibly, viscerally — it’s like the difference between sex and pornography. Or more specifically, between transformative all-encompassing sex and standard-issue joyless porn. The kind of sex where you are in every electrified atom of your corpus at once and if there’s a stack of unpaid parking tickets, a car alarm, a room on fire just outside this one, you don’t know it. Not right then in that rapturous time pocket. You are bruised or bony or flatulent or bad-haired and it does not matter, is not a matter in the now-here of things. You are doing one singular everything and it is good, good to be whole and relentlessly present just for this mystical, embodied now.

This is why I enjoy sports live, in person. A screen is too much in the way for the only real thing I’m seeking there, which is a body doing its utmost in a singular direction. Michael Jordan loping down the court toward a three-pointer might be the exception, as watching Yo Yo Ma tilt into his cello and its magnificent noise can also transcend the tube. But for the most part, give me an unmediated view of the body or let me go home and read about it later, or not at all.

Watching Nils Frahm hop from one stand-up piano to the lidless grand, one hand on a machine knob, the other franticking a glissando across a keyboard, his back to us shimmering with exultant intent, notes pouring over us in hordes, a stampede of tones and aberrations, plinkings and sustained chords, I am reminded that whatever I do, I want to do it like this: with all the energy of every cell, for some discrete time to do, to be, to know nothing else.

Years ago, I got to watch Yo Yo Ma practice a song he’d be performing with a young woman, a poet in a youth program I was leading. Understand that I know little about classical music, though I was aware of this man’s fame. When he started his warm-up runs on the cello, I started to cry. When I got home, I wrote this to the person I was in love with in that moment:

Today I watched a man play the cello with his whole body. And by “with his whole body” I mean every cell was playing the cello. The cells for breathing. The cells for praying. The cells for nodding, for shedding, belly cells, nail cells, teeth cells, eyelash cells, and this is how I want to love. To love not just you, or whoever comes next if we never return to each other, but to have no atom that is not fully rapt in the act of loving, loving the whole purposed and purposeful world, the atoms of street signs, of oak trees, of coal and mosquitoes and chalkboards and cello strings, absolutely of cello strings… I didn’t know the difference between talent and genius until I saw it, leaning out of a body, but as the body, and here it is: I did not want to kiss the genius. Or be any nearer the genius than I was, across the small room. I sat in my simple, comfortable chair and each of my arms grew arms of their own. Each of my legs unfurled into seven legs, like the tail of a peacock or a hand unfisting into a fan. My mouth grew a dozen mouths, my hair dropping to the floor in a dark and greying flood, and my ears — my ears stayed two ears, my heart one off-center, sloshing heart, men outside the window dangling from harnesses hanging a banner these eight floors up, the good news about our survival ringing everywhere, everywhere against the glass.

Anytime I am able to do one singular thing absolutely, I am healed. My friend who does SourcePoint therapy explains that we are formed perfectly at conception, and this world breaks us from that perfection beginning with birth and continuing through all of our traumas, large and small. Her energy work is one way I can come back into alignment. Another is to do one thing, just one thing, with unbroken attention, for as long as I can.

This world fractures us — it’s what it does. It also offers, time and again, with wild generosity, opportunities for us to mend. If I am not watching a genius magic up some gorgeous sound, I can be studying the patterns of growth in the bark of a tree. I can listen so intently to my friend that I can see the light rising off her skin in small waves. I can be so lost in a novel that my wife has to touch my arm because I could not hear her calling my name. In a world packed with distractions, what a privilege it is to give something or someone our total, unbroken focus. How that restores us, without end.

________

Marty McConnell is the author of “Gathering Voices: Creating a Community-Based Poetry Workshop,” (YesYes Books, 2018) and “when they say you can’t go home again, what they mean is you were never there,” which won the Michael Waters Poetry Prize. Her first poetry collection, “wine for a shotgun,” was published by EM Press in 2013. She is the co-founder and co-editor of “underbelly,” an online magazine focused on the art and magic of poetry revision.