different ways to imagine the soul
a watch made out of a rich mahogany, which you wear on work days and
take off when you get home. the mechanisms
are protected and waterproofed, but the wood
is wood so it isn't. when it rains,
you carry both a raincoat and an umbrella
because watches aren't the cheapest and
you care about your wooden things.
a group of five crows who are frequent visitors
of your yard. they seem to like lazing around
in the sun, and will spend a half hour
hopping between the trees and the grass.
you feel like they could be your family, like
each has a connection to one of you, like
in your brief acquaintance you have grown
in the same direction as them,
and you wonder whether the death of one
of these birds would be a bad omen.
some part of the body, somewhere, about
the size of a nut. in the search for the soul,
everyone was right that it is, in fact,
a discrete part of the body. we just hadn't
found it yet. we still haven't, but now we know
to look harder and feel like it isn't in vain.
nobody has gotten approval yet to begin
trial research on consenting terminal
patients, and you don't know if anyone ever will.
you and a friend have a bet on whether
or not it's in the neck.
even if you can feel it, you can't ever
see wind. the leaves rustle and the grass
sways and you feel a chill and a push in
a direction, and you walk in the direction
of the push like a sail. you can only ever
think of wind through analogy. one time
in a canoe you had a tailwind, so you held
your paddle up instead of paddling and
faced the blade against wind. you held your
arm strong and let the paddle drag the boat
along.
old cathedrals very often were founded on
the relic of a saint, locked
in a reliquary as proof of a holy presence.
you think it'd be cool for others to have
relics of you after you die. you wonder if
you could have a reliquary made of a rich
mahogany, inlaid with precious gems.
you don't consider yourself a spiritual person.
the soul is but a rhetorical concept,
an evocative, compelling notion
that people use to anthropomorphize themselves. at least you think so.
it's hard to tell sometimes whether someone
earnestly believes in the soul.
you find yourself believing in it when
nothing else conveys quite the same idea.
there's no real shortcut to breaking in a pair
of shoes. you kind of just
have to be okay with your feet stinging
for a little while.
you forget to bring your phone
to the bathroom sometimes and decide to
make patterns out of the patterns in the tiles.
the one side of the chair you keep
by the window in your room
that's more sunbleached than the other.
a number of words - all words
potentially - which after hours and hours
of stewing
have developed in your mind their own
connotations. now you have two secret
words that have moved in the same direction away from others.
you wait at the mall for some friends and until
they arrive, you endeavor to slip
into the wallpaper like a lamp,
ingressing into and violating it with
your wires and cords, only to release
your spores from a gorgeous bulb that people
only see when they look for it. you can
experience emotions again once your friends get there.
every room has a flow and you realized
a while ago that you move in the same direction
as the women. you don't know the extent
to which others can read the wind, though,
because you can't tell how well
they see currents.
every location you've slept at once
and only once.
sometimes you hear a straight tone waver,
or see a straight line sway, or feel
a straight board bend out of the way
of your hands, and you understand
everything is always moving, especially
the things that aren't moving.