Becoming seems to flicker—


A coat of holes, a sieve, and
the art of passing through.




Here, that stuck light. Here, that snared limb.
Does a throat or a bone or a muscle learn to trust?

Does everybody feel that? that right there? and that?
Hey, everybody.

I yawn during the video “Relieve Stress | Soft Qigong for Your Daily Routine.” I cannot catch my breath. My throat is a clenched bud.
Pause! 

I search why do I yawn during qi gong, why can’t i breathe, and diagnose myself with liver stagnation.
Wrap my throat in something my mother did. Something my father’s father did beneath the North Sea.

Imagine how frigid, beneath the sea. Your grandfather stagnating in Scotland’s mine. His heart all dark
and the canary down there, too. Lantern shadows. There he digs with his tender thoughts, the layered darknesses like feathers creating holes.

Oil slits. Dark and ancient cracks, liquid bodies coating the deep down world.
Mine-body, sieve and seal.
Becoming seems to flicker.

Toward becoming:
Be/hold the Northern flicker quivering in your palm. Run your finger over his coat of holes.
Feel the curve of slicing, soapstone talons in the meat of your hand. They could kill or crumble.
The holes are perforated by individual feathers that gather and become. Like lost pieces that found each other.
What is a piece of a hole? 

And what passes through the flicker’s heart holes as he flies? 
He rains that feeling down over the whole world. Or, at least, over his path from Canada to California. 
He lets that path of world hold the energy spilling from his chest. And his light spreads. That thick yellow light.
Does everybody feel that? that right there? and that?

Hey, everybody.
I want to know if our pains match, flick, flicker, and light up.

Clarice Lispector wrote crônicas for the the Jornal do Brasil. Seven years, every week a new self/sieve.
My self is the story of every other self, I think. There’s a tunnel between
what I think and what I believe. Something dark slips through in the night. The writer-ancestor speaks.

But flickers cry the cry that is not their own. Their mimicry is built of six-hundred-year-old dramas and of diving beasts,
of chittering and clashing bones.

In the self an oil pools, liver and throat. It is your ancestor. It is your animal body.

The flicker’s self stumbles out of air. A mesh of scattered light, each feather
toothed with the beginnings of holes. This invader. This outsider.  

He tells a story that filters through the air and lands in all places. It is a story
you already know. It is a story splayed with oil and hollow bone.
The vulnerable animal-spilling of time. 

Yours is the same. Yours is the lantern that coats the mine in shadows. The space beneath the sea glows.