RIN A S C E N T E _

[rinascente]

Here I am spinning again. A stone in a whirlpool, small and solid with unease turning, sinking, craving for a surface to land on. Any surface. The way old feelings become familiar friends- the piercing scent of anxiety, the hard embrace of apprehension. So much history between us, and I brace myself for the slow impact of submersion.

I become the skin of a drum, a serpent, a writhing palpitation of ferric tape winding my way to melodious calm. Deep breaths. One rectangle at a time. The quicksand is in my centre and it is falling into me. A sensation of swallowing something that expands to absorb me into its own soft vacuum. Air pressing against me, out of me, condensing me.

I am spinning below the surface amidst the weight of the sand. Singed and fractured by every uncertainty. Let the tape run its course. When the matrix reforms I am returned to where I belong. Eddying waters and swelling sands, nightmares burned away by the sun. As advised I turn to page xxii, reaching for my words.

-

[rinascente]

snow

He wakes into a rare moment of clarity, sensing everything around him a way he hasn't in a long while. The shard of winter daylight on the wall, a wool blanket crumpled under his hand and the most familiar whiff of jasmine, so soft and so sweet, flowing up his nostrils to rest somewhere behind his eyes. He blinks slowly as his mind wakens, corners of it rolling and extending in turns, with his body still he basks in the energy of whirring neurons.

He can see that it had been snowing. There’s the foamy roll of snow resting on the window ledge, and the strange flat clearness of the air visible even through the window. He feels rather warm. The heater must be on and someone, whoever it may be, is taking care of him on this frigid day. His mind twists on itself, an old cat stretching its limbs after a long nap, preparing for action- now where is the jasmine and why are there pangs in his chest?

He leans forward and peeks through the window.

The street below is a canal of soft cream with the tops of cars reflecting the dove-grey sky. He feels such an intense bout of delight that he started, trying to stand up and push aside the glass. His heart feels strong as a sail brimming with salted air yet he sees his hands trembling in front of him, senses the fragility in his bones. He is confused, for an instant, before realising that none of this matters. None of it matters because today is the day!

Today is the day he meets her for the first time, today he asks her to have coffee with him, today he tells the silly story and stutters- ruining- absolutely ruining a perfect moment and it is today, so he must go now. He turns with some effort to look at the clock on the wall. Seven minutes to put on a jacket and dash down the stairs. He knows he can do it, he's done it before, he just needs to find the big blue jacket. Right now.

It's only when the hands arrive on his shoulders that he notices the fallen cup on the floor, poised perfectly above a spreading stain. The hands are speaking soft words, soothing him, while he feels his limbs rattling like loose keys in a pocket. He needs the blue jacket! But he is being lifted by other faceless hands, cocooned in bedsheets on a small bed, and why? Why is he not upright and rushing through the snow? Why is he not making jokes with her, hoping she likes him maybe a little bit, in his wet shoes and the edges of him darkened by melting snow?

Who owns the white hands stroking his own, wafts of jasmine bringing him closer to her but not her? The skin on his hands have lost their softness so long ago, he can almost hear the rustling of aging cells, chafed and floating into the ether. He remembers holding her jasmine-scented hands, softer than a dream, the day they first met and then a long, long time afterward, when she drifted from this life into the next.

He feels himself fading inside the husk of this body, whoever thought a long life is a blessing is an abject fool. Look at him now! Heavy with loss and numb as a log of petrified wood. His eyes and his mind flutter to a halting close while the hands smooth over his bedcovers, leaving him to another dreamless sleep.

In his last moment of lucidity he gives himself a silent wish- to be outside, free, buried beneath the memory of this snow day with her.

-

[rinascente]

dusk

In the late summer dusk she is wistful as always, perhaps more so than any other time of the year. What is it about the golden hour of the day that brings on this amalgamation of sorrow and hope and a small madness, because after reflecting on the day's passage there comes the realisation that this is yet another day departed. The desperation to claw back a sun that has already set, to release the dread in her chest and rush at the gathering dusk, to part the midnight of blue darkening all that is around her.

She finds this to be the best time for journalling. Nothing other than the movement of her hands and the gushing of her words could possibly soothe her at a time like this. She writes with fervour fuelled by the fear of time lapsing, or morphing with the same predictability of the waxing moon floating outside.

She stands outside facing the last of the fire for this day, her room behind her and the surrounding bushland fading into the first shades of night. The envelope holding her words sealed and dated as she breathes in the last of the warmth and dust of day, wishing herself peace for this night and luck for the next day.

Her hands bring the envelop to her lips. A spark from her throat catches the paper and she watches as the red flame bloom and waver. She leaves it floating where she had stood. The burn of her words and the light of her magic. Her very own sun- if only for a few seconds.

-

[lifeinpoetry]

I yearn for names tethered to time however frayed they might be. What does a choir of former lovers sound like at night? Weren’t their short and shallow breaths hymns in my name?

— Ruben Miranda-Juarez Jr, from “Names: Recollections from a Borrowed Social Security Card.” published in Rigorous

[rinascente]

The idea that out there, somewhere, a weird, wild world awaited. A world that fit people of all sizes, where everyone was normal because nobody was.

Tessa Fontaine, The Electric Woman.

[superheroesweare-blog]

[heteroglossia]

“I have sometimes thought that a woman’s nature is like a great house full of rooms: there is a hall, through which everyone passes, going in and out; the drawing room, where one receives formal visits; the sitting room, where members of the family come and go as they list; but beyond that, far beyond, are other rooms, the hands of whose doors are perhaps never touched; no one knows the way to them, no one knows whither they lead; and in the innermost room, the soul sits alone and waits.”

