Spring, the release of Minnesota
ice and snow, revealing a battered lawn and battered steps in front of the
house. Always loving the wrong woman. The mayor’s wife sleeping tousled by his
side—she’s the wrong woman tonight in this dream? Innocent, distant, tucked in
where she belongs. Unreachable. And then that last line about Jews being better
than us. Surreal dream elements tucked against one another, arranged like random
mementos in the poem’s lockbox. One could read the melting grip of winter as a metaphor
for the speaker’s healing—revealing wreckage, sure, but unthawed and now
repairable. Pining for uninterested, taboo women is a frozen, fruitless
preoccupation. The point of feelings like this is that our control over them is
limited. There is some, but it gets overwhelmed easily. Keep it to yourself and
it passes. Control your behavior, that’s all, which isn’t entirely at our
control either, but much more than our feelings. Feel what you need to and let
the feelings come and go like breezes hot and chilly, dream it out, keep the
mask of your persona orthodox and presentable and coherent on the outside. If
you’re a confessional poet, you write it and publish it, private breezes
sculpted into public forms, like a photograph snapped mid-sneeze. Someone asked
to set up his apparatus and take a photo of Crazy Horse, the Sioux leader, the
famed and feared warrior. “Would you imprison my shadow?” We had just one, now
a precious, miraculous second, photo of Emily Dickinson. How much more valuable
are those two pictures than the avalanche of film and digital imagery we
produce now? My son is a good guy, and was a good kid. We have—literally—thousands
and thousands of images of him, tucked in boxes in the closet, stored in our
laptops, on tiny chip cards that click into our cameras, that wind up forgotten
amidst the loose change, paper clips, fragments of paper, dust bunnies, and
lint balls under the bookshelves, kicked under the bed with the slippers and
that other sock we can’t find. We will never look at most of them again. We
have just as many of ourselves, our parents, our cats. Each one a Dream Song,
snapped and judged once, then flipped into boxes, under the bed, numbered and
lined up in a folder of stored electronic files. Each image imprisoning
momentary shadows, boxing up fragments of our spirits. Had we one image of
Crazy Horse, framed and revered by every Lakota, and every Lakota enemy forced
into admiration by the warrior’s wisdom and desperate ferocity, then he would
be ours to arrange. We could hang him on the wall, or behind history’s bars, or
tuck him in a box. Without that, he remains free. Crazy Horse made the right
call. Every snapshot jails a bit of our time, but with multiplication, the bars
become more and more fragile, more diaphanous and thin, so rather than weighing
us down they follow in the breeze of our passing like feathers sucked forward
and held in the slipstream of a truck. Our lives are no longer integral and
solid, because we need the flurry of images to define them. Our lives are like
clouds of weightless, imprisoned shadows, taking form like dust in a tornado, each
microscopic particle a separate dream-moment. We’re part of this planet and
will never leave it, but we’re abandoning our old-fashioned solid selves, boulders
in a field of boulders, obsessed now with crushing ourselves into finer and
finer particles—sand, then dust, then mist, then a gas—and we mix into the
broad, light atmosphere, focused and weighty as cirrus clouds.
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