Object Permanence

by Tucker Lieberman

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In dreams we turn and turn:

the first side, the reverse side,

the third side. Nothing tracks,

endings are restarts, beginnings forgotten,

middles outside time, items not recovered.

There’s always one event that can’t be undone,

a doubled meaning that can’t be unfelt.

Who were we before this puddle-rainbow

schism, this petrifying fear?

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We are made of dead ancestors:

their atoms, our hearts,

their voices, our lullabies,

their chaos, our ruin.

If there is order,

it’s in the grave we share,

and we can’t hear our names.

No one carves the stone.

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Sense howls in the cold.

We are mountains that swallow loss,

ancestral loss, tender loss, shattering loss, unblinking loss.

Logic is not cooking over the fire.

May the feast-bringer not deliver empty bowls,

may we stop swallowing air,

may the loss-bringer let us starve,

better starvation than grief,

may there be no more feasts of loss.

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Grief is a truth, a threat-haunted call of the wild.

A thing lost is personal,

yet the pack howls, all together,

more voices than mouths,

some voices from the same mourner.

We ask of what was lost, will it come back to us,

and it does not answer,

but grief answers

and asks if we will come back to ourselves.

With neither map nor library,

with howl and scent alone,

wolves find each other in the night.

Why can’t we, too? Still, here, searching?

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I remember what it was to see you.

The greater the distance, the more I feel you.

The longer the silence, the more I hear you.

I understand you are coming to life,

what ends is never gone,

the idea of you is made of heat.

There are levels of silence:

a twist where I expected an end,

a metamorphosis where I expected a meal.

The idea of you pulls away from my hand,

and you are ice and echo, the city is you, the abyss is you.

I fly over. Nothing between us,

nothing separating us, nothing binding us.

What is gone has taken flight.

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Calling out the undead names,

we speak with extra voices from the bushes.

An undead persists after declaring it will resign.

That’s all it is, a person

who doesn’t know when to quit,

a promise of an ending not fulfilled,

a pattern from the past still present.

Why do we cling to the world and its objects,

trees that dot the horizon,

our ideas, other people’s ideas, of what we are?

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Every ritual has fire and water,

lifting the undead in steam.

We will remember what we saw

at this fire-lit festival

as we remember who we were.