Lint
I have a little pocketful of your steadfast resolution
—Dara Barrois/Dixon
I have a little pocketful of your doubt
a pocketful of eyepatches
and smallest of your clocks,
soap from the soap maker,
beads for the prayer.
I have a little pocketful of your vision,
adoration, wayward paths,
your nebulae, seething
with unseen color, pocketful of
wind blown itself inside out,
a button, a mint, a saint, vitamin I
never took, a pocket
of ampersand, cash, and credit, keys
to the kingdom of hope in my
hand, in that dark, a pocket
of worry dolls, pebbles from the breach of
the river, seeds from your accident
of flowers and the bottom right corner
of a note from you
with all the ink rubbed off.
—Dara Barrois/Dixon
I have a little pocketful of your doubt
a pocketful of eyepatches
and smallest of your clocks,
soap from the soap maker,
beads for the prayer.
I have a little pocketful of your vision,
adoration, wayward paths,
your nebulae, seething
with unseen color, pocketful of
wind blown itself inside out,
a button, a mint, a saint, vitamin I
never took, a pocket
of ampersand, cash, and credit, keys
to the kingdom of hope in my
hand, in that dark, a pocket
of worry dolls, pebbles from the breach of
the river, seeds from your accident
of flowers and the bottom right corner
of a note from you
with all the ink rubbed off.
In My Last Life I Was A Looper Pedal
| I made every kind of sound that was given to me, and a few others by accident. All of it charged with the same directive. I was like a cassette that sounded like a lake. In fact I was a time lapse. An endlessly unraveling wave. Going out and coming back, the song’s constant arrival, rival to static, ally to cricket, waterway, speed of the jet, afterthought of the near world. Like the planet shook and still shakes the details from the trees. They called me birdsong, folk song, rock song sung in the round for so long. They called me old and I liked it. What love to go on feeling it, when it’s all already happened. They called me sound for sore ears, the one who responds to a plea. Or on the wing, because I was the boomerang, loon because crooning, all the way back. To the first day of summer, to the Gulf Stream that recycles water up and over the continent. The middle is the hardest place to be because the sound travels right over it, and it is the softest place because the sound happens all around it. To make or be made, intertwine, riverine. Water gone on. What love, still here. Made plain. Made more. Attended. Bereft. Attended. Bereft. Amidst, this middling, this ministering. Reverb had me changing slowly. Let me dissolve into days made of days, mornings of mornings. Consciousness was trying me, the opening and closing of those flower mouths, at midday flooded with light and at nighttime only memory. And so I returned to myself by natural causes. Hello again hello. Never meant to tell all this, to keep telling you. The air around the wires not shocked, just buzzing. This little space already already. No one saw me waiting. Like all beings I had a limited view. My own story sent out and back to me countlessly. Gone but not yet forgot as ever across the rippling water. Gathered and made, I then dispersed. Like anything said. Anything heard. Listen here. |
Julie Choffel is the author of The Hello Delay (Fordham UP) and most recently the chapbook The Inevitable Return of What We Do Not Love (Finishing Line Press, 2022). Born and raised in Austin, TX, she now lives near Hartford and teaches at the University of Connecticut.
I had been thinking about the many ways experiences stay with us over time, as traces or echoes. We accumulate selves and stories and even potential futures like sedimentary layers, not knowing how these layers will be altered all over again by other forces. And the list, as a form of imagining, allows us to be part of those forces.
I had been thinking about the many ways experiences stay with us over time, as traces or echoes. We accumulate selves and stories and even potential futures like sedimentary layers, not knowing how these layers will be altered all over again by other forces. And the list, as a form of imagining, allows us to be part of those forces.