A poem in response to “my body is a place, just like any other.” In the spirit of collaboration I wish to share Jade’s keen words with you:
my body too is a place, just like any other — flung across and through — unbound and evasive — I am thrown by but also with — I wish I could offer more to travel through — I give only these dashes — to move here — and there — as leaves, sand, metal pipes — those grains of the voice you translate with such care — and which I have flown past, unhearing until now — and now with so many planes to pass through and across — I am back at the beginning — shaking as your camera, buzzing as your window, cloudy effervescent and blue in hues I wish I could have dissolved into always — wishing to be a name strung in your sky’s opaque like the toffee fluff of June, a whole city looking up to its pastel pleasure —
and coasting this ocean we share — others join in flight — like Emily — who also wrote with dashes — who also catapults across skies — who also cracks through clouds — like that obscured other who rhymes in ear and heart (she is here too) — and in this azure, I too hear the fly — I too could not see to see — and stumbling into then — I find myself — here — there — and everywhere — because bird girls can fly — and you translate heaven in a way I want to be — and how else is there to translate the names of the voice in the sky but as care — so I thank you for this — for to lead a better life — I need my love to be here — in transit —
A few other collaborators:
- Roland Barthes, “The Grain of the Voice”
- A nursemaid, Rezia, Septimus, + Regent’s Park in Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (“So, thought Septimus, looking up, they are signaling to me. Not indeed in actual words; that is, he could not read the language yet; but it was plain enough, this beauty, this exquisite beauty, and tears filled his eyes as he looked at the smoke words languishing and melting in the sky […] / It was toffee; they were advertising toffee, a nursemaid told Rezia. Together they began to spell t … o … f … / ‘K … R …’ said the nursemaid, and Septimus heard her say ‘Kay Arr’ close to his ear, deeply, softly, like a mellow organ, but with a roughness in her voice like a grasshopper’s, which rasped his spine deliciously and sent running up into his brain waves of sound which, concussing, broke.”)
- Emily Dickinson, “I heard a Fly buzz — when I died —”
- Joni Mitchell, “Amelia”
- ANOHNI and the Johnsons, “Bird Guhl”
- The Beatles, “Here, There and Everywhere”
- Anyone else who has dared to take flight