A M R i n g w a l t —

from BECAUSE

because

it man

because it

means

because an

entity or

a screen

because a

sinew be-

cause a

synapse

because

there’s no

synopsis

someone’s

situation

because I am

or I long to be

because

very not

because

people say

this and

all also

because we

like it out

there you see

A wheelchair at a storm door to watch the deer.

They look right at us. You smile and say hello.

Headlights turn on from across the street—a pick-

up truck backpedals slowly. You worry about

the deer, our friends, you tell me my parents’ dog

is my sister. I haven’t yet sang Antony for you,

a voice that is and moves. Something about dreams.

You ask me to write and you fall asleep and are

sleeptalking. This is our collaboration. Your daughter’s

dogs have settled, soothed by the cadence of your voice

and the trust it assigns to me. I tell you about Lamu,

music on Saturdays. I could tell you about the Norwegian

heiress or the tortoise eating leaves off of a porcelain

plate. I could tell you about a man who changed his

name to Satan and asked me to play his guitar.

I took a photograph there, on my phone, on a speedboat

before we dashed across the inmost harbor of the Indian

Ocean. I sang as I played Satan’s guitar. It was Karen Dalton’s

“Reason to Believe.” My friends told me that my voice

sounded like crying. And then I swam in the pool with Kelsey

while Ajith flirted with a girl from nearby who also sang

for us all. Our swimming was a ceremony for my life

bursting apart and becoming anew. Or, my swimming

had nothing to do with the idea of me. As time flits about

I’m stunned by memory, these impressions of another version

of my body stuttering through time and space. My friend

Emma. A ring I removed from my left hand as we sat

on the beach. But I’m thinking about the boat, still, the boat

that I saw but didn’t ride on. Painted onto the interior

was the line: Love if you want to be loved. Now the photo

of the boat is taped to my bedroom wall. M. and I text

about our paces and urgencies in letting ourselves be

known, how it slows with time, how the project of

knowing can unfold and may be an impossibility.

I return to a song called "Spectacle of Ritual”

and I write when the sun’s gone down.

The language of causality. My glasses break in half

down the middle and can’t be fixed. I wore these glasses

with my mother in New Mexico, tracing the dried out

sinews of a creek. Our footprints would be washed away

with the next rain. There was one lone white flower in

the ground, a primrose. Before this, I spoke with a man

in a pawn shop about onyx, how his son has been killed

in Gaza, how his son’s wife has moved on. He encouraged

her to keep loving. This is the project of a life. I remember

Trish, years ago, telling me

that if I’ve injured my feet twice—my right toe, cut on

the edge of a chest; my left toe, I’ve already forgotten—

that I need to pay attention.

An injury repeated means there’s something to learn.

I write this sentence in an essay on John Clare:

living bears the risk of becoming one’s own stigma,

and yet life itself remains relevant. We are a people

preoccupied with justice. We talk around and around it

until it can’t be found. We find language to define and

describe us but it falls short when there’s weeping, when

we’re sick and no medicine works. I take four antibiotics

until my doctor tests for the right one. Something about

thousands of dollars. I watch a reel on Instagram.

A young woman proclaims that doctors are cops.

She says—let me know what you think.

.