— Edith Wharton, The Ghost Stories

[rinascente]

You eat fire by eating fire.

Tessa Fontaine, The Electric Woman.

[sustancy]

[rinascente]

I reach the mountain at mid-afternoon, rain floating about the ferns and mountain ash, the road black and sinuous. At any other time driving into the green would've felt like dancing, but today my hands grip the steering wheel as my ears pop and I feel the damp air rushing through the vents to touch my face, my neck, my hair.

At the end of the evening I am tired from being polite and stay in my chair to savour the solitude of boredom. My eyes follow disco lights chasing the white of the wall beside me. For a few moments I am the wall behind a drop-cloth, feeling the fullness of my being in this imaginary space. True solitude is a place where I do not need my lungs, where breathing is obsolete- here the air and the light flow into me. Here my being brims over the outlines of my body and I am whole and free and perfect.

In the depth of the evening I start my way home. Night in the mountain is dark the way that the surburbs are never. Organza mist hang in the curves of the road and my mind moves in directions quicker than thoughts themselves. The drive home feels like one cutscene after another, from the twilight zone of the muted mountain to the empty suburban arterial then the onslaught of headlights on the freeway. And I feel strangely less alone on my own than I had been in that crowded room. 

Perhaps it's the exhaust, damp air and the remnant of my own perfume that is holding me, grounding me into this earth. 

-

[rinascente]

I travelled in a city bathed in the eternal blue light of predawn. A city of buildings with empty windows, barren streets and narrow stairs falling and rising in sync with its skeletal foundations.

I carried with me all the weight of my being- the chains, cogwheels, shells and long-lost meteorites. The burden and treasure of me. I carried them the same way the ocean carried its waves, a tree its fruit, an animal its bones, the sun its rays. It is everything I am, I had been and I am yet to become. And I embrace this extension of me, this definition of me, this refraction of me.

But I was wrong.

When the time came and the wandering ended, this weight that grounded me and held me alighted from me and transformed. The chains are wings, cogwheels an engine and the shells whistled in my hair as I took flight, while meteorites returned home to the starless sky.

I rose above this city that had been home and prison in equal parts and I floated into a soft, true dawn blossoming, minute by patient minute, into petals of feather-light clouds.

-

[rinascente]

The expression on his face is frank and wonderful. It's an expression with bones of its own.

Lisa Taddeo, Three Women.

[rinascente]

During lockdown I read time from the minute hand only. I watch days passing in increments of 10 minutes, quarter-pasts, twenty-to's. Sometimes I wait for it to move to that spot where it aligns with a clock marking before I start what I'm about to do. When I'm not looking at the clock I tell the time from the windows. The sun blaring against the neighbouring block of flats, the patch of sky above the fence, a glare so bright I can't see my own eyes in the mirror, the shadows of trembling branches imprinted on my bedroom wall. I look at the different slices of the same sky and decide for myself which season it is outside of these four walls.

By accident I read something I wrote a long time ago. I'd forgotten that it was probably my best piece, how much I loved it because I felt for once that I had captured the sliver of a moment exactly as I wanted. Now I feel miles away from the person I was then. I remember the intense confusion, the lostness, of being in a mind where every one of my nerves was bare and exposed. Feeling the friction of every minute glide over me.

Time is now an immovable embrace. I feel myself enclosed in its silent gentleness, its forgiveness. The softness of it, surrounding me, is entirely different from its former corrosive coarseness. I sit beside a kitchen smelling of freshly baked muffins and feel perfectly content in this moment of time.

-

[huong1952]

“I remember you as you were in the last autumn. / You were the grey beret and the still heart. / In your eyes the flames of the twilight fought on. / And the leaves fell in the water of your soul.”

— Pablo Neruda, from “I Remember You as You Were,” Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, trans. W. S. Merwin (Chronicle Books, 1993)

[rinascente]

#7

These are the days where my imaginings take me to the years of golden laughter. I feel light as a breeze flowing through the tree-tops. A bird sailing in the air on endless wings.

[rinascente]

The only thing that truly wakes me is sunlight.

Rays fall into the window, the smear of rain-pattering leaves, then a gentle stain of beginnings spreading next to me. Touching but never touching me until I wake, as usual, as though I’d never slept again. The briefest moment I need to recognise myself again.

I think about the day I wandered off, often, every now and again, when I hold a glass without playing with it, tonight and maybe some more tomorrow too. I can’t know where to put my fingers, where it is or which part of it wandered off first. I think it was my hands. Yes. I think back to a point in the blur where my hands were lost when I found my hands.

I pushed aside these and used my hands for those instead. I chose to make and chose not to create. When my hands lost their lines the same way mountains lose their veins I too was lost in the feelings of found.

But my hands were home. Attached. Cooperative. Synchronised with the rest in a place where hands belonged and twisted and turned and wove their own ways. I followed my un-mine hands and meandered my way into something I’ve always wanted that I’ve never wanted.

For the remainder of the mornings I do what I always do without knowing that I am lying in wait. I lie about waking, etching lines into faded scars to pass the time and I lie, lie, lie.

-

[ruegracieuse]

“I think sometimes I am not a woman, but the light that falls on this gate, on this ground. I am the seasons, I think sometimes, January, May, November; the mud, the mist, the dawn.”

— Virginia Woolf, The Waves  (via mirroir)