Charon
It was the early part of afternoon, late summer
when you texted me that you had buried Jojo
and since I knew already that her jaw was dissolving
I was not surprised and went to sit down with all the wildflowers
so I was, too, as close to Earth as we could get.
The grasses were tall and itchy and Jojo had died,
the soil felt cool in my nails, a peaceful and winterish trace from the ‘end of the world,’ the climate was different,
there were too many flies and also the burrs stuck less urgently.
Jojo was a cat, and just as long as she was living
we were all yet conflating being alive and being matter,
still disinterested in which of these was grounding our awareness
but now we need to have a stance, and for my part in Jojo’s life I picked the latter.
It was under the sign of the Earth, then
that I sat and could loosen my shirt and its stickiness,
that who Jojo once was and whoever I will be could speak
and make meanings and watch as the puff-balls would ripen.
For it had to be under the sign of the Earth because none of the stars would do,
because each of the stars has its own place on Earth if you follow your finger down radially,
and whose meaning could die as the finger reached zero,
in any small town with a main street and creeks.
As the blowing of flowers decayed towards the night, I was watching
for the moment to come when my sign, too, would wrinkle and shutter
but no moment came, and the moment was nighttime,
and the sign of the Earth had no orientation and no gravitaxis, and at first it was matter.
As far as signs go, anyway, it was true, since I noticed,
I have carried this clearing where I sat to that spot,
I bring this ‘there’ with me, unabashed and cool,
there was nothing ‘at hand’ and my mind though it wandered was wandering already, could be no more ‘at odds’ than a story could fail,
and as far as it goes, then, this Sign is no star
can’t be farther or nearer, mark no Thing nor the Dead
but rather the field where I sat was entangled with purples and whites of late summer
and the crunching of stems under frogs, and a late summer fog.
I had brought my knees close, at some point, and my toes had splayed out,
and some friends came to mind, as they typically do, we’d be cooking
or walking at dawn and the question would come, we usually deferred,
we were limited then by our insistence on life in the same way that children are freed in some way when they no longer need to refer to the pictures in books.
Jojo had once been ‘there,’ and we had shared a world in common,
these are the basins from which the twin sciences, younger than she was, need nourish; the people need know!
and beyond, they need realize, our Earth is to Charon as our stories to meaning,
that the latter is cold, inhospitable, far, and they settle invisibly deep into orbit,
but nowhere unlinked, and the truth is that Charon is small, as far as we know,
but as far as we don’t, its pubescent hills shade lakes of pure phosphorus, on the banks of which someone could sit
and look out towards the brilliant sky, unscattered by air, a perpetual dusk, where the sun
is too distant to break open language, so it sits with you gnarled and warped but completely relaxed,
and its words haven’t yet struck their chisels in deep or conspired to separate Things,
and life isn’t yet more than half-enclosed proteins, just thermally wiggling
teasing the entropic cost of an ‘inside’ and ‘out,’ not knowing enough to be wary of Being towards falling-apart
which already heartsplit asunder this clearing in two: a concern, which is some way of being ahead of yourself, and a mood in which somehow you’ve already been.
How much more than meaning are we born to be,
and how composite are these pools in which we posit meaning steeps?
I stand at the counter, crushing coffee beans with a wooden spoon,
or dunk my head in a creek trickling behind a parking lot
and my Jojo had died, so some part of my life is cut off now,
and the winters aren’t cold enough to charge with static difference from the summer
meaning’s amber whiskers, which usually are sensitive to stories such as this one,
they twitch when owls quiver in a loft somewhere upstate, they twitch when leeches wrack and roll their way from mud to someone’s ankle,
it's not that the ‘trail has gone dead,’ but a science is newborn, ecology, which already takes the isolate ‘trail’ as suspect,
refuses to leave as primordial Charon, refuses to work in the shade of its shadow,
and in each case its sister, metaxy, seeks to repair from its blazing this trail,
lets grow up all its grasses, untended but cared for, so the coffee beans and creek can slowly, like dew, coalesce on the tips of the wings of repatriate crickets.
In a way, where I lay was a graveyard, a place where the already-dead can alongside
awareness inhabit, that ‘nowhere’ which gathers composure when we restrict ourselves to ‘living subjects’ in a ‘space’ that measures place,
that ‘unfilled’ exterior night whereto we shooed the little bats who crept along the heat of burning periodicals into the landing,
the spasmodic flights of whom already we excluded to the place for ‘animals,’ set aside somehow, tangential to the Dead,
but in their limbs and in their vast expressions, we keep some hidden correspondence,
the shocking recognizability we also use to speak with Angels, though here again our disrepute among the creatures helps to keep them out the landing,
and into the clearing we’ve left, ‘having been there,’ though by shooing the bats I supposed I had saved them somehow
from disaster—being cut off from their star—I was swiping the air with a dishrag, at that point I was still altogether composed,
this was all after I sat with my Jojo, but not too long after, and certainly not long enough to have worked out
the rules of this feeling, for instance, in ethics, the golden rule now took the same form as Newton’s action-reaction,
that it now was a physics, and then could be taken to continuum limits, where a fluid was to particles as this was to neighbors,
but I was just a young student, and my cat was just buried, and I was convinced that my life had expended some certain amount of its meaning by then.