Fig Tree
Here we are again: the next decision, the next articulation of experience:
Geography, employment, climate, interpersonal network.
The details that suggest texture but amount to air.
The given, not the made.
Untextured grief, untextured loneliness, untextured sighs, aimless city walks, looking, looks.
What does the self need, then:
To root. To deepen itself.
You are already a ripening fig, why this urge still yet to choose?
——
Not that you would reinvent your life each second, but that you could.
How many lives do we get to live?
What happened at the beginning, that first major intersection: back in NYC,
Back from school, fallen out of school, dropped like a squashed-up napkin,
You did not choose to walk in that direction, you wandered there, then
Stayed. Not because you wanted to stay
But because others wanted to decide who stayed. If you decided anything,
You decided to be valuable in the context at hand. To be desired.
Not to be seen, but to be desired, yes. Being desired brought with it
Money, a social context, eventually a sublet apartment with pork sausages for dinner,
A kind of life. Apparent texture, but just the air.
——
In the morning before the feet touch the floor your mind reaches for things, then
As if you pass a boundary, the rest of your day is detached from its primary concerns.
You manage to live beautifully in front of what needs your attention.
Do you know what I mean?: this morning, whether to move to _____ ,
If you would fail yourself, or disappoint friends, by not going:
Constantly the shape of the life, its arc, the trajectory the same bleak—:
Sympathy fatigue, your teacher says. Do I apologize? We are of this same world.
Tomorrow morning things will be the same, or different.
The strategy of self-evasion persists.
You turn to look the decision in its face: and where the answer would be, smoke.
You cut through it and the when you see is nearly never now, the where nearly never here.
An evaluation of the present-moment circumstance as dictated by an imagined future
Dictated by an interpretation of the past.
In recent years you have listened to the projected future, I think, trusting in
The life of “poet”—that feeling of watching the poet movie—and if you want to try something new
You will ignore the projection: will that make new projections?
Stay where you are, make your way day by day, they tell us: honor the day by day, process.
What does process look like? I can’t see it.
——
The figs on Plath’s fig tree ripen. The malnourished self is the one not chosen.
When the body the self is inside of dies, the earth receives its energy,
Recycles its energy.
——
The trustworthy mate in London says, I think poetry is real for you,
I just don’t think you’ve found your freedom there yet.
As years later you still extend into the space of poems the same
Automatic impulse to reject what feels authentically your own
That you lose sense of what is your own
In service of being more agreeable, or more worthy of praise, or approval, or even
In service of “improving” by learning, but from folks who cannot, or will not, see you.
As I type,
You see how these words connect to “On the Overnight from Agadir,” a poem in this same book,
And for a long second, envision extending that poem into a book-length poem.
The projection sits behind a veil of should.
As if where you sit is less real than what your mind sees while you sit. Less you.
In this should, the other poems that exist around Agadir become their own later book, and this version,
This chronology of your work, emerges while you are at _____ in _____, a container
Legitimate enough, externally approved, but nearly neutral, void of the energy
You presume the True Self carries, or how the only choice that’s “right” indicates itself.
And what you experience then as an anxiety is about Safety. Safer. The psyche does try
To protect you, to protect itself, from the original wound:
You say, I am—and the world answers, You are not—
——
Race is fiction, naturally. Biologically, I mean.
I am trying to say something about interdependence, which I don’t believe in.
It implies separateness, which is false. I am trying
To say something about being varied expressions of the very same thing. The very same.
——
How to decide: that is the lesson of the neck.
If your desirability is the rubric, and not your desire, you shift and flicker. A quilt of nothing your own.
You trust language to carry me to where you reside. You can’t say why.
The lesson obvious, familiar in a collective sense, but in this particular mind distant
Or the distance is between the mind, which understands, and the spirit, which ...
I try to talk my way there. I grow exhausted, my interlocutors grow exhausted.
Reader, you, too, yes? Sympathy fatigue, a teacher called it.
Isn’t this life, its materials, yours, too. This story, your story.
We need you to make meaning with these words, to have meaning at all. You there.
——
The speaking is consequence and agent.
If it helps you find your way there, it may help you find your way lost.
It is its own moment, its own space.
——
You attempt to find all consequences to each possible decision. You see
Nothing above the x-axis of emotion or experience. (-X, -Y ) is the necessary point of arrival.
The only point of arrival you see as possible. What you see before Morocco is
Exactly what finds you there—not the bus, but the aimless city walks, the looking, the looks.
The lesson is to know the way into your own you.
No light. No assistance. No trees.
——
How to be free and safe at once then?
A place not governed by the desires, the whims, the rules of Others.
Freedom is no fear, Nina Simone says.
What you believed about yourself is what others believed about themselves refracted through you.
As soon as the gaze of another enters your language, your language ...
Is this why it is so hard at times to speak. About the groceries, the silly story about Saturday night.
E— fills in your sentences with questions that are plot and not color.
He doesn’t understand you lose the self whose language offers the story, its vernacular.
To ask how many languages you speak is to ask how many selves exist inside you.
If our wishes can change suddenly, freedom must be existing wherever here is.
The time-place we know to be given, the one we can count on until we can’t count on it.
You have lived between a reading of the past and versions of the future.
Your now is never actual, your language anachronistic to itself.
——
In a dream you help a student in your shared office at _____: the student has not been helped
By the person you share the office with:
You change her life, she says, she can’t believe what you’re saying to her:
The guy across from you equalizes by making a joke about how you don’t matter at _____.
You cut it down with the quickness: that familiar feeling of having to correct someone
Who believes they understand your situation, or projects their own view of you onto you:
You keep it moving. We’re late for a class that we are TA s in.
You don’t know where to sit. You move to a row that’s empty, except for at the end.
