A casual salutation
If you find yourself half naked and barefoot in the frosty grass, hearing, again, the earth's great, sonorous moan that says you are the air of the now and gone, that says all you love will turn to dust, and will meet you there, do not raise your fist. Do not raise your small voice against it. And do not take cover. Instead, curl your toes into the grass, watch the cloud ascending from your lips. Walk through the garden's dormant splendor. Say only, thank you. Thank you.
Ross Gay, Thank You
This poem paused my heart for a couple of beats when I came across it. I’m setting the bar too high following it with a couple poem-like species of my own. I’m trying to resist the temptation to editorialize too much about my verses though. Generally they will stand just as tall as they are regardless of the stature of other work. Meanwhile its worth a disclaimer about getting intimate with what I am putting down here, so excuse the overshareiness. It’s on-brand anyway (the feelings of it all) and is hopefully sufficiently abstracted to blur resemblances to real events and things.
Tickle, caress. Press against flesh. Stretching to stitch into taut freckled linen. Unzippering skin. Gently flaying rhythm, struck between push and release. Breath drawn in tight. Held. Jaws work. Teeth seek a knuckle to bite. Weld the seam. Nerves arrested, anticipating the sting. Pulses of recoil and longing. There is shelter in pain and warmth and purification. Too long undone and over too soon, a body acquires a taste for small agonies.
If you are put off, the subject matter for that one is just first-tattoo stuff, nothing prurient. This next one is a little cringy too, but mostly harmless. Just feelings and impressions. Insubstantial things. Unsubstantiated and uncorroborated. But an accurate evocation of how reality looks/looked from my peculiar perspective.
Words on paper help me move through these dissociative feelings and memories and to some extent come out more whole on the other side. And the snapshots leaf together into a flipbook whose story makes me understand myself better and maybe feel better understood.
An orientation in case you are not acquainted with the placename Ojai. How you pronounce it is like a casual salutation: “Oh hi.” The accent goes on the first syllable. OH! hi. This is important if you haven’t come across the word before, as the verses will land softer than they would with a bunch of hard “j” sounds rattling through them.
Ojai is a place I remember often and visit from where I sit, lie, and walk. Ojai is a home I had and never had. An impossibility and an illusion, Ojai is a haunting. A refuge I return to when I am sad, forgetting that it makes me sadder. Richly fragrant orange groves humming with busy pollinators. Near-ripe avocados on long branches draped over footpaths. Heavy sullen marine fog and also dry heat like a glowering kiln. Ojai is a failure. An occasion to which I couldn't rise. A mockery like an invitation lost in the mail. A dried riverbed etched with spits of round polished rocks, crusted in dust and shrouds of clinging algae. A meadow bursting with tiny frogs. Corrugated leaky plastic roof panels over shelves of moldy paperbacks. How to garden. How to ferment. How to heal the inner child. Cure illness with urine. Cure brokenness and broke-ness with self love and an abundance mindset. Ojai is cosplay for grownups. Millennials coming into inherited fortunes alongside retired actors and crypto capitalists, all dressed up for the Oregon Trail. Ojai is a winding road with blind corners, steep banks, and still-hot tire rubber streaks painted right up to the silent body of a dead rider. Washouts and road crews. Single lanes and detours. Ojai is blacktop and a black cat, content in the languid hours to torment bugs and lizards or, draped in cobwebs, recline on mulch under a bush of thorns and waxy leaves. Ojai is amnesia and a mirage that graciously grows distant when I try to draw near. A fading memory rezoned, redeveloped, paved over with fantasy and delusion. Arcades, colonnades, public parks and meadowlarks. A sanctuary aviary. Oat milk latte, hold the dairy. A playful place and not just a mausoleum. A bottle of hope stashed in the bottom of a backpack, to be uncorked when the journey has dragged on too long. Not just a burr in the saddle or the sole Ojai is confetti shot from a cannon. Ojai is kinetic. Ojai is still. Ojai is a mirror that shows me what's behind me, objects shrinking toward a receding horizon, while also giving me back my face. I'm dead now going on a year, sweet Ojai. My soul carried on trade winds to the farthest reach only now comes back to me, in the manner of dewdrops condensing on my cold body, seeping through my skin. And so I reconstitute from formlessness to the bounded shape of my flesh. In the reflection of Ojai I lock eyes with my eyes, am gifted with compassion for myself, and practice winking goodbye.
