tender collector
public space, storytelling, & climate
substack
magpoost@gmail.com
tender collector
public space, storytelling, & climate
substack
magpoost@gmail.com
Last spring, I spent a lot of time writing a little bit of poetry. Rather, I spent a lot of air time thinking about writing a little bit of poetry. I have a mountain I keep returning to, circling, surveying from every angle - right now it feels a bit like the main mountain in my story, but hopefully that is just because my brain is little and narrow-visioned right now. Hopefully I’ll close my eyes and the mountain will have been summited, summited, summited a thousand different times, a thousand new mountains. Hopefully, I cannot yet see the axis around which my life turns; some pivotal gear upon which the story of Maggie hinges.
But anyways, part of the mountain right now is paralysis. Part of the mountain is giving up on what I have to say even while it's coming out of my mouth, not believing that anyone will be able to hear it in their earholes and think anything other than, “Well now, that was a silly thing to think was worth saying. So obvious and boring. Really if you are going to say something, at least let it be of note.” I hear this said by a haughty school teacher cartoon fox, but also by everyone I’ve ever seen, every person I’ve looked at and to whom tried to say a sentence. But really, I’m the one being mean to myself. I’m the meanie, and also I am the smaller mouth trying to say hi to anyone at all.
I have this sense deep down that there is something I am really getting ready to say. It’s as if the me who is talking to you right now is a big red curtain, behind which a real old-fashioned musical is preparing. But I don’t know what the musical is yet, or who told me that it will happen, so I can’t quite describe it to you. And also it’s as if I can’t quite will myself to pop the cork which is my thumb holding back the wall of water, rushing behind a dam which is my fleshy, funny body. I am vibrating with excitement! If only I could sit down and force my hand to write, write, write it out.
Part of the mountain too, though, is the shaky feeling I get in my fleshy funny body: a fear that I’m a marble rattling around the middle of an empty bowl - perpetually leaning in to some center, building an anticipation of getting down to the middle, and right as I’m clearing my throat to say the heart of it, realizing there is nothing actually there. What I’m saying is: I don’t know if I trust myself. I can’t seem to sit myself down and look into my heart straight on, to see what has been worrying around in there. I want to say things directly and honestly. I want to say my words in a straight line to the center of the sun and find the little man there who is sitting watching us, and show you guys that he is happy, and we are okay, and things are beautiful.
Something I’ve been thinking about is the way true things are built into us; the way time slowly sweeps away the muckety muck, and the big bumpy hard ouchy things which felt so stuck are really a glass jar, a little rock, something true and real stuck in the river that is our selves. The way we know things long before we know them, how if you could look back, you would see little and littler versions of yourself bumping against something true that you won’t have the words for until much later.
What I’m hoping is that if I get things a-moving in myself, language-wise, writing-wise, the mud in the stream of my consciousness might start to move as well. It’s stream 101, right? Give it a couple days, and the mud will sweep along down the current. Maybe this machine will show me how it works, and I will see myself reflected in the surface. Or at least, I’ll have made something.
Here’s how the poetry collection ended (and how this begins, I suppose):
The time is so luscious now I feel like a knot, a
Fissure, a walnut.
I am both of and in and exception to the glory of the sound
of those boys bouncing basketballs.
If I died and became sound, would I feel a changed man at all?
I smell and I hear and I am
A rupture of
And of
And here I am me! I am scared
Every day now.