27. Saint Thomas Aquinas
for Claudia Hoffman
Part One
I wasn’t present. This isn’t what I expected. A sudden tickle in the ears and a sharp ringing. A pressure in my gut. Here I am. I am here now. No need for the televisions and newspapers. Like poetry, they withhold the things they can’t carry.
You’re crying.
Part Two
The essence of it is connecting, but nearly any connection is possible. Dots connect because they were made to do so. Letters the same way, and sentences, and again any arbitrary configuration of shapes, distances, and geological features. And if one dot is particularly large and anonymous: make it bigger, the biggest, the tallest, the most impressive, then it is an event. At least for a week or two.
Who knows an event?
The dots still connect at that scale, but the lines between them collapse and all of the grit collected in traveling from one to the next disappears, even if you read about it. The lines are drawn and erased as you follow along, like watching the ocean smooth away the beach.
From a distance, from up in a helicopter or from the comfort of a leather chair, survival is a given. It’s a requirement. You can’t be in the middle of a transformation and see how breathtaking it is. We want to lose our breath to get it back.
For everyone thousands of miles away, trauma makes a mess of that pleasure. Events can go anywhere we aren’t. We send encouraging words instead — enchantments with arms stretched forward and a good conscience.
It’s a magical thing at the right angle. The right angle is always far enough away for magic.
Seeing is a lonely sense.
Part Three
It smelled a certain way. I don’t remember the heat at all, except that it was a hot month. I think it was hot all the time. That morning, though, camp firewood and acrid rubber, something coarse in the light. It could have been anything.
Then, I turned the corner and I could see the wall of brown smoke. “Like a mushroom cloud,” I thought, only it was shaped like the sky and torn leather.
Shake our heads. Expression of disbelief. “What a nightmare” someone says. Well, I won’t mention that the sky was orange to the west and blue everywhere else. The smell went away at night, too, behind the valleys and hills. The mountains did as much work as forgetting required.
There was one bad day, okay, bad enough to stay inside and worry about where we would go if it climbed over the pass and into the neighborhoods. There’s only one highway east or west. Only one highway north or south, and everyone would want them simultaneously. Walls everywhere you looked.
But a lot of my fear is half-remembered; I can write about it without feeling it in my body. And I was so close.
Part Four
In hindsight, the first time was a novelty. What a place filled with so much kinetic energy. And flowers! “Something still grows here despite all the concrete and fuel.” Webs everywhere. The unrelenting spread of gray and brown stone and miles of cable tumbling toward nothing. Nothing most people want, anyway.
The city happens. Has happened, and keeps growing unfamiliar as it pushes. Isn’t it claustrophobic? Living with the noise and so close to people you don’t know and “I hope it sinks into the ocean.” It plays the villain and the inscrutable mess and the scene of historic turbulence; usually much more and less than a trip to the grocery store and traffic cameras; or the homeless sleeping in the underpasses . Before I tried it, no one mentioned the pineapple.
The bowl spills over and everyone east of the divide claps. Probably everyone east of the county. More fun to see the events culminating in a moral lesson; easier to make it stand still. Everywhere is a narrative with a beginning and middle. Everywhere is close to finished.
The second time is a delayed horror. Someone wakes up in December and discovers the life of it, happening now, without the chance to speak. “Prepare for the worst. Pack your things.” Hope that the way out is breathable and cool. The wind is an obstacle, not a relief, and with every minute the distance is folded again and again and again until it is every place at once. You are there.
The repetition makes you new, but not because you have reached a summit. That’s another event. You haven’t moved at all. You have been moved and now we are moving together.
Part Five
Then came the tightness through my heart. It spread up my arms and into my neck where it finally seized those pitiful images and tore them away. Like a transparent sheet that changes the color of the place. You can’t see it until it’s been removed.
Part Six
“I was afraid. They lost so much. It’s gone.” I didn’t know anyone who had been afraid until just then. Had I even thought of fear? The refrain was one event after another, one frame in trillions of them. Unrelenting time.
But a new street is a new street. An accumulation of little movements and private thoughts. I cried in the shower, played a game on the balcony as the sun set. I won’t forget that sky on that night in those conditions with those thoughts in my mind. Like I was somewhere.
What was it that came through the window that night with the moon? We may not remember ourselves, but I was with the moon and the trees and the folds of the curtains. I was with my neighbors.
When we move, what is repeated? And how? We are there every time. Is the rest just trees and earth and the temperature of the place?
Part Seven
It’s as if the conflagration reminds us: you are here for a while, then elsewhere if you are lucky. Even then, you can’t depend on being somewhere. You can’t depend on being. To be in it. For something to be around. What is it that is in this place, wherever we go?
I hadn’t thought of fear. What a remarkable event to have forgotten that. A spectacle.
You’re crying. You were there and stayed. It won’t be the same without you. It wasn’t a place before you made it one.
I hadn’t thought about fear even once. A place.
We are here.
It is good to have friends.
I am publishing my book of poetry, Place Like Home (or), one poem at a time. This is poem number 27. You can find more on my Medium page and here at The Junction. Thank you for reading.
