i'll miss this.
while they were brewing the hemlock for his execution, Socrates began to learn to play a new song on his flute.
dear little voice,
while they were brewing the hemlock for his execution, Socrates began to learn to play a new song on his flute.
“what’s the use?” a soldier asked him.
his answer was a shrug against inevitability: “to know it before i die.”
if i am repeating Socrates’ reply to myself now, worn thin in books by too many retellings, it is only because i have just taken a dried dandelion flower from the soil at my feet and placed it between two fingers.
this is an unremarkable moment. it will pass in fragments: in the garden before me, the sun is setting in the branches of the old jacaranda tree. the day is hot. the body of the man i love is bending over a small silver dish of water. a dish he has placed beneath the jacaranda tree so that the birds that nest there might find some small relief in the heat. the contrast is almost violent— this thing built for force, for movement, for lifting and bearing, that smells like dirt and small bolts of lightning, is now on his knees before the birds, adjusting their dish, making sure the water catches the light in a way that will draw them closer. what is the purpose of him doing this? to do it before he dies.
years do immeasurable things to identity. you look back and wonder when the change happened, whether it happened at all. i am older now, but still, i kneel in the dirt, looking at what I have seen a thousand times before as if it were something new: that old jacaranda tree with its electric flowers and rusting lanterns, the juniper clusters, lilacs, the air wavering with summer. his brief, unguarded tenderness in the january sun drowning me out.
i hold the splintered seeds between my thumb and finger and release them into the quick breeze between us. up they leap like the quick silence of a flame. like a blooming bud. like the shy beat of a butterfly wing. there is no greater drama in this. just movement. just time. the seedlings move through the air between us, bending in a thousand directions as the sun does. what is the purpose of doing this? to do it before i die.
he thought of the ruins of the Grecian worship, and it seemed, a temple was never perfectly a temple, till it was ruined and mixed up with the winds and the sky and the herbs. D.H. Lawrence wrote this in his impossibly perfect novel The Rainbow. one day this moment will be a temple too: dismantled, scattered, half-forgotten, folded into memory and longing and whatever remains of what i once felt, ruined and mixed up with the years and the spaces between them.
when that happens, it will be with a hushed sound so faint i will have to halt my breath to catch it— sand sifting through water, a hand running along a bannister— the sound will spiral and thin, an echo turning inward, slowing, until i understand that that sound is my own breath: a dandelion caught mid-drift, slipping gradually, a final cadence released into the air.
“cold southern gales blasting across Slope Point - located on the southernmost tip of New Zealand’s South Island - has given rise to this unique natural phenomenon: the trees here, being persistently battered by powerful winds coming in from the open ocean, have a permanently wind-swept appearance to them.”
“do you need a little prod?” Mary Oliver asks in her poem The Fourth Sign of the Zodiac.
“a little darkness to keep you going?”
i know that our uneasiness with the act of living comes from the stories we tell ourselves about death—death as a hand, waiting, poised to strike. what we can’t seem to imagine is the alternative: a hand that holds.
we are like dandelions, each day of our lives a single seed, drifting. time moves through us with the ease of water through cupped hands, taking without force, carrying without attempt. we tell ourselves there is always tomorrow. we set things aside. we hesitate. we make small, misdirected offerings to the future, believing in its permanence. but tomorrow is a fragile hinge. and in some tomorrow, when the earth opens beneath your feet, you will be like a seed and fall down. this is the bargain, the contract we never signed but always honour: to live, knowing we will not live forever.
the heat in your body is only passing through. years ago, it was summer heat pressing against the skin of a lake. yesterday, the flicker before lightning. soon your sweat will be an ocean, or a horse’s tear. a wave breaking. a mist rising. you are a temporary arrangement of atoms, already on their way somewhere else. you are more tide than stone, more echo than origin.
press a sprig of dandelion between your fingers, let the oil seep into your skin, and when the wind quickens, let it go. smell its bright resin rising. if i know anything about this world, it is because i have held it in pieces, felt it fracture, and still, inhaled.
what you feel is more yours than what you are. but maybe that has always been the point.
do you need a prod?
a little darkness to keep you going?
Cézanne wrote, ‘I am jealous of my little sensations.’ i am jealous of time. lately, i have been rehearsing for loss. i’ve been playing a game.
it’s called: i’ll miss this.
every insignificant moment, every ache, every inconvenience—i hold them up to the light like small, irreplaceable artefacts. the boredom of a Thursday. the relief of cool water on burnt skin. the sour weight of tears. the silence of insomnia. i take inventory. i say goodbye before i have to. and i say: i’ll miss this.
and one tomorrow, somewhere between leaving this world and dissolving into the wind, i wonder what i will say. i stretch my sentimentality to consider my inevitable proclamation. but i already know. i’ll say: i’ll miss this.
Amy Krouse Rosenthal, Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life
it is possible you will be given two billion heartbeats. this is, roughly, what the human body allows. but some bodies are interrupted. some bodies end suddenly, without warning, in the middle of an unfinished thought. and even if you are lucky enough to live out your full inheritance, it will not feel like enough.
“every thing that lives is holy, life delights in life,” William Blake wrote.
this, then, is the agreement: living is noticing. dying is not. so while you are still here, notice.
as Brian Doyle wrote:
“This is what I know: that the small is huge, that the tiny is vast, that pain is part and parcel of the gift of joy, and that this is love, and then there is everything else. You either walk toward love or away from it with every breath you draw. Humility is the road to love. Humility, maybe, is love.
You do your absolute best to find and hone and wield your divine gifts against the dark. You do your best to reach out tenderly to touch and elevate as many people as you can reach. You bring your naked love and defiant courage and salty grace to bear as much as you can, with all the attentiveness and humour you can muster. This life is after all a miracle and we ought to pay fierce attention every moment, as much as possible.”
i’ll miss this.
SWAYING IN THE WIND - Museo Textil de Oaxaca
“all you have is what you are, and what you give,” Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in The Dispossessed.
so now the seeds have vanished and i am gathering summer flowers in their place, pressing them to poems on wax paper, and placing them on his pillow where i have laid the seashells i found him on a beach in Victor Harbour, by the table where i have placed rosemary in the hope that it too will catch on a breeze, as we will one day, and follow its own perfume into his dreams. who knows what he will remember of these things one day, and what he will make of them, but the hope is there that if nothing else, what he will hold on to from these times will be the knowledge of having been deeply loved.
“what’s the use?” you might ask me.
to do this before i die.
a hand i love.
suppose we did this work like dandelions drifting—quietly, knowing that when the earth opens, we will fall.
i stand by the bird bowl longer than i should. it is enough.
love,
ars poetica.
little voice: it is my belief that Poetry is a human birthright. it is for this reason that my work will always be completely free, but it takes considerable Time and Love to give to you each week. if it has brought you something, please consider buying me a book so that I may continue to tuck Words in your pocket:
Oh wow, that dark, that prod, that sense of being ALIVE! What a beautiful, expansive piece. ⚡
“you are a temporary arrangement of atoms, already on their way somewhere else. you are more tide than stone, more echo than origin.”