It might be a tool. Something to work with, for, maybe, repair. From somewhere near, though I can’t pin the place. It’s not decoration—it’s some kind of meeting of beautiful and spare. From another time? It looks made for the hand. For a purpose I sense but can’t call up, can’t see how to hold it, what angle, what pressure, though I might come to know. Or know again. 

I want to learn. 

If instructions exist, then, how to listen? Listen to whom—someone much older, or no longer with us? When will they speak, and on what occasion? I know there are stories and ways to impart. Do I wait for the right age, or season, or moment? 

I pause for a while, and suggestions come: Scrape with it (stubborn, stuck things?) Brace it upright (where’s right-side up?) It makes me keep looking. Ride its curves. Scale its points. What it is and is not exchange places so quickly. 

Objects that explain themselves make no demands, the way needles or rulers describe so easily the task at hand. 

If a shape is a purpose, and a thing’s an idea, what is the project or task in mind here? Am I meant to join my questions with others, or am I working alone on them? 

Even without a name (I mean one shared with me; things know their own names), the object shines and resemblances beckon. Likeness proposes much can be known, if only in flashes—these bits and flecks sun-caught, iridesced like scales or mica, and traceable maybe to fish and mountain. 

A full expression must still be unfurling. May be always arriving. The en route enlists me: Keep (in the sense of hold, care for, preserve) whatever this is, found-but-resistant. No, not resistant. Just not-yet-revealing. If it’s true that a period of long unknowing often precedes sudden understanding, then naming too soon, by parts or in haste, upends the project. 

So far, it’s an object for making questions. 

 And once I’m released from having to know, the space that opens—interstitial, synaptic—reroutes my impatience. Suggests that the object’s not bent on veiling or worse, confounding, but works instead by glancings and partings. 

I have to assume so much is missed. And that there’s still time for imagining a body both using the object and being used by it. 

How long will it take? 

Each of these days. 

What else do I know? Keep nothing on a trinket shelf, catalogued, relic’ed, and gathering dust; the object must be close on the heart, near to breath, turned toward light. In that way it cracks open, not because fallen, not because broken, but unabashed as milkweed unsilking, as morning sun wetting the white pine’s soft needles, as dusk translucing the ear of a rabbit. 

I imagine the object’s stay here is brief. That it’s come at the end of a very long cycle. That all this time, before meeting, the object was held in a far-off elsewhere—then, it arrived. So suddenly. Here.

The way birth works. 

The way ruin’s now advancing. 

The object bears the feel of a thing gone and still loved, accompanying daily in ways that startle. What to notice most keenly about it? How unhurried it is, and prickled alert. Insistent as frost climbing a window. That it’s not mine alone—though this moment might be constituted for me. I might be the site where it wants to meet. At least for now. 

Follow, say the teeth or tines; bone or shell or rock of it. All material has a mind. My mother knew and kept in boxes, so carefully labeled for future encounters: raffia, feathers, shells, bark, sea grass, gourds. Unfinished work. I keep her things now and visit them often. I hold them close, my hand where her hand once wove, knotted, and coiled. I believe they’ll find a use for me.

And the object’s own shape? Heart-like, but rounder and flat. Its halves, like the fingers of two hands intermeshed, with a little space (maybe time?) between them. Do they open out, hinged like a gate, or stay locked like the staves of a well-made basket? 

Now, though, having been likened-to, the object slips free, resists comparison to fingers, gates, hearts—those forms particular to their conditions, built for their singular work.

I visit again what I know of the object: 

It traveled a night-route to come to me. 

It bears no instructions. 

It accompanies.

And the force or condition that conjured the object? 

I believe it was yearning. 

Yearning for what?

This moment. Right now. In view of an end, where all things take on the preciousness that could not be had in times of abundance. 

 

 

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Lia Purpura’s most recent collections are It Shouldn’t Have Been Beautiful (Penguin Poets) and All the Fierce Tethers (Sarabande). On Looking (Sarabande) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She lives in Baltimore, MD.

 

 

 

Photo by Mukund Shyam on Unsplash