Dogs
Star-crushed velvet of night song. A dog barking, distant concern. Chilly, under blanket, eardrums dilated. Everything slows. And an airplane, holding space open like a dream. (.)
Delayed departures and I notice Bali before leaving, or rather Balis, there being so many. The cocks crow from before sunrise and a pack of dogs barks at a passing presence, feral guardians of night. The scent of cooking rice mixed with floral incense smoke, women’s work, through sunrise. Mourning doves and frogs and tiny finches chirp their ambient language. Traffic heaves a periodic sigh, as on every workday, hordes of red-burnt tourists, the punctuated exchange of horns, brakes squealing, and fragments of conversation picked up from hidden alleyways. Giggling, crying. Colors run more saturated under heavy skies, overwhelming sight, and people walk uncovered, as if open to the sun. Plastics mixed with faded floral offerings crowd the gutters below their feet.
So open you might be fooled into believing she’s honest, a reputation ardently if sloppily maintained. Her government is tangled and obscure, embroidered with extra-judicial bureaucracies, her pathways impossible to navigate by compass, unmapped, and obstacles send you looping back in wild directions. You are the ant and someone toys with you. The more you try to cross, the farther from the source you go. So cloven is the island into slivers and pieces by rivers, ravines, and lava flows.
A silent goodbye to something here, pale jepun blossoms wreathed in green, or barren branches in their ever-staggered cycles, and black grass-roofed temples that house Barong. An extra moment granted to a stranger, the balance of the otherwise unknown.
How Not to Break
Σωκράτης: καλῶς γάρ, ὦ ἑταῖρε, λέγει.
Socrates: Beautifully said, fellow.
//
People forget the absolute confusion it would throw us into. Our poor hearts. To be flirted with by Socrates!
Everyone reacted in his own way. There were puppies, pitbulls and poodles among us, Siamese cats, golden retrievers, kosher beef hotdogs, poisonous spiders and slithering snakes, all electrified, burning cheeks, clammy hands, contemptuous coughs, eyes rolling exaggeratedly behind backs, tea-drinking, name-calling, note-taking, knowing looks, mistaken engagements, pregnant pauses, drunken outbursts, drunken confessions, drunken makeouts, sneaking sweets into pursed lips, so many petty jealousies you wouldn’t believe.
Backstabbing, frontstabbing, it got ugly, abusive. Nobody wanted to see himself like that. Some went abstract, algebraic, symbolic, tried to ignore it, tied their hands as they slept. It exhausted us all. Some dismissed her for it, pretended cute compliments were sarcastic slights, secret glances a lie, the multi-entendres a meaningless flourish, intellectual metaphor, performative bullshit, while sneaking behind bushes. Some named it irony, her beloveds and her beautifully saids, a great number of grown men turned theatrically, cartoonishly evil, sending pornography to professional inboxes, these are historical facts, they just broke.
From her simple, sweet flirtation: they broke.
The question was always, how not to break.
(Hold it together?) What does he want. (Does he want it from me?) What do I want. (Why do I want it?) Do I want to give. (Do I have what he wants?) Do I believe him. (Is it about sex?) The stimulation of bodies to pleasure, more pleasure, until lost in the pleasure. (Reforged in pleasure?) Is it empty or is it full. (It or me?) Am I safe or am I in danger. (Which is the one that holds me together?)
The heart becomes a gaping question.
After all, this is a rite of passage. Few of us pass. (Pass into what?) The beautiful is what we call it when someone just does.
//