We are speaking and singing with pigeons and grasses and rooftops,
with paintings and choruses and a deep robust voice, we are flicking on and off
within a series of squares. We are rearranging in a contained universe
and when we join like links in a chain, like a series of notes, we are moments lost
or moments the senses only recreate.
Look at this box, look at this pixel of light,
walk with me. Beneath my boot you will last, as I press the link,
your voice will echo through the recording, your tinny violin, your speakering yawp,
your volume raised. Recite me and I shall be your eyebrow or womb. Recite me
and I shall conspire with you in a scenery of rooms. Watch a rearrangement happen
and watch a mouth open and a hand abandon itself at the wrist.
Gestures create a mimicking of a clock and time is a thimble we do not fit inside
and we spill from the months like a jeer. Two voices are an echo frying in a pan,
two voices are a bird’s extended wings. We are speaking and singing with a room like a voice
and a stark mouth and no one will knock at our door. And I am alone inside my headphones
and I am alone inside my airpods, and you can join me but you also cannot, and I wave at you
through my window and my voice is a place we will meet, layered with memory and grief,
until the metronome blinds are drawn.
We are acting as subjects in a city, or role, speaking from throats
that it does not belong to, speaking from cobblestones that close around us. Welcome us,
we are walking. Welcome us. It takes a single wheel to contain us here at home.
I am watching the same kinds of people that are on a screen. I am being one of the people
that are on the screen. What I do alone I do together. What I hear in the isolation
I see flash up as a sound on a lake or a face saying its amen or saying its name.
I notice your hairline. I notice your collar, I notice your sweater. The world is full
of people speaking. I see the chips in your teeth, I see your guitar strings strum.
How many hours in a room make the light of that room a prison’s light. How many
blinds closed are hopings. Sadness has its cello or its bird body on the sill. Sadness
has its mantel gathering dust. Sadness waves its handkerchief, its hieroglyphic
of vegetation barely grown as we are numb even in our blissful response. I think about
the body of a project. I think about its grave. I think about the press of strings
to make a note as the purpose of a hand.
If you are an actor, what is a word in the mouth. The words are a backdrop.
The words are visual the way a minute is visual and all its wheel is a film.
A fish is a helicopter, a bridge is a bird. People not speaking while voices are heard.
A forehead wrinkling is a tree’s trunk wrinkling.
One man is a shadow crossing rippling pavement. One is a sparse grass growing up
between square stones. Our teeth are stones and I see them clenching or grinding,
and what is this sound of many? What is this sound of some? What is it in our paths
that cross and cross as our churches empty of their star-crossed lovers, as we cross
an ocean or perhaps grow cross. Do not crowd and do not shout. There is enough silence:
we can fill it with the pouring of a pitcher. There is enough alone in a single occupied room.
We sit outside several feet apart and do not touch.
Do you know the mapping that is in a touch?
Do you know the lanterns that are in a touch?
I hear you cry out. I hear so many cry out.
I am only the sparse grass growing up between a few square stones.
Ivy leaves shaking on their vine. We are all the leaves on a single vine.
Do not let your flute mistake you for the power of an exhalation, do not let
the ball of your thumb grow coarse and calloused from the plucking of a string,
do not shake on the vine. Simply take in sun, simply grip so that no one
can easily tear you away. It is a microphone that hears you and magnifies
or focuses your voice. It is headphones that create quiet for others
when sound is too much. Juxtapose outside and inside and twenty small squares.
The color of your hair is a universe. The opening of your lips is a sea. Side by side
you are not together, your isolation is a thread the world weaves with its spinning wheel
as we watch and watch and sing. The rim of your glasses and the gap in your teeth:
O humanity living while illnesses exist. A frenzy of shoreline, a billowing of wheat,
how the feathers of ourselves body and unbody, how the bodies of ourselves brood before
a tree trunk or spruce, how a cello can mellow the least of us from our moods and a violin
celebrate and all our selves bathing and bliss and all our selves spraying and sprightly
and then. Melancholy a mood, a doom of too much sun or a staircase running upward like a voice.
Life is our bridegroom. We walk the aisle but the aisle now is but a panorama of rooms, but
the aisle now is inside our eye as it moves from one to the other, look, the way a body must look
unseeing because its vision is touch untouching, because its isolation is a bride to which it is wed
every second for a March and then some, and then some.
How the world spins inside or outside or both at once and one has a grip with one’s unsure hands
and one has a grip with a strength like a vice only nicer or better, only bigger than the sky.
Repetition and three masks in the dark, a light below them flashing up to change the features
to crags and rocks and mountains unmarked, and when two come together it is a blunt miracle
no matter how they are divided by a line, down a screen, they are living inside each others’ sides
and siding inside each others’ lives and this, this is what a human is, kind, and this is what helps us
survive despite. Slow it down in these last seconds, laugh. A quiet laugh for that is what the mind
would ask for. Slow it down and laugh. Light faded to black. At almost exactly the ten minute mark.
O others, characters of myself with whom I have lived for ten long minutes, stay with me
and echo, for we are the echo that sustains the world.
Look directly at me, for I am starved.
Jennifer Militello is the Poet Laureate of New Hampshire. She is the author of the forthcoming hybrid collection Identifying the Pathogen (Tupelo Press, 2026), named a finalist for the FC2 Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize, the memoir Knock Wood, winner of the Dzanc Nonfiction Prize, and five collections of poetry, including, most recently, The Pact (Tupelo Press/Shearsman Books, 2021), called “emotionally resonant” by Publishers Weekly and “an incantatory homage to love” by the Times Literary Supplement. Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry, Best New Poets, American Poetry Review, The Nation, The New Republic, The Paris Review, and Poetry. She teaches in the MFA program at New England College.