emerge
in the morning, i emerge from a pile of warm bodies. all day, my hands massage things into being. my hands are dusty and strong; the clay is cold and white and heavy. i tear chunks from the side of a small mountain, and slowly work them until they become springy and malleable. from the side of the mountain, a cloud emerges. from the edge of the cloud, a portal emerges. along the brink of the portal, an anxious dream emerges. the wind whips. thunder breaks into the night. spring attempts to transpire, to become known. i am making the things i wish i could be, that i do not have, that i long for. is there ever thunder for snow? when words fail, will you learn to read the semaphore of my objects?
the lake-like air inside my cloud
last night, i dreamt i was an orphan. i made prayer flags and quilt tops out of brightly colored file folders. the files held details of my history, the kind of things which usually rest in the minds and mouths of relatives. my only weapons were an 18 inch metal ruler and a sewing needle. somehow i made my way in the world. another girl from the orphanage made an army of monkeys from flesh colored wax. when they came to life, she gave them each names. they would do anything for her.
i am making fluffy cumulonimbus and cumulostratus clouds out of porcelain. the inside of the cloud i am building right now smells like a lake. that wet, earthy smell reminds me of childhood freedom, dreams of endless possibilities, night crawlers, swimming long distances, early morning fog. it was a time when i had no idea i would one day be full of nostalgia for the south i never want to return to, and would instead be making clouds. after deeply breathing the lake-like air, i asked the cloud, “are you happy?,” it said nothing. when i asked the cloud, “do you want a sister?,” it said,”yes.” so, i will make a huge family of them. the dreams of the clouds will finally be captured like thought bubbles inside glass snow globes. i wish i knew how to escape the pull of gravity the way clouds seem to.
All of these thoughts made me remember a monologue that has stayed with me for years (from the brilliant play Black Battles with Dogs (Combat de Negre et de Chein), by Bernard-Marie Koltes). It is spoken by Alboury, a tribal West African man whose brother has been murdered by a white engineer who is working on the construction of a bridge:
A long time ago I said to my brother: I feel cold; he said to me: that is because there is a little cloud between you and the sun; I said to him: how can that little cloud make me so cold, when all around me people are sweating and getting burned by the sun? My brother said to me: I too am cold; so we kept each other warm. Then I said to my brother: when will this could vanish, so that the sun may warm us once again? He said to me: it will never vanish, it is a little cloud that will follow us wherever we go, always in between us and the sun. And I felt it follow us everywhere, so that in the midst of people laughing, naked in the heat, my brother and I were still cold and still warmed one other. So, beneath this little cloud which deprived us of warmth, my brother and I grew used to each other, and used to sharing our warmth. If my back had an itch, my brother was there to scratch it, and when his back itched I scratched it; worry made me bite the nails on his hands and, in his sleep, he sucked my thumb. Our women stayed close to us and they too began to freeze, but we all kept warm because we remained close to one another under our little cloud, we became used to each other and if one of us shivered it spread from one side of the group to the other. Our mothers came to join us, and the mothers of their mothers and their children, and our children, a countless family whose members were never torn away, not even in the dead, but retained in our close embrace, sheltered from the cold under the cloud. The little cloud had risen closer and closer towards the sun, depriving the whole family of warmth as we grew ever larger and ever more used to each other, an innumerable family made up of the dead, the living, and the unborn, each one ever more indipensible to the other, as we saw the edge of the sun-warmed lands moving away from us. That is why I have come for the body of my brother who has been torn from among us, because his absence has disturbed that closeness which has allowed us all to keep warm, because, even though he is dead, we still have need of his heat to warm us and he needs ours if he is to remain warm.
